Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

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      A search for “types” has framed much of the scholarship on lesbian history of England and the United States. From my own book on the relations between representations of the “masculine tribade” and the “chaste feminine friend” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,¹⁸ to Susan Lanser’s work on the “sapphist” as a flashpoint for modernity in the eighteenth century,¹⁹ to Martha Vicinus’s early delineation of four antecedents to modern lesbianism and, more recently, her exploration of nineteenth-century familial models for female intimacy such as mother/daughter and husband/wife,²⁰ to Judith Halberstam’s exploration of twentieth-century forms of female masculinity,²¹ an implicit typological impulse has framed efforts to render female-female desires intelligible—both in their own historical terms, and in ours.

      In part this typological inclination results from the medical taxonomies from which the modern category of homosexuality was derived.²² Thus, a reliance on systems of classification similarly has dominated studies of male homosexuality, both within the West and cross-culturally.²³ David M. Halperin has provided the most explicit description and theorization of typologies of male homosexuality across a broad temporal expanse. Halperin—previously one of the most influential advocates of historical discontinuity—attempts in How to Do the History of Homosexuality “to rehabilitate a modified constructionist approach to the history of sexuality by readily acknowledging the existence of transhistorical continuities, reintegrating them into the frame of the analysis, and reinterpreting their significance within a genealogical understanding of the emergence of (homo)sexuality itself.”²⁴

      Revisiting his own historicist practice in order to balance the conceptual appeals of historical continuity and change, Halperin offers a sophisticated analytical paradigm based on four “transhistorical” “pre-homosexual categories of male sex and gender deviance”: effeminacy; pederasty or active sodomy; friendship or male love; and passivity or inversion.²⁵ This rehabilitation implicitly relies on classical models of male-male relations, which are viewed as variously applicable at different times and places. Halperin proposes, however, a transhistorical model only up to the emergence of modern homosexuality—when, owing to a “long historical process of accumulation, accretion, and overlay,” the relations among these categories definitively changed.²⁶

      Although I have been inspired by Halperin’s engagement with continuist arguments, my current interest lies not in creating a transhistorical taxonomy of categories or figures—or, at least, this would only be one task in a larger project I envision. I am less interested in describing the contents of typologies and exposing the conceptual strands that contribute to them than in investigating the cultural conditions that render such types culturally salient at particular moments.²⁷ This reflects my desire to build methodologically on the project 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 СКАЧАТЬ