Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
pursued in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England while also moving beyond it. There I argued that, under the auspices of divergent discourses circulating in England, a symptomatic break in the representation of female homoeroticism occurred over the course of the seventeenth century, a shift in the terms of female embodiment, which led to a “cultural perversion” of female-female desire. This process of perversion, which involved particular negotiations of significance and insignificance, articulation and negation, intelligibility and unintelligibility, provided some of the primary materials out of which modern identity categories were fashioned. I also argued, however, that early modern representations are definitively estranged from modern conceptual categories. Rather than attempt to forge links between the tribade, the tommy, the invert, and the butch, for instance, I focused on certain conceptual axes that, within the temporal parameters of two centuries, organized the meanings of tribadism and female friendship. Building on the work of Annamarie Jagose on the terms of “lesbian inconsequence,”28 the book attempts to expose the fragile nature of a governing regime of visibility (and its corollary, invisibility) by focusing on the specific incoherences that have governed the intelligibility—and lack of intelligibility—of female-female desire.
The two figures whose genealogies I traced nonetheless appear strangely similar to subsequent emanations of female homoerotic desire. Figures that, since the foundational work in lesbian history, have been treated as prototypical for the nineteenth century (the passing woman and the romantic friend), as fundamental to the pathologizing discourses of sexology and early psychoanalysis (the invert and the pervert), and as vital to twentieth-century selfdefinitions (butch and femme) seem to have been cut from much of the same cloth as the early modern tribade and friend. Noting such resemblances linking various manifestations across time, I asked in closing: why do such apparent resonances assert themselves?
It would seem that certain representational features of female bodies and bonds slip into and out of historical view; some acquire more importance and visibility as others decline and fade, only to reappear in a different guise under changed social conditions. The discourses in which they are articulated shift and mutate as well. By the late eighteenth century, for instance, the sexually deviant figure that arguably had the most potential to signify transgressively—the tribade who supposedly used her enlarged clitoris to “imitate” the sex acts of men—had almost disappeared from the medical discourse that first gave her cultural intelligibility. Given the changes during this period to the practice of anatomy and physiology, it makes sense that she waned as an object of medical curiosity; but why did she linger in other genres, such as literature, and then later reappear in medicine (albeit in much different form) as the invert of sexology and psychoanalysis? The differences between the tribade and the invert, of course, are as considerable as those between Galen and Freud, but the metalogic of a figure composed by a masculinized style of desire persists. No longer diagnosed routinely, as she was in the early modern period, through the presence of an oversized clitoris, the tribade’s “monstrous” abuse of her body and other women was refigured by sexology as the mannish invert’s hypervirility, her masculine characteristics imbuing not only her physical nature, but her very soul.29 Nonetheless, the common recourse to a physiological explanation for a masculinized desire, as well as the projection of such desire onto women of Africa and the Middle East in both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, has been striking enough to invite continuist narratives.
In order to defend the hypothesis of continuity, however, one would need to analyze the intervening period and the discursive regimes at work within it. What happened to the terms of cultural representation between the production of the masculine tribade and the masculine invert? For one thing, the emergence of a new type: the sapphist. Susan Lanser has located the cultural production of the sapphist in a historical moment when “private intimacies between women became public relations.”30 Rather than residing in the pages of medical textbooks, the sapphist’s “publicity” was largely a construction of a variety of fictional forms, from picaresque novels to satiric pornography, which alternately celebrated and condemned her.31 By the latter part of the eighteenth century, so notorious was the figure of the sapphist that, as Martha Vicinus maintains, “women’s intimate friendships were divided into two types, sensual romantic friendship and sexual Sapphism.”32 Nonetheless, as Lisa Moore argues, sapphism and romantic friendship “continued to exhibit a dangerous intimacy.”33 What separated romantic friendship from suspect sapphism, contends Lanser, was less the masculinized gender performance of the sapphist than her deviation from class propriety. Indeed, Lanser argues that it is only through a kind of back-formation that figures suspected of sapphism—because of their violations of genteel respectability—were later deemed “masculine.”34
Over this same period, the intimate female friend was reconstituted as something both akin and alien to the innocent, chaste, yet desiring adolescent who is represented widely in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. By the late eighteenth century, under the auspices of a culture of manners, sensibility, and taste, the idioms of chastity and innocence that figured early modern friendship seem to have been channeled into the twin virtues of propriety and sentiment. Fictionally immortalized by that hypervirtuous exemplar of moral womanhood, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the “particular friend” of the Enlightenment appears to be both libidinally attached to and tragically barred from those female intimacies that might protect her from the worst abuses of patriarchal masculinity.35 A real-life Clarissa may have had access to “sensual romantic friendship” with such a friend as Anna, but it is the project of Richardson’s text—as it was of many eighteenth-century novels—to explicitly frustrate such desire.36
Yet, in their attempts to contain and stave off intimate female friendships, such texts had more in common with early modern literature than with later configurations of desire. For, by the next century, sensual romantic friendship—or, to invoke its function as an effect of domestic ideology, the “female world of love and ritual”—subsisted hand in glove with the Victorian bourgeois ideal of female passionlessness. Bolstered by a socioeconomic investment in women’s domesticity and the separation of spheres, the expectation of women’s lack of interest in sex with men paradoxically fostered the fervid expressions of love and desire among girls and women characterized by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg as “socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage.”37 Indeed, the nineteenth century, in Vicinus’s terms, “saw a concerted effort to spiritualize all love.”38 Out of the contradictory idioms of romantic friendship and sapphic sexuality, women in the nineteenth century were, as Vicinus asserts, able “to fashion something new—a personal identity based upon a sexualized, or at least recognizably eroticized, relationship with another woman.”39
This eroticized personal identity and public persona often depended on a form of gender inversion signified through sartorial and behavioral style. As both objects of and agents in the formation of modern identity categories, sapphists and inverts sought to make themselves legible (to themselves and to others) through the adoption of masculine dress. Yet, at the beginning of the modern era, as Vicinus argues, “gender inversion was the most important signifier of same-sex desire, but interpretations of the so-called mannish woman varied considerably.”40 As Laura Doan has shown, especially during the relaxation of gender conventions during World War I, certain British women who adopted masculine fashion neither perceived themselves nor were perceived by others as sapphists.41 Following the postwar tightening of gender ideology, and especially after the notorious 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall, many sapphists proclaimed their erotic independence by means of closely cropped hair, starched shirts, jackets, ties, cigarette lighters, and monocles.42 Their manipulation of the tropes of masculine dress drew upon prior preoccupations with the cultural signification of gendered clothes, yet did so within the context of a different gender regime and by means of vastly different material technologies. Tribades, one might say, did not smoke.
Why do certain figures and tropes of eroticism (and gender) become culturally salient at certain moments, becoming saturated with meaning, and then fade from view? Why do suspicions of deviant behavior sometimes seep into the most innocuous-seeming of friendships, and why are such friendships at other times immune from suspicion? Why do certain figures, separated by vast temporal expanses, appear to