Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

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      The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

      FOR DAVID HALPERIN

      Since around 2005, a specter has haunted the field in which I work: the specter of teleology. On behalf of a queerer historiography, some scholars of French and English early modern literature have charged other queer studies scholars with promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. This normalization allegedly is caused by unwitting imprisonment within a framework of teleology. A teleological perspective views the present as a necessary outcome of the past—the point toward which all prior events were trending.¹ The anti-teleologists challenge any such proleptic sequel as a straitjacketing of sex, time, and history, and they announce their critique as a decisive rupture from previous theories and methods of queer history (especially Foucault-inspired genealogy). Given the high profile of the scholars involved, as well as the high octane of their polemics, it is not surprising that their assessment has been embraced enthusiastically by many other scholars, inside and outside of early modern literary studies, who aim “to free queer scholarship from the tyranny of historicism.”² Whereas there are other hot topics within queer studies right now—including whether queer theory should “take a break” from feminism, whether it should “just say no” to futurity, whether it is irremediably impervious 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 СКАЧАТЬ