queer masculinities

236 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
entirely devoid of women, Kuriyama’s point implies that the image of
Marlowe as a transgressor and rebel is a construction of later history,
not of his own period. In that sense, her view is similar to Stephen
Orgel’s, who argues that ‘the transgressive Marlowe is largely a posthumous
phenomenon.’ 12 However, Orgel’s point is that, rather than
being subversive, the licentious, daring, ironic, and racy Marlowe in
fact explores humanity and desire within the limits of a period already
known for its restless ambition, individual aspiration, and ‘a higher tolerance
for obscurity than we have.’ 13 Thus after over a decade of criticism
about queer Marlowe we have come to the point at which
Marlowe’s queerness has been rendered ahistorical and, hence, nonexistent
or, at best, ambiguous. If Marlowe has been a metonymy for
early modern English queer masculinity, even homoeroticism, what do
views like Kuriyama’s and Orgel’s leave us with? The question is not
whether Marlowe was or was not homosexual, but what constitutes
queerness in early modern England. Expanding on Orgel’s argument
about our modern, not early modern, construction of Marlowe (and
Renaissance England) as a subversive homosexual, Mario DiGangi challenges
‘the kind of evidence we possess regarding the presence of male
same-sex relations in early modern England’ and he questions ‘the
methodologies used to interpret that evidence.’ 14 For DiGangi, like for
Orgel, Renaissance England, was a world without many inhibitions
‘about public discussion of illicit sexuality.’ 15
One of the central tasks of queer theory’s investigations of early
modern sexuality, then, is to ‘call into question the historiographical
status of concepts of alterity and sameness.’ 16 This is undoubtedly true,
but the question still remains to what extent the distinction between
alterity and sameness produces knowledge about kinds of masculinity,
including homoerotic masculinity, in a culture that conceptualized sexuality
only in terms of gender and specifically around matrimony and
procreation. The queer approach to early modern homoeroticism, rendered
as sodomy, is too broad a term for any kind of sexual transgression
or sexual act that is socially disruptive. Claude J. Summers, for instance,
has criticized Jonathan Goldberg’s approach to Renaissance queerness,
helping us to see male–male sexuality through a series of historically
contingent signifying practices. 17 Similarly speaking about homosexuality
from the position of material historicism, Mario DiGangi argues:
whatever claims modern science might make for homosexuality as a
‘materiality’ pertaining to the body will still tell us nothing about
the materiality of sexual practices and discourses … in early modern