ABSTRACT
The variety of topics and the range of rhetorical strategies included in this sourcebook reflect the uncertainty and instability of fixed categories of sex, gender and sexuality during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The period was marked by the unresolved tensions of ancient and ‘modern’ practices. It is tempting to seek out forerunners of late twentieth-century thinking, but the period was also the preserve of classical learning; the authority of influential medieval and Renaissance texts and commentaries was just as important as ‘direct’ empirical observation. Attitudes to sexuality were often brutal by our standards, but they were also multiple, contradictory and fanciful. The diversity of the rich textual heritage from this period mirrors our own condition insofar as we are faced with a variety of critical terminologies, models, strategies and prejudices that obstruct or enhance the possibility of knowing ‘sexuality’. Faced with such a heterogeneity of materials there is a serious danger that the object of study itself fragments into random groupings of particularities. Yet diversification of sexualities has been matched by expanded policing, observation and control; secret acts are viewed in the open forum of the confession, the law court, or the psychiatric session. Nonetheless, sexualities-in all their historical constructedness-shift beyond our grasp, refusing to yield up a stable cognitive core. Jeffrey Weeks, for instance, has warned that
There is no essence of homosexuality whose historical unfolding can be illuminated. There are only changing patterns in the organization of desire whose specific configurations can be decoded. This, of course, propels us into a whirlwind of deconstruction-for if gay identity is of recent provenance, what of heterosexual identity. (1985:6)
In recent years there has, nonetheless, been an explosion of ideas concerning sexuality. The drive to classify constructions of sexuality has itself become a theoretically problematic enterprise. Recently, ‘queer’, for instance, has been used to name a specific defiance of settled orthodoxies of sexual identity. Accordingly, the starting point for ‘queer theory’ is, in Moe Meyer’s words ‘an ontological challenge to dominant labeling philosophies’ (1994:1). This strategy takes up Weeks’s ‘whirlwind of deconstruction’ by contesting the binary opposition between (among other things) homosexuality and heterosexuality. These terms are not simply ‘mirror’ images; nor do they precisely and exclusively delineate a site of struggle. Moreover, it is not sufficient to work from a model of empowered and disempowered, particularly when we begin to discern intimations of the latter producing the
former. In a general cultural framework Stallybrass and White have noted that what was designated as ‘low’—as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating results only in a problematic and paradoxical exclusion: ‘Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust. But disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as ‘Other’, return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination’ (1986:191).
