Sex Lives: Intimate Infrastructures in Early Modernity

By Joseph Gamble

In Sex Lives, Joseph Gamble draws from literature, art, and personal testimonies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe to uncover how early moderns learned to have sex. In the early modern period, Gamble contends, everyone from pornographers to Shakespeare recognized that sex requires knowledge of both logistics (how to do it) and affect (how to feel about it). And knowledge, of course, takes practice.

Gamble turns to a wide range of early modern texts and images from England, France, and Italy, ranging from personal accounts to closet dramas to visual art in order to excavate and analyze a variety of sexual practices in early modernity. Using an intersectional, phenomenological approach to bring historical light to the quotidian sexual experiences of early modern subjects, the book develops the critical concept of the “sex life”—a colloquialism that opens up methodological avenues for understanding daily lived experience in granular detail, both in the distant past and today. Through this lens, Gamble explores how sex organized and permeated everyday life and experiences of gender and race in early modernity. He shows how affects around sex structure the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, revealing the role of sexual feeling and sexual racism in early modern English drama.

Sex Lives reshapes how we understand Renaissance literature, the history of sexuality, and the meaning of sex in both early modern Europe and our own moment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824612

Joseph Gamble

Joseph Gamble is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toledo.

Book preview

Sex Lives

Sex Lives

Intimate Infrastructures

in Early Modernity

Joseph Gamble

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 Joseph Gamble

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2460-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2461-2

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is

available from the Library of Congress

For Adam,

better the nest

CONTENTS

Preface

Note on Transcription

Introduction. The Will to Know-How

PART I. KNOW-HOW

Chapter 1. Practicing

Chapter 2. Lubricating

INTERLUDE

Chapter 3. Anticipating

PART II. FEEL-HOW

Chapter 4. Theorizing

Chapter 5. Converting

Epilogue. Living

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

There’s a big secret about sex: most people don’t know how they learned to have it. Unlike Leo Bersani’s infamous sex secret—most people don’t like it—which might provoke a sigh of relief (oh, thank goodness, someone finally said it!) or an indignant rebuttal (speak for yourself, pal!), this secret is more likely to muster up a sense of befuddlement.¹ "Learn how to have sex? you may have puzzled. I didn’t have to learn. I just sort of . . . figured it out. This, at least, has been for the past several years one of the prevailing responses when I have told people that I was writing a book about how early moderns learned how to have sex. The book you are now reading is that book, a book that is in many important ways still about how early moderns learned how to have sex. But this frequent rejoinder to the project—a sort of incredulity not about its historical claims or literary analyses, which these skeptics hadn’t even encountered yet, but about its foundational question—has shifted the project itself, leading me to theorize about what seems to be a widespread assumption that sexual practice is somehow divorced from knowledge, or at least from anything that might look recognizably like learning. So much so, apparently, that one can unironically posit figuring it out" as an alternative to, rather than one of the most widespread forms of, learning. If sexual pedagogy is a secret, it’s one we’ve been keeping even from ourselves.

It makes some sense that asking about the origins of sexual knowledge in an individual’s life might raise some hackles. Sexual acts and gestures, after all, seem for many to be intimately tied to a deep-seated sense of their self—the sort of movements that feel utterly instinctual, what one does when one lets go and merely acts in the heat of the moment, as we say. I should note, though, that the resistance to my suggestion that all this might not, in fact, spring from the core of our primal beings was highly gendered. Not to paint with too broad a brush but, well, it mostly made cis men uncomfortable—particularly cis straight men, but some cis gay men, too. Many cis women, straight and queer, as well as trans and nonbinary people of all stripes often seemed not only to intuitively grasp the validity and importance of the question, but to hear in it an implicit recognition of one of the most intimate strands of their lives. Though some of them may not have put it in exactly those terms before—learned how to have sex—they nevertheless found in that premise something that they had known about themselves but might not yet have articulated. Perhaps, then, the responses really haven’t been all that far off from speak for yourself, pal! and oh, thank goodness, someone finally said it!

I begin with these early responses in order to foreground the theoretical stakes of this book that might otherwise seem—especially for readers not accustomed to reading or caring about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—somewhat submerged beneath historical inquiry and literary analysis. This is, yes, a book about the sex lives of the early moderns, but it is also a book about our sex lives—about your sex life—and about, more generally, how we build and maintain our intimate worlds.

