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CHAPTER 1

Thinking Sex

Knowledge, Opacity, History

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

Is sex good to think with? Over the past thirty years, historians, literary critics, and scholars of gay, lesbian, queer, and sexuality studies have demonstrated that there is much to be gained, conceptually and politically, in thinking about sex. They have shown the extent to which sexual attitudes, concepts, and practices have been influenced by and are indices of societal concerns specific to time, place, and discursive context. Whether investigating historical lives or imaginative fictions, medicine or pornography, visual or textual representations, they have provided ample demonstration of the diversity of sexuality and the complex ways in which that diversity has been and continues to be represented, claimed, contested, and refused.

But what about thinking sex? That is, using sex as a way to think and, further, as a means by which to analyze what such thinking entails? Is it possible or desirable to use sex itself as an analytical guide for thinking about bodies, histories, representations, and signification? Can “sex” as a conceptual category help us apply pressure to the question of how we make sex into knowledge? To these questions, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns answers in the affirmative. Playing on the double meaning of thinking and knowing about sex and mobilizing sexuality as a form of knowledge and thought, this book explores how thinking about sex is related to thinking with sex, and how both activities affect a range of knowledge relations—especially the affective, embodied, cognitive, and political interactions among those who supposedly know and those who decidedly don’t.

Given the capaciousness of the concepts of “sex” and “knowledge,” inquiry into how sex is made into knowledge potentially could comprise a vast and unwieldy project, traversing several fields of endeavor. Indeed, the inquiry pursued in this book is one without a stable or coherent referent. In what ways are sexual knowledge and knowledge practices about sex “research objects”? Given sexuality’s relationship to the body and the psyche, nature and culture, what are its borders and boundaries? In order to narrow the field of inquiry, I have focused my study of sexual knowledge on three questions: What do we know about early modern sex? How do we know it? And what does such knowledge mean? As forthright as each of these questions appears, each extends outward into separate, yet overlapping, intellectual domains. To ask what we know about early modern sex is to ask a question that is simultaneously epistemological (having to do with the contents, conditions, and practices of knowledge) and historical (having to do with a precise time and space, including the here and now as well as the then and there). To ask how we know what we think we know is to venture into the domains of methodology (the analytical procedures we employ) and theory (the conceptual frameworks that inform our methods). It is to ask not only what sexual knowledge we make but how we might make history through the analytic provided by sexuality. And to ask what such knowledge means is to query what we do with it, how we make it both signify and significant, in individual, interpersonal, and social contexts. It is to query why we want to know what we hope to know, as well as to query what we do with that knowledge. The processes of meaning and doing thus raise questions about the effects of knowing and of the transmission of knowledge—questions infused not only with political but, as I will show, ethical and pedagogical dimensions. In thus reframing the history of sexuality as an epistemological problem, this book aims to reorient the ways by which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer studies scholars, approach the historicity of sex.

When considered epistemologically, sexual knowledge becomes a conceptual problematic, one that I will refer to as “sex-as-knowledge-relation.” I approach this problematic by means of some related premises: that how we access and produce the history of sexuality is as important as what we discover about prior organizations of erotic desire; that sex, like gender, is best approached as a flexible and capacious category of analysis (rather than a delimited or fixed object of study);¹ and that methods used to write the history of sexuality—that is, historiography as practiced by both historians and literary critics—will benefit from sustained consideration of what it means to “know” sex in the first place. Because my conception of history includes our own historical moment, I approach the relations between thinking sex and making sexual knowledge as both sequential (thinking comes first, making knowledge out of thought comes second) and recursive (how we make knowledge affects how we think, including what questions we can imagine).

Such are my central questions and premises—and if they appear, in their initial formulation, unduly abstract, I strive in this study to provide compelling demonstrations of how and why thinking sex-as-knowledge-relation might speak to a range of interests and projects. Over the course of the next nine chapters, my answers to these questions resolve into several arguments about the analytical challenges and stakes involved in making sexual knowledge out of the material traces of the past. My argument begins with the observation that many of us engaged in the effort to make sexual knowledge regularly hit up against conceptual difficulties: opacity, absence, gaps, blockages, and resistances. Whether we seek to acquire knowledge of sex in the past or to understand the past through the analytic of sexuality, such moments of impasse are often experienced as our own private research problem—albeit a problem we might acknowledge over e-mail or dinner with friends. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns argues that sexual knowledge is difficult because sex, as a category of human thought, volition, behavior, and representation, is, for a variety of reasons, opaque, often inscrutable, and resistant to understanding. Rather than attempt to surmount or conceal such obstacles, or grant them only minimal due as a matter of what is missing (whether in the archives or in our understanding), this book leverages the notions of opacity, obscurity, obstruction, and impasse in order to explore what such barriers to vision, access, and understanding might entail for the production and dissemination of knowledge about sex. It seeks in such obstacles what social scientists call “methodological release points,”² using them as an analytical wedge with which to open new questions about sex-as-knowledge-relation and devise new strategies to confront some of the ways it is possible not to know. The principle I seek to mobilize throughout the book is this: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access, but because it doesn’t.

Opaque Knowledge

Why might sex be hard to know? Why is sex opaque—and, as I shall argue, obstinate and implacable in its opacity? While this book will provide some detailed answers to these questions, I begin by noting that obstacles regarding sexual knowledge do not all derive from the same place, nor are they all of the same conceptual order.³ Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns takes its bearings from the fact that sex is an experience of the body (and hence fleeting) and that individual sexual acts are likewise local and ephemeral. Furthermore, there is the basic fact of psychic variation: to put it simply, what turns one person on may turn another one off. The extent of erotic diversity necessarily renders any instance of sexual experience or representation a highly contingent matter of interpretation. These two realities subtend the analyses that follow. Nonetheless, this is not a book about subjectivity, and thus not a book about desire. Nor is it about the emotional needs of the desiring subject except insofar as certain affects—particularly frustration and disappointment—can prompt inquiry into structural conditions of knowledge production. When attending to the past, this shift in focus away from “the subject” shifts attention from the question of what people (or literary characters) want to the knowledge relations they inhabit and perform. When attending to the present, this shift broadens the optic to include the disciplinary structures we inhabit and the questions we ask of past lives and texts.

