Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

      

      Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

       Thinking Sex

       with the

       Early Moderns

       Valerie Traub

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

      www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Traub, Valerie, author.

      Thinking sex with the early moderns / Valerie Traub.

      pages cm.— (Haney Foundation series)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4729-9

      1. Sex in literature. 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 3. Sex (Psychology)—History—16th century. 4. Sex (Psychology)—History—17th century. 5. Gender identity—England—History—16th century. 6. Gender identity—England—History—17th century. 7. Language and sex—History. 8. Renaissance—England. I. Title. II. Series:

      Haney Foundation series.

      PR428.S48T73 2016

      820.9′353809031—dc23

      2015017216

       To

       Gina

       Theresa

       Maureen

       Jennie

       Holly

       Sabiha

       Marjorie

       Laura

       Gavin

       Amy

       Chad

       Ari

       Stephen

       Sarah

       Tiffany

       Emily

       Charisse

       Lauren

       Amanda W

       Amanda O

       Leah

       Jennifer

       Jonathan

       Andrew

       Katie

       Angela

       Kate

       Amrita

       Hamit

       Eliza

      CONTENTS

       Preface

       Chapter 1. Thinking Sex: Knowledge, Opacity, History

       Part I. Making the History of Sexuality

       Chapter 2. Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History

       Chapter 3. The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

       Chapter 4. The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography

       Part II. Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts

       Chapter 5. The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge

       Chapter 6. Sex in the Interdisciplines

       Chapter 7. Talking Sex

       Part III. The Stakes of Gender

       Chapter 8. Shakespeare’s Sex

       Chapter 9. The Sign of the Lesbian

       Chapter 10. Sex Ed; or, Teach Me Tonight

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      PREFACE

      This book was written during a particular moment in U.S. cultural and political history—after the initial efflorescence of academic gay/lesbian/queer studies and during a socially conservative and sex-negative political backlash that extended from the media and medicine to schools and the arts. This was a time of severe social and discursive contradiction around sex, with sex phobia contending in equal measure with the sex saturation of a celebrity-obsessed culture. It began—although I did not know it at the time—in conversations with Mark Schoenfield at Vanderbilt University, who gamely agreed to read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets with me. A turning point came when Julie Crawford suggested that an early version of “The Joys of Martha Joyless” allegorized my own scholarly