The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography

A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 124-145

  Traub, Valerie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Anachronism; Cultural perversion; Lesbian; Meta logics; Patriarchal equilibrium

Indexed keywords

EID: 84889447972     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470690864.ch7     Document Type: Chapter

References (77)

1. The terms of the debate about continuism versus alterity have emerged from within the subfield of the history of homosexuality largely as constructed by literary scholars; historians more likely would frame the issue as one of continuity versus change over time. For most historians, the issue is not whether the past is other or different, but how, when, and if change does occur, which continuities remain or persist. Within history as a discipline, alterity often is reduced to antiquarianism and a fetishizing of the past for its pastness; it thus is fundamentally conservative. Within literary studies, conversely, the assertion of alterity often has had a radical cast. I am indebted to Dena Goodman for pushing for clarity on this matter.
2. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981); Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
3. Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1976): 43.
5. Judith M. Bennett, "Confronting Continuity," Journal of Women's History 9:3 (1997): 73-94, at p. 73.
6. Judith M. Bennett, "'Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianisms," Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 1-24.
7. Bennett, "Confronting Continuity," 88.
8. Louise Fradenberg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996): xix.
9. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
10. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004): xxii.
11. Recent attempts to move beyond the impasse produced by these debates have demonstrated that it is the precise nature and interrelations of continuities and discontinuities that are of interest, not the analytical predominance of one over the other. Classical, medieval, and early modern medicine, astrology, and physiognomy, for instance, describe some homoerotic behaviours, especially those associated with gender deviance, as linked to, and sometimes caused by, anatomical aberrations, diseases of the mind, or habituation owing to sexual practices. Although this view does not constitute "homosexual identity" in its post-sexological construction, neither is it an undifferentiated concept of sin to which all were subject. See, for instance, Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Anna Clark, "Twilight Moments," Journal of the History of Sexuality 14:1 & 2 (2005): 139-60. Despite these advances, too often the concept of identity remains undertheorized and hazily defined, associated with such different concepts as sexual inclination, tendency, preference, predisposition, orientation, consciousness, subjectivity, self-perception, and subculture-listed here according to a spectrum from "soft" to "hard" identity claims. Several problems and questions arise from this definitional confusion and associational logic. Are identity, orientation, and subjectivity synonymous? If they are, do they mean the same thing as inclination, predisposition, and tendency? Does an inclination, even if defined as innate, necessarily signify something causal, or is it merely probabilistic? Does the subcultural grouping of like-minded persons necessarily constitute an identity or subjectivity? Does the content of a homoerotic subjectivity alter historically?
12. Much lesbian history has been written by scholars trained as literary critics (e.g., Andreadis, Castle, Dinshaw, Donoghue, Faderman, Halberstam, Lanser, Moore, Rohy, Traub, Vicinus, and Wahl). This disciplinary training has affected not only the ways such histories are written (including their narrative shape and their explicit and implicit aims), but also criteria for what counts as evidence and the relative weight one accords to genre differences among texts. Why this dominance of lesbian critics is truer of lesbian than gay male history raises the question of whether lesbian history poses particular or distinctive problems in the history of sexuality. In addition, the turn toward cultural history within the discipline of history has effected a transformation of social history that has allowed it to speak to, and at times intersect with, intellectual history; this has allowed cultural history to address questions of power, politics, and representation in ways that social and intellectual history did not. I am grateful to Laura Doan for the first point and Dena Goodman for the second.
13. As part of a manuscript in progress, "The Sexuality of History: Sapphic Subjects and the Making of Modernity," Susan S. Lanser has published a series of important articles on eighteenth-century sapphism: "Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts," Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:2 (1998-9): 179-98; "Singular Politics: The Rise of the British Nation and the Production of the Old Maid," in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, eds. Judith Bennett and Amy Froide (Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999): 297-323; "Sapphic Picaresque, Sexual Difference and the Challenges of Homo-adventuring," Textual Practice 15:2 (2001): 1-18; "'Queer to Queer': Sapphic Bodies as Transgressive Texts," in Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Katharine Kittredge (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003): 21-46; and "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire," in Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women, eds., Joan E. Hartman and Adele Seeff (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming 2007): 157-75.
14. Martha Vicinus, "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996): 233-59; and Vicinus, Intimate Friends.
15. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
16. George Chauncey, Jr, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female Deviance," in Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics, eds. Robert Boyers and George Steiner, Salmagundi 58-9 (1982-3): 114-46. See also the way typology functions in Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1994): 111-36.
17. See Everett Rowson, "Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists," in Body Guards: The Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (London: Routledge, 1991): 50-79; Michael Sweet and Leonard Zwilling, "The First Medicalization: The Taxonomy and Etiology of Queers in Classical Indian Medicine," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:4 (1993): 590-607; Charlotte Furth, "Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century China," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 479-97; Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); George Chauncey, Jr, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Peter A. Jackson, "The Persistence of Gender: From Ancient Indian Pandakas to Modern Thai Gay-Quings," in Australia Queer, eds. Chris Berry and Annamarie Jagose, Meanjin, 55:1 (1996/1): 110-20; Alan Sinfield, "Lesbian and Gay Taxonomies," Critical Inquiry 29:1 (2002): 120-38.
18. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 106.
19. It may be useful to think of typologies as second order epiphenomena, whereas the conceptual logics that give rise to them are of the first order.
20. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002).
21. This is not to suggest that hypervirility was an invention of the late nineteenth century; hypervirility is characteristic of the Latin tribade and the medieval virago.
22. Lanser, "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire." 157.
23. See, in addition to Lanser, Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
24. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xvii.
25. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 152.
26. Lanser, "Befriending the Body."
27. On the intimacy between Clarissa and Anna Howe, see Theresa Braunschneider's University of Michigan PhD dissertation, "Maidenly Amusements: Narrating Female Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England" (2002).
28. See Moore, Dangerous Intimacies.
29. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (1975/76): 27-55, at p. 34.
30. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xviii.
31. Laura Doan, "Topsy-Turveydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism, and the Great War," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay History 12:4 (2006): 517-42.
32. Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
33. An earlier problem with typological methods was diagnosed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who critiqued teleological models of historical succession in Epistemology of the Closet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); her critique was expanded by Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660-1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
34. Currently, the category of transgender is pressuring old typologies. See, for instance, the implicit contest over typologies for Radclyffe Hall and her fictional alter-ego, Stephen Gordon, in the collection Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, eds. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), especially Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," 89-108; Jay Prosser, "Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well," 129-44; and Judith Halberstam, "'A Writer of Misfits': 'John' Radclyffe Hall and the Discourse of Inversion," 145-61.
35. For an astute analysis of eighteenth-century narrative conventions, see Braunschneider, "Maidenly Amusements." For differences between popular representations of passing women in ballads and newspapers in the eighteenth-and twentieth-centuries, see Alison Oram, 'Her Husband Was a Woman!' Women's Gender Crossing and Twentieth-Century British Popular Culture (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2007).
36. Sally O'Driscoll, "Word on the Street: Eighteenth-Century Pamphlets and the Popular Language of Gender" (work in progress).
37. Siobhan B. Somerville, "Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body," in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, eds. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 60-76; at pp. 73 and 62.
38. Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism.
39. See Lanser, "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire," Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, and Vicinus, Intimate Friends.
40. On Lister, see Anna Clark, "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity," Journal of the History of Sexuality 7:1 (1996): 23-50; on Phillips, see Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism.
41. One exception is the recent work of Caroline Gonda, "What Lesbians Do in Books, 1723-1835: Narrative Possibilities" (unpublished paper); "Ledore and Fanny Derham's Story," Women's Writing 6:3 (1999): 329-44; and "Lesbian Narrative in The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:2 (2006): 191-200.
42. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984): 267-319; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (New York: Longman Press, 1981).
43. See Katherine Binhammer, "The Sex Panic of the 1790s," Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:3 (1996): 409-34; and Lynn Hunt, "The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991): 108-30.
44. For a recent magisterial exception, see Alan Bray's The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
45. This critique focuses on such metanarrative's retrospective investment in progress, causality, and supersession; its sequential requirements of the pre-and the post-; its tendency toward false synthesis; and its press-ganging of all prior formations of same-sex desire into modern identities. See, for instance, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
46. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999); Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull, The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
47. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence.
48. In addition to Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, see Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and Anne Herrmann, Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (London and New York: Palgrave, 2000). These studies are in fact more temporally broad than their period-bound titles might suggest.
49. In addition to Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, see Karma Lochrie, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Murderous Plots and Medieval Secrets," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1995): 405-17, "Presidential Improprieties and Medieval Categories: The Absurdity of Heterosexuality," in Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, 87-96, and Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); as well as Steven F. Kruger, "Medieval/Postmodern: HIV/AIDS and the Temporality of Crisis," in Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, 252-83; and Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
50. The major monographs on lesbianism, including my own, are generally respectful of broad period boundaries. In addition to those listed above, see Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993); Julie Abraham, Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Valerie Rohy, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, eds., Same-Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
51. For examples of such border skirmishes, see Carolyn Dinshaw and Karma Lochrie's Letter to the Editor, "Queering History," and Madhavi Menon's Reply in "Forum," PMLA 121:3 (2006): 837-9, as well as Lochrie's critique of my work and that of Katherine Park in Heterosynchrasies. Dinshaw and Lochrie's insistence that "The issues are more complex than simple turf battles" elicits Menon's reply: "What they deny is a turf war is exactly that by any other name" (PMLA, 838).
52. Laura Doan, "Undoing Identity History" and "Sexuality Under the Searchlight," unpublished papers.