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 Part I, “Making the History of Sexuality,” the accent falls primarily on historiographic issues—that is, the methods and 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 What is true at the level of signifying systems is true as well for individual subjects and the specific conditions of communication in which they participate.³³

Because erotic desires and acts are unreliable as modes or catalysts of signification, they have seemed to require supplemental discursive framing in order to reveal the meanings and values they may, or may not, convey. Historicist scholars have tended to negotiate the uncertainty of sexual signification by describing erotic concepts through a period’s own languages and idioms, as well as by locating sexuality within densely contextualized domains—in essence, momentarily stabilizing the meanings of sex through other discourses: legal statutes and trials of sodomites and tribades, medical descriptions of the use and “abuse” of genitalia, and prescriptive literature that articulates dominant sexual mores. They have expended critical energy attempting to decode period-specific lexicons, hoping to pierce through cryptic allusions, linguistic codes, and playful innuendo to recover sexual subjectivities and evidence of erotic acts. This focus on signification and context—that is, on the way things mean—has now settled into what one critic calls “the routines of discursive contextualization,”³⁴ a habitual strategy with both gains and losses.³⁵

Over the past decade or so, a number of historicist scholars have moved beyond identity as the governing question of the history of sexuality, shifting the analytical imperative away from inclusion, for instance, of lesbians in history or dating the “birth of the homosexual,” and toward how sex signifies in ways eccentric to modern identity logics.³⁶ In my previous book The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, I analyzed the instability of sexual signification by exposing the dynamics that, I argued, governed representations of female same-sex desire in early modern England. Intent on resisting the way that narrow definitions of evidence preclude an understanding of female sexuality prior to the development of identity regimes, I traced the fates of figures of same-sex eroticism by composing a cultural history, arguing for a capacious designation of what “counts” as erotic for women.

As was true of that book, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns elaborates questions of sexual signification as a way to explore something other than identity history—not only because identity is haphazardly relevant to the early modern period but because it can constrain the questions that we ask of sexuality.³⁷ To be initially schematic about it (in terms that subsequent chapters will complicate): one strand of scholarship on sex—call it the historical/historicist/genealogical strand—focuses on what we can know about sexuality in the past, often in terms of its difference from the present. Another strand—call it the psychoanalytic and/or queer one—is concerned with how sexuality messes with signification, particularly in terms of the stability of identity categories. This latter emphasis is evident not only in queer theory focused on modernity but in historical studies of more distant periods. (Many studies, of course, enact both impulses.) Despite these differences, however, both strands have viewed the primary question about the past to be the appropriateness of adducing the force of sexual identity categories for earlier time periods.³⁸ In part, this is because influential genealogists have maintained that it is the aim of sexual genealogies to explore “the multiplicity of possible historical connections between sex and identity, a multiplicity whose existence has been obscured by the necessary but narrowly focused, totalizing critique of sexual identity as a unitary concept.”³⁹ The possible connections between sex and identity—related to but not put to rest by the anti-identitarian claims of queer theory—have thus served as the governing question of the history of sex, even when the motive is to show that such identities are unstable or contingent.

This book travels a different path to demonstrate that historical, even genealogical, projects need not concern themselves exclusively (or even at all) with connections between sex and identity, sex and subjectivity, or the truth relations they instantiate. Rather than adducing how early modern sexuality defies modern categories or is anti-identitarian, I untether sex from identity as the main historical question. Setting aside the issue of identity has also enabled me to set aside the issue of sexual nomenclatures. This does not mean the book is uninterested in language, much less in concepts: one chapter explores early modern lexicons for their representational dynamics, scrutinizing the ways by which sex is represented through language, while another takes up the term “lesbian” as a critical sign. But this book approaches signification mainly as a way to move closer to the shadowy borders and uneven edges where words-as-concepts rub up against bodies and the erotic acts they perform.

Many of the questions animating Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns arose out of my previous immersion in and confusion about early modern signifying practices. Because discourses about female-female desire were structured through rhetorics of absence, invisibility, and insignificance, I developed an almost allergic sensitivity to the potentials and pitfalls of the methods by which we research the sexual past. My nascent awareness of the importance of opacity in knowledge began when I had occasion to ask: How are we to locate the lines between passionate friendship and eroticism, especially insofar as women were generally disenfranchised from the classical ideology of friendship (amicitia) and often vilified for expressing self-motivated desire? Or, to move from the register of prevailing social discourses to that of the desiring individual: How, as the historian Anna Clark has asked, are we to positively identify the look, the caress, the sigh?⁴⁰ What is the basis for interpreting kissing, touching, embracing, or sharing a bed (all common practices in the early modern era) as erotic—or not?⁴¹ What, if any, is the erotic valence of flogging, in a period when theological, medical, pedagogical, and legal discourses approach the use of the whip and the rod through their own quite varied understandings?⁴² And whatever happened to chin chucking, a pervasive ancient and early modern practice that no longer seems to even signify in the modern world?⁴³ Or, to move to the realm of critical practice: On what basis can we differentiate between libertine sexism and libertine sexiness, particularly if we recognize that power differentials can have, and certainly have had, a constitutive role in sexuality? Does the widespread use of the term “homoerotic” for periods prior to modernity—a critical practice in which I participate—function, at least in part, as a cover for our confusion about the meanings of erotic desire? These questions—which are obviously hermeneutic, historical, and historiographic—are also, I have come to believe, epistemological.

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is concerned less with subjects’ desires for other subjects or the contexts within which those desires are granted meaning than with the articulation of desires for sexual knowledge and the various ways those desires are affirmed, ignored, or repelled. It retains my prior interest in the oscillating dynamics of significance and insignificance, intelligibility and unintelligibility, but here I approach the historicity of these dynamics along a parallel route located on a “meta” conceptual register. Rather than devise a chronological cultural history of sexuality or of the pursuit of sexual knowledge, I tarry with the synchronic contradictions of early modern knowledge relations, believing that it is by so doing that a diachronic history of thinking sex might become possible.

Historicizing Sex

Historians and literary critics understandably tend to avoid acknowledging in print how the conceptual, methodological, and archival impasses they encounter affect their interpretations and narratives.⁴⁴ In part this is because our scholarly instinct is to work toward revelation, to fill in gaps and make lacunae speak. Those of us working outside of a strictly philosophical register (and philosophy’s subfield of epistemology) don’t really have a vocabulary for talking about not knowing—except, that is, by means of psychoanalysis, which, at least within early modern studies, continues to struggle against perceptions of a disqualifying ahistoricism. But our reticence is also a result of the dominant preoccupation of most historical scholars (literary critics as well as historians), which has been to explore erotic attitudes, affects, identities, and ideologies—rather than confront what happens to interpretative practice when we look for the details of actual sexual practices. There are good reasons for this tendency: when we look for evidence of attitudes, we actually find it! Yet, when we start to scrutinize the details of such attitudes—or their concretization into dominant ideologies—they don’t necessarily tell us what people did with one another or what specific bodily acts meant to them. Despite this obvious obstacle, for literary critics and historians alike, the content of sex in the early modern era has been all too presumable, supposedly interpretable through such ready-to-hand, transhistorical rubrics as “homoeroticism,” “heterosexuality,” “sodomy,” “masochism,” “sadism,” “reproduction,” “heteronormativity,” and “cruising.” Such vague referents function as placeholders for a sexual activity and set of relational practices everywhere assumed, but rarely actually described. The material, corporeal aspects of sexual activity—not merely the ecstasy, pain, or ennui it occasions, but the nitty-gritty bodily acts of which it consists—remain surprisingly underarticulated and often subject to a presumptive, tacit form of knowing.⁴⁵

