Queer Modernism Research Articles

Notes on Hotel Camp: Sontag Meets Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room

This essay presents ten notes, historical and speculative, sparked by the fact that two of the classics of American queer writing, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), were partly inspired by the same tiny Paris hotel room. In place of a case for buried collaboration, I take inspiration from the coincidence of Baldwin and Sontag’s shared space to think their differences together—a conjunction which reveals larger things about the Baldwin we have revived, the Sontag we are reviving, and our residual habit of picturing queer modernism as a star map of individual, trademarked celebrity-functions. Fresh concentration on Sontag and Baldwin’s neglected interactions might help to save both from the distortions of the revivalist spotlight.

No Ka Māhūi Aloha: Unsettling Homo/Hetero-Nationalist Logics of Belonging

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that settler queer modernity attaches itself to logics of US nationalism in ways that naturalize settlement within US-occupied Indigenous territories. In Hawai'i, settler modernity and settler queer modernity seek to settle our ancestral ontologies, ascribing a "queer" framework onto poorly understood modes of Kanaka Maoli being, for example, māhū. The concept of the māhūi seeks to unmoor the idea of māhū from "queer" frameworks that enable the hetero-homo binary through notions of national belonging that figure us as vanishing. Thus, through theoretical and archival conversations about belonging, the māhūi is illuminated to be an epistemological plug-in to a Kanaka Maoli present conceived on our terms and through our thought structures.

Familialization of the ‘deviant’: a hindrance to queer community building?

Abstract Familial acceptance of queer relationships has long been at the centre of the same-sex marriage discourse in India. This is no coincidence since in India family as an institution represents caste, religious, class and other social privileges. Developing on Bordieu’s work on family, this paper examines three Hindi films—Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga (2019), Shubh Mangal Zaada Savdhaan (2020) and Badhaai Do (2022)—to formulate the ‘ideology of familialization’ as the basis of the queer narratives in these popular film texts. Through narrative analysis of these texts, this paper argues that these narratives function at two levels: one, at the level of inducting the erstwhile subjects of developmentalist economy into the neoliberal economy; and two, they selectively transform the familial space of these subjects to make it conducive to integrate LGBTQ persons. The narratives perpetuate a consensus about the importance of selective co-option of queer individuals within the socially dominant traditional families, to keep the cycle of social privilege undisturbed by producing what Bordieu calls ‘unproblematic inheritors’. This, I argue, prevents the individual queer characters from building a modern queer community, a radical collective with intersectional politics at its heart, at the cost of alienating those who do not come from such caste/class privilege. This serves the interest of both the neoliberal market/State and the Hindu upper caste dominated social, perpetuating the Ideology of Familialization which eventually has the power to function as a governmental tool of transforming the ‘deviant’ lovers into ‘model’ queer citizens.

LITERARY FAIRY TALE AS A MEANS OF FORMING THE TOLERANCE IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

The article deals with the study of the pedagogical potential of a literary fairy tale as a means of forming tolerance in primary school children. As illustrative material, the authors use LGBT fairy tales that actually reflect the topics that previously considered taboo. The aim of the research is to analyze modern queer tales considering social and literary tendencies, to determine the thematic section and to investigate the peculiarities of character creating process, as well as to generalize and systematize the literary experience of queer texts and trace how such fairy tales help to form a tolerant attitude towards others. The object of research is modern queer tales, which have become significant in culture and have caused mixed reaction. The research methodology involves historical-comparative, existential, hermeneutic and culturological methods. In postmodern world, there are significant changes in a person’s awareness of his/her place in the family and among people, there is also a search for self-identification and understanding of what is moral or immoral. The changes in social, value, and morality are reflected in fiction, which captures “possible – impossible”, “right – wrong”, “bad – good” at certain stages of development of the society. The appearance of queer literature and discussions around them testify to the readiness of the society for dialogue and understanding that the world is beautiful in its diversity. A person with his/her qualities, values, uniqueness and desire to be useful to the society in queer tales occupies an important place. Equally important is the issue of freedom to choose a life path, life purpose, a partner, as well as the right to self-expression. The origin and development of the issue is researched, the first LGBT books for children are briefly analyzed, and the most recent and most popular tales are focused on. Among them are “King and King” by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland (2002), “The bravest Knight that Ever Lived” by Daniel Errico (2014), “The Princes and the Treasure” by Jeffrey A. Miles (2014), “Princess Princess Ever After” by Katie O’Neill (2016). The narrative features of these tales are elucidated, a comparative analysis of the folklore tale and a new literary one is carried out. The structural matrix of the queer tale has been determined as a traditional one: tasks, hero and helper, journey, initiation, magic objects and happy end. Attention is focused on the characteristics of queer characters: their traits, actions, relationship with people. The problems and the leading motives of the tales are identified, and it is emphasized that the purpose of such literature is to show the world in its diversity, where there is a place for everyone. It is also advisable to focus on the deeds and actions of the characters but not on their sexual preferences.

