Practice Job Talk

Sex Lives of the Early Moderns
In this talk I offer a new conceptual and methodological approach to the history of sexuality: the sex life. Colloquial use of the term “sex life” usually takes the form of a value judgment: one’s sex life is either “good” or “bad.” I argue that these seemingly simple value judgments actually signal a host of assumptions about the ways that sex weaves itself—mentally, physically, emotionally, and politically—through everyday life, and that these assumptions can provide scholars with a useful guide for approaching sex in the past. Such a focus on the lived experience of sexuality can also, I argue, help us reconceptualize the lived experience of other, intersecting vectors of social differentiation and hierarchiziation. Focusing on one such intersection, the phenomenological imbrication of race and sex, I analyze the affective scripts that interracial romances like John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) offered to early modern playgoers—some of whom, I show, may we have been in interracial relationships themselves. Ultimately, I argue that reading for the sex lives of the early moderns reveals some of the inner workings of racism in a period before "race" emerged as an identity category.