Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
to racial and class diversity, and whether the moment of queer theory is over—these issues are all subject to explicit debate in various forums, from conferences and blogs to books and journals. What is curious about this queer teleoskepticism is that, to date, no one has actually responded to the charge—and thus there has been a notable absence of debate.3
It thus seems important to ask: Of what does this queer critique of teleology consist? How did it evolve? What strategies and solutions are being proposed, and what is their analytic and political purchase on the relations of sex, time, and history? Using the accusation of teleology as an analytical fulcrum, I parse in what follows some of the assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change implicit in the alleged relationship of teleological thinking to what has been called “straight temporality.” Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept “queer,” as well as “homo” and “hetero,” in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the unique affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake, I hope to show, are not only emerging understandings of the relations among chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.
To queer history within the terms of this body of scholarship is no longer simply to identify subjects in the past who do not comport with normative expectations of gender or heterosexuality; or to identify past actors whose desires and behaviors may or may not conform to modern categories of sexual identity; or to demonstrate the range of erotic practices—sodomy, tribadism, flagellation, mystical ecstasy—in which past historical actors might have engaged. To queer history rather has come to be seen as coterminous with and expressive of the need to queer temporality itself. As such, the scholarship I review here is part of a broader trend within queer studies. Variously called the “turn toward temporality” or the elucidation of “queer time,” a diverse range of work across disciplines and periods has focused on “time’s sexual politics.” Shifting away from the spatial modes underwriting much previous scholarship (theories of intersectionality and social geography, for instance), important books have explored backward emotional affects, lateral queer childhoods, and reproductive futurism.4 Although diverse in topic and method, this scholarship argues that temporal and sexual normativities, as well as temporal and sexual dissonance, are significantly, even constitutively, intertwined. Queer temporality, in the words of Annamarie Jagose, is “a mode of inhabiting time that is attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official narrations of the linear sequence that is taken to structure normative life.”5 Collectively, this curvature of time has fueled significant epistemological as well as methodological innovations, productively disturbing developmental and progressive schemas, whether conceived in psychological, narratological, social, or historical terms.
Nonetheless, the theoretical rationales, specific methodologies, and political payoff of this bending of time are far from clear. Indeed, even to speak of it as a “turn” may unduly homogenize scholarly projects that are keyed to different disciplinary registers and that display varying investments in the history of sexuality, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Some scholars working on queer temporality seem motivated primarily by resistance to narratives of the history of sexuality, while others are primarily interested in time, but not especially concerned with history. Some are speaking to debates about historical method within the historical periods in which they work, while others are speaking primarily to other queer studies scholars. The relationship to “the literary”—as a source for accessing both history and temporality—varies as well. Despite this heterogeneity, teleoskepticism is positioned in much of this work as a potent challenge to heteronormativity and “straight time.”
To my mind, the broad claims of theory, however intrinsically interesting or valuable, are best assessed in their applicability to specific historical contexts and fields of inquiry. For this reason, I scrutinize in what follows the arguments of three early modernists who maintain that teleological thinking present in queer historicism undergirds a stable edifice of temporal normativity. That a particularly intense critique of teleology has arisen within the context of early modern studies is partly due to scholars’ efforts to contend with the force of historicism, which has been the field’s dominant (but by no means exclusive) method since the 1980s. Furthermore, pre- and early modern studies have been the site of vigorous debate about historiographic method since volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality upped the critical ante on understandings of sexual modernity. The arguments described in these pages thus arise from within a distinct temporal and professional frame, and I leave to others the task of assessing whether my perspective generates questions pertinent to the explanatory potential of queer temporality more generally.6
Because the rest of this chapter focuses on the writings of Carla Freccero (who works mainly in French literature and culture) and Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon (whose expertise is in English), I state from the outset that I find much of their work, including some of their assertions regarding temporality, trenchant and thought provoking. In this I am far from alone: the quick uptake of their interventions bespeaks enormous enthusiasm among a diverse range of scholars. What follows unavoidably involves a certain amount of generalization that elides differences among them (especially regarding the role of gender and psychoanalysis) and fails to convey the insight and verve with which they read particular texts and cultural phenomena. My impetus for treating them as a collective stems from the fact that they have vigorously published on this theme and, despite their differences, share a common line of argumentation regarding teleology, regularly and approvingly cite one another regarding it, and are treated by other scholars as providing a unified perspective on it. The point is not to attack individual scholars, delineate strict methodological camps, or propose a single way of doing the history of sexuality. Indeed, part of what is confusing is that some of these scholars’ recent pronouncements run against the grain of their previous work.7 My aim, then, is to advance a more precise collective dialogue on the unique affordances of different methods for negotiating the complex links among sexuality, temporality, and history making. What are the possible different ways of queering history and temporality? What, if any, are the specific procedures that eventuate out of these different paths? And what are the stakes of those differences? If I answer critique with critique and, in the end, defend genealogical approaches to the history of sexuality—arguing in particular that we can read chronologically without straitjacketing ourselves or the past—I hope to do justice to these scholars’ innovations by engaging seriously with their polemics and acknowledging the value of certain hermeneutic strategies for which they are eloquent advocates.
In many respects, the projects of these early modernists reiterate familiar queer theoretical investments. They share with countless others a desire to promote the capacious analytical capacity of queer to deconstruct sexual identity, to illuminate the lack of coherence or fixity in erotic relations, and to highlight the radical indeterminacy and transitivity of both erotic desire and gender. Like many others, they find their warrant in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assertion that “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”8 Drawing on Sedgwick as well to privilege the universalizing over the minoritizing aspect of sexualities, these critics maintain that we should not “take the object of queering for granted.”9 In Freccero’s words, her “work has been mostly about advocating for queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability, so theoretically anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer.”10 Similarly, Menon maintains that “if queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer.”11 In historiographic terms, these critics refuse to countenance the emphasis on historical difference often attributed to historicist scholars. Collaborating on an article published in PMLA, for instance, Goldberg and Menon call for “acts of queering