queer masculinities

2 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
it). Queer rejects normatizing discourse, while at the same time calls
for all people to be queer. Queer ‘normatizes’ in its demand for queerness,
which is anti-normal. And herein lies a queer methodology,
which is exemplified in the diverse essays in this book, as well as in
much of the work that has gone on and is going on under the banner
of Queer Historiography.
Following the method of Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries, 2 I shall
begin with a modern metaphor before moving to (Anglo) Irish Early
Modern and Enlightenment history and the debates it raises. Queer
theory in terms of historical research, I would suggest, is like the AIDS
quilts that have recently adorned our cities. Each piece of the quilt is
made up of memories, the recovered, represented memories of a life
now gone. In turn, each memory is made up of the memorialized and
the memorializer, in a dynamic equilibrium, the one owing its existence
in the quilt to the other. Sometimes the memorialized will be
clearly visible in the design, sometimes more shadowy as the memorializer
is brought to the fore. As pieces of a quilt, none are constructed
with the design of the others in mind. All are separate. But all are part
of the quilt, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Although the pieces are stitched together only at the last minute, and
may make uncomfortable bedfellows (the individual designs jarring
with each other) each is as valuable as each other in demonstrating
diversity that is the raison d’être of a quilt.
In the same way each method that makes up the methodology that
is queer history is a separate piece of a whole that is greater than the
sum of its parts. In terms of research into the history of male–male
relationships, each method recovers the past, now more clearly, now
with more emphasis on the method of recovery. The success of a
method (which must lie in the clarity of the ideas expressed to the
mind of the reader) is, of course, to be desired. But it is not the goal of
the methodology as a whole, which is to celebrate diversity and dissonance.
The queer rather than the normative.
I offer the idea of the AIDS quilt as something of a caveat since a
number of recent historical studies of male–male relationships have
begun with just this sort of review of queer work to date, but with the
intention of offering the new method as the best way, while negating
the others. So Cameron McFarlane’s excellent The Sodomite in Fiction
and Satire, ends his review with a comment that introduces and recommends
his own approach at the expense of other approaches: ‘Because
each of these historians is, in his own way attempting to document the
cultural visibility of homosexuality in this period, they each necessarily