Arizona State University

Making Sexual Knowledge

Author(s): Valerie Traub
Source: Early Modern Women, Vol. 5 (Fall 2010), pp. 251-259
Published by: Arizona State University
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Early Modern Women:

An Interdisciplinary Journal

2010, vol. 5

Making Sexual Knowledge

Valerie Traub

How do
makeinsexual
knowledge?
In about
particular,
what
processes
are we
involved
generating
knowledge
sexuality
in the
past? I
suggest that those of us involved in historical sexuality studies might gain
some analytical purchase on these questions by entertaining three general
theses:1 that bow we address the history of sexuality is as important as what

we discover about prior organizations of erotic desire; that sexuality is best

approached as a flexible and capacious category of analysis (rather than a

delimited or fixed object of study); and that our historiographie methods
might benefit from consideration of what it means to "know" sexuality in
the first place.

Debates about historiographie method have been central to the field

of sexuality studies since its beginnings: for instance, regarding the salience
of acts versus identities, and whether or not to privilege historical alterity

or continuism; the relative claims of comprehensive period chronologies

in contrast to specific local histories; and the recognition of the politically

fraught relationship between pastness, particularly the premodern, and

sexualized formations of racial, ethnic, and national otherness.2 In addi
tion, debates about the relative merits of literary readings versus social
historyor, to put this in less disciplinary terms, of the relations between

representation and "real life," metaphors and materiality, texts and their
mediation, signification and social practicehave been constitutive of the
field.3

Yet, even as historians have taken the "narrative turn" and devised a
more interdisciplinary cultural history of sexuality, new methodological
lines recently have been drawn by certain early modern literary critics, writ

251

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252 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Valerie Traub

ing from the perspective of queer theory, who allege that a failure to treat
sex primarily as representation has resulted unwittingly in the creation of
triumphant developmental teleologies that conscript earlier sexual regimes
into a "preemptively defined category of the present ('modern homosexu
ality')."4 In different but complementary ways, Carla Freccero, Jonathan

Goldberg, Madhavi Menon, Martin Eisner, and Marc Schachter advocate

the specific capacities of formal textual analysisespecially deconstruc
tion and psychoanalysisto provide a less teleological, and thereby less
normalizing, "homohistory."5

I share many of the aims of these critics. Nonetheless, I have several

qualms about their proposed strategies. Elsewhere I have argued that their

championing of synchronic analysis, and their rejection of chronological

history as necessarily teleological and normalizing, depends on a caricature
of the discipline of history, as well as an overestimation of the work that
deconstruction can do.6 Here I want to suggest that their privileging of lit
erary over historical approaches threatens to harden disciplinary lines, not
because historians will attend to these critics' concerns, but because their
lack of real engagement with historical work virtually assures that histori
ans will not. But rather than simply argue that we treat sex simultaneously

as metaphoric and material, and construct its history through synchronic

and diachronic analyses, I propose that recognizing the status of sexuality
as an epistemological problem might provide critical traction beyond afford

ing less tendentious terms for methodological debate.7 Furthermore, by

advocating, as an affirmative intellectual stance, what we don't know as
well as what we can't know about the history of sexuality, I hope to direct
attention away from disciplinary turf wars while encouraging a more peda
gogical disposition toward sexual knowledge.8

That sexuality poses a problem of signification long has been recog

nized by historicist scholars.9 Several years ago, for instance, literary critic

Laurie Shannon, drawing on the work of historian Alan Bray, argued that
there is nothing fully "dispositive" about the power of sexuality in the early

modern period to convey particular meanings.10 Or, as I rephrased their

insights in The Renaissance of Lesbianism, "Erotic acts come to signify .,.

through a complex and continual social process."11 Because erotic desires

and acts operate unreliably as a trigger for articulation, they have seemed

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Making Sexual Knowledge 253

to require discursive framing in order to reveal the meanings and values
they may, or, just as importantly, may not, convey. Historicist scholars have

tended to negotiate the uncertainty of sexual signification by describing

early modern concepts through the period's own languages and idioms,
as well as by locating sexuality within densely contextualized domains

in essence, momentarily stabilizing the meanings of sex through other

discourses: legal statutes and trials of sodomites and tribades, medical

descriptions of the use and "abuse" of genitalia, and prescriptive literature
articulating sexual mores. If this strategy has now settled into what one
critic calls "the routines of discursive contextualization,"12 it also has led

some scholars to move beyond identity as the governing question of the

history of sexualityshifting the analytical and political imperative away
from inclusion, for instance, of lesbians in history, and toward the slippery

borders and uneven edges where erotic desires, bodies, and acts rub up
against other bodies, fields of signification, and social concerns.13

