Sodometries

Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities

Jonathan Goldberg

Publication Year: 2010

This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary-works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others-it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed 'homosexual sodomy' and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq.The book takes as axiomatic Foucault's description of sodomy as 'that utterly confused category.' Without collapsing questions of historical difference, it works to articulate relations between the early modern period and our own, between a time before the homo/heterosexual divide and the modern regimes that assume it. In this book, sodometries (a Renaissance word for 'sodomy' chosen for its nonce-word suggestiveness) are sites of complications around definitions of sex and gender. Because 'sodomy' is not a term capable of singular definition, representations of sodomy are never direct. Sodomy exists only relationally.Three social domains for textual production are explored in this book: the sixteenth-century English court as the location of high literariness; the theater, especially as a site for controversy around cross-dressing; the New World as the place where the slaughter of native populations (and, in New England, of Englishmen as well) was carried out in the name of ridding the hemisphere of sodomites. These lethal impulses are read as foundational for a U.S. imaginary still operative in many powerful quarters.The analyses of literary texts engage the most advanced work in early modern literary criticism (that done by feminist and New Historicist critics) and proposes a queer perspective that necessarily complicates and enriches such inquiries. Besides offering detailed readings of literary texts not often read in terms of the history of sexuality (Shakespeare's history plays, for example), the book also examines narratives of the conquest and colonization of the Americas.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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Title

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Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-ix

A version of the first part of Chapter 3 of Sodometries appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 107-26 as "Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters" and was reprinted in . . .

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Preface

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pp. xv-xvi

Sodometrie is a synonym for sodomy current in English from around 1540 to around 1650, the Oxford Dictionary notes. The word has been chosen to title this book not only because of its . . .

Chapter I. Introduction: "That Utterly Confused Category"

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pp. 1-26

In November 1990, just a few months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in the midst of U.S. preparations for war, an . . .

Part One "Wee/Men" Gender and Sexuality in the formations of Elizabethan High Literariness

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p. 27-27

Chapter 2. The Making of Courtly Makers

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pp. 29-61

UNDER THE AEGIS of the New Historicism, thanks especially to the work of Louis Montrose,l George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie has become a master key

Chapter 3. Spenser's Familiar Letters

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pp. 63-101

COLIN TO HOBBINOL ~ The Januarye eclogue of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender is filled with Colin Clout's insistent complaint about the unresponsiveness . . .

Part Two. "Play the Sodomits, or Worse": the Elizabethan Theater

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p. 103-103

Chapter 4. The Transvestite Stage: More on the Case of Christopher Marlowe

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pp. 105-143

FIFTY LINES INTO Marlowe's Edward IL Gaveston describes entertainments he thinks proper to his king. The work of "wanton poets, pleasant wits" . . .

Chapter 5. Desiring Hal

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pp. 145-175

ALTHOUGH THE RESPONSE to him has not been unanimous, most critics in this century have found it all but impossible to resist the attractions of the . . .

Part Three

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p. 177-177

Chapter 6. Discovering America

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pp. 179-222

To THOSE WHO KNOW Jonathan Katz's groundbreaking Gay American History or Walter Williams's The Spirit and the Flesh, the topic of this chapter will not be . . .

Chapter 7. Bradford's "Ancient Members' and "A Case of Buggery . . . Amongst Them"

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pp. 223-246

LANDA'S ACCOUNT OF the Yucatan, his ability to represent the Mayans textually, depends, I have argued, on violent acts of suppression-not only the Inquisition that . . .

Chapter 8. Tailpiece: From William Bradford to William Buckley

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pp. 247-249

IN THE SUMMER OF 1990, the National Review printed a letter from Marvin Liebman, longtime participant in the conservative movement, to his equally longtime . . .

Notes

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pp. 253-288

Index

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pp. 289-295

E-ISBN-13: 9780823249022
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823232215
Print-ISBN-10: 0823232212

Page Count: 320
Publication Year: 2010