Queering, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Culture

Queer theory and queer studies are approaches that date to the late 1980s and early 1990s (Teresa de Lauretis is credited with naming queer theory in 1991 in the journal differences). Queering approaches emerged from an earlier gay and lesbian studies; feminist theory, as it questioned the unitary nature of the categories "woman/women," recognizing that women of color, working class women, and lesbians might have very different concerns from the white, middle-class women at the center of Western, second-wave feminism; and (post)structuralist thought, especially Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's challenges to Marxism and psychoanalysis. Where gay and lesbian studies depend in large part upon an assumption that lesbian and gay identities exist transhistorically, queer theory (following Foucault) emphasizes that what has as sexuality is a modern deployment, and that bodies and pleasures may have been very differently organized in the past. Not only can we not be sure to find modern homosexuals in the past, heterosexuality in its modern form has only recently emerged.

Queer theory also recognizes that constructing all sexual difference around a homo/hetero binarism (powerfully analyzed by Eve Sedgwick) excludes many possibilities, and—under the pressure of this recognition—gay/lesbian studies has itself widened to embrace bisexual, transgender, and intersex experiences. The category "queer" indeed often subsumes any sexuality excluded from the "normal," including non-normative heterosex-ualities. Judith Butler understands the power of queer to reside precisely in the fact that its boundaries are not determined in advance, that it does not name some stable entity but is constantly in the process of being redefined and rearticulated.

Most generally, queer scholarship negotiates back and forth between (1) defining and interrogating the norms by which societies construct dominant sexualities and (2) considering what is excluded by those norms as queer. The "normal" always defines itself against others, marginalizing and silencing these; at the same time, the norm depends upon the queer others that it uses to define itself, and those others haunt the edges of dominant social/sexual spaces, potentially resisting and disrupting "normality."

Most queer theory has been articulated in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century material, in part because of the influence of Foucault's History of Sexuality (Volume I). An exception is Jonathan Dollimore's Sexual Dissidence, where Dollimore's work as an early modernist informs his theorizing of perverse sexuality. Although premodern sexual experience and social formations differed significantly from their modern counterparts, their study might nonetheless benefit from queer approaches. Foucault, after all, followed Volume I of his History with investigations of ancient Greek and Roman sexuality. In bringing queer theory to play in premodern contexts, scholars must be careful not simply to apply models that have been developed to understand more recent materials; queer theory must be historicized, brought into a conversation with what can be recovered about earlier historical moments and their treatment of the erotic.

An overall sense of the richness of queer work in medieval and early modern studies can be gathered by examining the many essay collections published since the early 1990s, including Susan Zimmerman's Erotic Politics: The Dynamics of Desire on the English Renaissance Stage (1992); Jonathan Goldberg's Queering the Renaissance (1994); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero's Premodern Sexualities (1996); Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler's Desire and Discipline (1996); Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James Schultz's Constructing Medieval Sexuality (1997); Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson's Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (1999); Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger's Queering the Middle Ages (2001); Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn's Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (2001); and Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke's Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800 (2003) and Siting Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800 (2005).

HISTORICAL RECOVERIES, RECLAIMINGS, REREADINGS

As suggested above, a gay/lesbian studies that considers homosexual identity to be largely transhistorical can be distinguished from a queer studies that calls stable identities into question. But one should not imagine Queer approaches simply superseding gay/lesbian ones: Queer work builds on much earlier gay/lesbian scholarship. Both queer and gay/lesbian study of the premodern has been concerned with rethinking a traditional historicism that has not considered sexual (and especially queer) experience an important topic of investigation. As with feminist work in women's history, gay/lesbian and queer scholarship has moved both to recover past moments, texts, experiences, and social structures previously ignored and to reclaim and reread better-known material by placing the sexual and erotic at the center of attention.

Two works that predate queer theory have been extraordinarily influential for the queer medieval/early modern work that has followed: John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) and Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982). Both find rich materials for the historical study of homosexuality, but Boswell and Bray also exemplify opposed approaches. While Boswell is aware of significant changes in how homosexuality is understood across the centuries, he insists nonetheless on the transhistorical usefulness of the category. (Boswell's position was immediately controversial; for later assessments of his work, see Matthew Kuefler's The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality [2006].) Bray, on the other hand, follows Foucault, insisting that "to talk of an individual in [the early modern] period as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism and ruinously misleading" (1995, p.16).