Queer Futurity and Conflicted Feeling(s) in the Poetry of Ariadna G. García

The work of Spanish poet Ariadna G. García (Madrid, 1977) occupies an unusual place within the archive of modern queer Spanish poetry. Collections like Construyéndome en ti (1997), Napalm. Cortometraje poético (2001), La Guerra de Invierno (2013), Helio (2014), and Ciudad sumergida (2018) are the product of a changing society in which poets can engage with questions surrounding queer participation in social institutions like couples and families as a concrete reality instead of imagined and anticipated future possibilities. The past(s), present(s), and future(s) that García’s poems explore highlight the potential that both negative and positive emotions have as sources of meaning for queer subjects and vehicles through which to imagine and think through potential alternative roles, identities, and opportunities. This poetry traces how poetic subjects who seek out social benefits and strive to make the most of fleeting moments of happiness and record past and present struggles for future generations stake out a complex position between hetero- and homonormativity and look beyond what José Esteban Muñoz has termed “the quagmire of the present.” Futurity in García’s work thus builds on positive affect in the present to imagine, project and cope with future moments, in the process demonstrating that queer utopianism need not rely on a negative view of the present to imagine a more inclusive future.

“The reader can never be sure what’s going to come next”: political reflexivity, ethics and queer affiliations in Oswell Blakeston’s 1950s travel writing/guide books

ABSTRACT Oswell Blakeston’s four now largely forgotten travel books, Portuguese Panorama (1955), Isle of St. Helena (1957), Sun at Midnight: Finland Holiday (1958), and Thank You Now: An Exploration of Ulster (1960), warrant the attention of contemporary scholars of travel writing. This article outlines how Blakeston’s writing about his travels, or holidays, further illuminates contemporary historical explorations of the continuum, rather than categorical opposition, between tourist guidebooks and travel writing. Blakeston's travel writing also exhibits a degree of what Debbie Lisle describes as “political reflexivity”. Related to this, his work narrates ethical interactions with new friends encountered on his journeys, while also dramatising some of the inevitable limitations this entails. Analysis of Blakeston’s travel writing also highlights links between the preoccupations detailed above and his queer modernist cultural lineage. This article therefore expands our historical understanding of the diversity of queer British travel writing during the twentieth century.

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Queertopia’s New World Order: Simon Nkoli’s Legacy in Queer Black Nightlife Spaces in Johannesburg

This article explores the concept of queer utopia, drawing from Muñoz’s writings on queer futurity, from Simon Nkoli’s embodiment of the struggle for queer utopia through organising with GLOW and in spaces of militant joy like Pride marches, and from modern queer Black feminist interpretations of nightlife spaces in Johannesburg. Through a close reading of a queer Black nightlife event in 2021 called Queertopia, this article argues that queer Black feminists are embodying queer utopia through nightlife, even in the midst of the manifold crises of COVID-19 and late-stage racial capitalism and cisheterophobia. By linking practices of healing and nightlife in these events to resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and particularly lifting up queer Black people involved in activism and social movement and cultural organising work, these parties continue the lineage of Simon Nkoli’s work towards dignity and joy. They exist as experiments in queer Black feminist practice, particularly through growing bonds and emphasising relationality between organisers and attendees of these parties, and focusing on healing, dancing, and dreaming in collective space. This article ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices, in the legacy of Nkoli’s activism and analysis, of embodying resistance and queer Black visibility, and ultimately of imagining utopias where queer Black people can fully thrive.

