Absence of Bikini, or the Cold War Boyology in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that running through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), there is a historical subtext of “Bikini”—that is, Bikini as an emblem of twofold reification of colonial history and female sexuality that symptomizes Cold War liberalism’s amalgamating sexual and international politics. Employing a queer theoretical analysis of the child and a new historicist approach to the Cold War literature eclectically, this article situates Golding’s text in the historical context of Bikini nuclear testing to examine how the text is underpinned by the hitherto neglected metanarratives of male homoeroticism and nuclear warfare. It also investigates how these metanarratives are censored out and rendered invisible by the novel’s own narrative technology and aesthetic ideology of “innocence,” an ideology that played a pivotal role in legitimating the ideology of Cold War liberalism.