What do we know about early modern sex? And how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? InThinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing ...so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.
Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable,Thinking Sex with the Early Modernsleverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.
The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies TRAUB, VALERIE
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
01/2013, Letnik:
128, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the name of "homohistory," "queer temporality," and "unhistoricism," some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These ...early modernists announce their critique of the "straight temporality" allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars' assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.
Generated from institutional locations as diverse as classics, history, medical sociology, and area and postcolonial studies, each response seizes on points of connection that provide a platform for ...affirming particular values and concerns: of history and interdisciplinarity, of complexity and contradiction, of the problematic travel in concepts. ...intrigued by epistemological processes, Lisa Jean Moore emphasizes the way Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns reveals the procedures by which analytical objects are constituted, thereby allowing us to interrogate "'how categories . . . came to be.'" Portraying our methods as "mutually reinforcing" and bringing my strategies into conversation with her favored scholarly tactics of "getting lost" and "situational analysis," she reformulates points of contact between our projects: "it is the elusive, contested, and controversial problematics around defining . . . objects that is the actual 'data"' Moore's invocation of the notion of "boundary objects" further collocates our mutual interest in "the centrifugal forces of opacity, plurality, and polyphony,' and the "centripetal drives of capturing the range of variation" and complexity.
Ambivalence as a Feminist Project Coccia, Emily; Harris, Lisa H; McClelland, Sara ...
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
06/2024, Letnik:
49, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay argues that the concept of ambivalence could be leveraged as a feminist project with specific epistemological value for scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Curating its ...recent appearance across several areas of study, we suggest the potential of ambivalence as a feminist analytic. We argue that this analytic may help feminist scholars understand the complexity of texts, people, and social circumstances—both past and present—because it offers a conceptual category that holds space for conflicting emotions, contending historical phenomena, and overlapping affective, ethical, and political commitments. We see unique value for feminist scholarship when ambivalence is foregrounded; it asks us to consider important tensions and binaries between subjection and liberation, certainty and uncertainty, and skepticism and conviction. Reconceptualizing ambivalence as a capacity and structural condition (rather than an individual deficiency or failing), we render this concept legible for feminists across various fields and disciplines. We propose three principles that could guide its uptake in scholarship: troubling the subjection/liberation binary, elevating the value of uncertainty, and encouraging constructive ambivalence in the researcher themself. While mindful of the risks and limits of ambivalence, we encourage others to adopt ambivalence as an analytic in their own work, describing the specific gains to be had in affectively and epistemologically sitting with the contradictions and discomforts it reveals.
Many scholars have argued that King Lear draws inspiration from the early modern sciences of anatomy and cartography, even as it critiques the modes of knowledge (violent and penetrative or rational ...and imperial) they represent. Taking its cue from the conflation of anatomical and cartographic tropes in Shakespeare’s play as well as in scholars’ accounts of it, this article tracks the material and ideological interaction of anatomical illustrations of the human body and representations of human figures on maps; it then reinterprets the play in light of that confluence. Rather than offering judgment on the efficacy or pretensions of science, the use of anatomy and cartography in King Lear participates in an emerging epistemology of human embodiment: a universalizing logic of the grid by which humans would be identified and differentiated, classified and compared.
Read in relation to the play’s invocation of nature, Lear ’s creation of an abstract, representative human reveals a genealogy of the modern concepts of norms and the normal. Scholars have contended that the logic of normality first emerged in the Enlightenment and gained traction over the nineteenth century. From the prospect provided by Lear , we access a prehistory to the discourse of normality—one that shows the concepts of nature and norms interacting, not through shared prescriptions of bodily conduct, but through their common commitment to universalizing styles of reasoning. In addition to shedding light on the play and critics’ treatments of it, this genealogy of normality enables a reassessment of aesthetic appraisals of Shakespeare’s “greatest tragedy” as well as the critical controversy that long attended the play’s performance history. King Lear bequeaths to us the terms of abstract universal humanity—a discourse of normality infused with and bolstered by appeals to our common nature—by which we still judge the play, and each other.
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