Perverse Attention(s): Djuna Barnes, John Rechy, and the Queer Modernist Aesthetics of Entrancement

This article examines the representational slippage between queerness and entranceability in two queer modernist novels, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and John Rechy’s City of Night. Highlighting the historical and conceptual overlap between early sexological work on inversion and early psychological work on trance, it argues that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, queer desire was in part understood as a function of compulsively misdirected and pathologically fixed attention. Embracing rather than refuting this model of queerness, writers such as Barnes and Rechy drew on the language and imagery of homoerotic entrancement to cultivate a mesmerizing—and distinctly queer—aesthetic, incorporating entrancement into their writing at the levels of both form and content. The article thus suggests that sexology provided writers such as Barnes and Rechy with an unexpected method for capturing and holding the attention of their readers, shaping queer modernist aesthetics in an oft-overlooked way.

Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now

Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now Tyler Schwaller (bio) There are certain works that have so transformed my ways of thinking that I sometimes forget what it was like to think otherwise. Dr. Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women is one of those texts. As I teach in both academic and ecclesial settings about the Bible and sexuality, I draw regularly upon the materials and insights of Dr. Brooten's work and of course cite her appropriately. However, the content has become so familiar to me that I sometimes forget the sheer scope of the book's impact. This opportunity to spend substantial time again with the text has illuminated for me that Love Between Women is not only an important work that I cite for evidence, but also one that I cannot and do not think apart from, as Dr. Brooten's arguments have so fundamentally shaped the ways I think about sex, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and its implications for contemporary discourses and debates. It is truly an honor to be able to reflect on the impact of this transformative work. I will admit that it made me somewhat anxious to present as part of this retrospective special section, as I have felt a tension between the manner in which I think I am supposed to speak "as a scholar" and what I really want to say, which is perhaps more confessional. But even as Dr. Brooten's Love Between Women has certainly sharpened my scholarly sensibilities, its influence has been deeper and farther-reaching for me. So, I would like to share in terms of my experiences with the text, which begin with the personal and extend beyond academe to workshops I have taught on the Bible and sexuality with church groups. These workshops have taken place primarily in United Methodist contexts.1 Further, I have drawn [End Page 177] upon Dr. Brooten's work while engaging in ecclesial juridical settings convened to enforce the United Methodist Church's anti-queer policies. This leads me to reflect in two directions: first, toward celebration and gratitude for Love Between Women and second, toward ethics of interpretation, scholarship, pedagogy, and sex. I initially encountered Love Between Women soon after coming out as gay, as I was still thinking through my relationship to the church and to the Bible. I experienced the commentary on Rom 1:18–32 especially as freeing.2 Without being able to name at the time what felt deficient, I had been left unsatisfied by mainstream progressive interpretive strategies aimed at affirming same-sex desire and relationships. I was familiar with two primary approaches, sometimes working in tandem: claiming that homosexuality is a modern category, thereby presuming biblical texts have nothing to say on the topic as we know it, and/or contending that ancient condemnation of same-sex desire is really a critique of pederasty (as if that were the only same-sex relationality known in the ancient world). These possibilities for claiming that modern queer relationality was unknown to biblical writers and so freed from scriptural scrutiny was first introduced to me in the published debate between Dan Via and Robert Gagnon, which I purchased and read in secret in high school.3 Such line of thinking was reinforced when I encountered Foucault in college and learned his claim that homosexuality emerged as a discrete concept only in the modern period. While I appreciated the call to think contextually, not generalizing categories of desire across time and space, I was unsatisfied by the notion that the best defense for queer love today would be the impossibility of its imagination in the past. What felt so freeing about reading the commentary in Love Between Women was to let go of the intellectual gymnastics and simply name things as they are: Paul does not like same-sex desire, full stop. But Paul draws upon contemporaneous thought to make an argument fundamentally rooted in the assumption of women's subordination.4 Recognizing that I could not support the underlying logic and so did not feel beholden to the argument, I acknowledged for myself the need to look elsewhere, to consider...

