Arousing disgust: visceral configurations of the queer, obscene, and pornographic in the reception and trial of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959)

Abstract

ABSTRACT When William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) was published in the USA in 1962 it was condemned by critics and courtrooms as obscene. Burroughs’ depictions of homosexual sex and desire were criticized in the obscenity trial and mainstream media as patently offensive, disgusting to the average reader. The argument that the book aroused disgust precluded the argument that it aroused sexual interest. While this view aligned with the dominant cultural understanding of homosexuality as sexual deviation, it complicated the legal assessment of the book as obscene as mid-century precedents narrowed the law’s jurisdiction to that deemed overtly pornographic. The trial and reception of Naked Lunch illuminate that, as the remit of obscenity law narrowed to the sexually arousing, the queer, obscene, and pornographic were determined in courtrooms and criticism by the visceral responses they were thought to solicit. This article builds on historical studies that have shown the conflation of the queer and the obscene in US law. The article argues that while assertions of disgust limited the (homo)erotic potential of non-normative sexual expressions, they also enabled such expressions to pass the censor as legal precedent collapsed the nominally obscene into the bodily rousing of pornography.