Same-sex Desire Research Articles

"cling with both hands": Erotic Pedagogy in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar

"cling with both hands":Erotic Pedagogy in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar Brianna Thompson (bio) In Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' postbellum novel The Gates Ajar (1868), when the fictional Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother Roy in the Civil War, she goes numb and begins to doubt her faith.1 Improbably accompanied by a daughter named Faith, her pious aunt arrives to care for her. The first time Mary cries in front of her aunt, Winifred "gather[s]" her (adult) niece onto her lap and consoles her: "'There,' she said in a low, lulling voice, 'now tell Auntie all about it.'"2 This early scene marks the beginning of loving religious instruction in which the women touch and comfort each other. Such instruction foreshadows how Winifred continues for Mary a desire taboo that Mary had already established with Roy. As Mary pivots from a sister desiring her brother to same-sex desire for Winifred, she and her aunt establish a radical new intimacy that exceeds traditional categories of love. Phelps frames both grief and religious empowerment as transformative processes in the mid-nineteenth century by offering us a story about tragedy that becomes livable due to the erotic potentiality of faith and grief. Readers of the wildly popular Gates Ajar found that religious teaching and mourning surprisingly enabled desire taboos. In this novel, American religious instruction [End Page 443] as it bleeds into surviving grief allows for a transformative experience that I call erotic pedagogy.3 While the term may sound as if it describes what were often normative homosocial relationships between Victorian American women, theorized by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg as "romantic friendship," erotic pedagogy offers a new analytic for understanding how these relationships could be infused with the Second Great Awakening's embodied religious enthusiasm in ways that enabled erotic expression.4 Erotic pedagogy describes how these women draw on erotic potentiality to fashion a new intimacy, transforming Mary's passionate grief for her brother into desire for her aunt. What I am reading as desire taboos play a crucial role in how Phelps understands bereavement. She comforted her readers by framing grief as something so raw and alienating that it made one feel painfully separate. Interestingly, Phelps expresses this aching alienation by making Mary's grief the logical outcome of losing someone with whom she already shared a unique relationship. To make a scenario in which Mary is experiencing the most extreme loss, she must love her brother so differently when he is alive that she is already distinctive. In other words, Mary's incestuous love for her brother anticipates her sense that her grief is singular. Phelps conceived of The Gates Ajar from 1863 through 1865, during and immediately after the Civil War, to console women whose patriarchal Protestantism offered few tools for dealing with world-shattering loss. With a death toll of over 750,000 American soldiers and an unknown number of civilian casualties, the only group that the war generated in surfeit were mourners.5 Grief became an abiding reality for Northerners and Southerners, as the war reduced almost every family in the reconstituted United States.6 After the war, Phelps recalls that "our country was dark with sorrowing women … Towards the nameless mounts of Arlington, of Gettysburg, … the yearning of desolated [End Page 444] homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air."7 She describes the Civil War's effects as an obstructing darkness because the war left surviving Americans, especially lower- and middle-class women, with particularly numerous losses.8 Women experienced the personal, gendered effects of the war's staggering damage due to two cultural norms. First, the work of mourning was often women's work, and second, "prevailing [religious] beliefs had nothing to say to an afflicted woman that could help her much. Creeds and commentaries and sermons were made by men."9 Phelps designed The Gates Ajar to address those gendered experiences of postwar bereavement. This essay intervenes in theories of nineteenth-century relationships, offering a new analytic for understanding how the Second Great Awakening's embodied religious enthusiasm could infuse female friendships in ways that enabled erotic expression. I suggest that, because...

Who Tells Our Stories?

