Ian Frederick Moulton, Arizona State University West
In recent years, largely due to the work of feminist critics and queer theorists, the dynamics of gender in the early modern period have been subjected to a thorough re-evaluation. In general this body of work stands as a successful and convincing attempt to shift attention from the center to the margins and to validate the experiences, lives, and struggles of those who did not belong to the male elites that were theoretically and materially at the apex of early modern society. In this paper, rather than exploring possibilities at the margins, I wish to concentrate on incoherence at the center by examining some of the fault lines that existed in the practice and gender ideology of masculinity in early modern patriarchy. Sodomy may have been (and may still be) an "utterly confused category,"1 but to a lesser degree all ideologies of gender are confused, in that they represent contingent responses to a host of social and cultural imperatives, many of which are conflicting or are themselves confused.
