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CHAPTER 3

The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

FOR DAVID HALPERIN

Since around 2005, a specter has haunted the field in which I work: the specter of teleology. On behalf of a queerer historiography, some scholars of French and English early modern literature have charged other queer studies scholars with promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. This normalization allegedly is caused by unwitting imprisonment within a framework of teleology. A teleological perspective views the present as a necessary outcome of the past—the point toward which all prior events were trending.¹ The anti-teleologists challenge any such proleptic sequel as a straitjacketing of sex, time, and history, and they announce their critique as a decisive rupture from previous theories and methods of queer history (especially Foucault-inspired genealogy). Given the high profile of the scholars involved, as well as the high octane of their polemics, it is not surprising that their assessment has been embraced enthusiastically by many other scholars, inside and outside of early modern literary studies, who aim “to free queer scholarship from the tyranny of historicism.”² Whereas there are other hot topics within queer studies right now—including whether queer theory should “take a break” from feminism, whether it should “just say no” to futurity, whether it is irremediably impervious to racial and class diversity, and whether the moment of queer theory is over—these issues are all subject to explicit debate in various forums, from conferences and blogs to books and journals. What is curious about this queer teleoskepticism is that, to date, no one has actually responded to the charge—and thus there has been a notable absence of debate.³

It thus seems important to ask: Of what does this queer critique of teleology consist? How did it evolve? What strategies and solutions are being proposed, and what is their analytic and political purchase on the relations of sex, time, and history? Using the accusation of teleology as an analytical fulcrum, I parse in what follows some of the assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change implicit in the alleged relationship of teleological thinking to what has been called “straight temporality.” Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept “queer,” as well as “homo” and “hetero,” in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the unique affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake, I hope to show, are not only emerging understandings of the relations among chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.

To queer history within the terms of this body of scholarship is no longer simply to identify subjects in the past who do not comport with normative expectations of gender or heterosexuality; or to identify past actors whose desires and behaviors may or may not conform to modern categories of sexual identity; or to demonstrate the range of erotic practices—sodomy, tribadism, flagellation, mystical ecstasy—in which past historical actors might have engaged. To queer history rather has come to be seen as coterminous with and expressive of the need to queer temporality itself. As such, the scholarship I review here is part of a broader trend within queer studies. Variously called the “turn toward temporality” or the elucidation of “queer time,” a diverse range of work across disciplines and periods has focused on “time’s sexual politics.” Shifting away from the spatial modes underwriting much previous scholarship (theories of intersectionality and social geography, for instance), important books have explored backward emotional affects, lateral queer childhoods, and reproductive futurism.⁴ Although diverse in topic and method, this scholarship argues that temporal and sexual normativities, as well as temporal and sexual dissonance, are significantly, even constitutively, intertwined. Queer temporality, in the words of Annamarie Jagose, is “a mode of inhabiting time that is attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official narrations of the linear sequence that is taken to structure normative life.”⁵ Collectively, this curvature of time has fueled significant epistemological as well as methodological innovations, productively disturbing developmental and progressive schemas, whether conceived in psychological, narratological, social, or historical terms.

Nonetheless, the theoretical rationales, specific methodologies, and political payoff of this bending of time are far from clear. Indeed, even to speak of it as a “turn” may unduly homogenize scholarly projects that are keyed to different disciplinary registers and that display varying investments in the history of sexuality, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Some scholars working on queer temporality seem motivated primarily by resistance to narratives of the history of sexuality, while others are primarily interested in time, but not especially concerned with history. Some are speaking to debates about historical method within the historical periods in which they work, while others are speaking primarily to other queer studies scholars. The relationship to “the literary”—as a source for accessing both history and temporality—varies as well. Despite this heterogeneity, teleoskepticism is positioned in much of this work as a potent challenge to heteronormativity and “straight time.”

To my mind, the broad claims of theory, however intrinsically interesting or valuable, are best assessed in their applicability to specific historical contexts and fields of inquiry. For this reason, I scrutinize in what follows the arguments of three early modernists who maintain that teleological thinking present in queer historicism undergirds a stable edifice of temporal normativity. That a particularly intense critique of teleology has arisen within the context of early modern studies is partly due to scholars’ efforts to contend with the force of historicism, which has been the field’s dominant (but by no means exclusive) method since the 1980s. Furthermore, pre- and early modern studies have been the site of vigorous debate about historiographic method since volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality upped the critical ante on understandings of sexual modernity. The arguments described in these pages thus arise from within a distinct temporal and professional frame, and I leave to others the task of assessing whether my perspective generates questions pertinent to the explanatory potential of queer temporality more generally.⁶

Because the rest of this chapter focuses on the writings of Carla Freccero (who works mainly in French literature and culture) and Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon (whose expertise is in English), I state from the outset that I find much of their work, including some of their assertions regarding temporality, trenchant and thought provoking. In this I am far from alone: the quick uptake of their interventions bespeaks enormous enthusiasm among a diverse range of scholars. What follows unavoidably involves a certain amount of generalization that elides differences among them (especially regarding the role of gender and psychoanalysis) and fails to convey the insight and verve with which they read particular texts and cultural phenomena. My impetus for treating them as a collective stems from the fact that they have vigorously published on this theme and, despite their differences, share a common line of argumentation regarding teleology, regularly and approvingly cite one another regarding it, and are treated by other scholars as providing a unified perspective on it. The point is not to attack individual scholars, delineate strict methodological camps, or propose a single way of doing the history of sexuality. Indeed, part of what is confusing is that some of these scholars’ recent pronouncements run against the grain of their previous work.⁷ My aim, then, is to advance a more precise collective dialogue on the unique affordances of different methods for negotiating the complex links among sexuality, temporality, and history making. What are the possible different ways of queering history and temporality? What, if any, are the specific procedures that eventuate out of these different paths? And what are the stakes of those differences? If I answer critique with critique and, in the end, defend genealogical approaches to the history of sexuality—arguing in particular that we can read chronologically without straitjacketing ourselves or the past—I hope to do justice to these scholars’ innovations by engaging seriously with their polemics and acknowledging the value of certain hermeneutic strategies for which they are eloquent advocates.

In many respects, the projects of these early modernists reiterate familiar queer theoretical investments. They share with countless others a desire to promote the capacious analytical capacity of queer to deconstruct sexual identity, to illuminate the lack of coherence or fixity in erotic relations, and to highlight the radical indeterminacy and transitivity of both erotic desire and gender. Like many others, they find their warrant in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assertion that “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”⁸ Drawing on Sedgwick as well to privilege the universalizing over the minoritizing aspect of sexualities, these critics maintain that we should not “take the object of queering for granted.”⁹ In Freccero’s words, her “work has been mostly about advocating for queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability, so theoretically anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer.”¹⁰ Similarly, Menon maintains that “if queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer.”¹¹ In historiographic terms, these critics refuse to countenance the emphasis on historical difference often attributed to historicist scholars. Collaborating on an article published in PMLA, for instance, Goldberg and Menon call for “acts of queering that would suspend the assurance that the only modes of knowing the past are either those that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself.” They also share a resistance to the conventional historical periodizations that typically organize the disciplines of history and literature: “We urge,” Goldberg and Menon say, “a reconsideration of relations between past and present that would trace differential boundaries instead of being bound by and to any one age.”¹²

Although similar statements appear in the historical work of other scholars, including some they critique, Freccero, Goldberg, and Menon charge these scholars with a failure to deliver. According to Menon, “the ideal of telos continues to shape even the least homonormative studies of Renaissance sexuality.”¹³ According to Freccero, “what [has] most resisted queering in my field … was a version of historicism and one of its corollaries, periodization.”¹⁴ And, according to Goldberg, other queer historicist scholars “remain devoted to a historical positivity that seems anything but the model offered by queer theory.”¹⁵ In these scholars’ view, this alleged “ideal of telos”—and its reputed corollaries, periodization and positivism—underwrites work governed by a genealogical intent that treats any earlier figures (for example, the sodomite, the tribade, the sapphist) as precursors of, in the words of Freccero, a “preemptively defined category of the present (‘modern homosexuality’).”¹⁶ Stating that they find a lingering attachment to identity that unduly stabilizes sexuality and recruits earlier sexual regimes into a lockstep march toward the present, they adduce in others’ work a homogeneous fiction of “modern homosexuality” that inadvertently, and through a kind of reverse contamination, conscripts past sexual arrangements to modern categories. And although certain deconstructive tendencies motivate much queer historical scholarship, these critics are further distinguished by the manner in which they champion the specific capacities of formal textual interpretation—especially the techniques of deconstruction and psychoanalysis—to provide a less teleological, less identitarian, and in their view, less normalizing historiographic practice. The alluring name that Goldberg and Menon give to their counterstrategy is “homohistory,” defined as a history that “would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism.”¹⁷ In sum, they call for a queering of history that would be, in Goldberg and Menon’s words, an “unhistoricism”—or, to use Freccero’s term, an “undoing” of the history of homosexuality (in ironic homage to David Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality, a main target of her critique).

Before I explore these arguments, I note that this critique has a history of its own. Although the question of teleology in organizing historical understanding has long vexed historians,¹⁸ this question gained momentum in queer studies by means of Sedgwick who, in Epistemology of the Closet, proposed as her axiom 5 that “the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.”¹⁹ Directed at the work of several gay male historians, Sedgwick’s critique focused not only on the work of Michel Foucault, but also Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, with its social constructionist effort to differentiate premodern forms of sexual desire and behavior from a distinctively modern homosexual identity. Comparing Halperin’s work to Foucault’s, she observed that “in each history one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be superseded by another. In each case the superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis.” Sedgwick’s critique of the “birth of the homosexual” and the model of supersession to which it was joined had as its ultimate goal the recognition of the “unrationalized coexistence” of incommensurate models of sexuality: “the most potent effects of modern homo/heterosexual definition tend to spring precisely from the inexplicitness or denial of the gaps between long-coexisting minoritizing and universalizing, or gendertransitive and gender-intransitive, understandings of same-sex relations.”²⁰ Concerned with what she termed the “unfortunate side effect” of historical studies (despite their “immense care, value, and potential”), she noted that whereas “‘homosexuality as we conceive of it today,’ has provided a rhetorically necessary fulcrum point for the denaturalizing work on the past done by many historians,” such formulations risked “reinforcing a dangerous consensus of knowingness about the genuinely unknown” in modern discourses of sexuality.²¹

Sedgwick’s critique had two conceptual targets: narratives of supersession, in which each prior term drops out, and the conceptual consolidation of the present (or the modern). A third target—the perceived emergence of the homosexual locatable in a specific moment in time—can be inferred from the irony that limns her descriptive lexicon of “birth” and “Great Paradigm Shift.” Compelling as her critique was, however, Sedgwick did not endorse a particular form of historiography. She neither asserted the likelihood of transhistorical meanings, made arguments about historical continuity and change, or advocated on behalf of synchronic over diachronic methods. Despite other scholars’ characterization of her critique as a “refusal of the model of linearity and supersession,”²² she did not address temporal linearity or chronology per se, much less advance a standard of total chronological suspension. By attending to “the performative space of contradiction,” Sedgwick deployed deconstructive strategies in her encounter with the past not as a way of doing history but rather “to denaturalize the present.”²³

