Before Intimacy: Modernity and Emotion in the Early Modern Discourse of Sexuality

Abstract

Much research into early modern sexuality has been driven by the Foucauldian paradigm that sexuality is not constituted as a personal identity before the nineteenth century. Critics have pointed out how, absent a discourse that organizes facts of sexuality into personal identities, sexuality could inhabit a whole range of social relationships not specifically designated as sexual. Such work has often focused on the implications of this situation for male-male relationships, and here Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of homosocial desire has proved an invaluable framework. 1 Sedgwick points to the way prestigious relationships between men are mediated by women, but part of the point Sedgwick makes is that there is a continuum between homosocial and homosexual bonds. The concept of homosocial desire captures how sexuality can inhabit the very heart of relationships between men that are not specifically designated as sexual. And as Alan Bray has shown in his analysis of sexuality between men in the early modern period, when homosocial relationships are attacked as instances of sodomy the charge typically arises not from the sheer fact of sexual contact between men but from a failure to respect the conventions of a rank-bound society. 2 As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in the early modern period "sexuality . . . does not stand apart as a separate domain," and therefore can, by turns, flourish at the very core of the most valorized social relations and, then again, radically unsettle the smooth operations of social business as usual. 3

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