Although I believe that the more historical evidence we accrue of specific erotic acts the better, I do not think that a diligent compilation of sexual practices will resolve this issue. For the opacity of sex, while it certainly has an archival dimension, is not merely a matter of evidentiary lack. When it comes to sex, even I don’t know what I’ve done, much less what my friends or neighbors do. And despite sociological surveys that purport to present an accurate snapshot of sexual behaviors, what the larger population does is also a mystery. This is less because people lie (although of course they do) than because we don’t have much of a language, even now, to narrate our experiences in anything but the baldest possible terms—which is one reason why historical scholars resort to handy transhistorical placeholders in the first place.⁴⁶

The use of such concepts has fostered important analytical work. But the time has come to demand more congruence between our theoretical concepts and the historical practices they are employed to name, and not just in pursuit of greater linguistic accuracy. Given the pervasive critical recourse to “heteronormativity,” for instance, we might well ask: what was normative about early modern cross-gender sex? Whatever it was, it was not belief in the self-evident naturalness of desire across the gendered categories of male and female. As literary critic Ben Saunders notes: “in the Renaissance, the love that dare not speak its name is not homosexuality but rather any love that dares to posit a woman as worthy of a man’s complete devotion.”⁴⁷ A number of pre- and early modernists have shown the extent to which the concept of “heterosexuality” fundamentally misidentifies the way in which sexual relations were understood, and thus leads scholars to misconstrue the societal norms aimed at regulating sexual behavior.⁴⁸ Similar pressure could be put on the concept of the “homoerotic,” which, as a critical term, serves to designate something, but in point of fact not too precisely. It thus simultaneously registers and deflects our confusion over the thorny problem of identifying what may look like homosexuality to us, but in certain respects isn’t. The resort to “queerness,” opportune as it has been, does not resolve this issue. A related problem is raised by invocations of terms derived from the discourse of sexology. To what does “masochism” refer? An interiorized desire for suffering? A form of bodily pleasure? An explicit erotic act, such as bondage? A sexual orientation and, by extension, a community of like-minded individuals? One impetus of this book is to suggest the payoff in coming clean about the extent to which these concepts are our categories, based on our projections of what the past was like. But no less a crucial impetus is to challenge the presumptive knowledge that these categories each, in their own way, sustain.

This book’s commitment to history and historiography thus runs deeper than the dominant historicist mandate to infuse literary scholarship with cultural and temporal specificity. While not neglecting that mandate, I believe that a literary critic’s commitment to history can also involve matters of method central to and challenging of the discipline of history itself. Beginning with my second chapter on Alan Bray’s histories of male homosexuality and friendship, my engagement with modes of historical understanding as well as techniques of historical analysis provides a baseline for the anatomizing analyses of the ensuing chapters.⁴⁹ Indeed, the rest of this book attempts to make good on the invitation issuing from Bray’s historiographic legacy. By taking up several different historiographic problems, I aim to historicize sexuality, engage with historically contingent questions about sexuality, analyze and critique the methods used to historicize sexuality, and ask what it means to historicize sexuality. The precise opacities that appear by means of these questions may be distinctive to the early modern period, but figuring out how to leverage them is a task relevant to every historical scholar concerned with erotic desires and practices or gendered embodiment.

It is no accident that questions about historiographic method have been central to the field of sexuality studies since its beginnings, with history, historicism, and historiography situated in complex tension with the hermeneutic priorities of literary studies. Debates about the relations between representation and “real life,” metaphors and materiality, texts and their mediation, signification and social practice have been central to how these disciplines and fields intersect, interpret, and misinterpret each other. One of the objectives of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is to affiliate the approach toward sex as a complex issue of representation and a remarkably malleable social metaphor (as typically practiced in literary studies and some versions of anthropology and history) with the view of sex as an empirically verifiable, material and social practice (as emphasized in sociology and psychology, as well as in history and anthropology). The ensuing pas de deux is simultaneously conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.

In the face of an institutional climate of intense (and at times mindless) championing of interdisciplinarity,⁵⁰ it is perhaps unsurprising that influential literary critics have championed the separation of literary from historical study in the name of a “queerer” historicism. Parts I and II proffer ways of thinking sex that direct attention to the points of contact and divergence between these two disciplines. Cross-disciplinary affiliation as I practice it here does not presuppose harmony or paper over differences; indeed, I often dwell on differences, precisely to explore the unique affordances offered by each method. The historical questions addressed in these sections include the relation between eroticism and friendship; the relative salience of acts versus identities; the decision to privilege historical alterity or continuity; the assumption of a correlation between periodization and subjectivity; the varied meanings and functions of temporality; ambivalence about comprehensive period chronologies; the problem of historical teleology; the methodological resources provided by language; and the politically fraught relation between pastness, particularly the premodern, and sexualized formations of racial, ethnic, religious, and national otherness. Among the historiographic arguments developed in these pages is the idea that to do the history of sexuality is not to turn a blind eye to perennial features of the erotic system; but neither is it too quickly to assume similarity or homology in such a way that historical distance and difference are rendered inconsequential. Relations between similarity and difference in historiography might be construed less as an imperative choice than as shimmering tension. To think about resemblance can open an inquiry up to alterity—especially to how something differs from itself. To think about alterity can lead one back to similarity—to ghostly echoes and uncanny resemblances. Similarity and difference, so construed, are metabolic and metamorphic; they are not “up against” each other in the sense of opposition, but “up against” each other in the sense of up close and personal—with all the fraught tensions that this can entail.⁵¹

My effort to think sex beyond the protocols of identity history and social contextualization has involved unsettling the boundaries between hetero and homoeroticism, as well as licit and illicit, transgressive and orthodox, sexualities. Abandoning strict division between such notions, as well as between men and women, same-sex bonds and heterosexual marriage, enables different configurations of relationship to come to the fore. Emphasizing the erratic and wayward transitivity of erotic desires and acts, and questioning the categories by which “the sexual” is defined, I enact a version of “queering” now common among early modernists and queer studies scholars, advancing the idea that queer is that which most “confounds the notion of being as being at one with oneself.”⁵² Nonetheless, there are crucial differences in my approach that trouble a presumed consensus about what it means, methodologically and theoretically, to queer. As I have already begun to suggest, rather than focusing on how early modern sexuality defies modern categories or is itself anti-identitarian, I focus on how sexuality sets up obstacles to knowledge, not in terms of identity but in terms of sex. Second, in my effort to deploy “queer”—as a verb, a method, and a category—with analytical rigor and precision, I explore, rather than assume, its oppositional stance toward normativity. Given the principled undefinability of “queer,” its infinite mobility and mutability, one notion has provided ballast for its centrifugal expansion: the idea that it is always posed against the “normal.” Other queer studies scholars have begun to explore how “queer mobility and indefinition function within queer studies as both a disciplinary norm and a front,” and that rather than being “endlessly open-ended, polyvalent, and reattachable,” it is “sticky … with history.”⁵³ Aligned with their efforts to explore the field habitus of queer studies but with more distant historical periods in mind, I explore what is normal for the early modern period. Third, because I attend “to sexuality’s governance across multiple and contradictory regulatory norms,”⁵⁴ I also retain gender as a crucial modifier of sexuality and the meanings of queer.

