5L[o]cating the sexual subject

As an object of academic inquiry, sexual behaviour in early modern England has been approached, by and large, from two converging directions: via deconstruction and via new historicism. Each of these methodologies implies a different model for articulating sexual behaviour, for dividing it into parts and turning it into words. Appropriating the principles of Sausurrean linguistics, deconstruction asks us to read sexual behaviour in terms of binaries. Acknowledging differences in the construction of sexuality from culture to culture, new historicism asks us to read sexual behaviour as a continuum. In practice if not in theory, the two approaches are complementary: if all sexual identities are made by marking binary differences, then particular identities can be plotted along a line of possible variations. I propose to consider these two models one by one, to assess their strengths and weaknesses and to offer a third model in their place.1’ But first we should take a sceptical look at ‘sex’ and ‘sexual’ as objects of enquiry. ‘Sex’ was not, after all, a conceptual category for any of the constituent cultures of early modern England, even for the religious and academic institutions that supplied the dominant culture with its justifying ideology. The OED corroborates Foucault’s claim that the notion of ‘sex’ as something more than genital coding dates only from the end of the eighteenth century (Foucault 1979:115-31). For us, ‘sex’ is an idea, an abstraction. What I wish to address here is something more immediate, more physical than that. In the words of Sonnet 129, the subject at hand is ‘lust in action’—something that is seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted before it is remembered, read, studied, analysed and talked about.