Near and Far: homoeroticism, labour and Hamo Thornycroft’s Mower

Abstract

This article offers a general and speculative theorization of the homoerotic and a specific historical account of Thornycroft’s sculpture The Mower, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. The first part of the article examines the statue in relation to the sculpture’s erotically charged friendship with poet and critic Edmund Gosse. Here, I discuss the sculpture as homoerotic, by which I mean positioned on the border between homosocial and the homosexual, both enabling and containing desire. I then go on to examine the relationship between the homoerotic and labour. On the one hand, for Thornycroft, the subject of labour legitimates a certain limited erotic interest in the male body. This eroticism, in turn, displaces the threat of class politics. On the other hand, for John Addington Symonds, who attempts to reveal the occluded operation of the homoerotic, the statue embodies a Utopian democracy where homosexual desire and radical politics are fused, and where social contradictions are transformed into affective unity. Finally I explore this complex relationship between desire and class in relation to the object’s skin, deploying Benjamin’s concept of aura. I offer some general comments on the different ways in which the material nature of sculpture and the experience of the viewer mediate the tension between politics and desire.