Rousseau's Toe

Abstract This article suggests that we might find a new way to address two stubborn questions regarding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions through a single shift in perspective. These two questions are: What can we make of the antipathy that readers often feel toward this text, in response to the narrator's demand for total empathetic identification? And, how can we draw out the text's queer potential? Versions of these two questions have been asked many times by critics, but always in the register of unveiling, unmasking, exposing. What if, rather than deconstructing or diagnosing, we take an explicitly reparative position toward the paranoia that the text models, and toward the queer encounters it records? This approach involves seeking empathy away from where the text directs us, giving Rousseau a version of what he wants while challenging his tyrannical program that sets out how we should read and relate. Far from attempting to restore to the narrator the coherence or wholeness that myriad suspicious reads have undermined, this reparative reading counsels approaching the text as fragmentary archive. In the process, early modern queer identities, surface versus depth, and the Confessions as foundational text for modern autobiography—and the modern self—are all reconsidered.

“Was it marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism

“Was it marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism Todd G. Nordgren (bio) On February 17, 1909, Virginia Stephen (not yet Woolf) accepted a marriage proposal from a panicked Lytton Strachey; it was called off before the end of their conversation.1 Other prominent queer authors in the early twentieth century lived in marriages, as Virginia would with Leonard, that afforded the appearance of propriety even if they did not practice it. Although he preferred short-lived relationships over monogamy, Guillaume Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb only a few months before his death from Spanish Flu in 1918. After marrying his first wife, Ray, David Garnett maintained his habit of conducting affairs with men and women alike. In each of these cases, otherwise sexually deviant people felt an imperative to marry or live as if married, despite their sharp critiques of the equation of marriage with a happy, successful life. When E. M. Forster protested, in the face of matrimony’s intractable grasp on life and literature alike, that novels were expected to end with “the old, old answer, marriage,” he voiced a widely-held frustration with the possibilities for representations of queer life in fiction and fact.2 This article explores how a vein of queer modernist writing, exemplified by David Garnett’s 1922 novella of animal transformation, Lady into Fox, dislodges conventional marriage as the central organizer of social and literary form by undermining the foundation of the marriage plot—narrative realism. Garnett’s novella subverts the hegemonic norms of the marriage plot, critiquing structures of heteronormative monogamy while offering an affirmative version of queer resistance in which moments of subversion surpass critique and instead imagine a new vision of [End Page 357] the social order. Moreover, Lady into Fox reveals that this history of progressive political expression is entangled with the legacies of modernist innovations and the often-elided role of fantasy in modernist writing. In Lady into Fox, what begins as a realist plot is undone through the introduction of a fantastic mode that overrides the otherwise normative events of the narrative when, early in the story, the protagonist’s wife is suddenly and irreversibly transformed into a fox. The novella registers the social, cultural, and ideological dominance of heterosexual couplings but undoes several features of the marriage plot’s closure in heterosexual monogamous compacts, creating an alternative way to organize a life beyond, as Forster puts it, “the old, old answer, marriage” through a transformation of one of characters into another species and the couple’s subsequent navigation of and adaptation to their new, queer way of living together. Exploring the fantastic, speculative vein of queer modernism that Garnett’s no-vella represents allows us to answer José Esteban Muñoz’s call to resist the “recent . . . erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination” that makes queer politics into nothing more than “mere inclusion in a corrupt and bankrupt social order” signified by the master symbol of marriage.3 Fantasy’s potential as an anti-realist genre is precisely what transforms critique into new possibilities for queer people, rather than rerouting their desires into normative social structures or failure. For Rosemary Jackson, fantasy “characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss.”4 As such, this article will turn to consider how the subversive imagining of a world of queer potential at the center of Lady into Fox resonates with desires expressed in two of the period’s most formative literary works: the origins of surrealism in Apollinaire’s play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903/1917) and Woolf’s celebrated mock biography of fantastic sex change, Orlando (1928). Garnett’s novella acts as a fulcrum around which turns this history of the entanglements of queer fantastical imagining and modernist innovations, illuminating a dynamic history of queer modernism beyond the simple “compensation” for loss that Jackson describes, or what Heather Love has called “selectively affirmative” histories drawn from “isolated moments of resistance in the larger story of homophobic oppression and violence.”5 Attending to the queer potential that fantasy offers Garnett in Lady into Fox...

