Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

      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