53. Freccero, "Undoing the Histories of Homosexuality," in Queer/Early/Modern, 31-50; Jonathan Goldberg, "Margaret Cavendish, Scribe," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10:3 (2004): 433-52; Madhavi Menon, "Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11:4 (2005): 491-519; Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, "Queering History," PMLA 120:5 (October 2005): 1608-17. Although Freccero, Goldberg, and Menon evince some differences in their approaches and in their criticisms of other scholars, their arguments are closely aligned.
54. Goldberg and Menon, "Queering History," 1616.
55. Menon, "Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis," 496.
56. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 31.
57. In addition to The Renaissance of Lesbianism, see "The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge," in Renaissance Culture and the New Millenium, eds., Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, Sean Keilen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
58. So much is made clear by contemporary debates about the globalization of gay identity See, for instance, Martin F. Manalansan, IV, "In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2:4 (1995): 425-38; Jasbir Kaur Puar, "Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8:1-2 (2002): 101-37; Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002); and M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005).
59. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 107.
60. Goldberg and Menon, "Queering History," 1609. Valerie Rohy's "Ahistorical," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12:1 (2006): 61-83, also attempts to rehabilitate anachronism by advocating "a backward, 'ahistorical' approach" (65).
61. Menon, reply in "Forum," PMLA, 839.
62. Goldberg, "Margaret Cavendish, Scribe," 435.
63. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 5.
64. Menon, in particular, seems to conflate any analysis of change with arguments for causality or what she calls "consequence," "Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis," 496.
65. Goldberg and Menon, "Queering History," 1615-16.
66. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 3.
67. These, it must be said, are questions that all historians face, not only those who work on sexuality.
68. Dinshaw and Lochrie, Letter to the Editor, "Forum," PMLA, 837.
69. This project is made all the more urgent by the proliferation of anthologies of gay and lesbian literature, which tend to recuperate traditional teleological schemas without explicitly arguing for them: see, for instance, Stephen Coote, ed., The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (London: Penguin, 1983); Emma Donoghue, Poems between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Terry Castle, ed., The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). On the other hand, certain sourcebooks flout such periods in order to collect under conceptual categories primary source material on lesbian lives in the past: see Alison Hennegan, ed., The Lesbian Pillow Book (London: The Fourth Estate, 2000).
70. Other scholars of lesbianism have also been pressing against the paradigm of identity history. In addition to Doan's essays on "undoing" identity history, Freccero's Queer/Early/Modern, and Lochrie's Heterosynchrasies, see Clark's "Twilight Moments," which begins to write the history of sexuality by focusing on desire rather than identity. In addition, Lanser's manuscript in progress proceeds along a very different route than the one I have advocated, but it, too, pushes in a more ambitious direction. By correlating the eruption of printed discourses about sapphism in England, France, and Holland to changes in the public sphere, political economy, and colonial conquest, Lanser focuses not "on how seventeenth-[and eighteenth-] century sapphism fits into a diachronic account of lesbian existence," but rather on "how lesbian representation fits into a synchronic account of the seventeenth [and eighteenth] century" ("The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire"). She thus turns "the screw of interpretation. . . from the history of sapphism to the sapphism of history," in effect arguing that lesbian history between 1560 to 1830 is the history of European modernity ("The Sexuality of History").
71. For comparative work, see, in addition to Elizabeth Wahl, Invisible Relations, and Lanser, "The Sexuality of History," Sharon Marcus, "Comparative Sapphism," in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, eds. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002): 251-85; and Comparatively Queer: Crossing Time, Crossing Cultures, eds. Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet, and William Spurlin (forthcoming).
72. See, for instance, Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive ofFeelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003); and Heather Love, "Emotional Rescue," in Gay Shame, eds. David Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
73. Although not often concerned explicitly with history prior to that of the twentieth century, queers of color have developed their own modes of analysis. See, for instance, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Disiden-tifications: Queers of Color and the Performance ofPolitics (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001).
74. On the history of Islamic lesbianism, see Kathryn Babayan, "The Aqâ' îd al-Nisâ': A Glimpse at Safavid Women in Local Isfahani Culture," in Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, Piety, ed. Gavin R. G. Hambly (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998): 349-81; Kathryn Babayan and Asfaneh Najmabadi, eds., Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal and Geographical Zones of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). On South Asian lesbianism, see Ruth Vanita, ed., Queering India; Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
75. On transnational queer scholarship, see, in addition to those listed in the note on globalization, Carolyn Dinshaw, "The History of GLQ, Volume 1: LGBTQStudies, Censorship, and Other Transnational Problems," GLQ': A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12:1 (2006): 5-26; Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, eds., "Thinking Sex Transnationally," special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5:4 (1999); and Phillip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen, eds., "Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender," special issue of Social Text 52-3 (1997).
76. For further thoughts on the methodological challenges posed by traveling sexual categories and epistemologies, and in particular the politically loaded significations of tradition and modernity, see Valerie Traub, "The Past is a Foreign Country?: The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies," in Islamicate Sexualities.
77. This question is indebted to my colleagues at the University of Michigan, especially Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, Hannah Rosen, Kathryn Babayan, Jarrod Hayes, Nadine Hubbs, and David Halperin, as we work together to enact such a project in the classroom.