Women Making Modernism ed. by Erica Gene Delsandro

Reviewed by: Women Making Modernism ed. by Erica Gene Delsandro Hannah Roche Women Making Modernism. Ed. by Erica Gene Delsandro. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2020. viii+238 pp. $80. ISBN 978–0–8130–6617–2. In an essay for the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies in 2018, Madelyn Detloff draws attention to the wearying ‘Sisyphe position’ occupied by feminist modernist scholars. Having spent decades pushing against the innumerable inequalities and patriarchal hierarchies that continue to characterize modernist studies, the feminist Sisyphe is tired. But she has also developed resilience, resistance, and a will to push on. ‘Rolling a rock up a hill over and over again is frustrating’, Detloff writes, ‘but it gives one strong arms’ (‘Strong-Armed Sisyphe: Feminist Queer Modernism Again … Again’, Feminist Modernist Studies, 1 (2018), 36–43 (p. 37)). This collection of nine robust and invigorating essays shows the Sisyphe of feminist modernism at her muscular best. Presenting women writers, artists, and thinkers ‘in terms of arrangements rather than hierarchies’ (p. 5), the volume sheds light on the feminist networks that made literary and artistic modernism as we (should) know it. In doing so, the book itself stands as testament to the collective power of women who write. The makers of modernism in the book’s title are not simply its often forgotten subjects, but also the scholars whose work aims to rescue, revitalize, and re-evaluate the contribution of those women today. In the first chapter following Erica Gene Delsandro’s lucid Introduction, Emily Ridge points out that ‘communities and networks are made up of small, disparate, mobile parts’ (p. 37). The mobility of the book’s individual ‘parts’ is one reason [End Page 119] why its case for women’s networks is so compelling. Peggy Guggenheim and her chequebook appear in chapters on financial speculation (by Julie Vandivere) and Emma Goldman (by Catherine W. Hollis), and the thread of Celia Marshik’s work on second-hand clothing is picked up by Jane Garrity’s discussion of Mary Hutchinson and ‘the pleasure of an old garment’ (p. 78). We later learn that an impoverished Edith Sitwell spent Bryher’s gift of £500 on two Ascot hats and a fur coat (Vandivere, p. 112). Both Garrity and Melissa Bradshaw explore Vogue’s modernist investments, while Allison Pease promotes ‘low theory’ (or even no theory) by demonstrating the value of Marshik’s material approach to the evening gown over the ‘vogue’ of certain frameworks (p. 124). In this way, the traditionally feminine subject of fashion is tailored into something both empowering and theoretically exciting, and modernism’s many interconnections or ‘constellations of correspondence’ (Delsandro, p. 191) are presented in new and enlightening ways. Not all of the women discussed in this volume championed other women. Bradshaw alerts us to Amy Lowell’s acerbic put-downs, and Vandivere observes how Guggenheim’s financial support was ‘sporadic and bitterly won’ (p. 107). However, given its primary focus on collaboration and sisterhood, it is fitting that the collection concludes with an essay inspired by a conversation between Detloff and Bradshaw. In a playful yet politically powerful explanation of why she does not have ‘Woolf fatigue’, Detloff considers the professional and pedagogical hazards of Woolf scholarship at a time when feminists worry about the ‘long shadow’ cast by modernism’s three most popular women writers: Woolf, Stein, and H.D. ‘have the potential to cast shade on other female modernists who deserve more light’ (p. 205). Though Detloff uses different metaphors here—‘We cannot burn down the institution [. . .] but we sure as hell can turn up the heat’ (p. 215)—it is impossible to read this essay on ‘iconic shade’ without remembering her strong-armed Sisyphe (or, indeed, without thinking of Mina Loy’s iconic lampshades from Chapter 4). Presenting Woolf as an outsider who was forced to ‘combat structural inequities’ (p. 215), Detloff ends the collection with a nod to the writers who, now part of the canon, were once rolling a rock up a hill. Women making modernism may still be pushing, but books like this one will help us to reach the top and stay there. Hannah Roche University of York Copyright © 2022...