Sedgwick’s discussion of the Great Paradigm Shift received a direct response from Halperin in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, where he offered a pluralist model of four distinct paradigms of male gender and eroticism, all of which, he argued, are in various ways subsumed by or conflated with the modern category of homosexuality. Answering Sedgwick’s objection regarding supersession while also integrating her primary insight regarding synchronic incoherence, Halperin writes:

A genealogical analysis of homosexuality begins with our contemporary notion of homosexuality, incoherent though it may be, not only because such a notion inevitably frames all inquiry into same-sex sexual expression in the past but also because its very incoherence registers the genetic traces of its own historical evolution. In fact, it is this incoherence at the core of the modern notion of homosexuality that furnishes the most eloquent indication of the historical accumulation of discontinuous notions that shelter within its specious unity. The genealogist attempts to disaggregate those notions by tracing their separate histories as well as the process of their interrelations, their crossings, and, eventually, their unstable convergence in the present day.²⁴

In other words, Halperin’s genealogy is committed to the view that modern sexual categories provide not just an obstacle to the past but also a window on to it. In positioning the present in the relation to the past, a queer genealogist might adduce similarities or differences, continuities or discontinuities, all in pursuit of the contingency of history.

In the decade between Sedgwick’s critique and Halperin’s response, skepticism about the functions of historical alterity and periodization grew among pre- and early modernists. In 1996, Freccero and Louise Fradenburg challenged queer historicists to “confront the pleasure we take in renouncing pleasure for the stern alterities of history.”²⁵ Rejecting as essentialist the insistence on the radical incommensurability of past and present sexualities, they proposed a historiographic practice conscious of the role of desires and identifications across time. Echoing Sedgwick in asking “Is it not indeed possible that alteritism at times functions precisely to stabilize the identity of ‘the modern’?” they argued that “it might, precisely, be more pleasurable and ethically resonant with our experience of the instabilities of identityformation to figure a particular historical ‘moment’ as itself fractured, layered, indeed, historical.”²⁶ Related motives animated the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, who sought to “show that queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality.”²⁷ Dinshaw’s “sensible” historiography, which depended on a “process of touching, of making partial connections between incommensurate entities” across the medieval and postmodern, also privileged a view of sexuality as indeterminate, constituted as much by disidentification and misrecognition as by identification and mimesis.²⁸

Such work forged an implicit alliance among two forms of queerness: one directed at subjectivity—affirmatively courting the contingency of desire and rejecting identity’s stabilizations—and one directed at historiography, with the aim of resisting alterity and periodization in favor of similitude, resemblance, and identification. Yet, none of these scholars set themselves the task of writing a historical account that traversed large expanses of time. Even as they challenged periodization, their own analyses remained bounded, whether within one or, in the case of Dinshaw, two temporally distinct time frames. By offering either a synchronic analysis or one that paratactically juxtaposed and connected modernity with premodernity, they could bracket the question of any intervening time span—indeed, the point was to bracket it. The brilliance of this move was that it enabled affective relations with the past to come to the fore—a move the consequences of which I will explore in Chapter 6. But this innovation also allowed these and subsequent scholars to avoid all matters associated with chronology, including how to explain the endurance or recurrence of some of the very similarities that interested them. Propelled by the desire to defamiliarize modern identity categories while finding new affiliations between the past and the present, the emerging field of queer historiography did not, at this point, directly engage with but rather sidestepped this central issue. This is a problem to which Chapter 4 turns, where I offer a positive model for negotiating the play of difference and similarity over the long temporal term.

Only after queer historiography adopted the postcolonial critique of an imperialist Western history did teleology per se gravitate to the center of discussion. In addition to confronting Eurocentrism and its geopolitical exclusions, postcolonial historians and historians of non-Western cultures followed Johannes Fabian in querying the ideological fit between spatial and temporal alterity, whereby spatially “othered” cultures are judged as inhabiting a time “before” Western modernity. Metanarratives emanating from the metropole have, indeed, inscribed a version of history as developmental telos, whereby a tight conceptual link exists between modernity, progress, and enlightenment, or inversely, between premodernity and what Anjali Arondekar terms “the time(s) of the primitive in a post-colonial world.”²⁹ Among those working on sexuality, the critique of Western timelines focused initially on debating the applicability of Western models of sexual identity to non-Western contexts. Troubling the Foucaultian division between a supposedly Eastern ars erotica and a Western, Christian scientia sexualis, historians of India, China, and the Middle East have refuted the discursive construction of non-Western sexualities as anterior, traditional, primitive, and inevitably developing toward Western models.³⁰ Resisting the “sedimented politics of time” that “often reproduces subjects, critical genealogies and methodological habits that duplicate the very historiographies we seek to exceed,”³¹ these scholars are striving toward a decolonization that is simultaneously archival, methodological, and temporal.

