[print edition page number: 1]

There will be a renaissance of sex.
— Gayle Rubin, “The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole”

People like different things. What turns us on may turn someone else’s stomach. What feels good to you might hurt us in a way we want to avoid. If we told you our desires, you might find them titillating, or disgusting, or boring, or simply incomprehensible. These may seem like banal truisms, but this collection argues that they can also serve as methodological guides to the study of sexuality in the distant past. For one thing, they remind us that the prevailing sexual categories of any given moment never encompass or name the totality of sexual experience at that time. The recent proliferation of (a)sexual identity categories — e.g., pansexual, demisexual, aromantic, furry, spanko — might seem, in the consistently myopic view of the normative public sphere, like a twenty-first-century phenomenon; but such inventiveness in the face of the paucity of pre-existing sexual categories actually has a much older provenance, as essays in this volume make clear. Methodologically speaking, then, “people like different things” might serve as a form of permission to acknowledge the critical value of highlighting surprising resonances between our own sexual desires, practices, and pleasures and [2] those that we see represented in historical texts. After all, if people like different things, it’s no small feat to find someone who seems to like the same things (or at least similar ones) even if that “person” is fictional, or centuries old, or both. But “people like different things” can also serve as a catchword for a critical impulse to be open to the possibility of finding and taking seriously early modern desires, practices, and pleasures that might not look like something we would want, or do, or like. One of the foundational convictions of this collection is that we must find ways to exceed the bounds of our own individual sexual imaginations in our analyses of historical sexual cultures.

In 1984, in an essay that would retrospectively be marked as one of the origin points of queer studies, the feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin argued for a “concept of benign sexual variation” that might loosen prevailing forms of sexual normalization in both the academy and the broader public sphere.^[1] In the wake of Rubin’s work, and the work of other foundational LGBT and queer studies scholars, such a critical concept of benign sexual variation — a recognition that people liking different things is no cause for concern, moralizing, or legal intervention — has indeed guided much work on sexuality. In early modern studies, in particular, this concept has undergirded a robust set of scholarship on sodomy and homoeroticism.^[2] But despite widespread critical consensus [3] about the conceptual vagaries of “sodomy,” the pervasiveness of early modern homoeroticism, and the anachronism of conceiving of early modern sexuality in terms of modern sexual identity categories like “straight” or “gay,” early modernists have only recently, and still somewhat rarely, come to excavate, describe, and analyze representations of sexual desires, practices, and pleasures that are not primarily organized around the gender of object choice and that often lie orthogonal [4] to the sexual categories of early modern institutions like the church and the state.^[3] “Sodomy” and “homoeroticism,” in their capaciousness, point to a great many forms of sexual relation; but do they help us understand early moderns who found themselves enjoying being hit, or who played sexual roles (including the roles of animals like dogs or ponies), or who found objects like fluids to be erotically charged? By asking such questions, The Kinky Renaissance attempts to expand both the archive of and our concepts for understanding early modern sexuality. The essays in this volume thus seek to leverage the sexual nuances of contemporary kink cultures in order to shift the ground of early modern sexuality studies.^[4]

Because many readers may not be familiar with the “sexual nuances of contemporary kink cultures,” some definitions are in order. In contemporary usage, kink is both an umbrella term for sexual subcultures and a catalyst for expanding the conceptual parameters of desire and pleasure. It encompasses a wide variety of practices and identities including, [5] but not limited to, various forms of bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism (BDSM); fetishism; and sexual role play. Some individuals — “kinksters” — might identify with a particular practice. One might encounter Dominants (also referred to as Doms or tops) and submissives (subs or bottoms), as well as “switches” who might play either role. Beyond these BDSM labels, some kinksters identify as fetishists (or, more specifically, as foot fetishists, or shoe fetishists, or leather fetishists, etc.); spankos (those who enjoy spanking play); or furries (those who enjoy animal-themed play), just to name a few. Crucially, such kinky identities form and are formed by sexual communities with their own counterpublic spheres: social networks like FetLife; subcultures of mainstream social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok; newsletters; group texts; clubs; and all sorts of parties and gatherings.^[5] Perhaps more than any other form of sexual categorization, “kink” is largely organized around being in community with others who share similar desires, practices, and pleasures.

Though many of these sexual communities form around specific kinks, rather than the umbrella concept of “kink,” the broader kink community shares an underlying concept of benign sexual variation and a conviction that everyone should have a right to sexual autonomy: people like different things, and they should get to like what they like, play how they want to play, and identify however they would like to identify. Importantly, such convictions are also premised on a community-wide commitment to consensual encounters and to care for others, in the broadest sense. Kink play, as kink communities have long avowed, should be Safe, Sane, and Consensual (SSC). More recently, kinksters have begun to speak of Risk-Aware Consensual Kink (RACK), a formulation that seeks both to avoid the potentially shaming and derogatory [2] aspects of the word “sane” and to acknowledge the potential dangers of even consensual kink play. In either formulation, consent is assumed to be a primary, authorizing value.

In addition to these more readily identifiable sexual categories and communities, kink also has the capacity to point to amorphous desires that do not take categorical shapes. For instance, “kink” might point toward contingent, fleeting forms of eroticization — often but not always non-genital — that open up various, supposedly non-erotic parts of the body to pleasure. Tickling, pinching, spanking, rubbing, dressing, sniffing, licking, flicking, twisting, tying, clamping, burning, icing: any of these actions might be “kinky,” insofar as they render forms of bodily contact (or the tease of contact, as in certain forms of sexual “edging”) erotic. Though any of these actions might lead to sexual identities and communities — like, for example, the spanko community — they needn’t necessarily. Indeed, they need not even solidify into long-standing desires and practices on the part of any individual actor. One might desire forms of kinky, inventive sexual play without desiring to recapitulate previous practices. One day playing with ice may be hot; the next it might just be cold again. Unlike sexual identity categories that are (at least in the medico-legal sphere, if not necessarily in people’s actual lives) assumed to be innate and largely immutable across a lifetime — the view, for instance, that one simply “is” straight, or gay, or bi — kinks might be fleeting or perpetual, fading or enduring. As an analytic category, then, kink can encourage us to think about sexual desires, practices, and pleasures not only as historically contingent but as individually contingent. At both the macro scale of populations and the micro scale of individuals, sex lives vary.^[6]

