The second part of Thomas King's ambitious two-volume project The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Queer Articulations focuses on questions of articulation and agency (resistant, constrained, conscious or not) in the production of queerness as a set of historically situated and repeated practices and performances. This study continues to chart the effects of a historical transition in early modern England in masculinity, from what King calls, following Raymond Williams, “residual” pederasty—premodern male subjection to hierarchies organized by proximity to the sovereign patriarch—to modern “emergent” privacy, which resists subjection in favor of collective gender identification and specular reciprocity and which privileges heteroerotic domesticity. Thus King works from the premise that the discursive struggles and bodily practices that will, in modernity, emerge as normative and hegemonic phallic masculine subjectivity are not (pace many historical studies of sex and gender in early modernity) primarily based in sexual difference and gender distinctions but rather in contradistinction—and active resistance—to a certain subjected homonormativity (symbolic pederasty or sodomy). Gender and heterosexuality thus emerge as constructions of a classed, private, male body that performs heteronormativity as against a theatricalized courtly body now read as affected, effeminate, queer. Performance and theatricality are key here: Queer Articulations studies how “theatricality and sodomy [are] performance practices foreclosed in the formation of private subjectivities and therefore available for resistant performances by those individuals located outside the universalized … public sphere: queers” (xxii).

The book is divided into chapters that examine an impressive interdisciplinary archive of discourses: literary and historical texts, letters, documents about the theater, visual representations, dance notations, and even music. It is a Foucauldian genealogy, a historical material study of how it is that certain bodily practices came to signify modern Anglo straight masculinity and, conversely, in the resistance of such bodily practices and styles of embodiment to naturalization and privatization, queerness. “Performing ‘Akimbo’” (the title of the first chapter) reworks this mannerist gesture to demonstrate its queer resistance to practices of privacy and manliness. A second chapter, on the Mollies, departs from many accounts and argues instead for the emergence of “molly” as a (falsely unified) sign of a struggle within the field of gender relations and questions of privacy and the public sphere, from which will emerge both homosexuality and heterosexuality as discursive domains. In the third chapter, King provides a reading of writings (by Colley Cibber and others) about Restoration actor Edward Kynaston's performances of women's roles, reworking them to reconstruct a history of “gestural agency” (298) that could be said, also, to provide one genealogy of modern camp. “How (Not) to Queer Boswell” takes issue with oedipalized readings of Boswell's relation to Johnson. King demonstrates how one might rethink Boswell's queerness in the context of the emergence of modern masculinity and its production of naturalized gender, which mystifies a prior order of authority and subordination (pederasty) that continues to produce distinctions among men. Boswell, in King's reading, resists this emergence, reinstating “the residual economy of alliance … at the very center of the emergence of an oedipalized domesticity” (330). The penultimate chapter focuses on voice through a history of the castrati and the famous Farinelli, culminating in a reading of Barthes’ reading of Balzac's Sarrasine. From this chapter, in particular, King derives a provocative conclusion: that the most recent modern “cut,” what separates residual from emergent in the construction and production of private embodied individuals, is scientific materiality, the “era of sexuality” giving way “to the full implementation of biopower” (413), where gender is located not in a field of social relations but “in the autopsic knife of the pathologist” (414).

Indeed, the wistful note on which the conclusion ends gives pause, for it seems melancholically to grieve the loss of the residual and stubbornly refuse the emergent, although throughout the book this reader had the impression that King rejects the adoption of melancholia as a politically resistive position in favor of the parodic, hyperbolic, satirical, and, above all, theatrical performances that resignify and thus resist normative regimes of privacy and domesticity and assert gender as social rather than identitarian. King might thus have concluded by surveying the nodes of resistance in the present rather than mourning the passing of performance. This is certainly the force of the book's careful theoretical engagements (especially in the long and field-comprehensive introduction) and political exhortations that demonstrate above all the degree to which Foucauldian genealogical projects are political, genealogies of the present aimed at change. And he might have forged more alliances with feminist queer and gender projects whose goals he shares or have looked beyond England for comparative historicizations of gendering. Had he done so, the historical transitions he tracks might have turned out to be more local and might, in turn, serve to help destroy nation (in addition to the “class of men” [xxii]) and periodization (the eighteenth century, long or otherwise) as key to the history of the modern West. Nevertheless, as a study of eighteenth-century English performative sexualities in their full contextualization—and the importance of these for the politics of “queer” in the present—Queer Articulations, the second volume of The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, is an impressive—and perversely hopeful—potentially field-changing work.