queer masculinities

Goran V. Stanivukovic: England 235
the state’s policing of it. It is perhaps the relative silence of authorities
on the issue of public sodomy, if it ever was public enough to cause
panic that enabled the discourse and representations of sodomy to
continue. Thus in the absence of substantial evidence for anything like
homosexual identity in the Renaissance, homoerotic masculinity of
early modern England was mostly reconstructed as what we would
define as queer, as relating to desire, not gender, and forms of the nonnormative
sexual behavior (non-normative at least from the historical
perspective of our times).
Current gay historiography of early modern England shies away
from the concepts of identification and identities, and privileges queer
methodologies of gaps and overlaps, performances of sexual and
gender behavior, and a circulation of flexible and often ambiguous
desire in order to capture what might have been the male–male sexual
culture of early modern England. Queer theory has done so not only
because identity smacks of determinism but also because, as predominantly
a theory of discursive and epistemological phenomena, queer
theory depends on rhetorical constructions, and social and textual representations.
Thus to read for signs of homoerotic desire and acts in
early modern England means to ‘read relationally’, to look at ‘texts as
sites of self-identification’, and to analyse ‘the syntax of desire not
readily named.’ 9 Yet the question of inquiry into early modern English
homoerotic masculinity arises precisely in the problem of selfidentification;
there are no early modern English texts where self-representation
is affirmatively established. Because of the lack of affirmative
self-identification, the early modern queer archive is, in a sense, ‘a
satire on the object of its knowledge.’ 10 That even at the point at
which, one could argue, early modern queer criticism has reached its
peak and exhausted its archives (and, it seems, much of its arguments
as well), the homoeroticism of even the most queer of early modern
English writers, Christopher Marlowe, continues to be seen as a puzzle
of identification, is best illustrated by two recent studies on this writer.
Thus, in her biography of Marlowe, Constance Brown Kuriyama does
not even mention once, let alone entertain the thought that Marlowe
might have had homosexual leanings. Kuriyama’s Marlowe, in fact, has
no sexuality. Rather, she argues that what ‘we know of Marlowe
himself’, including that he was ‘an openly gay man’, ‘was tweaked to
fit new iconic models and political agendas.’ 11 Leaving aside the
quibble that ‘openness’ is historically specific and that may not necessarily
manifest itself in behavior but, in Marlowe’s case, in dramatic
and non-dramatic poetry that is exclusively masculinist and almost