This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary-works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others-it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed 'homosexual sodomy' and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq.
The book takes as axiomatic Foucault's description of sodomy as 'that utterly confused category.' Without collapsing questions of historical difference, it works to articulate relations between the early modern period and our own, between a time before the homo/heterosexual divide and the modern regimes that assume it. In this book, sodometries (a Renaissance word for 'sodomy' chosen for its nonce-word suggestiveness) are sites of complications around definitions of sex and gender. Because 'sodomy' is not a term capable of singular definition, representations of sodomy are never direct. Sodomy exists only relationally.
Three social domains for textual production are explored in this book: the sixteenth-century English court as the location of high literariness; the theater, especially as a site for controversy around cross-dressing; the New World as the place where the slaughter of native populations (and, in New England, of Englishmen as well) was carried out in the name of ridding the hemisphere of sodomites. These lethal impulses are read as foundational for a U.S. imaginary still operative in many powerful quarters.
The analyses of literary texts engage the most advanced work in early modern literary criticism (that done by feminist and New Historicist critics) and proposes a queer perspective that necessarily complicates and enriches such inquiries. Besides offering detailed readings of literary texts not often read in terms of the history of sexuality (Shakespeare's history plays, for example), the book also examines narratives of the conquest and colonization of the Americas.

About the Author
Jonathan Goldberg was Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Emory University. His many books include Come As You Are, After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists; Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility; and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. His writing centered on early modernity but ranged from Sappho and Willa Cather to Patricia Highsmith and Todd Haynes in exploring questions of materiality and sexuality.

Reviews
"Sodometries has decisively shaped work in the history of sexuality for the last decade and remains a critical text for this developing field ... Goldberg's work is already a classic and has not been superceded." -- -Karen Newman Brown University "A groundbreaking and essential text for practicing and aspiring scholars of the English Renaissance." -- -Daniel Juan Gil Texas Christian University "A classic in queer theory and in new historicist accounts of the renaissance." -- -Janet Halley Harvard University "One of the first studies to think theory and history together in the study of Renaissance sexuality, Sodometries remains a methodologically transformative book -- for literary studies and for the history of sexuality." -- -Jeffrey Masten Northwestern University "Sodmetries revolutionized Renaissance Studies by insisting on asking questions about sexuality where none had been asked before. Focussing on texts that span histories and literatures, Sodometries challenges us to think of sexuality as something surprising rather than knowable." -- -Madhavi Menon American University "Sodometries is a stunning book: the complexity of its intelligence and the beauty of its stylistic accomplishments take one's breath away." -Journal of the History of Sexuailty "Any study of early modern sexual significance-or the historical range of possibilities for organizing it-must engage the exacting readings so keenly traced in Sodometries." -- -Laurie Shannon Northwestern University



Book Information
ISBN 9780823232215
Author Jonathan Goldberg
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press