Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sanchez, Melissa E
• Loomba, Ania

Titel

Family Quarrels: Feminist Criticism, Queer Studies, and Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

Ist Teil von

• Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, 2016, p.59-74

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Since Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg published “Queering History” in 2005, a debate about the usefulness of history in queer studies has been simmering. They advocate abandoning what they see as the inevitably teleological project of history, on the grounds that “we must never presume to know in advance how questions of sexuality will intersect with or run aslant the prevailing forms of sociality marked by gender or status.”2 In their view, queer studies must abandon the historical difference, first posited by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, between homosociality, homoeroticism, and sodomy as acts in the Renaissance, and homosexuality as a distinctively modern identity that dates from the early nineteenth century. They see such historical alterity as based on the assumption of “a determinate and knowable identity, past and present,” and it is this notion that they reject because in their view, “paying attention to the question of sexuality as a question involves violating the notion that history is the discourse of answers, a discourse whose commitment to determinate signification . . . provides false closure.”3