Introduction: Queer Early Modernity Beyond the Antinormative

In our recent special issue on “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire” (JEMCS 16.2), editors Ari Friedlander, Will Stockton, and Melissa Sanchez reflected on how recent debates about temporality and historicism in early modern sexuality studies can lend the field vitality and continued methodological self-reflexivity (1–20).¹ Indeed, we did not plan this issue of JEMCS to be devoted to any specific subject matter, but found that we had accepted a cluster of essays that all offered queer approaches to early modern material, prompting us to place them into more explicit conversation with each other. As the accidental nature of this special issue testifies, interest in early modern sexuality continues to inspire work across a growing variety of archives, methodologies, and fields.

“Desiring History and Historicizing Desire” asked where the field might go next in light of these debates about the relative academic status of “theory” and “history,” and how these name not just methods, but academic-institutional affiliations, gendered forms of prestige, and genres of scholarly writing. In her formal observations about the rhetoric of what she (in response to Madhavi Menon) calls “unhistoricism,” Valerie Traub argues that what is often fought out as a methodological difference is also very much about genre and prestige (Thinking Sex 78–81). The stakes of this debate, for many, have to do with the uneven transferability of work marked as “historical” and work marked as “theoretical”; as Melissa Sanchez asks, “how did the study of earlier literature become understood primarily as ‘literary criticism’ and that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature become classified as ‘theory’?” (128). If “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire” asked where the field of early modern sexuality studies might go next in light of these unanswered questions, then the articles in this issue offer a snapshot of current work on queer early modernity.

Thus, I want to introduce the articles that follow as contributions to contemporary problems in queer studies that are commonly disseminated under the name of “theory,” and to make a case for how these articles think through “theoretical” problems via early modern archives. I want to make this case because I think Traub and Sanchez are right about how choice of archive works as an implicit generic marker for scholarly readers, and how reference to non-contemporary primary source material can exclude work from being read as part of contemporary theoretical and methodological conversations, even when it very much contributes to these conversations. As Friedlander argues, “any contemporary discussion of politics—from gay marriage to trans* rights—and academia—from queer tactility to the organization of the modern university—would benefit from an early modern perspective” (12).

In particular, the essays gathered in this issue reveal what early modern archives can contribute to an important conversation in queer studies today: the reevaluation of antinormativity as the presumed foundational commitment of queer study and politics. In their introduction to a recent special issue of differences, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson ask: “What might queer theory do if its allegiance to antinormativity was rendered less secure?” (1). Antinormativity, they argue, has long formed a largely unquestioned force of rhetorical and political coherence for a field grounded in anti-identitarian critique and never completely or uncomplicatedly tethered to gay or lesbian identities or political movements. Such commitment to the antinormative, they argue, has proven amenable to scholars seeking political and rhetorical strategies for doing queer scholarship in an era of (uneven) queer assimilation, normativity, and incorporation into citizenship:

Under this formulation, U.S. national queer politics might be standing in patriotic assent to the military or heading to the altar to tie the knot with the state, but queer studies can still be critically queer by rallying against liberal political norms; prioritizing nonnormative sexual practices, identities, and desires; and exposing the exclusions and compromises of the field’s institutionalized logics, including its seeming reliance on traditional disciplinary practices and familiar race and gender hierarchies.

(7)

Indeed, as they argue here, the commitment to queer as capaciously “antinormative” has contributed vitally to the field (particularly queer of color critique, disability studies, and trans...