Two further terms bind together these multiple axes of kinky thinking and practice, and both serve as key concepts for many of the essays in[7] this collection: scenes and play. Kinksters often refer to their practices as “play,” emphasizing both kink’s ethos of erotic creativity and its telos of pleasure — even when that playful pleasure derives from pain or humiliation. Because one consents to kink play, forms of constraint — whether physical (like ropes) or psychic (like fears) — can be transformed in the play space into new types of freedom. “Play” is also a capacious kink term, one that attaches itself promiscuously to a variety of different practices. One can often turn something kinky simply by naming it as a form of “play.” For instance, those who eroticize the (carefully controlled) restriction of breathing might say that they engage in “breath play.”

Many kinksters, especially those who engage in forms of BDSM or other roleplaying, organize their play into “scenes.” Scenes mark the boundaries of play by offering participants mental (and sometimes physical) entrances and exits into roles, fantasies, and practices. A scene might be elaborately set, with props and toys, clothing and gear, or it might simply be a mental landscape for participants to enter together. Some scenes may be scripted, but others may simply be a set of guidelines for play. Some kinksters get off on rules; others play more loosely, though still within predetermined bounds. Both “play” and “scenes,” of course, are theatrical, and many of the essays in this collection thus find surprising parallels between early modern and contemporary kink cultures of playing, playgoing, and scene-making.

As one can see from this brief overview, the contemporary use of “kink” indexes wide and vibrant lexical, conceptual, and social fields. The word itself, though, has a much longer history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, “kink” began its life in English in the eleventh century as a form of breath play. To “kink (v.1)” is “to gasp convulsively for breath, lose the breath spasmodically, as in hooping-cough or a severe fit of laughing.” Though this particular use largely fell out of fashion by the end of the nineteenth century, it persisted as one of the primary — indeed, often the only — definitions of kink in early modern [8] dictionaries into and throughout the eighteenth century.^[7] Alongside this breathless kink, “kink” also morphed in the late-seventeenth century into a kind of rope play: “A short twist or curl in a rope, thread, hair, wire, or the like” (s.v. “kink [n.1],” 1.a) or, more broadly, “a sudden bend in a line, course, or the like that is otherwise straight or smoothly curved” (s.v. “kink [n.1],” 1.b). Across the past three centuries, these material meanings have supported various figurative meanings, including “an odd or fantastic notion” (s.v. “kink [n.1],” 2.a) or “an odd but clever method of doing something” (s.v. “kink [n.1],” 2.b). Perhaps most importantly, in American slang, the noun “kink” can also name a wide variety of those who bend the course of society’s “otherwise straight or smoothly curved” normative cis white heterosexual subjects: “a black person”; “a criminal”; or “a person whose sexual preferences or behaviour is regarded as abnormal or peculiar” (s.v. “kink [n.1],” 3.a, 3.b, 3.c).^[8] Thus, as these definitions suggest, and as many of the essays in this collection will bear out, a kinky analytic entails attending to the convergences of logics of sexual shaming and denigration, racialization, and criminalization. Such convergences are built into the word itself: to “kink” a text is to “twist” it, even “to catch or get entangled” (s.v. “kink [v.2],” 1) in this web of logics. This collection thus approaches kink intersectionally, taking it as a critical catalyst for analyzing the knotty entanglements of various forms of embodiment, desire, practice, pleasure, and fantasy that both circumscribe and underwrite the life possibilities of early modern subjects. [9]

Kinky Reading

Given these definitions of kink, what does a kinky reading practice look like? It might begin by following the “short twists” and “sudden bends” in an otherwise smooth line of early modern verse or prose. Take for example an ordinary, even banal, exchange in William Middleton and Thomas Rowley’s The Changeling (1622). Here is the first line of dialogue between Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna:

What was he going to say? Why does she interject so suddenly, and why bend his line in this direction? It is a critical commonplace to call this a shared line, but the word “shared” is a bit too harmonious; it misses the tension that splits subject from predicate, servant from mistress. “Shared” tells only part of the story — the part where Beatrice-Joanna completes Deflores’s line — but it misses the part where she steals his line from him, an inchoate form of breath play that sets the tone for a stifling erotic relationship that leaves them both breathless. The power in their opening exchange lies not in its content but in its form: a stolen breath, a twist in the verse. Together, Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna make a kinky line.

To call something kinky — especially something that does not seem explicitly or clearly sexual — can enchant it, opening our ears to the [10] erotic currents that run beneath or beside or even against it. Taken in this way, the word “kinky” can have a performative, even incantatory quality. Applying the word where we do not expect to find it helps us notice the erotic potential in an offhand remark, a fleeting encounter, an unassuming line of verse. Was that potential always there waiting to be activated by the “abracadabra” of “kinky!”, or does calling something kinky make it so? Yes to both, but also no, and certainly not all the time. As the essays in this volume make clear, kink is a plural concept, meaningful in different ways to different people in different contexts. This plurality and openness to interpretation is both exciting and terrifying, as the stakes are often so high. Kinky scenes can look a lot like oppression, after all, because they are so often drawn from the most serious breaches of ethics — sexual violence, nonconsent, enslavement, and abduction, to name only a few. Much of what makes something kinky is its wrongness. So: What do we do with the wrongness of Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna, especially in their early exchanges when the lady so plainly does not consent?

