Only by failing to attend to historicism as it is actually practiced can such an accusation stand.95 But rather than engage with history or historiography, unhistoricists seem more interested in refiguring abstract temporality. This would be entirely appropriate, were it not the case that they pursue queer temporality as a wholesale substitute for history and historiography. Posing unhistoricism against what they call “hegemonic history,” Goldberg and Menon take as “axiomatic”96 the critique of the traditional historical enterprise proffered by Hayden White’s Metahistory from 1973, whose work functions as the primary touchstone for Freccero as well.97 Their reiteration of this reference against “History” writ large implies that historians have ignored White’s critique, when in fact it has been widely discussed and to some degree integrated into cultural history, intellectual history, gender history, the history of sexuality, and queer historiography—as practiced by historians. Disciplinary history has witnessed as well a sustained engagement with time and temporality in recent years.
The “un” of unhistoricism disregards these engagements in order to produce a binary for the sake of deconstructing it. Moreover, this project bespeaks an antipathy to empirical inquiry, which, viewed as the primary tool of the historian, is posed as antithetical to acts of queering—as if queerness could not live in the details of empirical history. Needless to say, plenty of scholars in queer studies do practice various forms of empirical inquiry—not only historians, but anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, legal theorists, critical race theorists, and, yes, literary critics—and some of them have offered astute analyses of the relationship between their methods and those of queer theory. Without delving into that bibliography, one can simply ask: Where would queer theory be without the anthropology of Esther Newton, the history of George Chauncey, the sociology of Steven Epstein, the legal writings of Janet Halley? Where would queer theory be without Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex”?98
Rejecting out of hand the methods used by most social scientists, unhistoricism’s hostility to empiricism adorns itself in the resurgent prestige of “theory.” Freccero proposes to not “take seriously the pieties of the discipline that would require the solemn, even dour, marshalling of empirical evidence,”99 while Menon laments that “by grafting chronological history onto theory, Renaissance queer theorists confine themselves to being historians of sexuality.”100 Rendering explicit the hierarchical division of labor informing their critique, this conceptual and affective elevation of (sexy) theory over (dour) history is never fully explained, nor are the key practitioners of the history of sexuality—those trained as historians, those who identify as historians, or those working in history departments—cited and directly engaged. Indeed, one might probe what history stands for in this body of work. For many scholars, history is, on the one hand, an academic discipline, a knowledge community, a professional locus from which to investigate the past; on the other hand, it refers to the collective, highly mediated understandings of material, ideational, and discursive “events” of past cultures, achieved through various methods.101 But for the unhistoricists, history stands in for a very specific, self-delimiting, and ultimately caricatured set of methods, becoming an abject emblem crowned with a capital letter—in other words, a cliché.
It is not my purpose here to mount a defense of the work of historians, although Chapter 6 will engage directly with their work as it overlaps with and diverges from that of literary critics. For now, suffice it to say that the discipline of history is as varied and contentious as any literature department, and its internal debates regarding the “cultural turn,” “narrative,” “teleology,” “evidence,” “objectivity,” and “theory” are complex, nuanced, and ongoing. Others are doing a better job thinking through the particular affordances of disciplinary history, including its methods and protocols, for queer endeavors than I ever could.102 And historians of sexuality are more than capable of explaining their own investments and methods.103 I doubt, however, that historians will direct those explanations to the unhistoricists, for the latters’ lack of genuine interest in the discipline of history assures that most historians will feel free to ignore them.104 Their mischaracterization of the historian’s enterprise threatens not only to stall productive exchange between literary and historical studies (thereby contributing to the mutual disciplinary estrangement that in the past produced some of the problems of historical practice so abhorred by them), but to deflect attention away from the substantive methodological challenges still faced by those intent on crafting a queer historicism.105
Demeaning the disciplinary methods employed to investigate historical continuity and change does not advance the cause of queerness. Moreover, it has led to unnecessary confusion by implying that to queer temporality is necessarily to queer history and historiography. Historiography, of course, refers to the methods we use to adduce, narrate, and reactivate the past. But the past, history, and temporality—despite their obvious interrelations—are not the same. The past is whatever actually happened, to which we have only mediated access in the form of texts, artifacts, memories (a problem that will be addressed in Chapter 6). Time is the phenomenological dimension in which the ever-receding present becomes the past, even as the present tends toward the future. As simultaneously ontological and epistemological, it is an abstraction, yet also something we know feelingly through our own aging, mortality, future-leaning aspirations, and retrospective memories. And history denotes the narratives that we construct about the past and past times, narratives that take shape according to the precepts of a variety of historiographic methods, from archival sleuthing and textual analysis to interviews and demographics.
To insist on the need to distinguish between pastness, time, history, and historiography is to suggest that the effort to queer temporality may not be about queering history at all. The structure and movement of time is not the only means of access to the past nor the only way to negotiate our mediated relationship to it. Nor does a concern with temporality sum up the kinds of queer-friendly transactions that can be forged between past and present by historians and literary critics. Indeed, the effort to queer temporality charts a very particular itinerary, motivated by distinctive aims—disrupting developmental continuity and teleology prime among them—with only the most oblique relationship to other historical questions such as temporal contingency and change over the long term. Given these distinctions, the question might be how to negotiate the conceptual and methodological tensions between the projects of queering time and writing history. Any such negotiation would involve some difficult methodological decisions: whether and how to balance the claims of historical similitude and alterity when engaging with the past, whether and how to use psychoanalysis and deconstruction to enable not only synchronic but diachronic understandings across time, and whether and how sequence, chronology, and periodization might have utility for queer studies. Beyond these specifically historiographic issues, at stake more broadly are the role of empirical inquiry in queer studies, the adequacy of “homo” and “hetero” as descriptors of incommensurate phenomena, and the tension between identity and nonidentity in contemporary understandings of queerness.
However these issues are addressed, for both those invested in the project of queering temporality and those who remain skeptical about it, it might be the better part of valor to desist from couching the issues in terms of a rhetoric of “normalization.” For those committed to fostering a range of nonnormative modes of being and thought, the derision implicit in this accusation can only be construed as an attempt to foreclose the very possibility of resistance.106 While proclaiming a uniquely queer openness to experimentation and indeterminacy, this rhetoric disqualifies others’ ways of engaging with the past, suggesting that the effort to account for similarities and change over time can only be motivated by a hegemonic, if defunct, disciplinarity. Indicted by association as inimical to the agenda of queering are a wide range of methodological practices and tools: empiricism, periodization and chronology, large-scale historical narration, disciplinary-specific competencies, and attachment to logic itself. Paradoxically, unhistoricism arrogates to itself