Such work forged an implicit alliance among two forms of queerness: one directed at subjectivity—affirmatively courting the contingency of desire and rejecting identity’s stabilizations—and one directed at historiography, with the aim of resisting alterity and periodization in favor of similitude, resemblance, and identification. Yet, none of these scholars set themselves the task of writing a historical account that traversed large expanses of time. Even as they challenged periodization, their own analyses remained bounded, whether within one or, in the case of Dinshaw, two temporally distinct time frames. By offering either a synchronic analysis or one that paratactically juxtaposed and connected modernity with premodernity, they could bracket the question of any intervening time span—indeed, the point was to bracket it. The brilliance of this move was that it enabled affective relations with the past to come to the fore—a move the consequences of which I will explore in Chapter 6. But this innovation also allowed these and subsequent scholars to avoid all matters associated with chronology, including how to explain the endurance or recurrence of some of the very similarities that interested them. Propelled by the desire to defamiliarize modern identity categories while finding new affiliations between the past and the present, the emerging field of queer historiography did not, at this point, directly engage with but rather sidestepped this central issue. This is a problem to which Chapter 4 turns, where I offer a positive model for negotiating the play of difference and similarity over the long temporal term.
Only after queer historiography adopted the postcolonial critique of an imperialist Western history did teleology per se gravitate to the center of discussion. In addition to confronting Eurocentrism and its geopolitical exclusions, postcolonial historians and historians of non-Western cultures followed Johannes Fabian in querying the ideological fit between spatial and temporal alterity, whereby spatially “othered” cultures are judged as inhabiting a time “before” Western modernity. Metanarratives emanating from the metropole have, indeed, inscribed a version of history as developmental telos, whereby a tight conceptual link exists between modernity, progress, and enlightenment, or inversely, between premodernity and what Anjali Arondekar terms “the time(s) of the primitive in a post-colonial world.”29 Among those working on sexuality, the critique of Western timelines focused initially on debating the applicability of Western models of sexual identity to non-Western contexts. Troubling the Foucaultian division between a supposedly Eastern ars erotica and a Western, Christian scientia sexualis, historians of India, China, and the Middle East have refuted the discursive construction of non-Western sexualities as anterior, traditional, primitive, and inevitably developing toward Western models.30 Resisting the “sedimented politics of time” that “often reproduces subjects, critical genealogies and methodological habits that duplicate the very historiographies we seek to exceed,”31 these scholars are striving toward a decolonization that is simultaneously archival, methodological, and temporal.
In part because the “Middle Ages” has been treated as the abject other of modernity, medievalists were quick to adopt the postcolonial critique of historical timelines for queer studies. In 2001, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger emphasized the politically fraught relationships among the premodern, primitivity, and sexual positioning, calling into question “straight (teleological) narration, causal explanations, and schemes of periodization.”32 Since then, more scholars working on Western cultures have begun to look beyond sexual identity to ask questions about concepts in the history of sexuality that do and do not transit across cultural as well as historical borders. Querying what such differential presences and absences tell us about culturally distinct modes of comprehending and organizing sexuality, they are exploring how our recognition of them might promote alternative genealogies of sexual modernity.
By the middle of the last decade, then, the various strands emerging out of queer theory, pre- and early modern literary studies, and postcolonial history had converged in a critically conscious queer historicism that not only brought the past into provocative relations with the present but provided powerful incentive for scholars’ recognition of the role of similarity and identification in the act of historicizing. The notion that time might have, in its asynchronicities, warpings, and loops, something akin to queer dimensions, or be susceptible to queering through the productive juxtaposition of distant times and places, or in its linear flow be intriguingly coincident with other phenomena such as reproductive futurity and modernist progress, or may help us think about the uneven temporalities of sexual geographies and their tendentious transnational periodizations are ideas that have initiated a range of provocative meditations on the forces of historical alterity and similitude, identification and disidentification, affect and analysis, in the making of history. Indeed, my elucidation of “cycles of salience” in Chapter 4 responds appreciatively to this body of work, even as I aim to supplement the forms of eroticism considered to include female-female desire.
So why do I part company with the new “unhistoricism”? The unhistoricists’ implicit query of genealogy—what might be occluded by it?—is a vital one,33 and no doubt speaks to a more general fatigue regarding the injunction “always historicize!” Furthermore, I have considerable sympathy with the critical methods, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, that the unhistoricists employ to oppose that hegemony.34 I agree that “psychoanalysis, as an analytic, is also a historical method,”35 and would point to increased appreciation for its utility as one of the more appealing trends in early modern queer criticism.36 I share, as well, their interest in the capacity of queer to denaturalize sexual logics and expand the object of study through untoward combinations and juxtapositions; recognition of the role that affect and desire, particularly identification, play in the work of historical reconstruction; confidence in the specific capacities of literary language and literary form to contribute to historical understanding; and belief that the past can speak meaningfully to the present.
Despite these areas of agreement, I remain unconvinced that a teleological imperative is what impedes our understanding of past sexualities. In part, my skepticism stems from my understanding of genealogy as it was theorized and put into practice by Foucault. Since the publication of his initial description (articulated through a reading of Nietzsche), genealogy has come to mean a lot of different things to different people—some of it identifiable as Foucaultian, some of it not. Linguistically connoting “descent,” genealogy for Foucault “postulates conditions of possibility in the past for some synchronic feature of the present.”37 More particularly, it concerns how the identity of something is dispersed over time through mixing, repurposing, and contingency. Drawing a distinction between the organic development traceable back to an origin (Ursprung), descent (Herkunft), and emergence (Entstehung), he argued that the genealogist should seek to “dispel the chimeras of the origin” by “cultivat[ing] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.”38 Due to his emphasis on power, “details and accidents” tend in Foucault’s corpus to be produced by violence, pettiness, meanness, and quarrels, but to my mind they stand more generally for the principle of contingency and the way history proceeds by fits and starts. “Beginnings” refers to those moments when one thing is repurposed into another through practices of power-knowledge. Pressing for recognition of historical rupture and discontinuity, especially in terms of events and episodes “situated within the articulation of the body and history,”39 Foucault traced epistemic breaks of intelligibility that fundamentally altered what could be thought.40 Practices of repurposing necessarily involve dispersion, and the point of genealogy is “to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion,” while also recognizing in those passing events that which “gave birth to those things that continue to exist.”41 With the inevitability of the present disrupted, so too is the idea that the past actively inheres in or secretly animates the present.42 What is at stake in these productive contradictions is precisely the distinction Foucault drew between writing a history of the past in terms of the present (that is, conventional history) and writing a history of the present