Knowing Women’s Bodies

It is a central premise of what follows that our conceptual resources are impoverished when it is maintained that any attempt to account for sexuality in precisely gendered or corporeal terms results in an unwelcome policing of desire, an epistemological violence against the libido, or an exasperating confinement of bodies. My resistance to the trend to ignore, despecify, or dispatch gender in the name of queer is theoretically grounded in an appreciation of the multiple vectors (gender, sexuality, race, class) that historically have underpinned and crosshatched embodiment in sometimes congruent, sometimes incongruent ways. It also stems from a historical sense that queer studies misrecognizes its own conditions of emergence when it categorically rejects affiliation with feminism in the name of analytically separating sexuality from gender. Yes, gender and sexuality are not the same,⁵⁵ and there are good reasons for initiating their tactical divergence for certain questions and certain projects.⁵⁶ Nonetheless, to “distinguish sexuality from gender analytically is not [necessarily] to deny their relationship but is in fact the precondition for undertaking the study of that relationship.”⁵⁷ The question of how gender and sexuality do and do not interanimate at any particular time and place remains a live question.⁵⁸ This is in part because gender is continuously materialized through social and psychic practices and will operate contingently for different communities and individuals. Indeed, the intransigence of gender, as both embodied materiality and as analytic tool, is one of the opacities with which this book is most concerned. For all of these reasons, the feminism animating these pages is fueled not only by theoretical investments but by a historicist interest in the ongoing work of gender.⁵⁹

One of the main arguments of this book is that the gendered specificity of female embodiment offers an especially valuable resource for thinking sex. We can approach this resource in historicist terms, noting how often early modern discourses constitute the female body as a knowledge problem. Consider the early modern medical and theological controversies about the existence of the hymen, as well as the hymen’s controversial status in the effort to “prove” virginity.⁶⁰ As Margaret Ferguson argues, “for centuries, the hymen has been alleged to give ‘proof’ of a virgin’s existence; from the early modern period to the present, however, the proof is riddled by doubt. The hymen may have been destroyed by the digital searches of those charged with finding it; or it may have been lost ‘innocently,’ and in a way the female subject has forgotten; and/or it may never have existed (as an object available to ‘ocular proof’) at all.”⁶¹ Early modern medical texts also attribute the breaking of the hymen to the use of illicit “instruments” such as dildos, to overly vigorous masturbation, to the “defluxion of sharp humors,”⁶² and to the illicit penetration of the vagina by sexual partners, male and female.⁶³ But such acts are not, in the end, conclusive of the presence or absence of the hymen. Who knows how a woman has lost her hymen? Who knows if it even exists? Regularly presented in medical texts as a matter of “controversy,” the existence of the hymen stymied physicians’ most dedicated efforts to secure medical “fact.”⁶⁴

Representing a basic threshold of human knowledge, the enigma of the hymen is only one of a number of commonly noted “female mysteries.” Foremost among them is the truism that only women can definitely know the paternity of their children: while the reproductive effects of certain sex acts might seem obvious, the ascription of paternity onto a single man depends, absent the physical resemblance of child to father, on the performance of a woman’s word.⁶⁵ Likewise dependent upon women’s performative acts is the enduring question of women’s orgasm. Because it was commonly believed that women emitted seed during orgasm, this inquiry took the form of medical debates about the physical nature of female seed (including its confusion with vaginal lubrication, secretions, menses, and leukorrhea), its comparative quality (generally thought to be thinner and weaker than men’s), the extent to which emission of seed was the source of female erotic pleasure, and the age-old question of whether women’s pleasure in sex was greater than man’s. Add to this the ability of women to fake it and the ways in which anxiety about that ability bleeds into Renaissance concerns about women’s insincerity and capacity to deceive,⁶⁶ and women’s orgasm becomes another early modern sexual-knowledge problem. Such queries, controversies, and thematizations of the mystery of female bodies register the impossibility of knowing sex through them.⁶⁷

The photograph included here encapsulates some of what is at stake in using women’s embodiment to think more broadly about the historical conjunctions of sex and knowledge. It depicts a statue on a column outside the Paris cathedral of Notre Dame in which a gorgeous, female-headed, amply breasted snake is in the process of enticing Eve.⁶⁸ The seduction of Eve by the snake in the Garden of Eden stands in Western Christian traditions as an Ur-story not only of humankind’s fall from divine grace through knowledge of good and evil but also a fall into the knowledge of sex. Medieval commentators regularly interpreted the knowledge to which Eve and Adam became privy as understanding not only mortality and sin, but sexual desire, arousal, frustration, and pleasure. Augustine, for instance, materialized the origins and transmission of sin in the semen from which humans are propagated, arguing that “the sexual desire (libido) of our disobedient members arose in those first human beings as a result of the sin of disobedience.”⁶⁹ Indeed, for Augustine, spontaneous sexual arousal was clear evidence of the effect of original sin, both its proof and its penalty, for it materially evinced the triumph of the passions.⁷⁰

FIGURE 1. The seduction of Eve, Notre Dame de Paris. Photograph by Pascal Lemaître.

This interpretation of the Fall as not only introducing mortality but fallen flesh (signified by the naked genitals) was an important strain of Christian thought throughout the seventeenth century.⁷¹ The conceptual marriage of mortal with carnal knowledge helps to explain why the postlapsarian modesty topos—whereupon knowing themselves to be naked, Eve and Adam cover their genitals in shame—becomes so conventional in textual and visual representations across a wide swath of genres. It also provided convenient theological support for the common belief in women’s sexual insatiability, thought to result from deficient powers of reason. Insofar as lust was a mark of weakness and inconstancy, it not only was projected onto women, but was gendered feminine in ways that also redounded on men: excessive desire became a correlate of effeminacy.⁷² Fears of female insatiability, however, were not merely the result of misogynous fears of women’s erotic power over men. They are part of a larger epistemological configuration in which sex not only is the means of possessing knowledge but is its own form of knowledge. This knowledge is of a very particular kind: of and through the body and thus, according to church fathers, devoid of the reason that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world. Concerns about maintaining the distinction between humans and animals informed controversies, including commentaries by Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, over how to maintain the rational will while in the throes of passion and the degree to which sex does or does not momentarily turn humans into beasts. Given the associations among women, lust, and animality, the theological debate about the “beastliness” of sex is replete with gendered distinctions and implications.