Nonetheless, no scholar, to my knowledge, has used the instability

of sexual signification to think beyond disciplinary divides. I propose that
we might do so by considering the problem of sexuality's signification as
opening onto a broader vista: namely, the epistemological status of sexual
ity as a knowledge relation. Others have noted the radical incommensura
bility between erotic desire and the social shapes it assumes; for instance,

Goldberg and Menon characterize desire "as a formation that rarely has
a single objective correlative by which to be measured," and Eisner and
Schachter refer to sexuality's "epistemic uncertainty."14 Along with them,
I suggest that we grapple with the circumstance that, in fundamental yet
manifold ways, sex, as a category of human thought, volition, behavior, and

representation, is opaque, inaccessible, and resistant to understanding.

What happens when our quest for knowledge encounters this resis
tance? My past attempt to write a cultural history of early modern lesbian
ism yields several pertinent instances. For example, how are we to locate the

lines between passionate friendship and eroticism in that period, especially

insofar as women were officially disbarred from the ideology of friendship?

How, as the historian Anna Clark once asked, are we to positively identify
the look, the caress, the sigh?15 What is the basis for interpreting kissing,

touching, embracing, or sharing a bed as eroticor not?

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254 EMWJ2010, vol. 5 Valerie Traub

Such questions, which point to the difficulty of defining what "sex"

actually is (or was), generally go unasked by historians and historicists.

Perhaps this is because most historians and literary critics have been more

preoccupied with erotic attitudes, affects, identities, and ideologies than

with the details of sexual practices. For all the fields awareness of the con
tingency of sexual meanings, the content of sex has been strangely presum
able, apparently interpretable through such ready-to-hand transhistorical
rubrics as "heterosexuality," "sodomy," and "reproductive sex" (or, in a queer
idiom, "heteronormativity" and "cruising"). Such vague referents function as
placeholders for a sexual activity everywhere assumed, but rarely described.

The material, corporeal aspects of sexual activity remain surprisingly under

articulated.
I am not the first to offer this observation. A decade ago, in an essay

titled "Finding the Bodies," historian Cynthia Herrup diagnosed a con

stitutive embarrassment among historians about the physicality of sex.16
Chastising her colleagues for seeing something other than sex when they

analyze early modern discourses, she critiques the tendency to read the
sexual body as a metaphor for concerns that extend beyond the bodya
tendency she argues is due to self-consciousness about the object of study:
"to date," she says, "the most successful (least threatening) way to make sex

matter has been to disembody it. So we point out echoes of sex where it
physically is not and claim to find something more than sex where it physi

cally is."17 Having found a rich documentary archive associated with the
sodomy trial of the Earl of Castlehaven in the mid-seventeenth century
including descriptions of anal sodomy, rape, masturbation, and intercrural
intercourseHerrup urges historians to resist this hermeneutic error, to
stop reiterating the reticence of the archive, and instead help it to speak.

Although I believe that the causes of scholarly reserve are more

complex than professional anxiety about academic legitimacy, the rarity

with which scholars address what actually happens when bodies "have
sex" confirms the perspicacity of Herrup's call to "find the bodies." At the

same time, however, we need to approach those bodies with expectations

qualified by our awareness of the instability of sexual signification. Our

tendency to unthinkingly presume the material contents of sex may be

offset by focusing a spotlight on material sex acts, but the resistant epis

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Making Sexual Knowledge 255

temological status of sex will not be vanquished by some truth hidden in
the archives. This is because any historical question about sex is not merely

historical; it is also hermeneutic and epistemologicala question of the

category of sex as such.

Thus, rather than take recourse in one disciplinary method over

another, I propose that we use the epistemological opacity of sex to inform

the methods by which we pursue knowledge about it. Were we to adopt a

more deliberate epistemological approach, we would recast the dynamics

among sexuality, signification, and historiography as a problem of knowl
edge relations. To explore what this might mean, I offer four interrelated

implications for methodology and pedagogy that such a reformulation

would entail.

