Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality through Race

Abstract

W hen English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in ELR appeared in 1992 with Joseph Pequigney’s essay on Shakespeare’s two Antonios, followed bymy own essay on non-Shakespearean satiric comedy in 1995. In Sodomy and Interpretation (1991), a book that contributed to the first wave of lesbian/gay earlymodern scholarship, Gregory Bredbeck remarks on the belatedness of sexuality studies by quipping that the analytic triangle of race, class, and gender was never a pink triangle. Yet Bredbeck’s confidence in the critical predominance of race is odd, since, with few exceptions, race was also marginalized in early modern scholarship of that era. Certainly in the studies of sexuality published by Pequigney, Bredbeck, Bruce Smith, Jonathan Goldberg, and Valerie Traub in 1991–1992,