Failures of intimacy

In his 1583 The Anatomy of Abuses, Philip Stubbes famously charged that drama taught audiences how to “play the Sodomits, or worse.” Stubbes's capacious “or worse,” I would suggest, refers to certain affective relations that eventually became illegible under the rubrics of modern intimacy. In this book, I map the circulation of knowledge about these queer affections, not only in the plays that Stubbes targets, but also in poetry and prose written between 1588 and 1625. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the intimate sphere coalesced around relations characterized by two elements: interiorized desire and futurity. Interiorized desire locates the truth about the self and sexuality inside the body, thereby organizing and limiting the body's pleasures based on a hierarchized opposition between depths and surfaces. Access to futurity involves the perceived sense of a relationship's duration and its participation in legitimate social and sexual reproduction. These changes, of which Stubbes's charge is one of many indices, laid the foundation for modern understandings of normative intimacy as coextensive with long-term heterosexual monogamy. Coupling, and more specifically marriage, was invested with value as a site where affection was desirable – as opposed to a primarily economic and political arrangement with emotional bonds as a secondary concern – through its figuration as the interpersonal relation with the proper combination of interiorized desire and access to futurity. Other interpersonal relations were excluded from the category, becoming instead what I call “failures of intimacy,” despite being characterized by affect, care, and pleasure for those involved, sometimes to a greater degree than relations typically understood as intimate in modern Western culture.

Nothing about the heterosexual couple inherently implies the automatic presence of affect, care, or pleasure, any more than any other form of relationality. Yet modern Western culture's relational economy assumes precisely the opposite in its conferral of cultural prestige and value on long-term heterosexual monogamy. In his landmark discussion in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was “a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy” wherein “the legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion.” I demonstrate that in the Renaissance, while the heterosexual couple was still actively, loudly, one might even say indiscreetly, asserting itself over alternate forms of relationality, it was nevertheless possible to challenge the authority of couple form intimacy. Various literary texts of the period critiqued the consolidation of intimacy around long-term heterosexual monogamy and instead invested value in alternate forms of intimacy, including short-term, situational relations; non-monogamous and polyamorous sexual practices; erotic practices that involve non-normative understandings of the body's pleasures, such as masochism; and beyond. In this book, I analyze Renaissance texts where these “failures of intimacy” do not fail to provide satisfaction and pleasure to those involved in them. Empowering readers to reimagine their own intimate lives, these literary texts offer a counterdiscourse to the period's marital advice conduct books and other texts that attempt to naturalize the consolidation of intimacy around monogamous coupling. This counterdiscourse is present even when texts ostensibly demonize alternate forms of intimacy, as a greater flexibility in Renaissance narrative allowed readers to resist what appears to be textual foreclosure on transgressive intimate practices. Insisting on diversity within relational life, the texts I discuss not only scrutinized the heterosexual couple's attempts to co-opt intimacy's signifying powers; they also sustained otherwise denigrated affections in the representational spaces they opened up for them.