In part because the “Middle Ages” has been treated as the abject other of modernity, medievalists were quick to adopt the postcolonial critique of historical timelines for queer studies. In 2001, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger emphasized the politically fraught relationships among the premodern, primitivity, and sexual positioning, calling into question “straight (teleological) narration, causal explanations, and schemes of periodization.”³² Since then, more scholars working on Western cultures have begun to look beyond sexual identity to ask questions about concepts in the history of sexuality that do and do not transit across cultural as well as historical borders. Querying what such differential presences and absences tell us about culturally distinct modes of comprehending and organizing sexuality, they are exploring how our recognition of them might promote alternative genealogies of sexual modernity.

By the middle of the last decade, then, the various strands emerging out of queer theory, pre- and early modern literary studies, and postcolonial history had converged in a critically conscious queer historicism that not only brought the past into provocative relations with the present but provided powerful incentive for scholars’ recognition of the role of similarity and identification in the act of historicizing. The notion that time might have, in its asynchronicities, warpings, and loops, something akin to queer dimensions, or be susceptible to queering through the productive juxtaposition of distant times and places, or in its linear flow be intriguingly coincident with other phenomena such as reproductive futurity and modernist progress, or may help us think about the uneven temporalities of sexual geographies and their tendentious transnational periodizations are ideas that have initiated a range of provocative meditations on the forces of historical alterity and similitude, identification and disidentification, affect and analysis, in the making of history. Indeed, my elucidation of “cycles of salience” in Chapter 4 responds appreciatively to this body of work, even as I aim to supplement the forms of eroticism considered to include female-female desire.

So why do I part company with the new “unhistoricism”? The unhistoricists’ implicit query of genealogy—what might be occluded by it?—is a vital one,³³ and no doubt speaks to a more general fatigue regarding the injunction “always historicize!” Furthermore, I have considerable sympathy with the critical methods, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, that the unhistoricists employ to oppose that hegemony.³⁴ I agree that “psychoanalysis, as an analytic, is also a historical method,”³⁵ and would point to increased appreciation for its utility as one of the more appealing trends in early modern queer criticism.³⁶ I share, as well, their interest in the capacity of queer to denaturalize sexual logics and expand the object of study through untoward combinations and juxtapositions; recognition of the role that affect and desire, particularly identification, play in the work of historical reconstruction; confidence in the specific capacities of literary language and literary form to contribute to historical understanding; and belief that the past can speak meaningfully to the present.

Despite these areas of agreement, I remain unconvinced that a teleological imperative is what impedes our understanding of past sexualities. In part, my skepticism stems from my understanding of genealogy as it was theorized and put into practice by Foucault. Since the publication of his initial description (articulated through a reading of Nietzsche), genealogy has come to mean a lot of different things to different people—some of it identifiable as Foucaultian, some of it not. Linguistically connoting “descent,” genealogy for Foucault “postulates conditions of possibility in the past for some synchronic feature of the present.”³⁷ More particularly, it concerns how the identity of something is dispersed over time through mixing, repurposing, and contingency. Drawing a distinction between the organic development traceable back to an origin (Ursprung), descent (Herkunft), and emergence (Entstehung), he argued that the genealogist should seek to “dispel the chimeras of the origin” by “cultivat[ing] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.”³⁸ Due to his emphasis on power, “details and accidents” tend in Foucault’s corpus to be produced by violence, pettiness, meanness, and quarrels, but to my mind they stand more generally for the principle of contingency and the way history proceeds by fits and starts. “Beginnings” refers to those moments when one thing is repurposed into another through practices of power-knowledge. Pressing for recognition of historical rupture and discontinuity, especially in terms of events and episodes “situated within the articulation of the body and history,”³⁹ Foucault traced epistemic breaks of intelligibility that fundamentally altered what could be thought.⁴⁰ Practices of repurposing necessarily involve dispersion, and the point of genealogy is “to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion,” while also recognizing in those passing events that which “gave birth to those things that continue to exist.”⁴¹ With the inevitability of the present disrupted, so too is the idea that the past actively inheres in or secretly animates the present.⁴² What is at stake in these productive contradictions is precisely the distinction Foucault drew between writing a history of the past in terms of the present (that is, conventional history) and writing a history of the present (genealogy).⁴³ The latter recognizes that there is no firm ontological or epistemological ground for our identifications with the past—they, too, are historically contingent. The accusation, then, that genealogy, in the form that Foucault wrote it, is teleological runs against the grain of Foucault’s own project. Indeed, nothing could be further from teleology than Foucault’s own genealogies, which understand historical processes in full light of their conditionality.

With Foucault’s own genealogical project in mind,⁴⁴ I now want to scrutinize how the unhistoricists build their indictment of teleological misprision, first by presenting their projects through their own words. Recognizing that an “altericist reaction” among pre- and early modernists “was undoubtedly necessary insofar as it sought to enable analyses of gender and sexuality rather than foreclose them through a presumption that ‘we know whereof we speak,’” Freccero nonetheless worries “that altericism is sometimes accompanied by an older, more familiar claim that periods—those confections of nineteenth-century disciplinarization in the West—are to be respected in their time- and context-bound specificity. This is the historicism I speak of, the one that, in the name of difference smuggles in historical periodization in the spirit of making ‘empirical’ claims about gender and sexuality in the European past.”⁴⁵

