Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns by Valerie Traub (review)

Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is a landmark in the field of queer studies. It is a bold and personal book that constitutes an ambitious attempt to address a series of cruxes, contradictions, and controversies in the intersections between queer theory, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Over the course of ten chapters Traub articulates a series of thoughtful, rigorous, and cohesive positions on a wide range of issues, from a reading of Shakespeare's sonnets to a meditation on lesbian historiography. In each case, Traub identifies the core of the issue, explores various possible responses, and takes a clear but nuanced stand.

At the heart of the book is the notion that sex can itself be a way of thinking. Traub argues insightfully that the significance or truth of sex is often unknowable: sex is a "flexible and capacious category of analysis," not "a delimited or fixed object of study"; it is "opaque, often inscrutable, and resistant to understanding" (3). Rather than trying to break down this resistance, Traub celebrates it, contending that the opacity of sex allows scholars to explore "how we know as much as what we know" (34). Because sex is impossible to know, it becomes something to think with; it becomes a way of learning rather than a puzzle to solve. A leading scholar of early modern English sexuality, Traub naturally draws on her deep knowledge of early modern literature and culture in her attempt to "think sex." But her book is equally engaged with contemporary issues around sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual identity. Throughout, she uses insights and questions from the past to understand and interrogate the present.

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is divided into three sections. Part 1, "Making the History of Sexuality," deals with the problematics of the history of sexuality, beginning with an analysis of Alan Bray's influential work on early modern male friendship, then moving to recent debates about the relationship between historicism and queer studies, before concluding with a discussion of lesbian historiography.¹ Traub is critical of the notion that history as a discipline is fundamentally opposed to queer studies because it imposes a positivist teleology that sees everything in the past as leading to fixed and normative sexual identities in the present. Traub argues that reducing history to a positivist analysis of linear time ignores the work of history as it is actually practiced; historians deal with both synchronies and diachronies, and though their work is often founded in material realities, it also embraces ambiguities, conflicting narratives, and the limitations of written records. Moreover, Traub contends that efforts to separate the theoretical concept of "queerness" from the lived experience of people whose sexuality transgresses social norms is specious and unproductive. If "queer" is reduced to an abstract term denoting illogic and contrariety, it runs the risk of emptying itself of meaning and of denying the real experiences of those who have suffered the consequences of living a queer life.

Part 2, "Scenes of Instruction, or Early Modern Sex Acts," explores "what it means to assert historical knowledge" (32) by identifying significant gaps in our understanding of early modern sexuality. Through a reading of Richard Brome's 1638 play The Antipodes, Traub questions the certainty many modern scholars bring to their readings of early modern language about sex. In its depiction of a sexually dysfunctional marriage, The Antipodes suggests that sex between husband and wife—the only sexual relation openly valorized in early modern culture—is not so much natural as constructed. In Brome's play, sex is not something everyone knows but something everyone tries to learn. And one's ability to learn is limited and shaped by one's gender and class, as well as by other factors. Traub goes on to explore various interdisciplinary strategies for addressing the impasse presented by the unknowability of early modern sex and then proceeds to investigate early modern...