It is in this context that the depiction of the snake as female-headed and female-breasted becomes particularly arresting, for the colloquy between female serpent and Eve positions women in a special relationship to sexual knowledge.⁷³ It transforms the seduction of Eve into a gendered double whammy: on the one hand, the first woman is responsible for the Fall through her weakness, inconstancy, ambition, and the feminine wiles by which she tempts Adam to succumb; on the other hand, the snake as Eve’s seductress mirrors the temptress image while doubling down on the associations of female embodiment with duplicity, inconstancy, and rebelliousness. Authorized by the belief that “like” is most persuasive and effective with “like,” the image of the Eve-serpent interaction is also eroticized. According to the Jewish Midrash, the serpent was one of the two species of animals to have sex, as humans are conventionally thought to do, face-to-face.⁷⁴ The representation of two females engaged in such intimacy comes close to implying that Eve engaged in bestiality, a category of sexual sin that since Aquinas in the thirteenth century has been considered by many as the most grievous.⁷⁵ The unnatural human-animal conjunction implied in the snake’s homoerotic appeal thus spirals morally ever downward, turning sexual knowledge into something that is not only embodied but caused by the conjunction of two errant female wills.⁷⁶ And because the Fall is also a fall into human history, into temporality itself, the seduction of Eve registers women’s erotic embodiment and sexual knowledge as ambivalent agents of historical time. It is because of women, in this cultural narrative, that sex becomes intertwined with embodiment, sin, femininity, knowledge, and history.

This nexus of associations is a far cry from the modern dispensation in which sex is the privileged site of truth—the truth of the subject, the repository of the secrets of the individual self. In contrast, the knowledge of sex associated with early modern women was a fallen truth, one that moved the desiring subject away from God, the progenitor of all meaning. In this context, sexual knowledge could only be fraught for early modern women—an ensnaring catch-22. In intellectual and theological terms, female bodies represented something that could not and should not be known (except by a privileged few), as well as something that should not be talked about (except by a growing community of male “experts”). Women not only inhabited this position of nonknowledge; they were thought to personify it. In the medieval period, women’s bodies were considered to be repositories of secrets: the secrets of nature, the secrets of knowledge, the secrets of sex.⁷⁷ As the quest for greater and more sufficient explanatory knowledge began to be pursued outside of the monastery through medical practice, the theme of secrets lodged within the female body became an authorizing topos for science itself.⁷⁸

This official discourse, whereby sexual knowledge was assumed to be both lodged within the female body yet was supposedly known and articulated only by male elites, was contravened in practice. In domestic life, expert knowledge of the body and of sex was in fact the province of “ordinary women,” who, “through their practice of midwifery and of kitchen physic or medical care in the household” gained, practiced, and disseminated sexual knowledge.⁷⁹ Yet, the body that they supervised was simultaneously a source of knowledge shared with other women and a troubling source of vexed intimacy among them. It was also a frequent source of friction in their dealings with men. For women to express sexual knowledge in most public arenas, in particular, was self-incriminating, for it was virtually impossible to reveal such knowledge, particularly during legal processes, without seeming to confirm one’s own lack of chastity. “This was a culture,” in the words of Laura Gowing, “in which it was positively virtuous not to be able to describe sex.”⁸⁰

Awareness of such gendered paradoxes and epistemological double binds inform the affective, analytical, and political substrate that has generated much of this book. Early modern women are descendants of the seduced, seducing Eve and simultaneously that of her mirror image, the female-headed snake. Such figures are desirous of knowledge and either lack the wisdom and restraint that would tell them what they don’t (need to) know or resist the presumption of such limits. At the same time, in Eve’s listening to the seductions of the serpent, in her grasping for that apple, we can see her foredoomed effort to push beyond the constraints on permitted knowledge, on the terms of her embodiment and sexuality. Precisely because Eve and her progeny are damned for it, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns reclaims the legacy of these figures, figured intimately in colloquy, on behalf of sexual knowledge itself.

These knowledge relations take the feminist concerns of this book beyond a focus on positive and negative representations of women (and men) to ask about the structural, epistemological dynamics that constitute the possibility of representation of sex in the first place. These dynamics are mobile, unstable, and thus subject to the deconstructive work that often is allied with that of “queering.” Thus, one important strand of the analytical work of this book is to pause at the moments when the practice of queering meets up with the entailments of gender, where the fact of gendered embodiment and its relationship to ignorance and knowledge, power and authority, are both destabilized and materialized. Such a pause doesn’t merely challenge the universalizing pretensions of queer theory, which has based much of its intervention on distancing queerness from the minoritizing claims of identity.⁸¹ It encourages us to scrutinize the diacritical relations of gender to sexuality, while recognizing that gender itself is diacritical insofar as masculinity and femininity are knowable only through their difference and interaction.⁸²

Identification Histories

One way I have pursued a diacritical approach to gender and sexuality is by mobilizing a concept of cross-gender identification. Hazily defined in queer and gender studies, cross-gender identification involves a process—psychic, affective, analytical, and political—of transiting across gender boundaries. An important feature of early modern performances of gender,⁸³ cross-gender identification—when repurposed as a method—directs attention to several investments. Thinking in terms of cross-gender identification, first, assembles useful perspectives generated out of one gender on behalf of another. In practice, this means that one might recognize in the specificity of male embodiment some dispositions toward knowledge and sex that can benefit women, or that one might deploy pressure on a universal, nongendered category such as queer by considering women’s relation to it.

Second, cross-gender identification trains our eye on the fact that desires are not endlessly fluid and free-floating, but mobile across and through specific sites of embodiment and enunciation.⁸⁴ Indeed, given that my interest in cross-gender identification is less in the deconstruction of the male/female binary than in the transit across sites whose specificity is precisely what is at issue, this concept may help us refine the work that we want the concept of queer to do.⁸⁵

While these investments derive from thinking of cross-gender identification in terms of identities, cross-gender identification also facilitates the critical move beyond that terrain by shifting the focus to dynamic social and psychic processes.⁸⁶ Understood as the “play of difference and similitude in self-other relations,” identification both produces resemblance and self-recognition and disrupts them.⁸⁷ As Marjorie Rubright describes the critical turn this involves in relation to ethnicity, “attending to the process of identification … reframes our object of analysis by shifting analytic pressure from the ‘what’ (groups, identities, ethnic distinctiveness) to the ‘how’ (the dynamic processes wherein questions of identity and ethnicity emerge).”⁸⁸ For my purposes, identification (and disidentification) are particularly useful insofar as they call attention to the work involved in any relationship as it seeks to negotiate difference and achieve momentary stasis, balance, or coherence.⁸⁹

This dynamic notion of psychic process inflects the scholarship of historians and historicist literary critics when they construe “history” as something imaginatively knit together through active engagement with material fragments and traces. Whether they stress the alterity of the past or its connection to us, such scholars reasonably aver that the selection, organization, and interpretation of archival remains are subject to our identifications and desires.⁹⁰ The following chapters build on this insight but morph it for additional purposes. First, I am intent on showing that identification and disidentification enable us to hone in on the kinds of psychic, cultural, and historiographic labor of making sexual history. Second, I assume that disidentification and disavowal are as crucial as affirmative desire and recognition in that process of making. Third, I show that the play of similarity and difference within dynamics of psychic (dis)identification provides analytical purchase on the unpredictable oscillation of similarity and difference within historiographic practice.