Here Freccero forges a close correlation between a prior, apparently principled, commitment to alterity (thus, “altericism”) and periods (those time- and context-bound Western confections), while also suggesting that periodicity becomes the vehicle by which scholars make “empirical” claims. Freccero’s formulation “in the spirit of” leaves ambiguous whether periodization necessitates empiricism or empiricism necessitates periodization, but her point seems to be that altericists pass off periodization as something empirical, whereas it actually is something conceptual and metaphysical. Whichever way it works, empiricism and periodization are judged to be inimical to queer. I will return to the status of periods and empiricism later, but for now simply offer Freccero’s own description of her project in Queer/Early/Modern, which “set itself the task of critiquing historicisms and troubling periodization by rejecting a notion of empirical history and allowing fantasy and ideology an acknowledged place in the production of ‘fantasmatic’ historiography.”⁴⁶ Approaching historical affects as persistence and repetition, and situating subjects in a more “promiscuous” and asynchronic relationship to temporality, she fashions a historiographic method she calls “queer spectrality—ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality that work through the ways trauma, mourning, and event are registered on the level of subjectivity and history.”⁴⁷ As a historiographic method, queer spectrality is a flexible, alluring, and often moving hermeneutic. For instance, Freccero’s application of spectral (or as she also calls it, figural) historiography charts the “transspecies habitus” of dogs and humans through their manifestations of violence in colonialism and the contemporary prison-industrial complex; this reading implicates racism, transnational capital, virile masculinity, queer heterosexuality, and lesbian domestic relations in a complex affective network that is “comparatively queer relative to any progressive, ameliorative rational accounts of historical process.”⁴⁸ Rejecting progressive narratives as well as remedy and rationality, Freccero maintains that she is motivated by an ethical impulse to produce “queer time”⁴⁹ by means of “a suspension, a waiting, an attending to the world’s arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as a guarantee or security for action in the present, but as the very force from the past that moves us into the future.”⁵⁰

Less devoted to a psychoanalytic concept of fantasy but equally invested in nonidentitarian modes of thought, Goldberg, like Freccero, construes temporality as asynchronic, noncontinuous, and nonidentical. At least since his 1995 essay “The History That Will Be,” he has attempted to think beyond periodization, arguing that “historic possibilities must depend upon mobilizations that would be unthinkable if history were segmented across uncrossable divides.”⁵¹ Striving to keep “temporal multiplicity in play,” he objects that recent projects in the history of sexuality may “have shown that the present draws upon various incommensurate strands, [but] have tended nonetheless to divide these strands among previous discrete moments and to draw them in relationship to a consolidated present.”⁵² “Discrete moments”—that is, periods—are defined by Goldberg not only by their boundedness but by their relationship to a “consolidated present.” Periodization thereby is identified with “teleological similarity,” which “can imagine the past under the sign of difference, but not the present.” Extending “Sedgwick’s insistence that any time period is characterized by the ‘unrationalized coexistence of different models’” to the unrationalized coexistence of “different temporalities,” he maintains that “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains unresolved terrain. Or, rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”⁵³ Rather than a spectral haunting that seeks a reciprocal relation with the past, Goldberg explores the multitemporality, nonidentity, and noncorrespondence of the early modern, the recognition of which can expose the “imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities.”⁵⁴ In his 2009 book The Seeds of Things, Goldberg seeks the queer within the hetero by exploring, as he puts it in a related essay, the “multiple materialisms to be found in early modernity,” extending the meaning of “queer” to a consideration of physics because “queer theory is not and never was just about sex in itself.”⁵⁵

Menon makes many of the same theoretical and rhetorical moves as Freccero and Goldberg, but her special interest is in pressing against all forms of desire’s confinement, whether that of sexual identity, terminology, literary form, chronological boundaries, or historical method. Because desire, in her view, always exceeds identity and is “synonymous … with queerness,” she “insists that we refrain from identifying sexuality, and revel in pursuing the coils of a desire that cannot be contained in a binary temporal code.”⁵⁶ Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film begins by arguing that “our embrace of difference as the template for relating past and present produces a compulsory heterotemporality in which chronology determines identity.”⁵⁷ In other words, scholarly attention to historical difference produces a relationship to time in which sexual identity is causally related to chronological explanations; correlatively, queer studies scholars who do not suspend all chronology are not only normativizing but, in her words, “governed by dates.”⁵⁸ Subjection to the datelines of chronological time is then translated into teleology: “Defined as the doctrine of ends or final causes, teleology depends on a sequence leading to an end that can retrospectively be seen as having had a beginning.”⁵⁹ Disrupting this purported causal chain via “homohistory, in which desires always exceed identitarian categories and resist being corralled into hetero-temporal camps,”⁶⁰ Menon exploits what she sees as the tight congruence of literary form with historical and political structures, in order to access what she calls, in her book’s final sentence, “the homo in us all.”⁶¹ Her term “compulsory heterotemporality,” echoing Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” reactivates sexual normativity as the cause and effect of “straight” temporality and historiography. Adopting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies,⁶² Menon writes that “the temporal version of decolonization—what may be termed dechronolization—would involve taking anachronism seriously and defying difference as the underwriter of history.”⁶³ Under the banners of homohistory and unhistoricism, Menon rejects not only historical difference but what she sees as its theoretically suspect corollaries—facts, origins, authenticity, and citation or naming—to which she believes historicists naively adhere.

Composing what increasingly seems a united front, these scholars resist historicism on the grounds that it exaggerates the self-identity of any given moment and therefore exaggerates the differences between any two moments. Against what they view as a compulsory regime of historical alterity, they elevate anachronism and similitude as the expression of queer insurgency. Their readings offer persuasive examples of how queerness animates and troubles ostensibly heterosexual literary texts and cultural discourses. Their strengths as critics reside in the ability to see beyond heterosexuality’s inscription on textual form as well as their attentiveness to the vicissitudes of desire and the failures of sexuality. Their contributions as theorists include their fashioning of a queer analytic that encompasses a range of relations that do not conspire to any intelligible identity. Furthermore, a deep ethical commitment to deconstructive exposure—as a mode of reading, as politics, as theory—informs their provocations. Whether one applauds, as I do, or abhors, as others might, the political implications of continually exposing identity’s contradictions and indeterminacy (a debate now three decades old), their readings amply demonstrate the stresses and fractures within the normative, as well as the distinctive capacity of literary texts to solicit our awareness of such productive contradictions.

