Queer Modernism

Abstract

Modernism has become sexy again. Only yesterday, it seems, we were eager to relegate the likes of Eliot and Pound to the wrong side of a historical divide, the better to establish our postmodernist credentials. Today, however, the prefix is no longer a condition of our intellectual and ideological well‐being, and we are again laboring to become Joyce's contemporary. In a recent contribution to the “Changing Profession” forum in PMLA , Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz characterize this extraordinary transformation as an “expansion,” one that has metamorphosed even the object of study: where “modernism” once was, “modernisms” now are. According to Mao and Walkowitz, three broad areas of inquiry or interest define the newly pluralized field: (1) “The Transnational Turn,” (2) “Media in an Age of Mass Persuasion,” and (3) “Politics as Itself.” This seems broadly compelling, although there is little here that is either new or unique to the study of modernism. The old modernist studies, for instance, owe a great deal to the work of Hugh Kenner, which includes some important pages on “the mechanic muse,” and one might cite the centrality of Marshall McLuhan, himself a distinguished student of modernism, to any discussion of “media in an age of mass persuasion.” I would be hard‐pressed, moreover, to name any field of literary or cultural studies that has not taken a “transnational turn” of late. It may be, of course, that the new modernist studies are simply keeping faith with the deepest impulses of high modernism itself: “to make it new,” in the familiar paradox, is to recover what is very old. Certainly “expansion” is an impulse intrinsic to modernism, which is among the most imperial and imperializing of literary movements. It remains an open question, for instance, if postcolonial literature has escaped the hold of the Euromodernism that it might logically be expected to reject. The fidelity is not, however, absolute. What is resoundingly absent from Mao and Walkowitz's survey of the new modernist studies is what may well define our modernity: the unprecedented explanatory power attributed to sexuality in general and sexual deviance in particular. The word “sexuality” appears only once in their article, the words “homosexual” and “queer” not at all, and the “Works Cited” is remarkable, at least in part, for what it fails to cite: Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld (2007); Heather Love's Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007); and Michael Trask's Cruising Modernism (2003), to name but three. Apparently modernism has become sexy again by forgetting about sex.