Afterword: This Field That Is Not One

The essays in this volume assume that any single text includes multiple temporalities through its influences, allusions, fears and fantasies, material conditions of production and circulation, engagement and experimentation with form and genre, and considerations of reception (censorship, marketing, patronage, posthumous reputation)-not to mention the residual, dominant, and emergent cultural norms and contexts that coexist at a given moment. Because castrates were both literally silenced and forced to warp their own enunciations of their desires as (un?)sexed subjects to fit available discourses of effeminacy, passivity, hypersexuality, or asexuality, the castrate cannot, as it were, "speak" directly to us from the archive. [...]modern theorizations of sexed embodiment cannot be dismissed as anachronistic impositions on premodern experience. [...]they can provide conceptual frameworks and vocabularies by which to understand the interaction of dominant discourse and castrate agency in premodern Europe.