Readings, however, are not the same thing as history; more precisely, deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts, while they contribute much to historical understanding, do not necessarily conduce to a historical explanation. For all the undeniable utility of deconstruction, in particular, as an interpretative protocol, these critics, I submit, overestimate its analytical capacity and explanatory power. Although deconstruction exposes the contingency of—and thus implicitly historicizes—truth claims, the extent to which its largely synchronic hermeneutic can succeed as a full-scale historiographic method remains unresolved. Whereas deconstruction may be an extraordinary technique for elucidating queerness in time, it has not, at least not yet, demonstrated a satisfying capacity for analyzing temporality in all of its dimensions, including elucidating forms of queerness across time.⁶⁴

So how is it that these scholars make their argument with such persuasive force? To understand this, we need to attend to the rhetorical maneuvers and conceptual conflations that underlie their indictments of difference, chronology, and periodization. First, an associational logic pervades their work, wherein historical difference, chronology, periodization, and empirical facts are positioned in an endlessly self-incriminating and disqualifying feedback loop. These conflations reflect a general tendency toward analogical argumentation. As should be clear from their own words, Goldberg, Menon, and Freccero’s rejection of “straight temporality” forges a tight metonymic chain among the alleged operations of sex, time, and history. They accomplish these linkages via rhetorical maneuvers whereby difference and sameness are constellated with concepts that stand in as near cognates: not only hetero and homo, but distance and proximity, multiplicity and self-identity, change and stasis, disidentification and mimesis. These close cognates allude to both abstract theoretical principles and specific material realities. Yet, drawn as they are from different epistemological registers—psychic, social, temporal, formal, historiographic—and abstracted from contexts of space or time, they are rhetorically deployed so as to cross seamlessly from one conceptual domain to another. This unmarked analogic process forges a metonymic chain, whereby a tug on one link causes movement in another. However, because these analogies are asserted presumptively rather than argued, and sustained by the play of metaphors rather than by discursive or material connections, when the conceptual space or difference between these concepts becomes inconvenient, they are silently sundered—allowing great latitude for equivocation.

It remains unclear why analogical argumentation—familiar to readers of medieval and Renaissance texts as a dominant style of reasoning⁶⁵—might be especially suited for queer analysis. Nor is it clear why a particular mode of analogical thinking, that signified by the rhetorical trope metalepsis, is heralded by Freccero and Menon as an exemplary queer analytical tool. Metalepsis occurs when a present effect is attributed to a remote cause; it links A to D but only by eliding B and C. Since several steps intervene between the cause and effect, metalepsis comprises a “compressed chain of metaphorical reasoning.”⁶⁶ Metalepsis can be rhetorically powerful (as has been shown to be the case in Shakespearean drama),⁶⁷ but nonetheless is vulnerable to critique as fuzzy logic. Freccero, for instance, suggests that metalepsis is particularly queer and theoretical: “the reversal signified by the rhetorical term metalepsis could be seen to embody the spirit of queer analysis in its willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things. To read metaleptically, then, would be to engage in queer theorizing.”⁶⁸ More interested in its status as a repressed or failed rhetorical device, Menon uses metalepsis as an interpretive crux for reading absent sex scenes in Shakespearean drama, scenes of implied consummation, which, despite their failure to be staged, nonetheless link social cause to tragic effect. While there is much to admire in the way these critics demonstrate that “the ‘farfetched’ nature of metalepsis telescopes time so that the far appears near, and vice versa,”⁶⁹ their willingness to “embrace the accusation of metalepsis”⁷⁰ fails to translate into a cogent defense of metalepsis as a mode of queer argument.

To the contrary: a metaleptic sleight of hand enables the ground of critique to keep shifting.⁷¹ At times, it seems that the allegation of teleology is directed against scholars who invoke any form of sexual identity, even one located in the present, and even if construed as indeterminate and internally riven. At other times, the accusation appears aimed at scholars’ attempts to track terms, concepts, and forms of intelligibility by means of the temporal frame of chronology or diachrony. At times, it appears that the complaint is scholars’ failure to treat sex solely as representation, an interpretative choice that renders them immediately vulnerable to charges of empiricism and positivism. At other times, the indictment widens to encompass the entire discipline of history and the concerns and methods of historians. Through an on-again, off-again associational reasoning dedicated to the wholesale rejection of alterity-cum-heterotemporality, these investments mingle, come together, merge, and sometimes fall apart.

Recognizing that such rhetorical maneuvers underpin the charge of teleology,⁷² we might be justified in asking just what forms of similarity are being celebrated and what kinds of difference are discarded. A case in point is the talismanic invocation of “the homo.” Despite the catchy phrase “homohistory,” it remains unclear how expanding the possibilities of “the homo,” “with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism,” automatically enacts resistance to “a present assumed identical to itself.” Nor is it clear why “the homo” necessarily would be queerer than alterity, unless the corresponding shorthand of “hetero” is so essentialized as to be always already normativizing. Might historical alterity not sometimes offer its own pleasures (as well as accurately describe certain pre- and early modern modes of intelligibility)? How is it that “the homo” signifies similarity and identification across time while simultaneously signifying resistance to any such identification with sexual categories in the present? Just what is conveyed, in psychic, social, temporal, formal, and historical terms, by the über-concepts “homo” and “hetero”? How much analytical weight and presumed congruence can these master terms and their pseudocognates bear? To what extent are they in sync, when, and why? In these scholars’ hands, “homo” and “hetero” serve as mobile conceptual lynchpins, used theoretically to suture together diverse phenomena; but they fail to attach to, much less elucidate, specific social conditions or material embodiments.

