It is invalid to study past sexualities through the concept of 'sexual orientation'

Medieval scholars who abandon the idea of premodern heteronormativity will find themselves in good company. Early modernists have already abandoned it. Mario di Gangi, Jonathan goldberg, and Valerie Traub, among others, have long since retired that "aegis of the homo/hetero divide" from their period for its warping and presentist tendencies. Instead of reconstituting that aegis, early modern scholars have begun to map the multiform ways that heterosexuality was and was not in the Renaissance. Rebecca Bach, for example, baldly states that early modern England had "lots of marriage but no heterosexuality," thereby driving a historical wedge in modern presumptive heterosexuality. catherine belsey tracks the new taxonomy of heterosexual desire that became identified with marriage in the sixteenth century, thereby wedding for the first time the erotic with companionate marriage. Finally, Valerie Traub argues for the development in the early modern period of "domestic heterosexuality," a "new marital" regime in which erotic desire became the sine quo non of conjugal life." If heterosexuality assumed many forms during the early modern period, and if even those forms it did assume require names to distinguish them from past and present forms of heterosexuality, it seems reckless, to say the least, for medievalists to continue to use the crude, ham-fisted concept of heteronomativity to describe medieval sexualities and desires.
A measure of epistemological humility would go a long way toward correcting the tendencies of medieval scholars to assume heteronormativity of the past based on the presumption of widespread agreement about what heterosexuality means in the present.

Excerpted from:
Page: xvii
Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn't
By Karma Lochrie
Edition: illustrated
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816645981, 9780816645985
178 pages

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