Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub
rigor and precision, I explore, rather than assume, its oppositional stance toward normativity. Given the principled undefinability of “queer,” its infinite mobility and mutability, one notion has provided ballast for its centrifugal expansion: the idea that it is always posed against the “normal.” Other queer studies scholars have begun to explore how “queer mobility and indefinition function within queer studies as both a disciplinary norm and a front,” and that rather than being “endlessly open-ended, polyvalent, and reattachable,” it is “sticky … with history.”53 Aligned with their efforts to explore the field habitus of queer studies but with more distant historical periods in mind, I explore what is normal for the early modern period. Third, because I attend “to sexuality’s governance across multiple and contradictory regulatory norms,”54 I also retain gender as a crucial modifier of sexuality and the meanings of queer.
Knowing Women’s Bodies
It is a central premise of what follows that our conceptual resources are impoverished when it is maintained that any attempt to account for sexuality in precisely gendered or corporeal terms results in an unwelcome policing of desire, an epistemological violence against the libido, or an exasperating confinement of bodies. My resistance to the trend to ignore, despecify, or dispatch gender in the name of queer is theoretically grounded in an appreciation of the multiple vectors (gender, sexuality, race, class) that historically have underpinned and crosshatched embodiment in sometimes congruent, sometimes incongruent ways. It also stems from a historical sense that queer studies misrecognizes its own conditions of emergence when it categorically rejects affiliation with feminism in the name of analytically separating sexuality from gender. Yes, gender and sexuality are not the same,55 and there are good reasons for initiating their tactical divergence for certain questions and certain projects.56 Nonetheless, to “distinguish sexuality from gender analytically is not [necessarily] to deny their relationship but is in fact the precondition for undertaking the study of that relationship.”57 The question of how gender and sexuality do and do not interanimate at any particular time and place remains a live question.58 This is in part because gender is continuously materialized through social and psychic practices and will operate contingently for different communities and individuals. Indeed, the intransigence of gender, as both embodied materiality and as analytic tool, is one of the opacities with which this book is most concerned. For all of these reasons, the feminism animating these pages is fueled not only by theoretical investments but by a historicist interest in the ongoing work of gender.59
One of the main arguments of this book is that the gendered specificity of female embodiment offers an especially valuable resource for thinking sex. We can approach this resource in historicist terms, noting how often early modern discourses constitute the female body as a knowledge problem. Consider the early modern medical and theological controversies about the existence of the hymen, as well as the hymen’s controversial status in the effort to “prove” virginity.60 As Margaret Ferguson argues, “for centuries, the hymen has been alleged to give ‘proof’ of a virgin’s existence; from the early modern period to the present, however, the proof is riddled by doubt. The hymen may have been destroyed by the digital searches of those charged with finding it; or it may have been lost ‘innocently,’ and in a way the female subject has forgotten; and/or it may never have existed (as an object available to ‘ocular proof’) at all.”61 Early modern medical texts also attribute the breaking of the hymen to the use of illicit “instruments” such as dildos, to overly vigorous masturbation, to the “defluxion of sharp humors,”62 and to the illicit penetration of the vagina by sexual partners, male and female.63 But such acts are not, in the end, conclusive of the presence or absence of the hymen. Who knows how a woman has lost her hymen? Who knows if it even exists? Regularly presented in medical texts as a matter of “controversy,” the existence of the hymen stymied physicians’ most dedicated efforts to secure medical “fact.”64
Representing a basic threshold of human knowledge, the enigma of the hymen is only one of a number of commonly noted “female mysteries.” Foremost among them is the truism that only women can definitely know the paternity of their children: while the reproductive effects of certain sex acts might seem obvious, the ascription of paternity onto a single man depends, absent the physical resemblance of child to father, on the performance of a woman’s word.65 Likewise dependent upon women’s performative acts is the enduring question of women’s orgasm. Because it was commonly believed that women emitted seed during orgasm, this inquiry took the form of medical debates about the physical nature of female seed (including its confusion with vaginal lubrication, secretions, menses, and leukorrhea), its comparative quality (generally thought to be thinner and weaker than men’s), the extent to which emission of seed was the source of female erotic pleasure, and the age-old question of whether women’s pleasure in sex was greater than man’s. Add to this the ability of women to fake it and the ways in which anxiety about that ability bleeds into Renaissance concerns about women’s insincerity and capacity to deceive,66 and women’s orgasm becomes another early modern sexual-knowledge problem. Such queries, controversies, and thematizations of the mystery of female bodies register the impossibility of knowing sex through them.67
The photograph included here encapsulates some of what is at stake in using women’s embodiment to think more broadly about the historical conjunctions of sex and knowledge. It depicts a statue on a column outside the Paris cathedral of Notre Dame in which a gorgeous, female-headed, amply breasted snake is in the process of enticing Eve.68 The seduction of Eve by the snake in the Garden of Eden stands in Western Christian traditions as an Ur-story not only of humankind’s fall from divine grace through knowledge of good and evil but also a fall into the knowledge of sex. Medieval commentators regularly interpreted the knowledge to which Eve and Adam became privy as understanding not only mortality and sin, but sexual desire, arousal, frustration, and pleasure. Augustine, for instance, materialized the origins and transmission of sin in the semen from which humans are propagated, arguing that “the sexual desire (libido) of our disobedient members arose in those first human beings as a result of the sin of disobedience.”69 Indeed, for Augustine, spontaneous sexual arousal was clear evidence of the effect of original sin, both its proof and its penalty, for it materially evinced the triumph of the passions.70
FIGURE 1. The seduction of Eve, Notre Dame de Paris. Photograph by Pascal Lemaître.
This interpretation of the Fall as not only introducing mortality but fallen flesh (signified by the naked genitals) was an important strain of Christian thought throughout the seventeenth century.71 The conceptual marriage of mortal with carnal knowledge helps to explain why the postlapsarian modesty topos—whereupon knowing themselves to be naked, Eve and Adam cover their genitals in shame—becomes so conventional in textual and visual representations across a wide swath of genres. It also provided convenient theological support for the common belief in women’s sexual insatiability, thought to result from deficient powers of reason. Insofar as lust was a mark of weakness and inconstancy, it not only was projected onto women, but was gendered feminine in ways that also redounded on men: excessive desire became a correlate of effeminacy.72 Fears of female insatiability, however, were not merely the result of misogynous fears of women’s erotic power over men. They are part of a larger epistemological configuration in which sex not only is the means of possessing knowledge but is its own form of knowledge. This knowledge is of a very particular kind: of and through the body and thus, according to church fathers, devoid of the reason that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world. Concerns about maintaining the distinction between humans and animals informed controversies, including commentaries by Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, over how to maintain the rational will while in the throes of passion and the degree to which sex does or does not momentarily turn humans into beasts. Given the associations among women, lust, and animality, the theological debate about the “beastliness” of sex is replete with gendered distinctions and implications.
It is in this context that the depiction of the snake as female-headed and female-breasted becomes particularly arresting,