Annabel Patterson’s introduction to The Changeling is attuned to this wrongness and the critical impasse it creates. Of the “protagonist’s consummated sexual relationship,” Patterson describes an “electric charge [that] disables or at least disrupts our evaluative reflexes.”^[10] This electric charge does not appear out of nowhere, and tracing its origins is perhaps the most disrupting task of all. Does the first spark ignite at the kink in Beatrice-Joanna and Deflores’s opening line? Do the lady’s repeated protestations of her revulsion for Deflores stymie that charge, or do they catalyze it? And how does this charged current wend its way through what is arguably the play’s most tense and problematic scene, the blackmail scene? There can be no doubt in act three, scene four, that Deflores demands sex with Beatrice-Joanna in exchange for murdering her [11] betrothed, no doubt that she refuses him. No scholarship exists on the erotics of this scene and with good reason: it feels, frankly, too tricky and too icky even to suggest that there is anything erotic in this encounter beyond the scope of Deflores’s own myopic fantasies. But that does not stop audiences and readers from experiencing a range of layered and often conflicting responses to what they see and hear between Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna: disgust, curiosity, horror, wonder, anger, arousal. Structurally and affectively, this scene itself functions as a kink in the play; it “disables, or at least disrupts” our critical attentions to its erotic energies. If there is a charge to this scene, one thing is clear: what makes it icky also makes it hot.

A kinky analytic, then, makes available an apparatus for thinking through scenes that don’t fall neatly into our feminist and queer modes of processing. It gives us a point of entry into rooms that feel locked because it starts from the premise that “someone finds this hot” — and, crucially, it affirms that person’s desires. Unlocking the door to The Changeling’s blackmail scene is not about uncovering a hidden BDSM relationship between Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna since we know this cannot exist without her consent; it is, though, about acknowledging that someone finds this hot. (To be fair, lots of people probably do.) The formal kink in their opening line of dialogue unlocks something by tuning our ears to other kinks in the pair’s linguistic rhythms that run throughout The Changeling’s erotics of shame and humiliation; its fascination with bondage and enclosure; its mingling of sex and violence; its scenes of object fetishism; its voyeurism; and its triangulated (sometimes quadrangulated) erotic configurations. Like a line of verse, kink is characterized by its attention to form. It is rule bound, even as it plays with rules and tests its own boundaries. The formal kink in Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna’s opening line characterizes the erotic tension that builds as they steal each other’s breath again and again throughout the play to [12] tell clashing stories, all the while making new stories together, however incoherent and unbidden.

On the page, the kinky line creates a visual effect that patterns the reading practices we often apply to the play. With the two halves of the line stacked vertically but staggered horizontally, we see some of what we already know of The Changeling. Read vertically, it is a play about power, domination, and competing hierarchies of class and gender. But scholars like Christine Varnado and Patricia Cahill have also traced the horizontal currents that run across The Changeling — the homoerotic charge of Alonzo’s proleptic “O, o, o” (3.2.19) when Deflores stabs him, and the queer erotics of touch, surfaces, and skin in Deflores’s manipulations of Beatrice-Joanna’s glove or in Beatrice-Joanna stroking his “hard face” (2.2.88).^[11] The play’s queer energies often run counter to its top-down power structures and exist outside the vertical economy of Middleton and Rowley’s play.

A kinky reading practice follows erotic vectors that point in both directions, and it acknowledges that the play’s queer desires and pleasures exist not only within its vertical hierarchy but also because of it. For example, the scene of sexual blackmail is governed by top-down (and bottom-up) power: servant blackmails mistress, man assaults woman.^[12] But within the power hierarchies that structure the scene — hierarchies that should theoretically put more distance between Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna — a linguistic symmetry draws the two characters claustrophobically close. Although Deflores and Beatrice-Joanna are unable [13] or unwilling to hear each other, somehow they absorb and co-opt each other’s language again and again. True to kinky form, these symmetries appear precisely in the moments when a character performs their power — when Deflores threatens, when Beatrice-Joanna asserts “the distance that creation / Set ’twixt thy blood and mine” (3.4.133–34). Their power struggle makes possible a linguistic intimacy that comes to characterize their erotic relationship in the remainder of the play. Here are two examples of this kinky formalism from the blackmail scene. In both pieces of dialogue, Beatrice tries to leverage her social authority and Deflores steals her words, twisting them into new meanings in a shared line that both splits them and joins them together. First,

And again,

At times, Beatrice-Joanna and Deflores seem to speak two different languages. He cannot comprehend her “talk of modesty” and neither can she understand Deflores’s intentions: “I understand him not” (3.4.70); “I’m in a labyrinth” (3.4.73); “I know not what will please him!” (3.4.78); “What’s your meaning?” (3.4.85). But every misfire between them — every kink in their conversation — brings them closer together, until the end when Deflores zeroes them both out completely: “my life I rate at nothing” (3.4.152), while Beatrice he rates as “no more” than “what the act has made you” (3.4.138). Who is on top here? In practical terms, it must be Deflores. But his language tells another story in which both are on bottom, both submissive to some unknowable force from outside: “the act” or “the deed.” When Deflores confesses earlier in the scene that “this act / hath put me into a spirit” (3.4.106–7), he plays on the indeterminacy of words like “act” and “deed” — both repeated at length in the play, and in this scene — and tethers the murder of Alonzo to any number of unnamed, imagined (or unimaginable) erotic activities. If Deflores has the power here, why does this newfound authority arouse fantasies about closing the gap that separates him from Beatrice-Joanna? It is as though the vertical makes possible the horizontal:

Is this a fantasy of domination or of consummation? Or both? Deflores begins this speech by declaring himself Beatrice-Joanna’s “equal” (3.4.136) in her conscience, and he concludes in a similar key: “the deed” has “made [them] one.” Flattening out hierarchies, Deflores imagines sexual intimacy with Beatrice-Joanna as a likeness or merging. But the middle of his speech tells a competing story of her submission to Deflores: she “must forget [her] parentage to [him].” Now the play’s hierarchies are stretched and strained rather than smoothed over, with Deflores on top as Beatrice-Joanna’s new daddy, even as the two characters are “made … one.” Deflores’s language is a familiar one in the context of contemporary kink culture, especially the conventions of BDSM, which can include prolonged scenes of negotiation, roles like a daddy or a princess, sexual violence, and erotic intimacies that are framed as both lateral and vertical at the same time. That the play never fully bears out these familiar scripts — Beatrice-Joanna plainly does not consent — does not cancel them out for an audience whose ears are tuned to them. Beatrice-Joanna’s ears are not, and because she is either unable or unwilling to recognize these scripts, Deflores repeats them, unfolding his fantasies again and again in language Beatrice-Joanna describes as “bold and vicious” (3.4.122). The curious effect of this reiteration is that the scene begins to sound like one long kinky line. Deflores speaks, Beatrice-Joanna echoes his language with a difference (cf. Deflores: “And made you one with me,” then Beatrice-Joanna: “With thee, foul villain?”), and then he rephrases, adds, and emends, twisting and bending fantasies that gain intensity and lose their coherence with each iteration. He claims to be her “partner” (3.4.158) even as she makes him her “master” (3.4.159), and somehow both end up being true by the end of the play.

In clarifying the formal intricacies of Middleton and Rowley’s language, a kinky analytic also brings to light the political significance of this eroticization of power — the knotty imbrication of fantasies of domination and fantasies of mutuality, the twisting of the vertical and [16] the horizontal. Indeed, because many forms of kink take their charge from ratcheting up, reversing, or diffusing power hierarchies, kink is a particularly fecund avenue for analyzing the intersections of gender, race, and class, especially as those categories manifest themselves in the actual lived experience of sexual practice. As Amber Jamilla Musser has argued, “Masochism [and, we might add, kink more generally] is a powerful diagnostic tool,” one that “lays bare concepts of race, gender, power, and subjectivity.”^[13] In fact, kink — and BDSM practices in particular — served just such a diagnostic function when it became one of the primary political flashpoints of the so-called “feminist sex wars” of the late 1970s and ’80s.^[14] For many feminists of that era, BDSM (and pornography more generally) marked the apotheosis of the sexual subordination of women. For instance, in her reflections on the feminist sex wars, Gayle Rubin notes that groups like the San Francisco–based Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), a precursor to and contemporary of the more well-known, New York–based Women Against Pornography (WAP), conflated BDSM with pornography and both with “violence against women, and female subordination.”^[15] These groups thus interpreted the sexual proclivities and consensual practices of kinky women as, at best, a form of false consciousness inculcated by a violent patriarchy and, at worst, simply abuse. As the feminist journalist Catherine Scott notes in her study of pop cultural representations of [17] kink, “The misreading of BDSM as indistinguishable from abuse is one that dogs the mainstream public perception of kink” to this day.^[16]

But, as Scott also argues, to claim that BDSM is necessarily sexual violence, one must ignore or discount the voices and testimony of a great many women who avow kinky desires and who consent to kinky sex. Such disavowals, sex-radical feminists like Rubin note, amount to a form of condescension that is surprisingly misogynist in its structure: “Those women don’t know what’s good for them.” Scott also points out that such disavowals are surprisingly condescending toward kinky men as well:

Ultimately, non-kinksters and anti-kink feminists can and will wring their hands over what they perceive as terrible men who’ve brainwashed women into thinking they want such awful things done to them. What they fail to realize is that plenty of dominant men are already practicing self-analysis and agonizing over their desires, and that what is most liberating for these men is the realization that their female partners desire and enjoy kink play — it is the perpetuation of the myth that women are passive, easily brainwashable idiots with no agency or sexual identity of their own which hinders that. And it is precisely that myth that anti-kink feminists are spreading, hardly much of a victory for women.^[17]

In addition to discounting the personal desires of women who find pleasure and fulfillment in consensual scenes of submission, Scott points out, anti-kink feminists also install men as necessarily, even essentially, violent and exploitative. But, both in her interviews with other kink practitioners and in her own experience in BDSM communities, Scott notes that men who find pleasure and fulfillment in consensual scenes of domination often engage in quite a bit of self-reflection about the potential [18] political ramifications of their sexual desires. (One wishes the same could be said more widely for men who engage in non-kinky sexual practices.)

Kink is not merely a useful diagnostic of fault lines in feminist theorizing and activism, though. In addition to these long-standing debates about the relationship between kinky sex and gender politics, kinksters of color and, more recently, scholars of kink have also reflected explicitly and at length on the structuring capacities of racialization, race thinking, and racism in kink. As Ariane Cruz and Musser make clear in their monographs on the racialization of kink, BDSM, in particular, is a key site where sexuality and race organize and disorganize themselves. For instance, in The Color of Kink, Cruz deploys “BDSM as a critical aperture for elucidating the dynamics of racialized shame, humiliation, and pleasure that undergird the genre of commercial contemporary interracial pornography in the United States.”^[18] For Cruz, pornographic representations of interracial BDSM practices are generative for “reinvigorating debates about pleasure, domination, and perversion in the context of black female sexuality” because they dramatize the interrelation of race, sexuality, and gender not merely as abstract concepts but as visceral, embodied experiences.^[19] What’s more, in Cruz’s analysis, racialized BDSM perverts dominant narratives of racial domination and submission, cathecting scenes of abjection and disempowerment with an erotic charge that can scramble preconceived vectors of power. It may be the case, Cruz asks us to contemplate, that bondage is exciting to some Black women not despite but precisely because of its citation of slavery. While Cruz’s primary interventions lie in kink studies and Black feminism, her analysis of a wide variety of “race play” (“a BDSM practice that explicitly plays with race,”^[20] in her definition) ultimately reveals that race [19] — including whiteness — structures all forms of kink, even ones that don’t take their charge from the histories that suffuse the interracial play that is her monograph’s focus. One of the implications of Cruz’s analysis of the racialization of kink is that two white kinksters playing together will derive part of their pleasure (and pleasurable danger) precisely from their whiteness, as will two Black kinksters from their Blackness, or two Asian kinksters, etc. As Cruz argues, “Domination and submission are not just mechanisms of power but also modes of pleasure.”^[21] The pervasive currents of domination and submission that we call “race,” then, will be central to both the power and the pleasures of kink. As Kirk Quinsland points out in his essay in this volume, this is as true in early modern England as it is in twenty-first-century America. The essays in this collection are thus driven by a critical conviction that kink’s capacity to unveil and reformulate entrenched conceptions and hierarchies in one vector of power (e.g., race) cannot be disentangled from its enmeshment in other vectors of power (e.g., gender).

The Contours of Kink Studies

If you will permit a bit of armchair sociology: kinksters seem preternaturally disposed to reading. Perhaps because they are subject to such vitriol in the public sphere — even from some of those in the queer community who one might assume would be committed to a “benign theory of sexual variation” — kinksters for decades have developed a robust series of newsletters, zines, mailing lists, blogs, forums, chatrooms, YouTube channels, and even monographs. A partial list of authors of the latter would include: Patrick Califia, Catherine Scott, Margot Weiss, Mollena Williams, and Jay Wiseman.^[22] Scholars have also produced historical [20] studies of particular practices like flagellation, as well as more wide-ranging studies of the philosophical underpinnings of kink concepts — particularly masochism, which has served as an anchor for a whole host of critics working across time periods.^[23]The Kinky Renaissance thus brings recent work on actual BDSM practices and experiences into conversation with the extensive body of research on the concept of masochism in literary and cultural studies. Though the M comprises only one letter of the acronym, theorists of sexuality from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to Gilles Deleuze and Leo Bersani have set it apart from the B, D, and even the S.^[24] Rita Felski classifies masochism among “the most perplexing … of the terms bequeathed to us by the fathers of sexology,” with wildly conflicting descriptions:

Masochism has been depicted as craven submission or as willful revolt, as a form of radical self-shattering or the epitome of ironic self-consciousness. In one account, the masochistic script is an extreme instance of psychic rigidity and compulsive sexual need; from another perspective, it is the epitome of playfulness and theatricality. Some writers view masochism as an aberration; others see [21] it as a quasi-universal condition that lies at the core of human sexuality.^[25]

Common to many of these accounts is a tendency towards abstraction, in part because so many theorists (following Freud) locate masochism at the core of selfhood, ego development, and relationality. Theorizing masochism in these ways can disembody it, unkink it, and desexualize it altogether, as science journalist Leigh Cowart notes in her 2021 book Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose: “While masochism can definitely be about sex, it doesn’t always have to be …. Sex may be the gateway drug to getting us to talk about masochism, but masochism is so much more than kink.”^[26] The Kinky Renaissance resituates masochism in its kinky context — sex, in our view, is much more than a “gateway drug” — but our work is also indebted to studies of masochism that take a more philosophical approach, including the foundational writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade. Although Sade and Sacher-Masoch approach sexuality in different ways (Deleuze famously claims that sadism and masochism are fundamentally incompatible), their work shares a common focus on idealization. Sade’s libertine thrills not to a person or a body or even a sensation but to an ideal — the prospect of total chaos, delirious destruction. The sadistic hero thus reaches for “what is not here,” or “pure negation.”^[27] Likewise, the masochistic hero reaches toward an ideal — what Sacher-Masoch calls “supersensualism” — through the process of disavowal, [22] “question[ing] the validity of the existing reality in order to create a pure ideal reality.”^[28] Sacher-Masoch’s writings are “free from obscenity,” according to Deleuze: “He has a particular way of ‘desexualizing’ love and at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity.”^[29] In Sade’s yearning for pure negation and in Sacher-Masoch’s supersensualism, sexuality is instrumentalized — sometimes subordinated altogether — by an idea.

Early modernists in particular have found in masochism an opportunity to explore the instability of the humanist subject or self. As Cynthia Marshall writes in The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts,

Nothing preys on the humanist model of the self-identical subject, however, like the concept of masochism. Where the existence of the unconscious introduces a structural inconsistency in the subject, masochism entails a dynamic one — a more truly paradoxical, because essentially active, movement of the self against the self, rather than the merely static existence of an elusive, internal otherness.^[30]

Marshall draws from psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan, Jean Laplanche, and Bersani) to foreground the role of masochism — the impulse to negate selfhood — in the formation of the early modern subject. The concept of masochism, its pleasures and its paradoxes, helps Marshall account for the proliferation of texts that enable audiences to experience the pleasures of self-shattering during a period defined by [23] “the so-called birth of subjectivity.”^[31] Other scholars of early modern sexuality have turned to masochism to analyze a broad range of early modern characters, relationships, and affects: Antonio’s melancholy in The Merchant of Venice (Drew Daniel); Iago’s theory of mind in Othello (Paul Cefalu); Antony and Cleopatra’s longing for “the lover’s pinch” (Lisa S. Starks; Gillian Knoll); and the unrequited love/lust of Shakespeare’s two Helenas (Melissa E. Sanchez, Jillian Keenan, and Gillian Knoll in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and James Kuzner in All’s Well That Ends Well).^[32] Along with work on sexuality are early modern studies of “social masochism” (Hugh McIntosh) and “political masochism” (Amanda Bailey).^[33] While the word “kink” makes few appearances in this scholarship, it is clear that the concept of kink as a set of actual practices and communities is a quiet presence. The Kinky Renaissance turns up the volume.

As this insistence on the value of kink’s sexual practices and communities to broader literary concerns might suggest, one of the many critical [24] desires that led to this collection was the desire to reformulate the terms of queer analysis in early modern studies. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observed long ago, “queer” has both minoritizing and universalizing axes: on the one hand, some of us are queer, insofar as our sexual desires, practices, and lives are organized primarily outside of or against normative formations; on the other hand, because desire is slippery, anyone or anything might, in the right light or the right mood, become or be seen as queer, if only temporarily. Kink has its own analogous axes. As we discuss above, some people identify as kinky — or, more specifically, as Doms, subs, switches, spankos, princesses, furries, etc.; in this vein, as some of our contributors argue, kinky sexual communities, if not necessarily identities, were also operative in early modern England. But kink also has its own universalizing tendencies since it serves as an umbrella term for a wide variety of sexual practices, desires, fantasies, and communities. Most broadly, one of the promises of kink is that the possibilities of desire may not be predetermined — predetermined by anything, really: identity, the church, the state, or even the body’s capacities for pleasure. What could be more universalizing than an investment in a limitless capacity to find just about anything hot?

Kink, though, is not equivalent to queer. While “queer” often positions itself against norms, kink also points to practices and desires that are sometimes beside norms and sometimes within them, such as BDSM practices that take some of their erotic energy from intensifying normative power hierarchies, taking them to the extreme. Indeed, while some kinksters may find pleasure in forms of resisting or subverting norms (being “naughty”), others delight in practices, fantasies, and images that are simply orthogonal to the normative membrane of sexuality altogether. “Water sports,” for instance (the name for various forms of kink play involving urine), may indeed draw on the sexual energy of engaging in taboo, but “anti-normative” hardly seems to capture either the appeal or the political significance of being pissed on. Kink thus offers an [25] opportunity to reconsider queer theory’s own self-organizing impulses and to find new ways of imagining and analyzing forms of sexual pleasure and sexual politics that are not defined, in the first instance, around the conceptually straitening nexus of “normativity.” The Kinky Renaissance, then, seeks to offer a wide variety of ways of doing “queer theory without anti-normativity,” as Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson suggest in a recent special issue of differences.^[34]

Similarly, because kink communities explicitly center consent (recall the Safe, Sane, and Consensual or Risk-Aware Consensual Kink monikers), one of the affordances of kinky thinking is that it allows us to reconsider the concept of consent, at least provisionally, outside of the framework of adjudicating assault. To be sure, certain forms of kinky sex take their torque from their proximity to forms of bodily or emotional injury, and in this sense “consent” within kink is intimately bound up with issues of harm, violation, and the boundaries of assault. But whereas legal frameworks of consent primarily pose the question, “What constitutes an actionable violation of bodily autonomy and rights?” — that is, when is sexual activity so sufficiently harmful that the state should intervene and enact punishment? — kinky frameworks of consent primarily pose the question, “How can we mutually build an infrastructure to support our desires?”^[35] As a legal category, consent purports to name the boundaries of, and thus to proleptically defend against, a sexual violation; as a kinky category, consent seeks to name the boundaries of, and thus to make possible the realization of, otherwise unnamed desires. [26]

Indeed, it is this recognition and elevation of the unnamed and unimagined that makes kink so powerful, both as a set of practices and as a methodological guide for queer theory and the history of sexuality. Like any good analytic, kink enlivens our capacity to notice, to pay attention. As the essays in this volume attest, and as we hope the brief reading of The Changeling at the beginning of this essay suggested, the pleasures of kinky thinking primarily derive from intensely close readings of texts, bodies, practices, desires, and fantasies. A common sentiment among the essays in this volume is that, as Gina Filo argues, kink “open[s] up” new vistas on a wide variety of pleasures, power relations, and even formalist concerns. Such an opening works in at least two ways: kink encourages us to think, of course, about the specificity of desire’s psychic life (e.g., fantasies), but kink also encourages us to think more closely about the body’s material capacities (e.g., how and where its sensations might become pleasures). Various essays in this volume follow one or the other — or sometimes both — of these analytic tracks as they trace the contours of kinky sexuality, and of kinky literary representation, in early modern England.

Beyond its penchant for enlivening our capacities for close reading, kink is useful to think with in all sorts of ways. Theoretically speaking, it pitches a big tent: because it libidinizes gendered and racial power hierarchies, kink needs — and poses useful questions for — feminism and critical race theory. Because it entails tracing the psychic contours of sexual fantasies, kink invites psychoanalytic methods. Because it offers ways of exploring new sensations, pleasures, and intimacies that do not include or require sexual attraction, kink aligns with studies of asexuality and aromanticism that challenge compulsory sexuality.^[36] [27] And because kinky communities are, by definition, socially marginalized (not to mention, often, ostracized), kink converges with major questions in social theory about the construction and boundaries of autonomy and the public sphere. Which is to say: if you care about how people share a world, then you can, and perhaps should, care about kink.

The methodological affordances of kink might be distilled, at least in part, into the following set of propositions:

1. Kink focuses our attention on the particularities of sexual desires beyond the gender of object choice, beyond genital stimulation, and beyond teleologies of orgasm.
2. Kink unsettles received notions of power within sexual interactions.
3. Relatedly, kink also unsettles received notions about the centrality of “norms” and “normativity” to the constitution of sexual life. That is, kink is transgressive without necessarily being non- or anti-normative.
4. Kink reconfigures our understanding of the artistic processes and concerns of even highly canonical early modern writers.
5. Kink points us to new archives of early modern sexual life.

Importantly, kink, as a critical analytic, opens up this theoretical and methodological space regardless of the kind of sexual practices and desires that are being examined. Which is to say: thinking kink makes even supposedly unkinky (sometimes called “vanilla”) sex more critically interesting. [28]

What These Essays Do

The essays in this volume originated in a seminar at the 2021 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA); all of our contributors thus focus primarily on English literary texts. This geographical and historical boundary is borne largely of convenience rather than a conviction that there is necessarily something uniquely kinky about early modern England. Of course, early modern English literature has kinks of its own, along with unique ways of representing and understanding broader, more familiar kinks like cuckoldry and sexual flagellation. In seventeenth-century English pornography, for example, scenes of sexual flagellation were thought to enhance fertility by producing more copious ejaculate (both male and female) and by elevating body temperature. Sarah Toulalan offers a culturally specific account of the fixation on the flagellant’s reddening flesh as “a visual indicator of the body’s raised heat.”^[37] Red marks are kinky for different reasons in other times, places, and communities — the display of bruises and reddening skin is a staple of contemporary spanko porn — and we hope the essays in this volume will contribute to a more capacious understanding of kink within and beyond the boundaries of early modern England. We hope, in fact, that readers with expertise in other national and linguistic traditions will find inspiration in these pages to produce work in their respective fields, as well as comparative work across place, language, and time. Indeed, because the concept of “kink” will vary across the different sexual configurations of different cultures, what is kinky in one context might be perfectly vanilla in another.^[38]

Our contributors offer intensely close readings of early modern English literature in order to help us understand the sexual specificity of that [29] particular time and place. James Mulder, for instance, offers a remarkably nuanced close reading of the erotics of the “rough, gauzy, pliant, slippery textures, sweet scents, and soft sounds” that are animated in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Such a kinky focus on the libidinal powers of “sensory stimuli” allows him to “deprioritize both penetration and genital contact” and to think sex “radically otherwise than in the binarizing terms of power, domination, and subordination.” Resisting what he calls the “gravitational pull” of penetration in early modern sexuality studies, Mulder’s focus on non-penetrative and non-genital pleasures brings new insight both to the poem and to our understanding of the early modern sexual landscape.

