Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

protocols by which historians and literary critics investigate and pursue knowledge about sex in the past. Given the interdisciplinary nature of lesbian/gay/queer studies, it is peculiar that reflections on historiographic method often seem silently embedded in scholarship, present implicitly in the mode of argumentation and the means of marshaling evidence, rather than being fully aired. In this section, I bring method to the forefront by articulating my own preferences and choices, which arise from within the interdisciplinary dialogues among the protocols of close reading, the investments of queer and feminist theories, and the proffering of historical claims. Part II, “Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts,” sustains this interest in historiography but layers on to it questions about what it means to “know” sexuality, both in the early modern period and today.¹⁵ Grounded in a concept of erotic tutelage and linked by the effort to examine various forms of presumptive knowledge about sex as well as an interest in the material acts that comprise “sex,” these chapters treat both analytical presumptions and sex acts themselves as scenes of instruction. The pedagogical relations with which I am concerned toggle between those represented within early modern texts, between texts and their original readers or audiences, and between scholars who study such texts and our students and readers. Part III, “The Stakes of Gender,” shifts into a more explicitly theoretical mode in order to focus on the difference that gender specificity makes to the now twenty-year-old project of “queering the Renaissance.” Engaging in close readings of lyric poetry and a range of other scholars’ work, this section demonstrates the stakes of a literary and historical practice that is simultaneously feminist and queer.

      Signifying Sex

      Once one considers the possibility that there is something to be gained from highlighting and mobilizing methodological opacities rather than attempting to surmount or ignore them, one cannot help but notice that they have something significant in common with the incoherence, intransigence, and unintelligibility of eroticism itself—whether conceived as libido, eros, a fantasy structure, or sexual act. Indeed, the concept of “sex” is founded on numerous, sometimes incongruent, ideas. We regularly speak of sex as: anatomy, gender, desire, fantasy, making love, reproduction, violence, and individual erotic acts.¹⁶ Although feminist and queer studies scholars have become adept at separating and flagging these meanings, this doesn’t bring confusion to a halt, because “sexuality” in academic discourse often implies an additional set of concepts: affect, kinship,¹⁷ or a particular “regime” of modernity.¹⁸ I use “sexuality” interchangeably with “sex” and “eroticism” throughout this book for I intend these terms to cover a range of erotic feelings and corporeal practices; indeed, part of the task of this book is to think by means of their overlaps and ambiguities. For this reason, whereas I use “sexual” and “erotic” as predicates that are sufficiently stable in the relations they signify to hold up across time, my emphasis will be on their historically varying contents and rhetorics, as well as the fact that the actions they name are not necessarily “the same” or known in advance.

      “Knowledge,” too, can signify in various ways. In the early modern period, the word could convey acknowledgment, recognition, and awareness, as well as friendship and intimacy; not incidentally, it also referred to what Genesis 4 calls “carnal knowledge.” Repeatedly in the period sex is likened to a form of knowledge, as in the 1540 act of Parliament that refers to “such mariages beyng … consummate with bodily knowledge” (Act 32 Hen. 8, c. 38) or rape victims’ testimonies that “he had knowledge of my body.” In our own time, as Ludmilla Jordanova notes, knowledge refers to “awareness, information, understanding, insight, explanation, wisdom,” each of which involves “distinct relationships between knowers and known.”¹⁹ Central to the conceptions guiding this book is the multiplicity of “knowledge,” “knowing,” and “knowers,” as well as the dynamic historical relations among knowledge and sex. In this regard, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns shares with feminist philosophers of epistemology a concern with what is known, how it is known, differential access to knowledge, and the terms by which knowledge is expressed. It departs from their collective project by concerning itself less with the establishment of truth claims (or their contestation) than in exploring the techniques of knowledge production educed by sex.²⁰ Furthermore, the concept of knowledge motivating this book includes not only official discourses but knowing that is “made by trial and error, drift, unforeseen by-products, crazy inventions, play, and frivolous speculation.”²¹ Most especially, epistemology as I conceive it is concerned with the categories and concepts by which early moderns, and scholars of early modernity, think sex.²²

      Framing the question as how sexuality sets up obstacles to knowledge involves revisiting how queer studies has approached the concept of epistemology. In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love maintains that queer historiography has moved away from an epistemological focus, which she defines as the quest to find identities, toward a focus on affect and identification.²³ Love’s definition of identity knowledge as an epistemologically based method makes a certain kind of sense, but it also risks confusion. I would suggest that earlier LGBT scholarship was driven less by a concern with knowledge relations than with sexual ontology, insofar as it tended to treat sexual identity as a form of being, whether in the form of social identity or individual subjectivity. Lesbian studies, to be sure, did tend to focus on acts of knowing, but its central historical question, “Was she a lesbian?” was less an opening onto knowledge relations in the past, or between the past and the present, than a question of wanting to know whether the identity category fit, as Martha Vicinus memorably put it, “for sure.”²⁴ My return to epistemology brackets precisely the concept of identity that Love used to define epistemology’s salience in order to zero in on the conceptual categories and maneuvers that are implicated in knowledge’s production.

      The conceptual terms available to signify sexual knowledge, and thus the terms available to signify what sex is or might mean both in the early modern period and today, are thus crucial to what follows. Beyond the hard-to-pin-down definitional nature of sex and knowledge, I seek to leverage the idea that sex itself poses an interrelated problem of signification and knowability. Indeed, the epistemology of sex is intensely bound to the issues of sexual representation and signification—by which I mean the capacity of language to denote and connote meanings about erotic affect, embodiment, desires, and practices, through practices of articulation as well as silence, and by means of conceptual categories that implicitly organize what can be known and circulated. Recognition of the various discursive means by which sex is (un)intelligible has been central to theorizing the cultural symbolics and ideological work of sexuality.²⁵ Homosexuality especially has been viewed as “occasioning a crisis in and for the logic of representation itself.”²⁶ Lesbianism has been seen as constituted by dynamics of insignificance, unaccountability, invisibility, and inconsequence.²⁷ Historically distinct forms of unintelligibility have been important to queer theorists reading “the tropologies of sexuality that are put into play once the field of sexuality becomes charged by the widespread availability of a ‘homosexual’ identity.”²⁸

      This book, however, investigates a discursive system in which the “widespread availability” of any sexual identity had yet to come to the fore. For this reason, early modernists confront what might be called distinctly presuppositional discursive contexts—by which I mean how the past is both like and unlike, “not yet like” and “not ever like,” the present.²⁹ It is perhaps especially the case that, within the bounds of early modern English, one cannot safely assume that a given word, phrase, speech, or bodily act is erotic—or, for that matter, not erotic. “Sodomy” might or might not mean sodomy; “lesbian” might or might not mean lesbian; “whore” might or might not mean whore.³⁰ For, as literary critic Laurie Shannon, following the historian Alan Bray, has noted, there is nothing actually “dispositive” about the capacity of sex in the early modern period to signify particular meanings.³¹ Or, as I rephrased this insight in earlier work through the concept of (in)significance: “Erotic acts come to signify … through a complex and continual social process.”³²