Same Difference: Homo and Allo in Lyly’s Euphues

Abstract

One result of the work on the history of sexuality in the last few decades has been the reluctance to apply our current sexual taxonomy to the lives and texts of the past. While this has led to many cumbersome locutions, most scholars would agree that the gain in subtlety has been enormous. Still, although we no longer feel comfortable using our contemporary terms to describe people in the past, our taxonomy is still dominated by binary thinking: in other words, we still tend to describe past sexualities as binary systems and the only change is that we use different binary oppositions. My problem is not with binaries per se, but rather with the narrow way in which they are used. As a rule, all that is at issue in any given binary taxonomy is whether two things or people are the same as each other or different from each other; furthermore, the tendency is to consider only one aspect with each pair: male or female; big or small; black or white; and so on. In this essay, I want to begin by looking at our use of sexual binaries to describe the sexualities of the past; I shall then discuss the first section of John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), a text that holds out the possibility of subtler classifications of human relationships. What I see in this text is an awareness that an individual will often be both the same as and different from another individual and thus any assigning of labels can never be the whole story.