In her contribution to this volume, Erika Carbonara emphasizes the importance of community to understanding kink in both its contemporary and early modern formations. Rather than understanding “cuckoldry” to be merely a catchword for social anxieties about women’s chastity and men’s sexual dupery, Carbonara looks both to early modern drama and more ephemeral cultural artifacts like pamphlets and ballads to argue that some early modern men in fact desired to be, and found pleasure in being, cuckolded, not least because it offered a socio-sexual axis along which they could form communities with other “contented” cuckolds.

Similarly revising long-standing critical narratives, Gina Filo’s essay reevaluates a critical consensus about the supposedly disordered, disgusting, and misogynist sexuality of Robert Herrick’s poetry. In her reading of Hesperides, Filo finds instead a “far wider, queerer array of nonpathological and nonpathologized pleasures and positions for the early modern sexual subject than is often assumed possible.” Inviting us to reclaim Herrick’s perversities as instances of benign sexual variation, Filo reframes a familiar poet whose works are frequently anthologized and taught in the undergraduate classroom. In her deft close readings, topoi from the Petrarchan pain tradition are interwoven with kinky [30] pleasures like “switchy bondage play” to reveal “a veritable buffet of varieties of sexual expression” that have gone largely unnoticed by studies of Herrick’s work.

Where these first essays critically reevaluate seemingly familiar poets and sexual identities, some essays in the collection leverage the concept of kink to reconsider thorny feminist and queer questions about power, consent, and sexual ethics. Erin Kelly, for instance, explores the role of consent in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, a play whose uneven reception history mostly hinges on the question of Katherine’s consent to Petruchio’s treatment. Kelly observes that Petruchio and Katherine are hardly ever alone onstage (arguably never alone, with Christopher Sly in the stalls) and thus extends the question of consent to sex “in the midst of the street.” Drawing from research on the play’s reception history and legal proceedings involving public sex, Kelly proposes that “The Taming of the Shrew raises questions about the ethics and legality of kink that go beyond a couple’s negotiated agreements to consider what type of consent (if any) should be sought from those who witness or, through their presence, become de facto partakers in a kinky encounter.”

Attuned to another ethically fraught scene in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1610), Nathaniel Leonard makes the case that the play indexes forms of kinky sexual practice and knowledge that circulated in the early modern English imagination. The centerpiece of Leonard’s chapter is a scene of sexual bondage that the King instantly and enthusiastically recognizes as “a pretty new device.” When his lover Evadne binds the King to his bed to enact her revenge, Leonard argues, the play stages a form of ritualized violence common to the genre of revenge tragedy. By attending to the generic features of revenge tragedy, Leonard contextualizes the long association of kinky sexual practices with (meta)theatricality and ritual.

In his essay, Kirk Quinsland looks to one of the most complex and controversial modern kinks — “race play,” the consensual eroticization [31] of racial domination — in order to reevaluate Shakespeare’s representation of interracial sex in Titus Andronicus (1594). Quinsland argues that the concept of “race play” helps us see that the racial significations of sexual desires and practices may sometimes be more rigid and disenfranchising for those outside of a given sexual relationship than they are for those inside of it. “What Tamora and Aaron experience as a way of playing within and playing with systems of racial signification,” Quinsland argues, “the Romans read as reinforcement of old stereotypes and boundaries and as a degradation of a White body tarnished by its sexual association with Blackness.” “This contradiction in signification,” he goes on to claim, “illustrates the need to create space for kink/sex that is pleasurable for its consenting participants, even if it violates external ethical norms.” Pleasure is, in Quinsland’s view, autotelic: it is not a means to an end but an end unto itself.

The final essays in the collection turn even more centrally to the relationship between kink and practices of literary representation. For instance, in her contribution to the volume, Beatrice Bradley introduces a “representational quandary” within both early modern poetry and contemporary hard-core pornography. The quandary is one of visibility — specifically of showing the climactic moment (the so-called “money shot”) in bareback porn films. Bradley’s essay locates a similar tension between the visual and the tactile in early modern “representations of the female body adorned with a liquid that vacillates between aestheticized droplets and amorphous muck.” Tracing the path of fluids such as tears and sweat along breasts, cheeks, and clasped hands in The Faerie Queene and Venus and Adonis, Bradley lingers over those moments when fluids elide and become indeterminate. In her account, “the problems of fluidic representation function to suggest not only climax … but also a displacement of pleasure and control, eliding distinctions between characters who involuntarily produce the fluid and those who come into contact with it.” [32]

Similarly, Heather Frazier draws on the contemporary kink concept of a “golden shower” — the eroticization of being pissed on — to open up space for noticing a particular trope in early modern drama that might have otherwise flown beneath our radars: women emptying their chamber pots on men. Turning to two plays by John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed (c. 1604–17) and The Captain (1612, co-written with Beaumont), Frazier argues that Fletcher frequently represents women “who sexually dominate men with their urine.” Such water sports are not, however, unequivocally pleasure-centered kink activities. Indeed, Frazier argues that “ultimately, the conservative messages of both plays underscore a significant limitation to the expression of female sexual desire in early seventeenth-century English drama, even sexual desire coded as kinky and subversive.” Frazier’s reading allows us to see that certain early modern dramatists could imagine sexual practices that today might be labeled “kinks,” even if such imagining is put to the service not of promoting pleasure but of shutting it down.

