BOOK REVIEWS
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Thus, in contrast, her project “outlines the idea of homohistory, [a field] in
which desires always exceed identitarian categories and resist being corralled
into hetero-temporal camps” (1-2). Homohistory, Menon is quick to make clear,
is not “ahistorical—or somehow ‘outside’ history—nor even anti-historical—or
against history—unhistoricism argues that a history based on difference is
inadequate to housing the study of desire” (3). Homohistory, in other words, is a
history based on sameness rather than difference, and thus it has the capacity to
dissolve the divisive identity/sodomy binary. And in order to show how
traditional history is always heterosexist and always unable to contain desire,
regardless of the form of that desire as hetero-, homo-, or bisexual in nature,
Menon proposes, in the succeeding chapters of her work, to analyze the
inadequacies of five of the major bases of traditional history itself: teleology,
facts, citation, origins, and authenticity.
In Chapter 1, Menon engages with the idea of teleology in which, she
rightly claims, historicists have a significant investment. This investment reveals
“a fascination with thinking about sexuality as a developmental movement from
before to after, from prematurity (or early modernity) to maturity (or
modernity)” and, in turn, it also “marks the historicist project of distinguishing
between a distant past and a current present” (29). Furthermore, historicists seek
to weld “this chronological difference to concepts like sodomy and
homosexuality. According to this process of chrono-conceptual fusion, the
sodomite marks a necessary first stage in the development of an individual we
can now recognize as homo” (30). As such, sexuality is merely a “teleological
progression” that, from the homohistorical perspective, lays bare the “relation
between past and present [that] needs to be a causal one where the very being of
the present is predicated on the past’s being one way and not another” (30, 33).
Menon proceeds to a study of Shakespeare’s early erotic poem Venus and
Adonis in order to show how historical teleology can be disrupted and, thus, the
success(ion) of (hetero-)sexuality can be thwarted. In this work “the ‘before’ and
‘after’ of teleology—the consequence so necessary to establish success—is
explicitly denied in a poem in which Shakespeare’s most dramatic reworking of
the Ovidian myth is that Adonis does not succumb to Venus at all” (35). In fact,
for Menon, the text of Venus and Adonis “seems more interested in the
relationship between sexuality and failure than in the teleological success of
sex” (35). Of course, the important point is that teleology, here in the form of
Venus’s sexual desire for Adonis, can be evaded; the expected progression from
sexual desire to intercourse and to procreation can be circumvented; failure of
sexual desire is not just a possible, but an actual, outcome. Homohistory seizes
on this failure of historical teleology in relation to sexuality and desire in Venus
and Adonis and uses it to suggest that, in exactly the same manner,
contemporary homosexuality does not naturally or automatically follow early
modem sodomy, a notion that, in and of itself, offers us a heady new way of
exploring the history of sexuality in tandem with the poetic and dramatic works
of Shakespeare.