queer masculinities

Richard Godbeer: America 195
woman and that between either two persons of the same sex or a
human being and an animal. According to New England’s spiritual
teachers, sodomy and bestiality disrupted the natural order and crossed
scripturally ordained boundaries between sexes and species. They were
thus more egregiously sinful and disorderly than was ‘uncleanness’
between a man and a woman. New England, wrote Charles Chauncy,
was ‘defiled by such sins.’ They should be punished, declared Cotton
Mather, ‘with death, without mercy.’ 12
Two recent studies have linked denunciations of sodomy in seventeenth-century
New England to an allegedly intense fear of femininity
and effeminization. According to Roger Thompson, the virulence of
Puritan ‘homophobia’ was due in large part to ‘the presence of gender
role confusion and sexual insecurity within an aggressively masculine
environment.’ Male New Englanders were, he claims, ‘emasculated’ by
the depiction of men and women as utterly dependent upon God’s
will; they also faced ‘effemination’ through the frequent use of bridal
imagery to characterize the relationship between the redeemed and
their savior. In addition to ‘the psychic toll’ which these facets of
Puritan theology inflicted upon its male adherents, a significant
number of ‘threatening Amazons’ in seventeenth-century New
England, women who usurped men’s roles and challenged their
authority, created a parallel ‘source of insecurity.’ Colin Talley also
points to ‘a profound fear of femininity in its various constellations,
which resulted in an inherently anxious hypermasculine gender identity,’
expressed in part through vehement condemnation of sodomy. 13
This approach is based upon a fundamental misconception of
Puritan gender ideology. Early modern notions of gender were in some
respects remarkably fluid and capacious. Puritans, in common with
other members of seventeenth-century Anglo-American society, had a
clear sense of masculinity and femininity as distinct constellations of
qualities, the former associated with authority and the latter with subordination.
Yet roles and attributes labeled as masculine or feminine
were not attached inflexibly to male or female bodies: women could
assume male-identified roles in particular contexts and be treated in
those contexts as functionally male; men were likewise expected to
adopt feminine roles in certain circumstances and did so without
qualm. Social, political, and spiritual order rested just as firmly on male
as on female submission to those placed above them; men made sense
of situations in which they performed a subordinate and deferential
role by assuming in those contexts a female persona. John Winthrop,
for example, equated a citizen’s ‘subjection to authority’ with a wife’s