I also begin with these responses in the hopes that this brief reminder that there is indeed a body and a life behind these words might provide the reader with a sort of tonal key signature with which to move through the chapters that follow. It seems to me that something about the texture and stakes of the project would be lost in an attempt to extract myself fully from these pages, to perform (and any choice we make on the page is a performance) a disinterested, objective historical sexology. What might be gained and lost here in my own brief emergence into the project seems to me to have absolutely everything to do with the distinction between and relation of theory and history. Throughout the book, I feel a deep responsibility to the historicity of my archive—a desire to say something as historically accurate and as true as possible about sexual life in early modernity—but the book as a whole is not beholden to this historicity. The distant past is simultaneously my primary object of analysis and also a sort of estranging device, a useful way to scramble my (and hopefully our) preconceived notions about sexuality, and to render what’s taken for granted about daily life into a set of questions.

This is, I think, what happened when some early auditors were caught up short by the idea that one might have to learn how to have sex. What they had taken for granted—I just sort of . . . figured it out—suddenly became less sure, less solid. I was asking them to turn what they took to be the facts of their lives into questions. Like many other sexual propositions, this one had the capacity to disturb and to delight in equal measure, depending on what the world had ever allowed my auditors to take for granted about their bodies and their lives in the first place. Perhaps most surprisingly, this capacity to disturb and to delight lost none of its polarizing force in what I might have expected to be the dampening insulation of its historical groundedness. I was asking how early moderns learned how to have sex, but my interlocutors heard me asking about how they had learned how to have sex. I was asking an historical question, but they heard a theoretical one. We were both right.

Many people who have encountered the ideas of this book along the way have wanted—and I have wanted, too—an explicit accounting of the book’s historicity, a demonstration of the imminence of the sex life to the particular period of my archive. Why the sex lives of the early moderns and not the medievals, or the Victorians, or, or, or? One partial answer to this question is that early modernity saw a marked increase in the production, both literary and material, of what could be considered pornography—a hotly contested generic classification to which I return frequently throughout this book—without yet seeing the calcification of what we might call proto-gay sexual identities (as, for instance, eighteenth-century England saw with molly houses).² Another partial answer: as the rest of this book will bear out, thinking about the sex life, to my mind, necessarily entails thinking about sexual racism. Though we are increasingly aware that the medieval period was marked by globalization and burgeoning racist ideologies, early modernity marked, at least in England, the beginning of a Black English population, a (somewhat) religiously plural and cosmopolitan London, and a rapidly expanding colonial enterprise. The early modern period thus presents a key historical site for thinking about the phenomenology of racial-sexual life.

Each of these partial answers seems true to me, but also insufficient, since each tries to cordon off what I’m looking at from what might have come before or after it, to close down the possibility of sexual and racial continuities with periods with which I’m not as intimately familiar, often by too patly making the latter period seem too modern and the earlier one seem not modern enough. I’m not particularly interested in this, in part because I want to hold open the potential for electric connections between somewhat arbitrarily (but nevertheless, in the material circumstances of the profession, very really) demarcated moments of history. I also want to resist this historical fence-building because it suggests that what I’m describing is most important for the way it manifests some other latent sociohistorical forces: that early modern sex lives were different from other historical sex lives because of something about the particular organization of social, political, and economic forces in early modernity. That this was so is so obviously true as to be deeply banal, but it is also precisely the sort of broader social sphere analysis that, you will see, I’m trying to hold at bay, at least for a little while, in order to see what might happen in the space of not-yet-quite thinking in this macro-level way.

I thus came to see my continual return to this question not as an indication that the project itself had failed to live up to the question, but that the question had failed to live up to the project. Insofar as it attends to the specificities of texts, images, and lives that entered into and moved through the world from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, Sex Lives is decidedly an early modern book. I make claims about early modern sexual, racial, and literary practice that will, I hope, be compelling to those whose primary professional interest is in this period. But insofar as the questions that I ask about what constitutes sexual life are portable across historical periods—insofar as, in asking about how early moderns learned how to have sex, you might reasonably and correctly hear me asking how you and I learned how to have sex—this is a work of theory, one that might indeed, had I been a different person with a different set of skills and literary-historical expertise, have taken up a different archive and perhaps come to somewhat similar—though, I want to stress, surely not identical—conclusions and propositions. This book takes early modernity as the site of my analysis because, in short, I am an early modernist.