Hybrid Subjects, Fluid Bonds

Abstract This essay offers a study of male homoeroticism in an unconventional and yet seminal nineteenth-century woman-authored tanci work, Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (Phoenixes Flying Together; preface dated 1899) by Cheng Huiying 程蕙英 (before 1859–after 1899). Perhaps the only tanci known today that focuses centrally on male same-sex relations, Phoenixes Flying Together offers a vital example of early modern queer literary tradition by illustrating fluid male-male bonds and hybrid ideals of homosexuality. Such textual representations shift Confucian cardinal relations, redefine the power of nanse, and demonstrate queer identifications beyond heteronormative relations. Reading women's tanci through the intersectional lenses of early modernity, queer theory, and narrativity, this study examines such narratives as an inspiration to initiate a more contextualized epistemological, historical, and methodical understanding of the dynamic textual spaces that harbor same-sex intimacies, erotic desires, and clandestine longings in vernacular traditions. Narratives of male intimacy, camaraderie, and homosexual love in Cheng's text facilitate the construction of queer subjectivities through character focalization and embedded frames of storytelling and thereby reconfigure patrilineal norms of personal, familial, societal, and political relations. Ultimately, when engaged in conversation with global queer discourses, early modern Chinese vernacular narratives foster a culturally situated understanding of queer historiography, as well as the shifting social structures of power that often condition and facilitate nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman

Reviewed by: Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman Dennis Denisoff (bio) Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman; pp. xii + 234. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $34.95. In Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, Dustin Friedman asks us to consider aestheticism not so much as a cultural movement or an aesthetic philosophy but as a theory—a theory of sexuality preceding the institutionalized discourses of desire. As such, the book proposes a conceptual pivot to existing scholarship on the articulation of Victorian notions of sexual identity through discourses of aesthetics, particularly Paterian aestheticism. Dozens of scholars have addressed aestheticism as a crucial concept through which some non-normative identities attained conceptual cohesion and cultural recognition. Early works such as Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) reflect the heavy influence of poststructuralism on queer studies, and in particular that of Michel Foucault's models of biopower. With more than a third of Before Queer Theory focusing on Walter Pater and the rest on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field, Friedman positions his study squarely within the context of aestheticism studies. He differentiates his contribution in two key ways. First, he places particular emphasis on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on Pater's queer aesthetics and the aestheticism that developed under its influence. Second, his study is not a reading of the history and works of aestheticism through recent queer theory but a recognition of aestheticism as, in part, a queer theory in itself. When Friedman says, "Aestheticism is one of queer theory's unacknowledged ancestors," he is not denying the decades of groundbreaking scholarship that has explored the queerness of aestheticism (5). Rather, he is emphasizing a Victorian, politicized, theoretical paradigm that arose before sexology, criminology, and related discourses attained cultural coherence and, eventually, became foundational to much of what is now recognized as modern queer theory, principally under the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Avoiding anachronism, Friedman defines the term "queer" rather loosely, allowing it to address a range of attractions, including what we might today read as gay and lesbian desire while also remaining open to forms of aesthetic desire that do not adhere to particular subject/object relations. Friedman argues that contributors to the aesthetic movement "consciously departed from the essentialist understandings of sexual identity promoted by the sexologists. They realized that the aesthetic, as a space located within the social yet not strictly bound by its rules, was a realm where sexual difference could be embraced without being pathologized" (15). It is worth noting that the field of sexology was itself inchoate when Pater began writing. It is true that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis (recognized by Foucault and others as the first work using psychology to articulate sexual regimes) had appeared in Latin in 1844, but it still situated non-normative practices—which included tribadism, necrophilia, and agalmatophilia (sex with statues)—in an ambiguous notion of general excess rooted in the non-procreative act of masturbation. Pater, Simeon Solomon, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other key contributors to early aestheticism would have been open to configurations of sexuality that were less constricted than Foucault's technology of power might imply. Aestheticism, that is, explored desires that preceded the historical moment when sexological identity [End Page 154] formation and institutionalization became dominant fixtures, maneuvering within a more ambiguous sexual "chaos," as Kaan called it (Psychopathia Sexualis, edited by Benjamin Kahan, [Cornell University Press, 2016], 44). One of Friedman's most useful insights arises from his focus on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on aestheticist notions of sexuality specifically. Hegel was perhaps the most influential German philosopher at later Victorian Oxford, although Kate Hext, Billie Andrew Inman, and William Shuter have demonstrated the importance of recognizing the various German philosophers who influenced Pater's aesthetic views. Other scholars have also richly analyzed Hegel's influence on Pater, including Giles Whiteley, whose Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (2010) addresses Pater's oeuvre with particular attention to what Pater calls a Hegelian "radical dualism...

Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan

Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan

Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten

Reviewed by: Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten Caitlyn McLoughlin Masten, Jeffrey, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 368; 51 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $65.00; ISBN 9780812247862. Medieval and early modern scholars frequently reflect on their disciplinarity, yet only relatively recently have they begun to consider how various normative and powerful social systems have influenced the generation and fruition of their fields. Over the past two hundred years, these fields have operated under fairly homogenous and exclusive academic structures that value and uphold white, Eurocentric, and heteronormative systems of critical engagement and historical e/valuation. Contributing to a contemporary reckoning with just such an exclusionary pedigree, Jeffrey Masten considers the ways that exclusions have been enforced within philological considerations of early modern texts. In Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time, Masten explores the relationship between writing and sexuality, offering queer readings not only of particular philological practices and early modern modes of textual production, but, perhaps most notably, of letters themselves (the introductory material takes as a specific and convincing subject the letter Q). Masten argues that 'the study of sex and gender in historically distant cultures is necessarily a philological investigation' (p. 15), directly contributing to what he identifies as a re-emergence of scholastic engagement with premodern sexual identities. By coining the term 'queer philology', Masten necessarily aligns philology with 'sexual practices, the positioning of bodies and body parts, and "identities" that seem nonnormative, whether in their own time or, especially, from this historical distance' (p. 15), bringing welcome nuance to the established connection between language and identity. Masten's queer philology successfully attempts a self-reflection with the aim of highlighting how 'philology's manifold methods and rhetorics of [End Page 236] investigation are often themselves thoroughly implicated in the languages of sex, gender, and the body' (p. 18), and how often writing about language is itself inflected with and reliant upon language of heteronormative reproduction and familial systems. This work then, is of particular interest and use to scholars working on kinship systems, queer or otherwise. In addition to focusing on 'the implication of philological modes of analysis in discourses of sex/gender' (p. 32), the introduction and first chapter focus on early modern standardization practices that were only in their infancy in seventeenth-century Europe, and the various ways that compositors and editors hid or even erased instances of queerness, in premodern acts of straightwashing. The monograph's final section 'advocates explicitly for a more active engagement of editorial practice with philologies of sex, sexuality, and gender', but not before Masten's presentation of three lexicons in the body of the work (focused friendship, boy-desire, and sodomy) that concentrate on 'discourses that have become integral to historical analyses of especially male same-sex relations in early modern England' (p. 32). In these sections, Masten takes as his focus several works by and concerning Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, among others. While many scholarly texts that operate under the 'queer theory' academic umbrella acknowledge and engage the importance of language in the construction—or more often, deconstruction—of identity, Masten moves beyond a fleeting or cursory concession, engaging the professional practices and scholastic enterprises that determine so completely contemporary conceptions of history and historical texts. Since its release in 2016, Queer Philologies has been overwhelmingly well reviewed, with most writers acknowledging its important contribution to new efforts in 'doing' early modern queer theory. The work's broader impact on the field of early modern drama studies was recognized in 2018 when Masten received the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award (Rice University). In 2021, Queer Philologies reminds of the continuing need to examine the often subtle but manifold ways that marginal experiences are embedded in language technologies and systemic culture more broadly. In this way, and although Masten primarily focuses on sexual identities, his study of queer philologies also illuminates the various ways that white, Western assumptions about language and culture dictate critical engagement with premodern history at large. Towards the end of the book, Masten specifically turns his attention to...

