Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton

Abstract

James M. Bromley and Will Stockton, eds. Sex Before Sex: Figuring Act in Early Modern England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 329 pages. $27.50.The title of Sex Before Sex is deliberately disorienting. That modern sexual subjectivity did not exist in early modernity is by now familiar to us, providing impetus for recent overview of premodern sexual historiography entitled Sex Before Sexuality. But until now, critics have been likely to assume that while early modern cultural formations of sexuality were different than our own, early modern sexual acts were much like ours. Aren't sexual acts, if not their meanings, instinctive, natural, and timeless? The essays gathered here, authored by some of most creative scholars currently working in early modern sexuality studies, suggest that this is decidedly not case. Taken as a whole, collection argues for a reorientation of field away from axes of desires and identities and towards those of acts and their figurations, emphasizing importance of viewing acts as interpretive cruxes that must be parsed before one can construct arguments about sexual desires and identities. In their provocative introduction, James M. Bromley and Will Stockton rightly point out that despite wealth of scholarship on early modern sexuality produced since Jonathan Goldberg's landmark collection, Queering Renaissance (1994), the act itself actually remains an undertheorized and underhistoricized concept (10). The result of this methodological focus on hermeneutic complexity of sexual signification (6) is an admirably diverse series of essays that leaves reader with a renewed appreciation for how little we know about before sex, and how rich opportunities are for future research.In addition to introduction and an afterword, volume contains ten essays organized into five pairs. The first two essays, by Christine Varnado and Kathryn Schwarz, analyze the construction of sexual (15). The collection begins with an eye-opening critical intervention, in which Varnado persuasively argues that early modern studies has yet to implement full interpretive power of a queer analytic for understanding early modern sexual figuration. Examining on- and off-stage figurations of in Romeo and Juliet (1594-95), The Roaring Girl (1611), and The Changeling (1622), Varnado's essay demonstrates that our largely heteronormative critical practice has tended to overlook potential presence of queer in early modern drama. As a corrective to this bias, essay calls for an active queer reading practice that is not limited to those acts that are explicitly represented or discussed on stage. Schwarz's essay uses a range of texts, including Thomas Heywood's Gynaikeion (1624), to take a new look at feminist insight that patriarchal reliance on female sexualized bodies is circular, since sexually secure body that subtends social order depends upon social processes of sexual regulation. Schwarz complicates this formulation by considering resistance that material body-including dead body-registers to its inscription into socio-sexual discourse. The violent cultural response this resistance provokes not only fails to secure social order, but also fractures [social and sexual] knowledge into imaginative possibilities and obscures social meanings of sex (73). Both of these essays, then, respond to challenge of how early modern before figured-not by answering question, but by complicating what it means to ask it.The next pair of essays, by Melissa J. Jones and Nicholas F. Radel, examines relationship between gender and fantasy. Jones's essay turns to modern pornography that focuses on humiliation of men with flaccid phalluses to reinterpret male spectacular impotence in Thomas Nashe's Choise of Valentines (1592-93) and John Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598). …