First, because of the opacity of sexuality, the relation between the

material and the metaphoric, reality and representation, will remain both
inextricable and shifting, subject to temporary stasis only through the dis
cursive framing we impose upon it. Of necessity, those discursive frames

are both our own and those specific to each historical period; and they
impart a doubled partiality (incompleteness and bias) to our knowledge.
Second, the explanatory power of any discipline-based analysis will remain
limited. Neither the teasing out of hermeneutic complexity nor a compre

hensive combing of the archives can secure sexual signification. Greater

epistemological awareness cannot adjudicate between the metaphoric and
the material statuses of sex, much less between the protocols of our diverse

methods. Rather, foregrounding the epistemological problems posed by

sex could render such mediation less salient by changing the terms of our
questions. Third, by shifting our focus, an epistemological approach would

encourage more metacritical reflection on our collective projects. What

does it mean to possess sexual knowledge, both of the past and for the
present? What can knowledge about erotic practices tell usand, just as
importantly, not tell us, about history and ourselves? If sexuality's history

comprises a knowledge relation, is there any merit to the study of sexual

ignorance, including not only our scholarly ignorance of the past, but that
of prior historical actors (whether considered as fictional or dramatic char
acters, as subjects in poetry and visual art, or as members of society)? And
what kinds of knowledge relations are implied by our own desire to know

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256 EMWJ2010, vol 5 Valerie Traub

about sex, especially when such desires have been, at least since Foucault,
the subject of trenchant critique?

This final question takes us beyond the realm of methodology and

into the terrain of pedagogy. It is one of the ironies of sexuality studies that

only in the wake of Foucault's genealogy of modern discourses of sexual

ity (which mapped the relations between knowledge, power, and pleasure)
did the history of sexuality gain an institutional foothold in the academy.18

Insofar as the will to knowledge is aligned with the will to power, and the
requirements of our teaching and scholarship necessarily involve putting
sex into discourse, our own desires for knowledge about sexuality, and our
role in communicating that knowledge, risk captivation within the modern

disciplining of sex. I suspect that the tension between Foucault's critique

and our location within the academy may haunt the pedagogical aspira
tions of those scholars who teach sexuality's history, contributing to the
diffidence and detachment diagnosed by Herrup. Yet, we avoid confronting
the complex pedagogical function of our scholarship and teaching at some
cost. On the one hand, we cede too much ground to our conservative critics,

who seek to silence speech about sex; on the other hand, we fail to respond
affirmatively to our students' desires for knowledge that might affect their

erotic lives. Advancing a pedagogical imperative in light of this opacity

would involve critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge produc
tion and transmissionthat is, on our own implication within a scientia
sexualis. It would entail owning up to the desire for sexual knowledge (our

own and our students'), and how such desire, especially when channeled
through the past, speaks to current conditions of erotic diversity. Finally, it

would encourage us to assert the analytical value of sexual ignorance.

In staking a claim for the value of ignorance, I echo but also extend

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's deconstruction of the relations between igno

rance and knowledge in Epistemology of the Closet. Whereas Sedgwick's
analytic of "the closet" approached the productivity of "ignorance effects"
primarily through the politically noxious work they are conscripted to do

("harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforce

ments"),19 I want to direct attention toward the potentially positive effects

that may be fostered by sexual ignorance. One such effect could be the
reconceptualization of sexual historiography as a capacious and aspiration

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Making Sexual Knowledge 257

al form of "sex education." The sex education I have in mind would affirm
the difficulty and obscurity of sex as a rich epistemological resourceas
a heuristic with which to think as well as act. The obstacles we face in
making sexual history can be used to illuminate the difficulty of knowing
sexuality; and both impediments might be adopted as a guiding principle
of historiography and pedagogy. Sex may be good to think with, not because
it permits us access, but because it doesn't.

Such an intellectual disposition would recognize in what we don't

know, as well as what we can't know, not only the partiality of our methods
and a spur to future inquiry, but an intractability that has been constitutive

of the history of sex, and which continues to inform our relations to that
history. It is not just that the truth of sex is not fully attainable or repre
sentable in words, as the contingencies of sexual signification manifest. It
is also the case that the project of knowing sex, thinking sex, and making
sexual knowledge is situated within the space of a contradictionbetween,
on the one hand, respect for the embodied specificity of material sex acts,
and, on the other hand, recognition of the impossibility of our ever fully

knowing what such acts might mean. It is the task of those of us in his
torical sexuality studies to work this contradiction, to render it productive.

