The chapters that follow demonstrate that the opacities of eroticism—not just those aspects of sex that exceed our grasp, but those that manifest themselves as the unthought—can serve as a productive analytical resource. The epistemological orientation enacted here derives not only from hitting up against such impasses, but from intuiting that these structures of occultation and unintelligibility are also the source of our ability to apprehend and analyze them. In short, the obstacles we face in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality, and both impediments can be productively adopted as a guiding principle of historiography, pedagogy, and ethics.
Given that sex may be good to think with precisely because of its recalcitrant relation to knowledge, the sense of “making” heralded in the book’s first part is slightly ironic: any knowledge made necessarily carries within it, as a hard, inviolate kernel, those impediments by which it is also constituted. Such constitutive impediments explain why I evoke Elizabeth Bishop’s description of the “taste” of knowledge as “bitter” and “briny,” able to burn one’s tongue. At the same time, my conception of the difficulty involved is guided by the apprehension that, as Bishop writes, “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” It might seem that Bishop idealizes knowledge as ultimately “clear” and “utterly free.” Yet, in pausing with her over the verb that qualifies her invocation of knowledge—that is, to “imagine”—we might find reason to pause as well over the task of drawing knowledge from “the cold hard mouth” and “rocky breasts” of the world. What is at stake, in her poem and my project, is precisely what “we imagine knowledge to be.” At stake as well is what stymies us and what it means to go on “tasting” knowledge, despite its salt-soaked bitterness.
By moving through an instructive range of difficulties (including the archival, the historiographic, and the hermeneutic) and by subordinating the question of the desiring subject, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns engages in an extended thought experiment. It proposes, first, that we approach the conceptual status of sex (its meaning, its ontology, its significance) not only as a problem of representation (of what can be expressed or textualized or not expressed or textualized)4 or as a problem of signification (as something made intelligible or unintelligible by means of particular conceptual categories) but as an epistemological problem. An epistemological approach—asking what can be known as well as how it is known—recasts the dynamics among sex, representation, signification, and historiography as a problem of knowledge relations: constituted not only by social interchange but by implicit understandings of what counts as knowledge and what eludes or baffles as ignorance. Tracing the contours of a structural dynamic between knowledge and ignorance back in time before the “epistemology of the closet,” I advocate that we confront what we don’t know as well as what we can’t know about sex in the past.5 This confrontation with the variety of ways that it is possible not to know implicates the investigator, if willing, in various considerations of pedagogy and ethics.
These epistemological, pedagogical, and ethical propositions come into especially sharp focus when we attempt to think sex, as my title designates, with the early moderns. My title pays homage to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,”6 which proposed “elements of a descriptive and conceptual framework for thinking about sex and its politics.”7 “Thinking Sex” is often credited as one of the founding documents of queer theory, in no small measure because it provides a general blueprint for investigating sex through the conceptual categories by which it is thought.8 In attempting to “build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history” and “to locate particular varieties of sexual persecution within a more general system of sexual stratification,” Rubin anatomizes six conventional ways of thinking sex: sexual essentialism (belief in its biologically mandated and universal status); sex negativity (fear of the dangerous effects of sex on peoples and cultures); the fallacy of misplaced scale (which mandates disproportionate punishment for sexual crimes); the hierarchical valuation of sex acts (whereby monogamous heterosexuality is elevated over “promiscuity” or “perversions”); the domino theory of sexual peril (whereby sexual contagion is thought to spread restlessly through the body politic); and the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation (whereby people mistake their own sexual preference for a universal system). Sex for Rubin is simultaneously a matter of representation and reality, discourse and embodiment, metaphor and phenomenological acts. If what results from Rubin’s capacious focus seems particularly portable—applicable to cultures and times far removed from the twentieth-century United States—and thus becomes recognizable as “theory,” this theory is derived and abstracted from the lived situation of bodies and the acts in which they engage.9
Rubin’s concepts have motivated an enormous body of work on sexuality, particularly within queer studies. Beyond their utility for contesting sexual normativity, the method that activates them provides a model for scrutinizing the conceptual categories whereby we can think sex. My analytical mode, accordingly, is not primarily narrative or hermeneutic, but anatomizing, as I attempt to parse the ways in which certain concepts enable or disable our methods and understandings. Like Rubin, I have located my analysis within the frameworks provided by very specific modes of embodiment, believing that theories and methods—however brilliantly conceived and argued—are best tested and tempered within the forge of temporal and spatial particularity.
Even as I develop theoretical and methodological principles that I hope will prove useful to scholars’ investigation of other times and cultures,10 my archive is composed of texts and discourses produced in England from the late sixteenth to the later part of the seventeenth century. The configuration of “the early modern” situates the scholar of sex in a particular relationship not only to other scholars but to literary culture and to history, with the iconic figures of “Shakespeare” and “the Renaissance” looming large. No doubt the view looks different from other times and places, where questions of sexual definition, historical alterity, sexual modernity, new media and genres,11 and the availability of archival materials contour the terrain along distinctive tracks.12 I maintain, however, that the particular synergy of, on the one hand, differences between early modernity and our own time (e.g., the lack of widely legible sexual identities in the early modern period) and, on the other hand, similarities between then and now (e.g., the existence of a diverse erotic repertoire) offers an advantageous prospect from which to scrutinize fissures in and obstructions to our knowledge.13
The chapters that follow hone in on two questions: What are the contours of sexual knowledge—its contents, syntaxes, and specificities—for the early moderns? And which social, intellectual, and institutional processes are involved in creating and exchanging it—for them and for us? Attention to the second question, in particular, entails focusing on the overlaps and contradictory injunctions that divide and conjoin literary and historical study.14 What processes constitute “the history of sexuality” as a research object? Is it a field of inquiry with agreed-upon methods? How does it function as a point of contention within and between disciplines? And which objects of inquiry within the history of sexuality particularly stymie our efforts to know them? By means of three rubrics, I have organized my exploration of these questions along related conceptual axes. In