Proceeding from the conviction that the future of feminist, queer sexuality studies lies in an enhanced ability to identify across rather than solely along the vectors of gender and sexuality, the historiography I’ve practiced here is both retrospective and prospective; it recognizes, on the one hand, that “the past exists in a state of infinite regress” and, on the other hand, that “the past is always coming at us.”⁹¹ We are the pivot between past and future, their point of vital and vitalizing connection. What is at stake in this perception is a certain way of critically inhabiting a relation to a distant “other” (who can in various ways seem a lot like the self). Most especially, this practice includes not only recognition of the “blind spots in our current understanding,”⁹² as is often suggested, but an injunction to explore how blind spots condition the very possibility of thought. For this reason, for all my interest in defamiliarizing the present, the historiography I advocate doesn’t so much put all its “faith in exposure”⁹³ as presume that deconstructive disclosure must be accompanied by recognition of those impasses that resist being thought.

The Questions of Psychoanalysis

So conceived, historiography, like sex, names a knowledge relation. It also bears a certain relationship to psychoanalytic thought. To approach identification and disidentification as psychic fuel in the project of making sexual knowledge suggests the utility of psychoanalysis for historiography. Psychoanalysis takes many forms and has a century-long, multifarious, and contentious history of its own. It names, simultaneously, a theory of how things work (e.g., the drives and its affects), a set of analytic concepts (e.g., the unconscious, repression, displacement), and a program of action (e.g., therapy, hermeneutics). It is the second of these—psychoanalysis as a set of concepts—that is most relevant to my project, as I occasionally take recourse in the analytical resources offered by specific concepts regarding the mechanisms of psychic process (particularly identification, transference, and displacement). I approach psychoanalytic concepts and techniques as themselves historical phenomena and thus part of an evolving and internally self-critical method.⁹⁴ Far from being the explicit framework of the analysis contained herein (or assuming a total congruence between psychoanalytic methods and the history of sexuality),⁹⁵ psychoanalysis provides this book with a certain disposition toward knowledge.⁹⁶

The largest departure of this book from most psychoanalytic work is that its focus is not the desiring subject; its greatest debt is to the idea that knowledge is opaque and recalcitrant.⁹⁷ Knowledge, in psychoanalysis, is believed to develop through anxiety, resistance, refusal, dependence, disavowal, hate, frustration, and abjection, as well as through identification, desire, attachment, gratitude, fantasy, pleasure, and love. One might opine that the idea of sex as inscrutable and resistant to understanding is merely the mythology of psychoanalysis itself: sex resists understanding so that we can mobilize more techniques to know it. Shifting from the attempt to discover the truth of the subject to exploring how we practice sex-as-knowledge-relation, however, enables us to scrutinize and to think more carefully about the specific forms that resistance and attachment take.

When approached as a mode of knowledge relation, psychoanalysis can be employed not for its prepositional contents (the Oedipal complex, the mirror stage), but for its propositional syntax. This syntax is valuable to the extent that it elicits a questioning attitude not only toward the “incognito of the unconscious”⁹⁸ but toward processes of knowing and making knowledge. Indeed, a propositional syntax directs attention to the kinds of psychic and social work involved in making sex mean, whether in the past or in the present. If there is one thing this emphasis on labor entails, it is recognition that sexual knowledge is elusive, that it requires us to slow down to catch its peculiar tempo, and that, far from functioning as “the sinecure of self presence,”⁹⁹ sex is just as likely to disrupt such certitude.

One premise of this book is that the psychoanalytic concept of transference—that dynamic exchange of energies (affective, erotic, and cognitive) between any two interlocutors—as well as the related concept of “working through” can be leveraged for the purposes of historiographic practice. The concepts of transference and countertransference offer a structural understanding of some of the strategies and stakes of one’s engagement with the past. Whether transferential energies exist between analyst and analysand, reader and text, or historian and event, whether they are construed as erotically charged or not, they compose a dynamic and tensile knowledge relation.¹⁰⁰ Reversing classic psychoanalytic treatments of “history,” it is helpful to think of the past in the position of the analyst, the historian/critic in that of the analysand. The analysand’s desires, identifications, and unconscious wishes may be foregrounded in the analytic encounter, as the analysand may “identify with, repeat, or performatively reenact forces active in it,”¹⁰¹ but they are understood to be only one aspect of the complex negotiation between “pastness” and the scholar. And yet, certain aspects of the traditional position of analyst to history-as-analysand remain relevant to this encounter. To the extent that the historiographic impulse is an orientation toward a distant and inscrutable “other” (whether construed as similar to or different from oneself), it can adopt an attitude akin to that of psychoanalysis in its listening mode: actively attending to what is and is not spoken, by whom, and in what context. A psychoanalytic orientation to the past, then, entails scholars taking up the position of both the analyst (who listens, who inquires, who is conscious of countertransference) and the analysand (who desires, who identifies with, who engages in transference).

If, as psychoanalytic thinkers are apt to aver, the process of analysis involves closeness and distance, “extreme intimacy and extreme impersonality,”¹⁰² this spatialized tension nicely captures the posture toward the past that the following chapters attempt to enact: attentive to the “working through” of issues within early modern texts alongside the “working through” of problems extant between those texts and the present moment. Such a working through does not lead to closure, but to the examination of ongoing forms of relationality and perceptual, psychic, and political processes. Within this intimate yet not-personal encounter, it is not just that the unconscious desire of the observer changes the object of study but that analysis of such desire can produce knowledge about both the observer and the past as an object—including what it is impossible to know.¹⁰³ This feedback loop, in short, involves and depends upon the transferential historicity of knowledge relations.¹⁰⁴

Faithful attention to the past, one might counter, is the aim of all rigorous historical and historicist scholarship. So much is true. But there is one important distinction that underlies my yoking of historiography with a psychoanalytic disposition: when pursued as a method of open-ended interpretation rather than of pinning down meaning; when pausing over the tensions between knowing and not knowing; when lingering with the implications of the limits of knowledge—history making can be seen to perform psychoanalysis in a different key. What draws these strategies into paratactic relation is a process of thinking with. Strolling alongside and pausing along the way, this stance encourages a critical aptitude attentive to the caesuras, the gaps and false starts, the moments of inarticulacy, that structure and punctuate narratives, methods, and analyses of sex.¹⁰⁵

Psychoanalysis, Early Modernity, Queer Studies

My emphasis on psychic work and on thinking sex transferentially aligns Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns with certain tendencies within both early modern studies and queer studies. Early modern critics whose interests in desire and its vicissitudes are frankly epistemological provide the closest cognate to my own.¹⁰⁶ For instance, I share with Ben Saunders a wish to understand “the relation of desire to understanding”¹⁰⁷ and recognize with him that this relation is caught up in the unknowable “wild card” of our own desires.¹⁰⁸ The subject’s failure to know likewise motivates Graham Hammill’s observation that “while Freud and Lacan are both very sure of what sexuality is not, neither is very sure at all of what it is. What makes psychoanalysis of great interest to the study of sexuality is this uncertainty.”¹⁰⁹ Furthermore, “the difficulty that psychoanalytic thought has with sexuality is symptomatic of sexuality itself as an object of critical knowledge and historical analysis.”¹¹⁰ But having torqued the framework away from desire-as-subjectivity to sex-as-knowledge-relation, my synthesis of psychoanalysis with historiography attempts a balancing act unconsidered by these critics. If psychoanalysis urges us to stay with contradictions and to mind the epistemological gap, not by stepping over it but by stepping into it,¹¹¹ an appreciation of historical contingency reminds us that there might be some good reasons on occasion to climb out in order to reach firmer ground. The method I strive to enact greets the charisma of answers with charitable interest but also generous skepticism; it greets naïveté with patience and warm regard; and by taking time to dwell in impossibility, it tries as long as possible to keep multiple options available—while also recognizing when it is necessary to take a stand.