Parts of this book may look more recognizably like theory than others. But even when I am offering an historical overview of the sexual landscape of early modernity or am deep in a reading of an early modern play or poem, I am always offering you a proposition: that the sex life might be a set of questions, processes, and practices that are not innate or instinctual, but acquired and worked through over time. That we might have to learn how to live our lives, and especially how to share them with other people. As I try to show throughout the book, this proposition has far-reaching consequences, both theoretical and methodological, for literary, social, and historical study. But it also has far-reaching consequences for how we simply inhabit the world. I have no pretensions that the literary and cultural analyses of this book will lead directly to an improvement in the sex lives of its readers (though I would be delighted to be wrong about this); but at its core, Sex Lives is animated precisely by the notion that such analyses might undergird a project of making life more livable. Wherever and whoever you are, when you turn away from these pages and move through the world again, what parts of your life (sexual or otherwise)—what habits, intuitions, desires—might you start to estrange, to turn into questions? In the pages that follow, I offer one set of possible questions about sexual life and some methods for theorizing and analyzing it, both now and in the past. My first and best hope for this book is that to these questions and methods you might add your own.

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

Throughout the text I have maintained the original spelling of early modern quotations, including i/j and u/v, though I have opted to modernize ff to F and vv to w, as well as to render long s as short s. Contractions have been expanded, as indicated by brackets (for print sources) or italics (for manuscripts).

INTRODUCTION

The Will to Know-How

The sex life names the quotidian practices through which we build, maintain, and selectively hold open intimate infrastructures. When we speak casually about our sex lives, we’re usually evaluating something about the frequency, and perhaps variety, of sexual interaction. Within the normative matrix of compulsory sexuality, one’s sex life is either good (lots of fulfilling sex, preferably varied either in style or partners) or bad (little to no fulfilling sex, or rote sex with the same partner).¹ The concept of the sex life, though, actually implies much more than an evaluative quantitative analysis; it also points to widespread intuitions about the importance of sex as an ongoing process that unfolds across time (a life) and the daily vicissitudes of practice, affect, and knowledge that such a life necessarily entails. It thus carries within it the capacity to disrupt that normative matrix, to scramble assumptions about what might make a life (sexual or otherwise) good or bad. Not everyone wants or has a sex life, to be sure, but for those who do, our sex lives are achievements, hard won from the bricolage of daily making-do. Little Atlases all, we hold up the infrastructures that hold up our shared worlds. This is one thing we mean when we say that we live.²

This book offers a theory of the sex life by way of analyses of early modern texts and images that index forms of learning how to have sex—how to make one’s body fit with another body; how to recognize, interpret, and even redirect one’s own desires and the desires of others; how to hold open a space for being changed by the surprise, the comfort, and the disturbance of intimate attachments that can offer possibilities for remaining bound to the world; and how to hold on to the world while navigating the negative affects, too—the disappointments, the denials, the racism that corrodes sexual life, both in early modernity and today. In offering a theory of the sex life, I expand on and critically shift recent work on the imbrication of sexual knowledge and sexual practices by Valerie Traub, Jeffrey Masten, and the contributors to a pivotal collection of essays, Sex Before Sex.³ In particular, this book builds on Will Fisher’s groundbreaking work on early modern sex acts, which has demonstrated that sex acts themselves have histories, communities, avenues of transmission, and historically contingent modes of socialization.⁴ But even as acts can form the ground of sexual recognition, they can also be hard and weird, affectively and epistemologically opaque. They require knowledge and practice; they can fail or flail, go unexpectedly (but sometimes delightfully) awry. Acts might be remembered, or imagined, or tested out, or disavowed. They bring up and bring out a whole host of feelings: titillation but also timidity, anticipation but also regret. At a certain level of analysis, acts and the feelings through which we make sense of them are really all there is: life, after all, is lived in acts and affects. This book offers one way of recognizing, anatomizing, theorizing, and practicing that certain level of analysis.

