Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

letters between men.⁸² In other words, there is the question of how Bray actually reads the lives of the women whom he includes, and what these readings do to broaden the terms of feminist and lesbian histories. Finally, one is left to wonder about the historiographic irony that a woman should have been the means to reinsert sex back into the historical narrative. Early in the historiography of homosexuality, the boys had sodomy and the girls had romantic friendship; in The Friend, as in other recent work, the history of male homosexuality is all about love.

      If we shift our focus from what Bray says about women to what his work makes available to those of us working on women, however, a more enabling set of procedures emerges. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, methods of analysis and interpretation derived from scholarship on men can be usefully applied on behalf of women; such methodological cross-gender identification, I argue, may even have some advantages over the supposedly gender-neutral rubric of “queer.” Adoption of Bray’s insights about the unstable nature of erotic signification and consideration of the ontological and epistemological issues raised by his work would greatly nuance scholarship on women’s sexuality, which has tended to presuppose a certain knowingness about it. Indeed, insofar as a central question in the history of female homoeroticism has been how to talk about “lesbianism” before the advent of modern identity categories, we would do well to consider how this question of anachronistic terminology can morph into an ontological question—what is lesbianism in any given era?—as well as how these queries might be supplemented with the epistemological question: how do we know it?

      Although nothing in Bray’s corpus provides clear answers to these questions, in its performance of ambiguity, tension, and irresolution his work urges us to ask them. In the expanse of its historical sweep, The Friend, in particular, gestures in a direction that might draw us closer to some answers. Perhaps not since Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present has a responsible scholar of gay/lesbian/queer history approached large-scale historical change and continuity with such confidence and ambition. In part because the postmodern suspicion toward the explanatory power of metanarratives has taken firm hold in those subfields where the history of homosexuality is most often written (social and cultural history, gender and women’s history, cultural studies, literary studies),⁸³ the creation of densely local and socially contextualized knowledges has been constitutive of the field.

      Bray’s widening of the temporal lens in The Friend allows us to consider anew how the retrospective fiction of periodization has functioned as an epistemic force field, permitting certain questions to advance while occluding others. To the extent that the suitability of assuming a longer vantage has been raised within the history of homosexuality, it has been approached primarily via the debate between acts and identities or, in its more historiographical formulation, between the assertion of alterity or continuism. In the context of this debate, responsible reconsideration of taking the long view has gone precisely nowhere. Yet, as archival materials come to light that support more nuanced conceptions of identity, orientation, and predisposition than early social constructivist accounts would have allowed, these debates have begun to diminish in importance.⁸⁴ Recent attempts to move beyond the impasse produced by these debates have demonstrated that it is the precise nature and interrelations of continuities and discontinuities that are of interest, not the analytical predominance of one over the other.⁸⁵

      Bray’s final book is perhaps the most subtle mediation between the claims of historical continuity and historical difference in this field to date. It thus provides the springboard for the consideration of historiography, including issues of alterity, continuism, and periodization, pursued in the next two chapters. In addition, by insisting that friendship can be understood only in terms of the wider context that gives it meaning, The Friend confutes a basic, if undertheorized, premise of the historiography of homosexuality: that we must conceptualize our object of analysis by provisionally isolating its parameters and claiming for it, however tacitly, a relatively independent social status. That is, whether one historicizes the sodomite or the molly, tribadism, sapphism, or queer virginity, in order to gain a foothold for these phenomena in a landscape unmarked by modern identity categories, scholars have tended to approach the phenomena as discrete, internally unified, and relatively bounded. Despite our adoption of Bray’s argument that homoeroticism is part of a networked system of social relations, we have failed to recognize the full ramifications of that insight and so have treated homoeroticism much like the historical periods in which we locate it.

      Could it be that this bounded conceptualization of our analytical object is related to the problem of period boundaries? I am not sure, but it seems no accident that Bray’s final book flouts both at once. There is no question that many of the issues prominent in the history of homosexuality traverse historical domains. Chapter 4 will enumerate these issues with a particular focus on lesbianism, identifying them as “perennial axes of social definition” that crop up as “cycles of salience,” while also arguing against a view of seamless continuity by which the past is directly laminated onto later social formations. While the mandate of that chapter is to advance analytically the history of women’s sexuality, the more general point is to foster the creation of a temporally capacious, conceptually organized, gender-comparative history of sexuality. Fitted together in a dialogic rather than a teleological mold, this history might not only find a form that is conceptually coherent yet rife with tensions; through its parataxis and juxtapositions, it might also energize new areas of inquiry, ones that beckon beyond the protocols that have organized research for the past two decades. The conversation I want to enable is not principally one between the past and the present—queer theory, influenced by Foucaultian genealogy, has provided an ample set of procedures for that, usable even by as devout a social historian as Bray. What requires new theorizing, I suggest, is how to stage a dialogue between one past and another. It is to this problem that the next two chapters turn.

      It may seem that I have strayed far from the terrain mapped out by Alan Bray. These were not his questions, to be sure. Nonetheless, they are the questions that arise out of the exploratory maps that he so diligently and generously offered. Following the signposts in his work, much of what follows attempts to chart more precisely the overlapping coordinates of love, friendship, eroticism, and sexuality present in his historiographic vista, while also placing these coordinates in more compelling relation to gender, as well as in relation to issues that have emerged since his death. Perhaps the most humbling legacy of the friend whom we have lost—and of friendship’s loss—is this: just as Alan Bray’s first book provided guidance for much of the historical work that followed, his final gift of friendship beckons us to a new landscape, which is also, as he eloquently testifies, quite old yet, because of his work, quite near.

      CHAPTER 3

      The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

      FOR DAVID HALPERIN

      Since around 2005, a specter has haunted the field in which I work: the specter of teleology. On behalf of a queerer historiography, some scholars of French and English early modern literature have charged other queer studies scholars with promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. This normalization allegedly is caused by unwitting imprisonment within a framework of teleology. A teleological perspective views the present as a necessary outcome of the past—the point toward which all prior events were trending.¹ The anti-teleologists challenge any such proleptic sequel as a straitjacketing of sex, time, and history, and they announce their critique as a decisive rupture from previous theories and methods of queer history (especially Foucault-inspired genealogy). Given the high profile of the scholars involved, as well as the high octane of their polemics, it is not surprising that their assessment has been embraced enthusiastically by many other scholars, inside and outside of early modern literary studies, who aim “to free queer scholarship from the tyranny of historicism.”² Whereas there are other hot topics within queer studies right now—including whether queer theory should