Such stands feel especially urgent in queer studies right now. In my effort to explore the psychic work entailed by thinking sex in and as history, this book pushes against a governing, if underarticulated, assumption in queer studies: that erotic desires and practices are best characterized as pleasure. And here, both Foucault’s separation of pleasure from desire,¹¹² and psychoanalysis, whose concept of jouissance often serves as a touchstone, have a lot to answer for. I have two objections to the queer uptake of jouissance. First, in psychoanalytic thought, jouissance is a far more complex, self-contradictory concept than its anodyne translation as “enjoyment,” “pleasure,” or even “orgasm” (jouir is the French term for orgasm) would suggest. As L. O. Aranye Fradenburg writes: “The concept of jouissance has little in common with the notion of satisfaction. It is libidinal rapture at or beyond the limit of our endurance—most obviously orgasm, but by extension, any ecstasy that depends in some way on the exacerbation of sensuous experience. Jouissance is not pleasure, because it involves unpleasurable excesses of sensation…. Nor does it satisfy ‘me’: ‘I’ lose ‘myself’ in it. ‘I’ am even, all too often, averse to it, because ‘I’ do not want to lose myself in it.”¹¹³ As a radical divestiture of the self, jouissance is opposed to the kinds of ego- and identity-affirming gestures that, despite its anti-identitarian polemics, underwrite much queer scholarship.

More important, the queer celebration of jouissance often seems intent on promoting the counterfactual notions that erotic desire inevitably will be experienced in ways that stimulate ascending excitation (either as a continuous arc, movement from plateau to plateau, or through ebbs and flows) and lead, indispensably and inexorably, to a climax of bodily and mental arousal and satisfaction.¹¹⁴ Even Leo Bersani—whose influential analysis of erotic self-shattering “which disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries”¹¹⁵ is framed by the crucial insight that “there is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”¹¹⁶—implies that sex is fundamentally, essentially, about pleasure.¹¹⁷ When presuming enjoyment and gratification as the sine qua non of sex, queer studies might be said to enforce its own it-goes-without-saying: after all, if it weren’t for pleasure, why would we be queer?¹¹⁸ Needless to say, this presumption is based on a convenient forgetting of another psychoanalytic premise upon which much queer theory was founded: that desire, psychically emerging out of the experience and management of loss, as well as negotiations of the boundaries between self and other, repeatedly entails significant evasions of satisfaction. (Queer studies scholars tend to accept this as a tenet of the formation of subjectivity but forget its implications for bodily experience.) Yet, rather than ontologize the notion that desire is always in excess of the capacity to satisfy it, as queer Lacanians are apt to do, I translate this insight into a methodological compass, one that directs our orientation toward obstacles and limits.

To be prosaic about it, the taking for granted of orgasmic “achievement” and sexual “satisfaction” fails to confront the force of compulsions and aversions that animate, direct, and constrain people’s erotic lives—whether these constraints are felt in terms of object choice (including unconscious predilections for certain gendered, raced, and classed bodies), particular body parts or prosthetics (dildos, nipple or cock rings), explicit corporeal activities (looking, sucking, rubbing, penetration), or sites and social contexts (bedroom, bathhouse, hotel, public toilet, park). For every affirmative experience of desire (“I want that”), there implicitly are posed other desires (“I don’t want that), which may be more or less inflexible or aversive (“I might like that with this person or that object, but not here, not now”). For all the thought that has been expended on the cultural penchant for classifying people according to the gender of their erotic partners (and these preferences are now, for good reasons, generally understood to be not born of antipathy), with the exception of psychological and therapeutic discourses, relatively little serious attention has gone into understanding the function of displeasure—not to mention dissatisfaction, disappointment, making do, boredom, and privation—that exist as an undercurrent of many people’s erotic lives.¹¹⁹ Sex for many is a matter of perennial trial and considerable error, not only in respect to attaining “good enough” sex with particular partners, but in terms of preferred bodily acts. Indeed, as Sedgwick noted on behalf of erotic difference, “Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do.”¹²⁰ If the thriving market for self-help books, magazine stories, and online advice columns indicates anything, it is that sex remains for many a mysterious domain—even a problem—with basic understandings of anatomy, physiology, affective and sexual response in question throughout the life span.

To the extent that queer studies assumes rather than analyzes the pleasures of sex and implicitly relegates sexual frustration, sexual unhappiness, and bad sex to the domain of therapeutic intervention,¹²¹ it not only leaves something important out of its domain of inquiry, implying that the question of sexual ineptitude and dissatisfaction aren’t worth theorizing,¹²² but fails to benefit from the ways that trial and error provide a means for theorizing sex itself.¹²³ This book proposes that it is by attending to various obstacles to sexual satisfaction, very broadly construed, that we might devise new questions and alternative ways of thinking sex. In short, it hopes to persuade that queer theory could exploit the conceptual payoff of bad sex by including within its sphere of attention sex that is frustrating, dissatisfying, even aversive—for it is out of these affective states, and the quotidian adjustments they require, that queer worlds also emerge.¹²⁴

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns has been impelled by my political commitments as a feminist, my previous research on the cultural history of lesbianism, my training as an early modern literary critic, and my cross-disciplinary institutional location. Posing these commitments in various relations to one another, it enacts an interdisciplinary vision of critical and historical practice: one that is simultaneously feminist and queer, that mines the analytical value of cross-gender identification, and is as respectful of the protocols of archival research as of psychic indeterminacy and close reading. Its meta-level register, however, is perhaps more akin to that of “theory” than is usually the case in literary criticism or historical scholarship. Indeed, because it is hard to outline the contours of an opacity—it refers, after all, to a shadowy presence, with murky edges subject to fluctuating degrees of illumination—I approach sexual knowledge obliquely, through the varying interpretative practices it occasions. Because the latter chapters assume familiarity with terminology, historiographic issues, and critical debates introduced earlier, they are best read in the order they appear. Although certain concerns of the sections overlap, their arguments do not so much repeat as become refracted through the prism of various angles of vision and interpretation; certain issues telescope in and out, as I use literary readings to theorize and historicize, and use history and literature to test the limits of theory.

