Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns / / Valerie Traub.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2015
• VerfasserIn: Traub, Valerie,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Haney Foundation Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (480 p.) :; 4 illus.

What do we know about early modern sex, and how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns leverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1. Thinking Sex: Knowledge, Opacity, History -- Part I. Making the History of Sexuality -- Chapter 2. Friendship's Loss: Alan Bray's Making of History -- Chapter 3. The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies -- Chapter 4. The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography -- Part II. Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts -- Chapter 5. The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge -- Chapter 6. Sex in the Interdisciplines -- Chapter 7. Talking Sex -- Part III. The Stakes of Gender -- Chapter 8. Shakespeare's Sex -- Chapter 9. The Sign of the Lesbian -- Chapter 10. Sex Ed; or, Teach Me Tonight -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments