Abstract:

If we ask modern queer people about their experience of sex education, one frustration recurs: the difficulty of simply finding out what queer people do with each other. Scholars have recognised this problem as a feature of early modern culture too. As Valerie Traub has cogently asked, ‘Can, in fact, people know what they want if they are missing the language by which to know it, think it, speak it?’ While Traub poses this question about sex in general, this sentiment is – as the often queer focus of her work suggests – particularly applicable to queer sexual practices in the early modern period. Drawing on early modern legal and linguistic discourse, this paper unpicks the processes by which, for the people of early modern England, precise knowledge of queer sexual practices was often disabled and occluded. Considering sexual knowledge as a literary production, it argues for the importance of genre in shaping how writers negotiated this discursive environment. It asks, too, what ethical responsibilities the scholar of queer history has to their subjects, and how we might write a history of queer sexual knowledge which centres queer experience, agency and resilience.

Kit Heyam is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on developing new methodological approaches to transgressive gender and sexuality in historical literature and culture, both in academic research and in curatorial practice.

Their book Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Basic Books UK/Seal Press, 2022) proposes a new approach to global trans history rooted in care, decolonial practice and cognisance of contemporary politics. As such, it represents a significant contribution to trans studies, providing a new methodological approach to contested histories of gender nonconformity in which gender is often culturally specific or inextricable from other experiences such as social role, sexuality and theatrical performance. It draws on both literary and historical sources, and argues that literary methodologies can help us to recognise our affective connection to the past and to shape an ethics of historiographical care for past and contemporary subjects.