The book’s first part, “Making the History of Sexuality,” takes up problems of historiographic method as pursued by historians and literary scholars. It does so first from the standpoint of the history of male homosexuality, then by investigating the effort to queer temporality, and third from the perspective of lesbian historiography. These approaches, though distinct, are interrelated, and by the end of Part I they accrue into something close to a methodological desideratum. That desideratum is itself interdisciplinary: if Chapter 2 engages with historiography as practiced by a historian, and Chapter 3 engages with literary critics who position their projects against disciplinary history, Chapter 4 offers my own proposal for “how to do” the history of sexuality at the intersection of these disciplines by focusing on the particular problems of lesbian history. Together these chapters suggest ways to balance historical sameness and difference, continuism and alterity, queer theory and the history of sexuality, and they bring clarity to the principles of selection by which one idea, figure, or trope is made to correspond to another.

Part II, “Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts,” builds on Part I’s historiographic inquiries, while also querying what it means to assert historical knowledge. Postulating that the scrutiny of sex acts enables special access to the obscured substrate of sexual historiography, I comprehensively survey the state of our knowledge about early modern sexual practices and offer a framework for how to productively work the constitutive contradictions first adduced in the scholarship of Bray. If Part I focuses on sex as represented in history, Part II begins to make a case for construing sex not only as the effect of historical processes or as a precise set of practices, but as an agent of history—that is, an agent in historical processes of knowledge production. But in order to apprehend this agency, we need to consider whether what “presents” as a historiographic problem is in fact an epistemological one. To consider this issue by means of specific examples, Part II focuses on what we still do not know about early modern sex, asking what this “lack” might tell us. It closely reads early modern language and texts and scrutinizes literary and historical scholarship, attending in particular to the role of presumptive knowledge in the making of sexual knowledge. Advocating the import of what we don’t know as well as what we can’t know, Part II explores the meanings of sexual acts, sexual language, sexual publics, and sex education both in the early modern period and today. In addition, by modeling cross-gender identification as a critical practice on behalf of women, and by managing the gap between treatments of sex as representation and sex as material practice, Part II puts into critical practice some of the methods introduced in Part I.

Part III, “The Stakes of Gender,” pairs two chapters that might seem to have nothing to do with one another, insofar as one is about the relationship between male homoerotic and heteroerotic desire in an early modern sonnet sequence and the other is about lesbianism in contemporary critical discourse. This counterintuitive pairing, however, allows me to capitalize on the methodological payoff of the previous sections, bringing into explicit theorization the diacritical relationships between gender and sexuality, and both to history. These chapters build methodologically on Annamarie Jagose’s proposition in Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence that sexuality “is culturally produced as a sequential fiction.”¹²⁵ Viewed from the perspective of sequence, all sexual identifications are “always secondary, always back formations, always belated.”¹²⁶ This belatedness is projected specifically onto the representation of lesbianism, which typically is viewed as inconsequential and imitative, thereby masking a “disavowal of precisely that derivativeness which … is the heart of sexuality itself.”¹²⁷ Whereas Jagose’s consideration of sequence hinges its critique of the terms of lesbian visibility on the precedential ordering of first and second, origin and derivation, I have repurposed her deconstructive analytic. Splitting the terms of her analysis apart, Chapter 8 focuses on the import of sequence in Shakespeare’s sonnets, while Chapter 9 focuses on the secondariness of lesbianism in current critical dispensations. My reading of the difficulties involved in diacritically reading Shakespeare’s sonnets no less than “the sign of the lesbian” demonstrates that both, in fact, function as exquisite metonymies of the problem of sexual opacity to which this book is dedicated.

“Sex Ed; or, Teach Me Tonight” concludes the book by meditating on the opacity of sexual knowledge in the current moment. An extempore rejoinder at a sexuality studies conference provides an occasion to consider the impossible pedagogical imperatives involved in queer studies as well as in a more capaciously conceived “sex education.” While collating and distilling the argumentative energies of the preceding chapters, this chapter ties the analysis of history to the larger stakes—of pedagogy, ethics, and futurity—that motivate the book as a whole. It returns us to the intellectual, historiographic, and pedagogical disposition that would recognize in what we don’t know, as well as what we can’t know, not only the partiality of our methods and a spur to future inquiry but an intractability that has been constitutive of the history of sex and that continues to inform our relations to that history and to each other.

By attempting to think sex with the early moderns, this book aims to show that the obstacles we face in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality and that both impediments can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography, pedagogy, and ethics. It is not just that the truth of sex is not fully attainable or representable in words or images, as the contingencies of sexual signification manifest. Nor is it just that sexuality is socially constructed or a product of manifold historical processes. From the second chapter dedicated to the scholarship of Alan Bray to the tenth chapter dedicated to sexual pedogogy, I hope to persuade that the projects of knowing sex, thinking sex, and making sexual knowledge are situated within the space of an irresolvable contradiction. Other queer studies scholars have asserted and analyzed the “the unknowability of the sexual,”¹²⁸ sexuality’s “epistemic uncertainty,”¹²⁹ and the “unfathomable nature of the erotic.”¹³⁰ They have provocatively raised “the question of sexuality as a question,”¹³¹ noting the radical incommensurability between self-knowledge, erotic desire, and the social shapes desire assumes.¹³² It is one task of those of us in historical sexuality and queer studies to work this contradiction, to render its constitutive irony resonant and productive. Rather than deploy the apprehension of uncertainty and inscrutability to defend psychoanalysis as a method, to situate theory and literature against history, to extract an archival ethics of eroticism out of Foucault, or to separate feminism from queer studies, I use the opacity of sex to draw queer and psychoanalytic theory, history and literature, feminist and queer interests, closer together.

This book represents my effort to think my way not out but by means of a series of epistemological dead ends. As critics, many of us are a lot better at critique than in collaboratively envisioning, much less creating, structures that would stimulate analysis of the recalcitrant knowledge relations considered in these pages.¹³³ To the extent that this book engages in critique,¹³⁴ I have been motivated by the belief that energy is gained not only when scholars enthusiastically agree about the animating force of a new concept or a renewed method, but when we disagree, when we are not all intent on the same general project, and when pressure is put on existing as well as emerging concepts and methods. If some of this book takes the form of critique, however, most of it gambles on envisioning a different scholarly horizon, where ignorance is productive, inarticulacy is treasured, and bewilderment beckons us toward different questions to ask of the relationship between sex and bodies in time. In recasting the issues as ones of epistemology and pedagogy rather than subjectivity and identity, of knowledge and ignorance rather than norms and their transgression, of erotic dissatisfaction as much as erotic pleasure, of sequence and syntax alongside semiotic content, and of how we know as much as what we know, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns strives to enact an ethical relation, finally, to sex, that is worthy of and accountable to its ongoing history.