Articles Accepted in Journal
Abstract:
This essay contributes to recent debates in the study of
the history of sexuality that have developed out of a
comparison of a story from Apuleius’ Golden Ass and its
transformation by Boccaccio in the Decameron.
Addressing questions of book history, philology, and
textual transmission, it offers another perspective on the
problems of identity, temporality, and epistemology that
have been at the center of these debates and proposes
reorienting considerations of Foucault’s still-contested
role in the field by drawing on the underappreciated later
volumes of Foucault’s landmark History of Sexuality.
Rather than mining these stories for exemplary social
types or for information about past sex acts’ social
meanings, this essay uses philological and paratextual
materials to focalize these tales’ interpretive erotics,
complicate the temporal relationship between them, and
model a way of studying the history of sexuality that is
not tied to a history of social types, identities, or acts.