Once translated into historiographie, literary critical, and pedagogical

practice, this intellectual disposition has the potential to shift our scholarly

horizon. In recasting the issues as those of epistemology and pedagogy

(rather than identity), of knowledge and ignorance (rather than inclusion),
of how we know as much as what we know, we might be in a position to
develop a scholarly ethics worthy of the history of sexuality.20

Notes
1. By historical sexuality studies, I refer primarily to those scholars working
within, and at the intersection of, literary studies, the history of sexuality, and LGBT/
queer studies.
2. For an introduction to these debates, see Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise

Fradenberg and Carla Freccero (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Queering

the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
3. For a recent summary of the relationship between history and literary criti

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258 EMWJ 2010, vol 5 Valerie Traub

cism, see Dagmar Herzog, "Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures,"
American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (Dec. 2009): 1-22. Representation, of course, also
encompasses visual texts, but debates about methodology for representing sex within art
history have not been particularly influential across disciplines.

4. Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke

University Press, 2006), esp. 31.

5. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, "Queering History," PMLA 120,

no. 5 (Oct. 2005): 1608-17; esp. 1609; Jonathan Goldberg,"Margaret Cavendish, Scribe,"
GLQ;: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 433-52; Madhavi Menon,
"Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
11, no. 4 (2005): 491-519; and Martin G. Eisner and Marc D. Schachter,"Libido Sciendi:
Apuleius, Boccaccio, and the Study of the History of Sexuality," PMLA 124, no. 3 (May

2009): 817-37.
6. See Valerie Traub, "The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography," in
A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, eds. George
Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 124-45.
7. Epistemology, of course, has been a central concern of feminist theorists from

Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler, but they have focused mainly on issues of ontology
and intelligibility, rather than the corporeal reality of sexual behaviors in the past.

8. See Carolyn Dinshaw and Karma Lochrie's "Letter to the Editor," which
insists that "The issues are more complex than simple turf battles," and Madhavi Menons
"Reply," "What they deny is a turf war is exactly that by any other name," in "Forum:

Queering History," PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 837-39.

9. For early articulations of this problem, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries:
Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and

Queering the Renaissance, ed. Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

10. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's

Press, 1982); Laurie Shannon, "Queerly Philological Reading," for "Lesbianism in the
Renaissance" seminar, Shakespeare Association of America, Minneapolis, 2001, and
Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 2002).

11. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 163, emphasis added.

12. Peter Coviello, "World Enough: Sex and Time in Recent Queer Studies,"
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2 C 3 (2007): 387-401, esp. 392.

13. See, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), whose
method of "touching" across disparate temporalities seeks to connect those "left out of
sexual categories back then and ... those left out of current sexual categories now," esp. 1;
Anna Clark, "Twilight Moments 'Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, nos. 1 & 2 (2005):

139-60, and Desire: A History of European Sexuality (London: Routledge, 2008), who
focuses on the expression of erotic desire rather than the acquisition of sexual identity;

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Making Sexual Knowledge 259

and Laura Doan, "Topsy-Turveydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism, and the Great War,"

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay History 12, no. 4 (2006): 517-42, who urges recon
sideration of the relevance of "sexual identity" as an analytical category.

14. Goldberg and Menon, "Queering History," 1611; Eisner and Schachter,
"Libido Sciendi," 823.
15. Anna Clark, Response to panel on"Identity History" at Berkshire Conference

on the History of Women, June 2008.

16. Cynthia Herrup, "Finding the Bodies," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 5, no. 3 (1999): 255-65. See also A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd
Earl of Castlehaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
17. Herrup, "Finding the Bodies," 257.

18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1976). The influence of Foucault is axiomat
ic in historical sexuality studies. For trenchant analysis of the use and misuse of Foucault,

see David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
19. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990), esp. 5.

20. For more on this project, in addition to "The Present Future of Lesbian

Historiography," see my "Friendships Loss: Alan Brays Making of History," GLQ: A

Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 339-65; and "The Joys of Martha
Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge," in
The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture, ed., Leonard
Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean Keilen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
170-98.

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