Who Tells Our Stories? Marcia M. Gallo (bio) Lauren Jae Gutterman. Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780812251746 (cl). Jaime Harker. The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 239 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469643342 (cl); 9781469643359 (pb); 9781469643366 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 592 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469641096 (cl); 9781469641102 (pb); 9781469641119 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; ISBN 9781478005902 (cl); 9781478006534 (pb); 9781478007241 (ebook). Four recent books on female same-sex, bisexual, and “quare” desire provide rich opportunities for complicating contemporary accounts of lesbian and feminist history.1 In particular, the three authors reviewed here rely on a diverse set of sources—correspondence, oral histories, family albums and archival documents, journalism, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and LGBTQ+ studies—to expand the life stories we can access. For that alone, we owe them thanks, because all three authors bring to the fore an impressive array of people too often missing from our accounts of women who love women, from the mid-twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty first. Lauren Jae Gutterman is cohost of the “Sexing History” podcast and assistant professor in the American Studies and History Departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, received the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians award for a “first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality.” Jaime Harker, the owner of the Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, is a self-described “gay bookstore connoisseur” who operates her business as an especially welcoming place for members of LGBTQ+ communities. [End Page 183] With the publication of her first book in 2018, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, she aims to provide readers with “a literary history of a group of writers who, when remembered at all, tend to be approached in isolation” (16). The author of both Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History and Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women, E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of Northwestern University School of Communication and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African American Studies at Northwestern. He also was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson’s first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), examines how Blackness is appropriated and performed both within and outside African American culture. His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of Black gay men in the US South which received the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. Utilizing these oral histories, Johnson also created “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales,” an evocative and spellbinding one-man show which he performed at numerous venues from 2006 to 2013. All three of the authors bring their own experiences to bear on their work, but they all focus on the women whose stories they tell. As a group, they utilize familiar sources to ask new questions about female same-sex desire and enrich the existing archives with new and complex narrators. Three of the books focus specifically on the US South, and all incorporate a range of eras, geographies, races, ethnicities, and class statuses to remind us that social institutions such as marriage connect many women’s lives. Lauren Jae Gutterman’s Her Neighbor’s Wife relies on a number of archives, including the treasure trove of materials in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Collection at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She also makes good use of oral histories—such as those collected by lesbian scholar Kelly Anderson at...

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Navy: A Microhistory

Homosexuality in the Late Imperial Russian NavyA Microhistory Irina Roldugina (bio) During the winter of 1916, at the height of World War I, Second-Rank Captain Vladimir Grigor´evich Petrov, aged 35, found himself in a trouble-some situation. The Naval Procuracy in Kronstadt had opened a preliminary investigation: he was suspected of homosexual activity with his subordinates.1 Petrov refused to assist the investigation and said nothing about the sensitive topic. His reluctance to cooperate did not prevent officials from conducting the inquiry, but it meant that they had to rely on the testimonies of witnesses. More than 20 people were thoroughly questioned about Petrov's same-sex liaisons during his service at the Kronstadt Naval Base. Some of them had to answer the official investigator's questions two and even three times. As a result, the surviving paperwork provides a unique perspective on how homo-sexuality was discussed and perceived by people not professionally engaged with the subject. Since Michel Foucault first raised the question about the birth of the modern homosexual, historians have been quite prolific in researching and contextualizing the issue in various regions and countries. Alongside the important role of medical science, they argue, homosexual selfhood was forged by such factors as capitalism, the rise of free wage labor, secularization, the [End Page 451] spread of literacy, and urban growth.2 The present article seeks to contribute to this historiography by examining how the figure of the homosexual emerged and was understood outside the expert community in prerevolutionary Russia. The military context, I further suggest, shaped the perception of homosexuality in this case. Scholarship in this area is still relatively modest. In her groundbreaking book The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, Laura Engelstein suggests that homosexuality had never been a subject of broad public discussion or political attention in Russia, as it was in England and Germany.3 By the turn of the century, however, she shows that a significant proportion of Russian legal scholars were advocating for a modernizing approach to homosexuality and the decriminalization of consensual male intercourse, although this agenda subsequently failed.4 "The reformers refused, however, to endorse a notion of privacy and individual self-determination that would have allowed adult males to deviate freely from public norms and reproductive sexuality and gender definition."5 According to Engelstein, Russian medical experts did not provide significant help to these legal reformers. Frustrated by the lack of autonomy within tsarist society, they were not as influential as their European colleagues: "The medical interpretations of homosexuality, which Foucault sees as crucial to the development of modern sexual identity in the West, had little effect on Russian legal thinking."6 One of the most important implications of Engelstein's analysis for the present article is her argument about the failure of the "political and sexual modernity" that Russian professionals had sought to achieve in late imperial Russia.7 Having worked mainly with printed sources and focusing her attention exclusively on medical and legal discourses among "educated Russians," Engelstein [End Page 452] ignores the question of how expert medical and legal debates might have influenced laypeople. What exactly could they have absorbed through the era's flourishing print culture on the question of homosexuality? Indeed, she admits the sexual question preoccupied not only professionals in the years following the revolution of 1905 but also began to attract attention "in settings open to a more general audience."8 A decade later, Dan Healey offered a different approach.9 Using previously unknown archival material, he demonstrates how a "masculine tradition indulgent of mutual eros," and the increasing visibility of male prostitution in St. Petersburg and Moscow by the end of the 19th century combined to shape the emergence of a homosexual subculture in the capital cities.10 He also discusses the intersection of masculinity and social status, arguing that class played a central role in same-sex urban sexuality: "Men who experienced same-sex desire expressed it according to the social roles they played."11 At the end of the 19th century, according to Healey, "traditional mutual male sexuality in the provinces highlights the apparent patriarchal confidence...

Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History ed. by Jeffrey Merrick

Reviewed by: Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History ed. by Jeffrey Merrick Benjamin Bernard Jeffrey Merrick, ed., Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 272; 1 map. $34.95 paper. The lack of accessible edited primary sources about early modern European sexuality has been so keenly felt that scholars regularly crowd-source suggestions on Twitter.2 Building on decades of archival research, numerous articles, and several edited volumes, Jeffrey Merrick (Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) has furnished an indispensable resource that responds to this need. With careful curation and scrupulous English translations, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History is a crucial collection for researchers, teachers, and students of early modern same-sex desire. Because there is, in Merrick's view, "more information about sex between men (but, alas, not between women as well) in Paris than in any other major city in the eighteenth century,"3 this volume also enables Anglophone scholars interested in cross-cultural comparison and thus will benefit sexuality studies in the early modern world more broadly. The volume's rich prefatory commentaries in each subsection and its abundant endnotes provide readers with a patient orientation to each source base, distilling years of expert reflection by the subject's leading historian. This collection brings together documents of two kinds: police files and printed representations. The first corpus, "Surveillance of the Parisian Subculture," assembles English translations of 48 documents generated by the early modern Parisian police according to four institutional and chronological groupings: the lieutenancy general of police's morals bureau primarily in the 1720s, reports of the watch around the 1770s, reports of the Swiss Guard of the Champs-Élysées in the early 1780s, and reports of commissioners, or commissaires, in the 1780s. These sources, in Merrick's deft hands, shine particular light on the texture of everyday life. The first of these policing institutions, the morals bureau of the lieutenancy general of police in Paris, undertook surveillance, arrests, interrogations, and detentions of men for the crime of sodomy, as Merrick has shown in numerous articles [End Page 109] (helpfully listed in the book's "Recommended Reading" section).4 The lieutenancy general's bureaucratic apparatus generated paperwork including reports of undercover spies (or "decoys") dictated to police clerks, denunciations of arrested men, and case summary sheets. (Merrick previously published some documents selected from the moral police's sodomy files in his first primary source collection, co-edited with Bryant Ragan, which inspired me as an undergraduate.5) In this section, readers meet a representative line-up of sodomites: the "incorrigible" recidivist Marquis de Brécey and his lackey Jacques Bernard (no relation), and the lace merchant Emery Eraux who cruised the Seine riverbank by the Collège Mazarin. Merrick has carefully selected cases from thousands of manuscript pages to demonstrate the "variety and complexity" of homosexuality in early modern Paris: patterns of behavior that include the prevalence of age-differentiated relationships, the role of labor patterns in structuring affective relations, and even the at times surprising limits of tolerance. Readers can consider whether transformations between these 1720s sources and the later documents reflect changes in the practices of policing, in the mores of the population under surveillance, or in both. In Part II, "Representations of Same-Sex Relations," Merrick collects thirty-one depictions of male-male and female-female sexuality in print. The first subsection, "Gossip and Slander," includes scandalmongering pamphlets known as nouvelles and libelles that narrate social episodes. This subsection also juxtaposes those newssheets with archival evidence: in addition to translating a newssheet relating the story of a botched pickup at the opera in 1780 by the unfortunate actor Jean-François Bithemer, Merrick appends a legal petition Bithemer's mother filed against a calumnious actress at the comic opera who publicly denounced her son's "improper relations with men" (141–42). The next subsection, "Tradition," includes excerpts of humanist and legal encyclopedias that contrast with the moral dynamism of the third subsection, "Enlightenment." The latter comprises texts generated by self-described philosophes and some that interdisciplinary scholars...