Queer Modernist Weapons of the Weak

This review of Jill Richards’s The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes situates the text within recent strains of queer modernist studies as well as longstanding theorizations of queer resistance. Closely reading one of Richards’s primary case studies, Claude Cahun, I argue that The Fury Archives patterns its thinking off of anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of “weapons of the weak.” As a key critical analytic for LGBT/queer studies, these modes of defiance course through Richards’s activist monograph via both its modernist content and its scholarly form.

Periodically Queer: Sexology and Non-Normative Sexualities in the Little Magazine The Masses

This paper will be concerned with the special affordances of periodical writing, taking the modernist little magazine The Masses as its example. This magazine was instrumentally involved in promoting sexual liberation and ‘sex radicalism’ in the United States of the 1910s, and I argue that the – contracted, serial, and contingent – structure of periodical publishing had an incisive impact on the ways in which the magazine responded to and transfigured the contemporary rhetoric of sexology. Focusing on the enactment of non-normative sexualities in the little magazine, I aim to show that the iterative and kaleidoscopic form of presentation yields effects that are different from the aesthetics of queer modernism as manifest in the ‘closed’ literary forms of the episodic novel or the short story collection. I will cast a close look at Floyd Dell's writing in the magazine to argue my case, and end with a reflection on (the publication history of) Sherwood Anderson's ‘Hands’.

Beyond Brideshead: The Male Homoerotics of 1930s Oxford

AbstractLooking beyond the notorious “Brideshead” aesthetes and homoeroticism of 1920s Oxford, this article explores the queer sensibilities of the university's male undergraduates and their associates through the 1930s. Steadily through the decade, Oxford's unique brand of queer aestheticism and same-sex love affairs became embroiled with wider debates about the hegemony of socialism and communism and the supposed degeneracy of standards at Oxford. At the same time, the assimilation of medicalized concepts of perversion and homosexuality increasingly made Oxford's aesthetes and same-sex love affairs objects of critical scrutiny, effeminophobia, and homophobia. For many of the university's queer male undergraduates, the Oxford University Dramatic Society provided a safe haven and a platform for queer expression both in Oxford and beyond. A group of images by the Russian émigré photographer Cyril Arapoff provides further insights into the male homoerotics of 1930s Oxford. Situated within the context of Arapoff's life in the city between 1933 and 1939, his extraordinary photographs of nude and seminude young men offer glimpses into the queer lives and loves at Oxford in a period when such experiences were rarely articulated in written form. The images include the spaces the young men inhabited and their interconnections to London's vibrantly queer dance and theater scene. Such insights help establish more firmly interwar Oxford as an important hub of queer modernism, with national and international import for the course of modern queer history.