Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
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