Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
They also share a resistance to the conventional historical periodizations that typically organize the disciplines of history and literature: “We urge,” Goldberg and Menon say, “a reconsideration of relations between past and present that would trace differential boundaries instead of being bound by and to any one age.”12
Although similar statements appear in the historical work of other scholars, including some they critique, Freccero, Goldberg, and Menon charge these scholars with a failure to deliver. According to Menon, “the ideal of telos continues to shape even the least homonormative studies of Renaissance sexuality.”13 According to Freccero, “what [has] most resisted queering in my field … was a version of historicism and one of its corollaries, periodization.”14 And, according to Goldberg, other queer historicist scholars “remain devoted to a historical positivity that seems anything but the model offered by queer theory.”15 In these scholars’ view, this alleged “ideal of telos”—and its reputed corollaries, periodization and positivism—underwrites work governed by a genealogical intent that treats any earlier figures (for example, the sodomite, the tribade, the sapphist) as precursors of, in the words of Freccero, a “preemptively defined category of the present (‘modern homosexuality’).”16 Stating that they find a lingering attachment to identity that unduly stabilizes sexuality and recruits earlier sexual regimes into a lockstep march toward the present, they adduce in others’ work a homogeneous fiction of “modern homosexuality” that inadvertently, and through a kind of reverse contamination, conscripts past sexual arrangements to modern categories. And although certain deconstructive tendencies motivate much queer historical scholarship, these critics are further distinguished by the manner in which they champion the specific capacities of formal textual interpretation—especially the techniques of deconstruction and psychoanalysis—to provide a less teleological, less identitarian, and in their view, less normalizing historiographic practice. The alluring name that Goldberg and Menon give to their counterstrategy is “homohistory,” defined as a history that “would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism.”17 In sum, they call for a queering of history that would be, in Goldberg and Menon’s words, an “unhistoricism”—or, to use Freccero’s term, an “undoing” of the history of homosexuality (in ironic homage to David Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality, a main target of her critique).
Before I explore these arguments, I note that this critique has a history of its own. Although the question of teleology in organizing historical understanding has long vexed historians,18 this question gained momentum in queer studies by means of Sedgwick who, in Epistemology of the Closet, proposed as her axiom 5 that “the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.”19 Directed at the work of several gay male historians, Sedgwick’s critique focused not only on the work of Michel Foucault, but also Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, with its social constructionist effort to differentiate premodern forms of sexual desire and behavior from a distinctively modern homosexual identity. Comparing Halperin’s work to Foucault’s, she observed that “in each history one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be superseded by another. In each case the superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis.” Sedgwick’s critique of the “birth of the homosexual” and the model of supersession to which it was joined had as its ultimate goal the recognition of the “unrationalized coexistence” of incommensurate models of sexuality: “the most potent effects of modern homo/heterosexual definition tend to spring precisely from the inexplicitness or denial of the gaps between long-coexisting minoritizing and universalizing, or gendertransitive and gender-intransitive, understandings of same-sex relations.”20 Concerned with what she termed the “unfortunate side effect” of historical studies (despite their “immense care, value, and potential”), she noted that whereas “‘homosexuality as we conceive of it today,’ has provided a rhetorically necessary fulcrum point for the denaturalizing work on the past done by many historians,” such formulations risked “reinforcing a dangerous consensus of knowingness about the genuinely unknown” in modern discourses of sexuality.21
Sedgwick’s critique had two conceptual targets: narratives of supersession, in which each prior term drops out, and the conceptual consolidation of the present (or the modern). A third target—the perceived emergence of the homosexual locatable in a specific moment in time—can be inferred from the irony that limns her descriptive lexicon of “birth” and “Great Paradigm Shift.” Compelling as her critique was, however, Sedgwick did not endorse a particular form of historiography. She neither asserted the likelihood of transhistorical meanings, made arguments about historical continuity and change, or advocated on behalf of synchronic over diachronic methods. Despite other scholars’ characterization of her critique as a “refusal of the model of linearity and supersession,”22 she did not address temporal linearity or chronology per se, much less advance a standard of total chronological suspension. By attending to “the performative space of contradiction,” Sedgwick deployed deconstructive strategies in her encounter with the past not as a way of doing history but rather “to denaturalize the present.”23
Sedgwick’s discussion of the Great Paradigm Shift received a direct response from Halperin in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, where he offered a pluralist model of four distinct paradigms of male gender and eroticism, all of which, he argued, are in various ways subsumed by or conflated with the modern category of homosexuality. Answering Sedgwick’s objection regarding supersession while also integrating her primary insight regarding synchronic incoherence, Halperin writes:
A genealogical analysis of homosexuality begins with our contemporary notion of homosexuality, incoherent though it may be, not only because such a notion inevitably frames all inquiry into same-sex sexual expression in the past but also because its very incoherence registers the genetic traces of its own historical evolution. In fact, it is this incoherence at the core of the modern notion of homosexuality that furnishes the most eloquent indication of the historical accumulation of discontinuous notions that shelter within its specious unity. The genealogist attempts to disaggregate those notions by tracing their separate histories as well as the process of their interrelations, their crossings, and, eventually, their unstable convergence in the present day.24
In other words, Halperin’s genealogy is committed to the view that modern sexual categories provide not just an obstacle to the past but also a window on to it. In positioning the present in the relation to the past, a queer genealogist might adduce similarities or differences, continuities or discontinuities, all in pursuit of the contingency of history.
In the decade between Sedgwick’s critique and Halperin’s response, skepticism about the functions of historical alterity and periodization grew among pre- and early modernists. In 1996, Freccero and Louise Fradenburg challenged queer historicists to “confront the pleasure we take in renouncing pleasure for the stern alterities of history.”25 Rejecting as essentialist the insistence on the radical incommensurability of past and present sexualities, they proposed a historiographic practice conscious of the role of desires and identifications across time. Echoing Sedgwick in asking “Is it not indeed possible that alteritism at times functions precisely to stabilize the identity of ‘the modern’?” they argued that “it might, precisely, be more pleasurable and ethically resonant with our experience of the instabilities of identityformation to figure a particular historical ‘moment’ as itself fractured, layered, indeed, historical.”26 Related motives animated the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, who sought to “show that queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality.”27 Dinshaw’s “sensible” historiography, which depended on a “process of touching, of making partial connections between incommensurate entities” across the medieval and postmodern, also privileged a view of sexuality as indeterminate, constituted