‘My Pintle onely shall my scepter bee’: Anarchy and the Politics of Queer Sex in Rochester and Cleland
- Naomi Wallace
- Aug 27
- 1 min read
Author Bio:
Naomi is an English Literature and History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in late-medieval English and Scottish literature, as well as queer theory and psychoanalysis. She is particularly interested in literature as a vehicle for memorialisation, and the intellectual project of mourning, and will be starting an MLitt in Medieval Studies at the University of St Andrews in September 2025. Outside of studying, she is an avid reader of contemporary literary fiction, and is particularly fond of the work of Jeanette Winterson.
Essay 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.
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