My Pintle onely shall my sceptre bee': Anarchy and the Politics of Queer Sex in Rochester and Cleland

Abstract

This essay reads Rochester's closet drama Sodom (1684) and John Cleland's pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), alongside emerging concepts of publicity, in terms of their discursive constructions of queer sex. Drawing upon psychoanalytical approaches, it first demonstrates the anarchical representations of sex between men, which is positioned as a threat to the heterosexual public sphere. It then turns to consider the invisibility of lesbian sexuality, both within the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary texts, but also in contemporary queer theory. Where sex between women is dismissed as mere foreplay to more substantive - phallic - intercourse, both texts emphasise the pervasive presence of sodomy. The potential for gay sex to disrupt the positional logic of heterosexual identification, ultimately, leads both Rochester and Cleland to representations of sodomy as pernicious, infectious, and dangerously anarchic.