The work of historical recovery, reclaiming, and rereading done since Boswell and Bray has been extremely varied. In literary studies, scholars have uncovered new or little-known texts—letters exchanged between women or between men that evince erotically-charged affection; poetry like that which Thomas Stehling collects in Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship (1984), and Richard Barnfield's late-sixteenth-century homoerotic poetry. Critics have also returned to canonical texts to reread these from queer perspectives. Unsurprisingly, it has been especially works containing explicit sexual material that have benefited from such rereadings: Alain de Lille's twelfth-century Plaint of Nature, in which a personified Nature complains about the prevalence of non-procreative sex; Dante's circle of sodomites in the Inferno; the performances of such queerly embodied figures as the Pardoner, Wife of Bath, and Summoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Christopher Marlowe's drama, especially Edward II, with its depiction of erotically charged male/male relations; William Shakespeare's sonnets, especially those in which the male speaker ardently addresses the "young man," and the Shakespearean drama that plays with cross-gender identifications. A significant body of scholarship on the Renaissance stage, like Stephen Orgel's, considers how the experience of cross-dressed acting signified culturally.

Many literary studies have also cast their web more widely, to examine and queer texts not so explicitly homoerotic. Richard E. Zeikowitz's Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (2003) and James A. Schultz's Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (2006) take up, in very different queering ways, a "courtly love" poetry typically taken to be "heterosexual." Tison Pugh's Queering Medieval Genres (2004) develops readings of lyric, fabliau, "tragedy," and Arthurian romance. Anna Kłosowska's Queer Love in the Middle Ages (2005) considers a wide range of medieval French texts. Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (1999) and Glenn Burger's Chaucer's Queer Nation (2003) look not just at Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath but also at Lollard writings, The Book of Margery Kempe (Dinshaw), and the representation of marriage (Burger) as sites for queer reading. While focused largely on Shakespeare, Valerie Traub's Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992) also attends to a variety of other early modern cultural material. Mario DiGangi's Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) surveys a wide range of dramatic genres to show the centrality of homoeroticism to each, as to many early modern institutions and social experiences. Richard Rambuss's Closet Devotions (1998) looks to the intensely corporeal religious poetry of Robert Crashaw, George Herbert, and John Donne for queer affect. Also broadly conceived in the texts they take up and the formulations they develop are Gregory W. Bredbeck's Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (1991), Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries (1992), Bruce R. Smith's Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (1994), Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse (1997), and Daniel Juan Gil's Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (2006).

Such literary scholarship can be seen as uncovering several complex sorts of discourse—fictional, dramatic, lyrical—through which medieval and early modern writers understood emotional/affective and sexual/erotic experience. Other queer historical scholarship similarly recovers and reinterprets discourses shaping and shaped by eroticism. (A useful overview of medievalist work is provided by Ruth Mazo Karras in Sexuality in Medieval Europe [2005]. Kenneth Borris's Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance [2004] provides a compendious collection of early modern texts.) Scholars like Joan Cadden, Danielle Jacquart, Claude Thomasset, and Karma Lochrie (for the medieval) and Katharine Park, Valerie Traub, and Thomas Laqueur (for the early modern) have excavated medical/scientific discourses of the sexualized body. Many others have examined theological and religious engagements with sex and eroticism: condemnations of sodomy, beginning with Peter Damian's eleventh-century Book of Gomorrah; writings on spiritual friendship, beginning with Aelred of Rievaulx in the twelfth century; penitential manuals; women's mystical reflections; fire-and-brimstone sermons like Bernardino of Siena's in early Renaissance Italy; Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) theology and exegesis. Those contributing to this scholarship include Boswell, E. Ann Matter, Brian Patrick McGuire, Mark D. Jordan, Lochrie, Allen Frantzen, Dyan Elliot, Jacqueline Murray, Judith Bennett, Franco Mormando, Helmut Puff, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Alan Stewart, and Bray. Political and legal discourses on disallowed sexuality have also received significant attention—for instance, in the detailed archival work done by Michael Rocke in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (1996), or, in a very different vein, by Ruth Mazo Karras in Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1996).

Especially prominent in examinations of medieval and early modern religious, political, and legal formulations has been sodomy, a term that included much disallowed sexual behavior. Mark Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997) shows how sodomy became a common way of understanding queer sex. William Burgwinkle's Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature (2004) develops a sophisticated reading of how legal and religious understandings of sodomy are written into, and rewritten by, literary texts. Sodomy has been even more central in early modern scholarship, including Helmut Puff's Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (2003); the essays collected by Thomas Betteridge in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (2002); and several books of literary criticism—Goldberg's Sodometries, Bredbeck's Sodomy and Interpretation, Alan Stewart's Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997), and Richard Halpern's Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (2002). These emphasize especially the slipperiness of the term, in Goldberg's words, its "relational" function as "a measure whose geometry we do not know, whose (a)symmetries we are to explore (Sodometries, p. xv). That is, sodomy, as Foucault emphasized, is a "thoroughly confused category," and it is precisely its incoherences that give it social power and literary/interpretive resonance.

