Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England
Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England James Bromley and Will Stockton, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 Since the publication of Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) the field of early modern literary and cultural studies has been having a robust conversation about the history of sexuality. Yet as Valerie Traub points out in her "Afterword" to James Bromley and Will Stockton's Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) "the content of sex has been strangely presumable, apparently interpretable through ready to hand transhistorical rubrics" (3, emphasis mine) Bromley and Stockton's volume subjects this supposed "content" to close scrutiny, arguing that despite the presumptive sine qua non of (penile vaginal) intercourse, there is no single, transhistorical definition of sex, and no clear taxonomy or hierarchy of sexual acts. "Sodomy," scholars fluent in the conversation know, "is an utterly confused category" Sex Before Sex suggests that this may be the case for the whole field of sex itself) Bromley and Stockton argue that "the epistemological recalcitrance of sex," and the complexities of its representation make it a singularly exciting, if challenging, area of inquiry: one that asks us to question what we think we know not only about the past, but about the present as well. Fully aware that the authors in the volume are working with both modern and early modern epistemologies of sexuality or more accurately, that both are working fictions of our own creation the volume endeavors to theorize and historicize sex through a series of essays based not (only) on particular acts, but on questions about how sexual acts might signify. While the editors take account of legal definitions and injunctions (for example, Edward Coke's precedent setting legal claim that the "emission of semen without penetration maketh no Rape" [5] they suggest that the licit is only one way of reading (for) sex; acts that are "unremarkable within [legal] discourses' criteria" may be harder to see, but they are just as worthy of our attention. Bromley and Stockton are also refreshingly interested not only in new archives and methodologies, but also in refusing to police "the boundary between 'reading' and 'reading into'" (6) (They cite Stanley Wells's prudish and proprietary indictment of the "dirty minds" of certain interpreters, but I always think of Alan Sinfield's amazing line in "How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist" (1996) when such considerations come up: "If gay men say 'OK, this is how [Antonio] speaks to us' that, surely, is our business." If sex is not really 'there' apart from specific discursive "deployments of sexuality," the editors ask, then are not literary texts and, indeed, our readings of those texts particularly rich sources of knowledge? If we suspend the idea that there is 'knowledge' to be had, then how does attention to acts that have "no immediate connection to the most prevalent, politicized, identitarian discourses of sexuality in the present" help us to "expose the limits of, and challenge the dominance of current discourses of sexuality" (8, 9) If the earlier project of "queering" the Renaissance meant to "expose the ways that heterosexuality and heteronormativity shape critical perspectives on the Renaissance past as well as to recover expression of homoerotic desire and evidence of homoerotic relationships before the advent of homosexual identity," then is it not time to look at the sexual past not in terms of difference, development, or supersession, but rather in all its hitherto unremarked upon variety? Refusing an approach that defaults "sex to penile vaginal intercourse" and relegates "all other acts to the category of the queer" (10) the erotic imagination that Sex Before Sex brings to the fore is one that is bracingly plural not only in its variety, but also in its relationship to gender, intimacy, intersubjectivity, and, refreshingly, the presumptively dyadic nature of sexual behavior.