Sexuality, the diverse enactments of erotic desire and physical embodiment; temporality, the various manifestations of time; and history, historicism and historiography, the aggregate repertoire of cognitive and affective approaches to the past, are not intrinsically connected. Neither straight identity nor heterosexual desire is the same as linear time. Not every diachronic or chronological treatment of temporality need be normativizing, nor is every linear arc sexually “straight.” A scholar’s adherence to chronological time does not, in and of itself, have any necessary relationship to sexuality, much less to sexual normativity. Neither does a scholar’s segmentation of time into periods. The act of periodizing is of routinized professional significance, functioning for many historians and literary critics as rote convenience, not to mention a structure underlying the academic job market. It is worthwhile to question the value of any conceptualization that has been reified in this way, as well as to insist that scholars recognize their complacency and complicity with its arbitrary application. Periodization produces some unfortunate effects, including misrecognitions of the exemplarity and/or novelty of one’s chosen purview, as well as falsely universalizing claims based on ignorance of what scholars concerned with other times actually do. But conventional periods are only one way to slice and dice the past; time, conceived as “the phenomenal ordering of events,”⁷³ is both ontological and epistemological; as such, it can be segmented in multiple ways, with the concept of “the period” changing according to the question and time frame considered.⁷⁴ To periodize is not, in and of itself, a brief on behalf of a particular method. Although it has become common to refer to the act of periodization as “not simply the drawing of an arbitrary line through time, but a complex practice of conceptualizing categories, which are posited as homogeneous and retroactively validated by the designation of a period divide,”⁷⁵ the identity that periodicity imposes need not be inevitably problematic—as long as it is understood to be contingent, manufactured, invested, and not produced by othering what came before. The wholesale characterization of periodization as a straightening of the past races over such issues while making light of historical contingency—that is, the ways in which practices, representations, and discourses happen to gather in particular places and times.

Although certain problematic allegiances among sexuality, temporality, and historiography do exist—as when invocations of the future are enrolled in the service of reproductive generation⁷⁶—these links, far from being immanent in either sex or time, are historically and discursively produced. If temporality has been harnessed to reproductive futurity, this is due to an operation of ideology, not to the formal procedures of diachronic method (which, while not exempt from ideology, is not the same thing as ideology). However coimplicated, mutually reinforcing, and potentially recursive, the relations of sex to time are the effects of a historical process, not the preconditions to history. We thus need to ask: by which analytical and material processes do history and historiography become teleological, heterotemporal, or straight?

History is polytemporal not only because each synchronic moment is riddled with multiple, and sometimes contradictory, asynchronicities, but because time, like language, operates simultaneously on synchronic and diachronic axes. Although it is true, as Menon argues, that “time does not necessarily move from past to future, backward to forward,”⁷⁷ it also is true that time moves on. Any ethics we might wish to derive from a consideration of temporality must contend with the irreducible force of time’s movement on our bodies, our species, and the planet.⁷⁸ Queer or not, we remain in many respects in time. Analytics dedicated to charting time’s cultural logics can be organized via lines, curves, mash-ups, juxtapositions. Nonetheless, writing the history of sexuality by means of asynchronicities located within a synchronic frame or by vaulting over huge expanses of time may bypass chronology, but it generally fails to break out of the binary of “then” and “now” that thus far has constituted queer studies’ engagement with the past.⁷⁹

The sequential process that constitutes diachrony is, I would argue, a crucial and often tendentious element of sex, texts, and history. Sequence is a formal elaboration, made possible by a syntactical arrangement, the purpose of which is to imply connections, highlight or manage disconnections, and drive a temporal movement along. But sequence in one domain—for instance, narrative or poetic form—may or may not equate to, or even imply, sequence in another—such as that which structures erotic concepts like “foreplay” and “consummation.” What is the relationship between unconventional literary or cinematic form and queer eroticism? How and why might the operations of sexuality and form be coincident, and what is at stake in apprehending them as identical?⁸⁰ What mechanism or process—aesthetic, erotic, political, historical—enables their equation? Are all “points,” consummations, and closures (textual, erotic, political, historical) necessarily coimplicated, and do they all possess the same degree of inevitability?

Absent investigation of these questions, the presumptive metonymies of sexuality, temporality, and historiography confuse chronology and consequence with teleological progress. In constructing this specter, the advocates of homohistory assert, ironically, a new essentialism. Chapter 8 of this book will address the relationships between sexuality and textuality by means of an alternative analytic of sequence. For now, suffice it to say that it may not be so very queer to bind such disparate phenomena into a single unitary ontology. To invoke Sedgwick once more: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?”⁸¹ That these conflations occur under the banner of queer should not go unnoticed. Queer’s freefloating, endlessly mobile, and infinitely subversive capacities may be one of its strengths—accomplishing strategic maneuvers that no other concept does—but its principled imprecision poses considerable analytic limitations. Simply at the level of politics, for instance, queer’s congeniality with neoliberalism has been well documented.⁸² However mutable as a horizon of possibility, queer is a position taken up in resistance to specific configurations of gender and sexuality. If queer, as is often said, is intelligible only in relation to social norms,⁸³ and if the concept of normality itself is of relatively recent vintage,⁸⁴ then queer needs to be defined and redefined in relation to those changing configurations.⁸⁵ To fail to specify these relations is to ignore desire’s emergence out of distinct cultural and material configurations of space and time, as well as what psychoanalysis calls libidinal predicates. It is to celebrate the instability of queer by means of a false universalization of the normal.

