Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

Since the move away from the famous-gay-people-in-history approach, the history of homosexuality—both male and female—mainly has been written by means of research segmented along traditional period lines. Even as queer theory, post-structuralism, and the “linguistic turn” have pressured many of the methodological premises of literary critics and traditional historians, the power of periodization has not been shaken—as titles such as Queering the Renaissance, Queering the Middle Ages, and Queering the Moderns attest.⁵⁴ Although it has become a tenet of historicist queer studies to disrupt the “straight,” reproductive logic of sequential temporality, to expose periodization as a fetish, and to keep one eye on our contemporary situation, the ensuing conversation between past and present generally has been accomplished by relying on a period-bound concept of the past: one historical moment, situated in proximity to modernity (or postmodernity).⁵⁵ To queer the Middle Ages, for instance, is also to historicize the modern—with the injunction to “get medieval” pursued by considering how medieval concepts inhabit, resonate, or are at odds with contemporary categories and crises: the U.S. military policy of don’t ask, don’t tell; the sexual politics of the Clinton impeachment; the discourse of HIV/AIDS; the love lyrics of rock star Melissa Etheridge.⁵⁶

      Queer historiography, in other words, has enabled a provocative conversation between the past and the present, history and (post)modernity. Notwithstanding this provocation, the retrospective fiction of periodization has functioned epistemologically as a force field, encouraging certain questions while obstructing others.⁵⁷ In particular, the common sense of periodization has kept our analytical attention off those problematic areas where historical boundaries meet: the ragged edges, margins, and interstices of periodization that frame our narratives.⁵⁸ It is here that historical claims, especially about the advent of change or novelty, can rub uncomfortably against one another—sometimes calling into question the basic premises and arguments of temporally discrete historical studies and sometimes leading to charges of scholarly ignorance or special pleading. Yet, as understandable as is the desire to expose other scholars’ epistemic privileging of their own turf, a strategy of border surveillance does not help us learn to speak across period divides.⁵⁹

      I want to suggest a different strategy—one based on acknowledgment of perennial axes of social definition and their temporal appearance as cycles of salience, and which is in pursuit of the explanatory metalogics that such definitions manifest. Many of the issues in gay/lesbian/queer history that have structured the asking of questions and the seeking of answers traverse historical domains. Whereas these issues may not all function as axes of social definition, they provide one means of access to them as well as to a better understanding of the moments when they accrue social significance. Presented as a large set of substantive themes, they include:

      • the relationship between erotic acts and erotic identities;

      • the quest for the etiology of erotic desire in the physical body, including the role of anatomy;

      • the status accorded to the genitals in defining sexual acts;

      • the relations of love, intimacy, and friendship to eroticism, including the defensive separation of sex from friendship;

      • the fine line between virtue and transgression, orderly and disorderly homoeroticism;

      • the relationship of eroticism to gender deviance and conformity;

      • the symbolic and social functions of gendered clothing;

      • the relevance of age, class/status, and ethnic/racial hierarchies to erotic relations;

      • the composition and effects of familial, marital, and household arrangements;

      • the role of voluntary kinship and familial nomenclatures in mediating and expressing erotic bonds;

      • the relationship of homoeroticism to homosociality;

      • the role of gender-segregated spaces, including religious, educational, criminal, and medical institutions;

      • the existence of communities and subcultures, including public sexual cultures and spaces;

      • the division between public and private sexualities;

      • the effects of racial, geographical, religious, and national othering;

      • the effects of social and geographical mobility;

      • assessments of appropriate erotic knowledge, including the ambiguous line separating medicine from obscenity;

      • the credibility of religious, medical, scientific, and legal discourses in the production of sexual categories, including definitions of nature, the unnatural, normality, and the abnormal;

      • the differences between concepts of erotic identity, predisposition, and habitual behaviors;

      • the dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, including covert signs, coding, and open secrets;

      • the efficacy of representations of (homo)sexual contamination and/or predation to the body politic;

      • the impact of sexually transmitted diseases on fears of mortality and social catastrophe;

      • the interdiction against and circulation of sexual prostheses and supplemental technologies of sex;

      • the relationship of hermaphrodites and the intersexed to same-sex desires and practices;

      • the attractions of aesthetic conventions of erotic similitude versus erotic difference and/or hierarchy;

      • the effects of narrative, poetic, and visual form on representations of homoeroticism.

      Because of pervasive gender asymmetries, additional themes have had more consequence for the history of female bodies, experiences, and representations:

      • the misogynist logic of female imperfection, excessive appetite, susceptibility to seduction, and inconstancy;

      • the role of female anatomy, especially the clitoris, in cultural representations;

      • the import of chastity, reproductive marriage, and the sexual double standard on women’s erotic options;

      • women’s unequal access to sex education and sexual knowledge, including sexual language, anatomical definitions, and medical taxonomies;

      • the effects of reproductive choice and constraint on women’s erotic welfare;

      • the gendering of propriety, emotion, and sensibility;

      • the derivative, secondary order of lesbian visibility, which underpins conceptual misrecognitions such as lesbian “impossibility” and “imitation”;

      • the social power of lesbians (and representations of female homoeroticism) relative to that of men;

      • the relation of women’s erotic ties to their political subjectivity—that is, to feminism;

      • the potential threat that female-female eroticism poses to patriarchal relations and male dominance.

      This list is unwieldy, but even so, it is not comprehensive. Each of these themes assumes different contours, contents, and emphases when examined from historically specific locations.⁶⁰ Some of them have been discussed at length in queer scholarship; others hardly have been raised. Some have settled in one or another historical location; others have been assumed to possess no past. Not only does each one provide a specific angle for investigating how subjects might have understood—or not understood—themselves, but in the aggregate they allow us to appreciate the extent to which their powers of definition extend across discrete historical moments and, thus, beyond the subjects so defined by them. They are substantive and constitutive: organizing the self-perceptions and contributing to the intelligibility of same-sex desire (as both representation and lived experience) for people in the past, while also providing the terms by which we have identified those subjects and made the past intelligible to ourselves. To the extent that they precipitate the establishment of temporal patterns of meaning making, they have been complicit in framing queer