Rather than continuing the longstanding scholarly focus on sexual discourses, then, I turn my attention to the epistemological and phenomenological infrastructures with which early moderns navigated the world—the knowledges and affects that form the conditions of possibility of early modern sex lives. Why, though, call forms of everyday sexual practice and feeling infrastructures? Infrastructures are what lie underneath (infra)—and thus hold up—structures. For the feminist theorist Ara Wilson, infrastructures are material in a literal sense: roads, sewers, cell towers, power plants, public bathrooms—the stuff of the world that makes (or supposedly aims to make) our movement through it frictionless, or at least slightly smoother. Understanding how infrastructures enable or hinder intimacy, she writes, is a conduit to understanding the concrete force of abstract fields of power by allowing us to identify actually existing systems rather than a priori structures.⁵

For instance, as Wilson points out, the public bathroom becomes a site both of pleasurably self-shattering intimacy (cruising) and violently self-shattering forms of misrecognition (the exclusion of trans people), not to mention the mundane but life-sustaining relief of urinary release. Not that either of those first two examples isn’t structural—how could they not be?—but when you lock eyes with a stranger in a bathroom, what’s most important in the moment doesn’t seem to be, really, the discursive construction of heteronormativity, but its phenomenological effects: actually existing systems, rather than a priori structures. You lock eyes and then what? You sidle off to a stall together? You get thrown out? Or, no less important because more mundane, you quickly look away? Sure, the answer depends on structures—heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia—but it also depends on a more intimate relation, on how you and they decide to hold up or let drop the little world you find yourselves in. Recognizing this phenomenology of infrastructure, Lauren Berlant writes that infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure.⁶ An infrastructural analysis, Berlant argues, helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance. Objects, they quip, are always looser than they appear.⁷

This book understands the sex life to be one of those loose objects. The looseness of sex—its openness to revision, and the necessity of continually learning how to practice it—is certainly due in part to the convergence of force and value within the material infrastructures that Wilson outlines. But sex is also phenomenologically loose more generally because of a set of affective and epistemological infrastructures that might seem less material, but really aren’t: the knowledge of how to make one’s body fit with another body, say, or moods that leave open (or shut down) the possibility of intimacy. In the terms of this book, infrastructures might be the knowledge of where to put one’s hands, or tongue, or genitals; or how to repurpose household items into lubricants; or the sociability of sexual tip-trading; or the affective literacies that allow one to know how someone else is feeling, and how one feels oneself; or the savvy necessary to strategically transform one’s sexual desires in order to achieve the possibility of security and life, especially in the face of constant demands to adjust one’s life to the whims of white supremacist violence. (This list is not exhaustive: you might, I hope, add your own infrastructures to it.)

As these last items suggest, the concept of infrastructure also presents one way of understanding the imbrication of sexuality and race not merely as discourses, but also as lived experiences. Sexual racism is one of the primary infrastructures undergirding contemporary sexual life: both structurally and phenomenologically, our desires do not occur in a raceless vacuum. Though all sex is racialized, people of color in particular constantly have to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of fetishization and denigration, the push and pull of desire and denial. Across a lifetime of such navigation, one accumulates a whole set of racial-sexual experiences and feelings, and a complex knowledge of how to make sense of such experiences and feelings. It is this accumulated knowledge that forms an infrastructure that mediates between the broad-scale structures of race and sexuality on the one hand and the seemingly infinite variation of individual experiences on the other: a sort of highway of knowledge and feeling on which one learns to navigate the space between oneself and the world. If racial-sexual politics, on a broad scale, articulate and circumscribe the possibilities of a life, these racial-sexual affects and knowledges are the very stuff of that life.

As an infrastructure, sexual racism spans a wide scale: it might manifest as a mindless set of split-second rejections of particular sexual or romantic partners (unthinkingly swiping left to reject Black women on Tinder, say), but it also might take the form of explicit disavowals (as in the racist, misogynist gay male refrain of no fats, no femmes, no Asians) or preferences (I only date Indian men). The racial politics of any given sexual decision are as complex as our desires: after all, a white man’s insistence on dating only Black women will ring differently in the political carillon than a Black man’s. Equally as complex, though—and equally as important—are the affects that suffuse such decisions: how it feels to be chosen, or rejected; to be seen, or to be merely imagined; to be placed on an impossible sexual pedestal, or to be cast out as undesirable merely on the basis of one’s racial identity. From a bird’s-eye view, the politics of such situations may take analytic preference; but on the ground, day-to-day, it’s the feelings—the sting of rejection, the electricity of desire—that can matter most to an individual’s survival, not to mention their thriving.

As Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, social differences are effects of how bodies inhabit spaces with others.⁸ To focus on these feelings, these bodily habits, then, as I do throughout this book, is not to reduce sexual racism to a set of individual concerns, but to understand that political structures (and their attendant infrastructures) emerge in our bodies as phenomenological experiences. Indeed, as Sharon Patricia Holland argues in The Erotic Life of Racism, understanding quotidian acts of racism, as opposed to egregious or spectacular acts of racist violence, can help us get at the experience—the feeling—of racism.⁹ Aliyah I. Abdur-Rahman has similarly argued that there is power in the erotic . . . to narrate a world.¹⁰ Racial embodiment and experience, she goes on to note, might inhere not only in the realm of the external, the phenotypical, but also in an internal site of instinct, impulse, intuition, [and] longing.¹¹ Or, as the early modernist Carol Mejia LaPerle has recently put it in her introduction to Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature: ‘How does it feel’ is an invitation to put into words the nexus of relations, dispositions, and sensations that constitute the racialized subject’s lived experience.¹²

Thus, in addition to investigating the logistical ins and outs of physical sex acts, this book also follows Ahmed, Holland, Abdur-Rahman and Mejia LaPerle in taking a phenomenological approach to the feeling of a pointedly sexual racism by analyzing how early moderns learned to navigate the racialized affects that suffused their sex lives. After all, though the examples I have chosen above are distinctly modern (and, to some extent, distinctly American), the sex lives of the early moderns were also fundamentally structured by sexual racism. As critics like Abdulhamit Arvas, Urvashi Chakravarty, Arthur Little, Carmen Nocentelli, and Valerie Traub have argued, early modern sexuality—both in Europe and in the colonial contact zone—was undergirded by a set of racial logics that parceled out the supposedly deviant from the supposedly normal, the kindred from the stranger, the desirable from the denigrated.¹³

As these scholars show, these racial-sexual logics were discursive, but, as I will argue throughout this book, they also guided the quotidian sex lives of those living within these discursive realms—which is to say, they shaped not only the institutional and textual structure of the public sphere, but, more intimately, how early moderns felt about each other, how they came to understand and anticipate those feelings, and what they ultimately decided to do with their bodies. This book, then, provides a sketch of early modern sex lives by threading together analyses of sexual practices with sexual affects—what one does and how one feels—all the while remaining attentive to how these intimate infrastructures shape and are shaped by shifting forms of early modern racism (not to mention misogyny and class hierarchy). To do so, I ask: how are the practices through which early moderns built and maintained intimate infrastructures driven, directed, or dismantled by racism? How do forms of early modern sexual pedagogy encourage or reinforce racist practices of group-differentiation, hierarchization, and marking? How, in particular, do affects serve as vectors of racist denigration within the intimate confines of romantic relationships? Which is to say: how did it feel? In the face of the world’s friction, the corrosive drag of racist fictions of desire and denial, how did early moderns—particularly those most intimately targeted by such racist fictions—keep going, make it through, and even thrive? How, that is, did they make their lives livable? Such intersectional, phenomenological questions help me build a fuller picture of the daily making-do that constituted early modern sex lives, a picture that accounts for the experiences that form what Ann Laura Stoler has called the affective grid of colonial politics.¹⁴

My focus on this daily making-do of sex is organized around the concept of the sex life in part because of the theoretical purchase of raising a widely circulating colloquialism to the level of an analytic (a point to which I will return in a moment), but also in part because this is one of the terms through which some early moderns organized their conceptualization of quotidian sexuality. Take, for instance, the anonymous seventeenth-century French poem that prefaced the first edition of L’Escole des Filles (1667), a pornographic prose dialogue depicting a young woman, Fanchon, being taught the ins and outs of sex by her older friend, Susanne. This madrigal praises the dialogue’s anonymous author in an idiom vulgar enough to prepare readers for the language in which they will soon learn about sex from the dialogue itself:

Autheur foutu d’vn foutu livre,

Escrivain foutu de Cypris,

Qui dans tous tes foutus escrits,

Fais voir que bien foutre est bien vivre.

Cent arguments foutus dont tu fais leçons,

Pour faire foutre en cent façons,

N’eterniseront pas ta plume.

Non ce qui te rendra pour jamais glorieux,

C’est que dans ton foutu volume,

Par une nouvelle coustume,

Ta prose nous fout par les yeux.

Fucking author of a fucking book,

Fucking Cyprian writer,

Who in all your fucking writings

Makes us see that to fuck well is to live well.

A hundred fucking arguments from which you fashion lessons

For fucking in a hundred ways,

Won’t make your pen eternal.

No, what will render you forever glorious,

Is that in your fucking volume,

In a new manner,

Your prose fucks us in our eyes.¹⁵

This bawdy verse is surprisingly difficult to translate into English,