The analytic capacity of queer can only be elevated to ontology if it is abstracted and dehistoricized.⁸⁶ One of the more dubious forms this abstraction takes is to insist that sexual identity is completely irrelevant to contemporary queer life. Opines Menon: “a homosexuality that is posited as chronologically and sexually identifiable adheres to the strictures of hetero-historicism and is therefore not, according to the logic of my argument, queer at all.”⁸⁷ Although Goldberg and Freccero have no doubt that sexual identities generate real effects, they tend to interpret them as exclusively pernicious. If, as Lee Edelman maintains, “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one,”⁸⁸ it remains the case that queerness today is imbricated with and tethered to a range of identities, in complex relations of support, tension, and contest.⁸⁹ However problematic, regulatory, and incoherent modern identity categories may be, this does not obviate their cogency as palpable discursive and social constructions. That we remain under modernity’s sway is clear from contemporary debates about the globalization of gay identity,⁹⁰ as well as by the pervasive institutionalization of sexual identities in laws, social policies, and clinical therapies. For this reason, a queer historicism that refuses, on principle, to countenance the existence of the category “modern homosexuality” invests too much descriptive accuracy in the transhistorical truth value of queer theory.⁹¹

Rather than continue a zero-sum game of identity versus nonidentity, queer scholars might gain some analytical purchase by recognizing that the material, social, and psychic conditions of queer life might not always be served by the presumption of an exclusive queerness: perhaps at least some of us, and the worlds within which we live, are queer and gay, queer and bi, queer and trans, queer and lesbian, queer and heterosexual. This is not only a matter of recognizing the import of social emplacements and embodied desires—or even the contingency of queer theory itself—but the give-and-take of psychic processes. Identities may be fictions—or in Freccero’s term, phantasms—but they are weighty ones, and they still do important work. That they also break down, become unhinged, is understood in psychoanalysis as part of a lifelong process of formation and deformation, not an either-or proposition.

To clarify this tension in less psychoanalytic terms, it may be useful to return to the theorist who has done more than anyone to render explicit the stakes of a queer hermeneutic. Following her description of the “open mesh of possibilities” with a long list of possible self-identifications that “queer” might compass, Sedgwick noted that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”⁹² Sedgwick’s queer is positioned in relation to both universalizing and minoritizing axes; its radical potential is relative to the political work of identity, which is seen as simultaneously enabling and disabling, self-empowering and disciplinary. As is usual with her caveats, there is something important at stake here, and it has to do with politics and ethics. Intent on promoting the universalizing over the minoritizing aspects of eroticism, those who would celebrate “the homo in us all” seem unaware of, or perhaps untroubled by, the asymmetrical disposition of privileges and rights attached to sexual minority status. Furthermore, to argue, as Menon does, that sexual identity categories are themselves an effect of a misguided queer historicism⁹³ is to misrecognize the processes by which identities are produced, as well as the political force of their application and dissemination.⁹⁴

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 the only appropriate model of queer history even as its practitioners imply that history is not something they are interested in making. The categorical quality of their polemic, which implicitly installs queer as a doctrinal foundation and ideological litmus test, goes to the heart of historiographic and queer ethics. It goes to the heart of academic and queer politics. It goes to the heart of interdisciplinarity and its future.

Rather than practice “queer theory as that which challenges all categorization,”¹⁰⁷ I believe there remain ample reasons to practice a queer historicism dedicated to showing how categories, however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be. To understand the chance nature of coincidence and convergence, of sequence and consequence, and to follow them through to the entirely contingent outcomes to which they gave rise: this is not a historicism that creates categories of identity or presumes their inevitability; it is one that seeks to explain such categories’ constitutive, pervasive, and persistent force. Resisting unwarranted teleologies while accounting for resonances and change will bring us closer to achieving the difficult and delicate balance of apprehending historical sameness and difference,¹⁰⁸ continuism and alterity, that the past, as past, presents to us. The more we honor this balance, the more complex and circumspect will be our comprehension of the relative incoherence and relative power of past and present conceptual categories, as well as of the dynamic relations among subjectivity, sexuality, and historiography.

Such a queer historicism need not segregate itself from other methods, such as psychoanalysis, with its crucial recognition of the role of the unconscious in historical life, and its aim may well be the further deconstruction of identity categories. But any such rapprochement would require enhanced discernment regarding the ways our bodies remain in time, as well as regarding the use to which different theorists of sex, time, and history are put. In this regard, the exchange I have attempted to advance in these pages cannot help but touch upon the generative legacy of Eve Sedgwick. In its citational circulations, that legacy has become ever more diffuse—and at times attenuated or diluted. The question of how we utilize the multiple “Sedgwicks” we have known is thus one issue at stake. That this is so might give sufficient reason to pause over the prospect of yoking the future of queerness so tightly to unhistoricism. What we create out of the copia bequeathed by Sedgwick—as well as by those with whom she was in dialogue—merits something more scrupulous. After all: what we remember, what we forget, what we retain, what we omit, and what we finally acknowledge as our debts—this is no less than history in the making.