In the collection’s final essay, Gillian Knoll locates the “eroticized experience of being controlled” in John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon (1595). She argues that while Lyly’s Pandora — created by Nature solely for the purpose of propagating with shepherds — may seem to “begin as a heteronormative fantasy,” she nevertheless comes to embody the erotic position of the submissive. The language of BDSM — of scene setting, slut training, and topping from the bottom — allows Knoll to excavate from Lyly’s play a whole host of richly textured and nuanced desires within the broad, not-very-descriptive category of the “heteronormative.” From a kinky perspective, Knoll shows us, actively kneeling — choosing to give up power — can in fact itself be a source of intense power and desire.

Many kinksters, especially those who engage in particularly intense scenes, also engage in rituals of exiting and processing scenes, coming down from a high, returning to the world, and resolidifying both their [33] sense of self and their bond with their partner(s). Colloquially, such practices are known as “aftercare.” In her afterword to the volume, Christine Varnado argues that such practices of aftercare are also part and parcel of academic genres: not only the monograph and the edited collection, which frequently feature codas, epilogues, and afterwords, but even the academic conference. Reflecting on both the initial event of the 2021 SAA seminar at which many of these essays were first incubated — via Zoom, due to the ongoing pandemic — and on the critical, aesthetic, and sexual-theoretical affordances of the essays’ final iterations, Varnado emphasizes the forms of attention, thought, and imagination — as well as, ultimately, community and care — that each of our contributors enact. Excavating what she calls a “kink formalism” in these essays, Varnado suggests — and we enthusiastically agree — that the essays’ attention to the formal characteristics of early modern literature in fact open up new avenues for understanding the concept of kink even outside of early modernity. The stakes of these essays, that is, reverberate beyond their most immediate objects of study, redounding onto our contemporary conceptions of kink, of sexuality, and of literary criticism.

Why Kink Now?

We sympathize with the fact that some readers may find the topic of this volume needlessly provocative (at best) or (at worst) prurient. After all, why bother studying kink when there are so many more pressing social issues in the world today — not to mention in early modernity? Such critical objections are both understandable and quite old. As Gayle Rubin writes in “Thinking Sex,” “To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously [34] crazy about sexuality.”^[39] Rubin first published these words in 1984, but, sadly, they apply just as readily forty years later. The purpose of this volume is neither prurience nor provocation but coming to a fuller historical understanding of the possibilities of sexual life in early modern England. Because it is historical, this is an academic goal. But it is also a political goal, since this greater historical understanding is intended to redound back to the possibilities of sexual life in our own times.

Academically speaking, we hope this volume will serve as an invitation into a set of questions, reading practices, and modes of thought that might be unfamiliar to many readers, even those whose primary expertise lies in sexuality. Indeed, though some of our contributors come to early modern kink by way of expertise in sexuality studies, some have never before published on sexual topics. Ironically, the specificity of kink — over against the generality of something like “sexuality” writ large — is precisely what makes it so generative for such a wide array of scholars, since kink both opens its conceptual arms wide and also narrows our analyses down to what people want; what people do; and how, where, and with whom they do it in their daily lives. As the following essays bear out in great detail and with aplomb, this analytic-focusing also enlivens our investigations of literary representation and form. Early modern literature just looks different, in a variety of exciting ways, once you start thinking kink.

Relatedly, we also hope that this collection will offer kinky readers some historical and literary forebears. As scholars of queer and trans studies we have learned to be skeptical of the flattening effects of projects of historical recovery; at the same time, though, we understand the potential power of helping build entry points for identifications across time, what Valerie Traub once called “homo life support.”^[40] Building such entry points into the past can also create possibilities for connections [35] in the present — both by bringing together a variety of scholars in this volume who might not otherwise have congregated and by helping future readers validate their own kinky thinking. In her account of feminist debates about lesbian BDSM in the 1970s, Rubin cogently lays out the necessity of actively creating sexual communities: “Most of us,” she writes,

are born into and raised by straight families, educated in straight schools, and socialized by straight peer groups. Our upbringing does not provide us with the social skills, information, or routes of access into unconventional sexual lifestyles. We must find our way into those social spaces where we can meet partners, find friends, get validation, and participate in a community life which does not presuppose that we are straight.^[41]

Though somewhat rarefied, academic publications can often be a transformative site for providing this sort of validation and community. (Our continued citation of Rubin’s work suggests as much: finding her writing early in our academic careers made it easier for us not only to think sex but also to be who we wanted to be.) We hope that this volume will be one such transformative site for some of our readers.

Just as importantly, understanding early modern histories and representations of kink can also provide political ballasts for our current moment. In the United States, in particular, sexual freedoms have been curtailed sharply in recent years, from the vociferous debates about the exclusion of kink from Pride events to bans on drag performances to the devastating reversal of Roe v. Wade, which was announced just as we were finishing the first draft of this introduction. In delivering the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito, like many conservative justices before him, insisted that in order [36] to claim that a right that is not explicitly enumerated in the text of the Constitution is nevertheless protected under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, such a right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”^[42] In other cases questioning a right to sexual privacy — notably the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision upholding a Georgia sodomy law — justices have extended such a “history and tradition” test back further beyond “this Nation,” looking especially to English common law for guidance.^[43] As the contributors to Queering the Renaissance discussed thirty years ago, judicial rulings constraining sexual behavior are often based in such broad-scale historical generalizations about past sexual behavior (“it was ever thus”).^[44] While in these essays our contributors focus primarily on early modern England, it has long been acknowledged that the literary, cultural, social, and political environment of colonial America and the early republic was directly influenced by early modern England. One of the goals of this collection, therefore, is to provide an academically rigorous refutation of attempts to paint kink as a modern sexual aberration and thus one that might be policed by sweeping reference to the supposed sexual practices of the past. Just as abortion — its practices but also the communities formed by such practices — long predates the Constitution of the United States of America, so too do a wide variety of sexual practices and communities long predate — and thus produce — the formation of this country. We have been here. We are here. We will be here.