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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 543-545



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Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon. By Graham L. Hammill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. x + 219 pp.

On its most fundamental level, Sexuality and Form attempts to understand what queer analysis can do with writers and artists such as Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon, whose names have been (wrongly and anachronistically) associated with modernist constructions of homosexuality. Graham L. Hammill rightly rejects universalizing assumptions about homosexuality in favor of an analysis that renders early modern same-sex arrangements in their historical specificity. But what makes his argument far more interesting is his acknowledgment that the concept of homosexuality might indeed be employed in understanding those specifics:

The historically wrenching misnomer "homosexuality" got at something significant in each of these figures, something that has a great deal to do with the sexed body and its relation to history and to interpretation, if not a great deal with object choice per se. . . . each of these thinkers situates his work at a certain threshold of civility that frustrates and extends social norms and the protocols of reading and spectatorship, the historical modes of evaluation that support them. . . . What each develops is sexed thinking as poiesis of the body that extends and modifies social thought. (5)

What I think Hammill means here (his characteristically abstract prose makes it difficult to determine his meaning precisely) is that while Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon are not homosexual, and do not represent homosexuality per se, same-sex eroticism in their works signals the limits of the social representation of sexuality in the Renaissance. It is, in fact, a sign not of what is known about "sexuality," or what is known to be "sexuality" in the early modern period, but of what is not known, what cannot be known, even, perhaps, what is not there. Hammill follows the brilliant insights of Valerie Traub and Jonathan Goldberg that homosexuality is "(in)significant" in the early modern period; that is, it both does and does not signify, or it signifies as a "(no) place." 1 He wishes not simply to repeat their deconstructive readings, however, but to think about sex as a set of corporeal practices linked to social and political discourses even if it is not fully appropriated by them.

Hammill is properly concerned with what it means to "queer" history, what a "queer history" could look like, and what its relationship to the present [End Page 543] (queer or not) may be. In raising these questions, he opposes Foucault's reading that makes an epochal distinction between a modern history of sexuality and a premodern era of presexuality. He argues, instead, that formal qualities in the representation of the body in the works of Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon allow them to be read differently in the future; that is, they may signify sexualities not available in their own times. In this regard, Hammill makes a provocative critique of a queer theory that clings to the ego as the site of sexual transgression. For him, "sexual" transgression depends not so much on individual egos in rebellion as on bodies poised to expose what is unknown or unspoken within the social. This is smart and heady stuff. Hammill's striking new formulations of important historiographical problems lead him to readings of Caravaggio's paintings, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Bacon's new scientific model that sometimes shimmer with insight.

For instance, Hammill shows how the formal qualities of Caravaggio's religious paintings represent an unseen voice calling for conversion as palpable, almost material. Furthermore, he argues that this voice evokes an eroticism that can hardly be constituted as such. So, in The Conversion of Saint Paul the sexually suggestive nature of Saul/Paul's pose renders the absent voice of the Nazarene as the voice of a lover. The painting thus runs counter to the dominant story of Christian transformation as a movement from the flesh to the spirit, for it exposes a particular kind of sexed body in Christian history as something that would be unknown by that...

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