Valerie Traub, “Racializing Sexuality in Early Modern Erotic Narrative”

Please join us in the Comparative Literature Library (Bingham Hall, 8th floor) at 4:30 PM on September 21st  for a lecture by Professor Valerie Traub entitled “Racializing Sexuality in Early Modern Erotic Narrative.” Graduate students are also encouraged to participate in a seminar-style workshop the following day, which will use Professor Traub’s essay “Sexuality” in A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance as a springboard to discuss how sexuality fits into her current book project, Mapping Humanity in the Early Modern West, as well as broader methodological issues in the field. A light lunch will be served at the workshop - please RSVP using this link so we know how much food to order. 

Professor Traub’s talk will focus on Frances Beaumont’s adaptation of an Ovidian erotic narrative, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditis, to examine the role of blushing in the racialization of sexuality. As a bodily response to a range of affects—erotic desire, emotional longing, envy, shame, fear, and even anger—the blush has multiple meanings. But the meanings of the blush change across time. The blush becomes implicated in the conferral and denial of human status in early modernity because it racialises sexuality while also sexualising racial difference. By the late seventeenth century, this bodily-affective phenomenon had become an indicator of a racialised sexuality, whereby an affectively self-reflexive subject of erotic desire is composed as generically, in its very essence, white. In particular, the capacity to express, by means of blushing, the complexity and ambivalence of one’s desiring state becomes part of the performative repertoire of white erotic subjectivity.

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These events are part of a yearlong interdisciplinary speaker series entitled “Queer and Trans Case Studies in Early Modern Literature,” which highlights the range of geographies, languages, and methodologies which animate the study of gender and sexuality in early modern literature.  Future speakers include Jeffrey Masten, coming to Yale on October 26, and Colby Gordon and Abdulhamit Arvas in the spring semester. Please reach out to Patrick Soto (patrick.soto@yale.edu) or Jacob Romm (jacob.romm@yale.edu) with any questions.