Some scholars (for instance, DiGangi) have objected to making sodomy the sole focus of work on premodern sexualities. After all, other homoerotic and antinormative discourses and experiences are culturally significant. Alan Bray's The Friend (2003) traces the experience of homosocial friendship from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Theodora Jankowski's Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (2000) reads women's virginity as queerly resisting patriarchal marriage; in this resistance, it echoes the earlier practice of "chaste marriage" described by Dyan Elliott in Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (1993). The emphasis on sodomy also tends to privilege male sexuality, though the category of sodomy had an impact as well on defining and limiting female sexuality, as noted in several of the essays in Sautman and Sheingorn's Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages. Lochrie, morever, argues that there were medieval discourses of female sodomy that we should attend to, and her own work—both Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (1999) and Heterosyncrasies (2005)—examines medieval women's eroticism. In early modern studies, Valerie Traub's The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002) similarly calls attention to the complex discourses and experiences of female/female love, desire, and eroticism.

HISTORICAL RECONFIGURATIONS

Not all of the work of recovery, reclamation, and rereading just detailed identifies itself as queer. But all contributes to a larger queer project of understanding both the sexual norms of medieval/early modern culture and the ways in which the experiences of individuals and communities queerly exceeded those norms. Also crucial to this project is a political impulse to make the historical work of medieval and early modern studies pertinent for our twenty-first-century moment. Can understanding a queer past make queer lives in the present more livable? In Dinshaw's resonant formulation, can the past and the present touch each other queerly?

The answers offered to such questions have been complex and often contradictory—ranging from the assertion of direct continuities between the medieval and the (post)-modern to insistence on the unbridgeable alterity of present and past. For the most part, self-defined queer scholarship has, following Foucault, emphasized difference. Thus, Lochrie, in Heterosyncrasies, argues that even to talk of medieval "norms" or "normality" is anachronistic; that such categories are the product of the statistical thinking of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and that a dynamic of norm and queer deviations simply does not work in analyzing medieval material. But even those who strongly emphasize the premodern's alterity do so with the current moment at least partly in mind: to recognize how different sexual configurations were in the past is also to suggest how different they might become in the future. To argue, as Burger does in Chaucer's Queer Nation, that late-medieval marriage was radically changing destabilizes (queers) a hegemonic understanding of modern heterosexual marriage as unchanging and universal.

Burger also explicitly connects present and past queernesses, beginning his book by comparing Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" and its effects to John Preston's twentieth-century gay pornography. Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval, is consistently concerned with how medieval and postmodern "sexualities and communities" might touch each other. Goldberg's Sodometries takes up not only early modern materials but their resonances with representations of the Persian Gulf War (1991) and the U.S. Supreme Court sodomy decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1988). And Carla Freccero argues in Queer/Early/Modern (2005) that a sequential historicism of past, present, and future does not do justice to the operations of history, emphasizing that the past continues, spectrally, to inhabit the present and to insist on new future configurations. Her readings move back and forth from Petrarch to Melissa Etheridge, sixteenth-century European colonial accounts of cannibalism to the anti-transgender violence of the Brandon Teena case.

The future of queer historicist work is itself unpredictable, but such experiments in bringing past and present to touch each other will continue, as queer scholars consider how their historical work matters in the present moment. And, as queer studies more generally moves to examine the intersections of sexuality with such other categories as gender, race, religion, class, and age, medieval and early modern work might also move in a similar direction. The scholarship of Jeffrey J. Cohen, Steven F. Kruger, Kim Hall, Dymphna Callaghan, and Madhavi Menon, for instance, begins to think through some of these intersections, but there is a need for further investigation.

see also Literature: II. The Study of; Queer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Borris, Kenneth, ed. 2004. Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470–1650. New York: Routledge.

Boswell, John. 1980. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bray, Alan. 1995. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press. (Orig. pub. 1982.)

Burger, Glenn. 2003. Chaucer's Queer Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Burger, Glenn, and Steven F. Kruger, eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Burgwinkle, William. 2004. Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

DiGangi, Mario. 1997. Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978–1986. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, Random House.

Fradenburg, Louise, and Carla Freccero, eds. 1996. Premodern Sexualities. New York: Routledge.

Goldberg, Jonathan, ed. 1994. Queering the Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Goldberg, Jonathan. 1992. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jordan, Mark. 1997. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. 2005. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. New York: Routledge.

Lochrie, Karma. 2005. Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lochrie Karma; Peggy McCracken; and James A. Schultz, eds. 1997. Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Masten, Jeffrey. 1997. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Murray, Jacqueline, and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. 1996. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rambuss, Richard. 1998. Closet Devotions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sautman, Francesca Canadé, and Pamela Sheingorn. 2001. Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave.

Traub, Valerie. 2002. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

                                       Steven F. Kruger