In "Queer/Early/Modern," Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early
modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that
accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past,
present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in
our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New
Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect
historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the
past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity
found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and
she encourages us to read differently the relation between history
and literature. Contending that the term "queer," in its
indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading
practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they
live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of "fantasmatic
historiography" that brings together history and fantasy, past and
present, event and affect.
Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis,
deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series
of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer
theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern
studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts,
discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labe, and Melissa
Ethridge; David Halperin's take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius's
"The Golden Ass" and Boccaccio's "Decameron"; and France's domestic
partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre's
"Heptameron." Turning to French cleric Jean de Lery's account,
published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious
rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the
twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques
Derrida's concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a
mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the
haunting of the present by the past.
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