Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

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      In many respects, the projects of these early modernists reiterate familiar queer theoretical investments. They share with countless others a desire to promote the capacious analytical capacity of queer to deconstruct sexual identity, to illuminate the lack of coherence or fixity in erotic relations, and to highlight the radical indeterminacy and transitivity of both erotic desire and gender. Like many others, they find their warrant in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assertion that “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”⁸ Drawing on Sedgwick as well to privilege the universalizing over the minoritizing aspect of sexualities, these critics maintain that we should not “take the object of queering for granted.”⁹ In Freccero’s words, her “work has been mostly about advocating for queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability, so theoretically anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer.”¹⁰ Similarly, Menon maintains that “if queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer.”¹¹ In historiographic terms, these critics refuse to countenance the emphasis on historical difference often attributed to historicist scholars. Collaborating on an article published in PMLA, for instance, Goldberg and Menon call for “acts of queering that would suspend the assurance that the only modes of knowing the past are either those that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself.” 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).