«I Will Eat You and Spit You Out»: A Reading of the ‘Lesbian Machine’ in Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina

This article analyzes the «lesbian-machines» (Grosz 1995, 184) at work in Dacia Maraini’s novel Lettere a Marina (1981) and collection of poems Mangiami pure (1978). To this purpose, I engage with two conceptions of desire within the western philosophical tradition. Firstly, examining the development of the metaphor of cannibalism or ‘eros fagico’, I argue that Maraini avoids the ontologization of the notion of desire considered as a lack and thus disengages it from its historical association with the denigration of the female other. Secondly, conceiving desire as a force of production, relational and creative, I explore a particular use of metaphors in the novel which leads to bodily transformations or metamorphosis, without, however, reaching the subject’s imperceptibility through progressive identification. The co-presence and re-elaboration of two, apparently incompatible, theories of desire underline female same-sex desire’s potential to be thought and actualized as a lack and a production, its tendency to annihilate and being annihilated as well as its creative impulses. As a result, Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina and Mangiami pure complicate and destabilize the fixity of representational categories, expanding discourses on lesbianism and lesbian desire. Indeed, the convolution of negative and positive dilates the domain of desire and multiplies its possibilities, carving out a «narrative space in which women might desire differently» (Ross 2015, 16), beyond the heterosexual norm and in diverse ways, who and how they please.

Violence and desire described by committed football-supporters in substance abuse treatment. Clinical psychodynamic findings

This study concerns male clients in substance abuse treatment, who were or had been football supporters, engaged in violence. Previous research has acknowledged the connection between football and violence, substances, homosociality and masculinity. Desire and treatment needs have however not been investigated. This study contributes to this knowledge gap. It is written from a treatment viewpoint, acknowledging current psychodynamic/analytical perspectives on gender, relationships, and affects. The study is based on the author’s clinical encounters with supporters who were in psychodynamic treatment due to problems with substance use. A thematic analysis of the author’s memories of the clinical encounters was performed. Three themes were identified; Alcohol and drugs, Desire and Clinical interaction. The results show that consumption of alcohol and cocaine was intermingled with the homosocial supporter-culture and accordingly with the clients’ social life, which needs to be acknowledged in treatment. Moreover, violence was not only connected to homosocial strivings and hypermasculine behaviors, but also to desire. Same-sex desire could for example arise during fighting, which could be an alluring part of violence, while simultaneously shame-provoking. The study shows that supporters, and possibly other homosocial groups, are more diverse than sometimes presented. Accordingly, clinicians who encounter committed football supporters should be open to questions of desire, including non-normative sexual experiences, while acknowledging that the topic might be difficult for clients. Clinicians also need to understand how intertwined supporter-culture and substances are, and discuss affects and relationships with clients.

Translating the homoerotic from and into Russian

The translation of a text with homoerotic content reveals complex political, social and cultural contestation in the transnationalization of sexual desire and identity. This article examines the translations of homoerotic poetry by Russian émigré writer Valerii Pereleshin from and into Russian. Pereleshin’s different approaches in his inverse translation (Pushkin’s “Imitating the Arabic” and Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs) and direct translation (Pessoa’s “Antinous”) demonstrate how translation choices are governed by the interplay of discourses of same-sex desires in different cultural contexts, as well the poet-translator’s expression of sexual otherness.

Narrative containment of the same-sex underworld in contemporary Vietnam. A critical exploration of the police presence and function in Bùi Anh Tấn's fiction

ABSTRACT Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and contained in contemporary Vietnamese fiction. The pioneering works of the prolific policeman-author Bùi Anh Tấn have spearheaded a strong connection between sex and crime in his representations of homosexuality. These potentially subversive representations take place within a liminal underworld, often depicted as an alternative space constitutive of personal identity characterized by same-sex desire outside of recognition by legal authorities or public morality. A critical exploration of the police presence and function within the narrative can uncover the underlying techniques and technologies of surveillance and discipline whereby depictions of the same-sex underworld are policed by and therefore complicit in an operational regime of pervasive hetero-normativity. By examining the thematics of criminality, sexual/social outcast, self-renunciation/acceptance, and cultural ambiguity in the sizable LGBT-themed oeuvre of Bùi Anh Tấn over the past two decades, this paper explores how this body of works partakes in the construction and containment of a transgressive yet marginalized homosexual underworld. Marked by the police presence and subjected to the policing function of the texts, this same-sex underworld is transformed into an object of increasing attention and fascination for an ever so curious yet still ambivalent Vietnamese society.

Of longing and waiting: An inter-Asia approach to love and intimacy among older lesbians and bisexual women

This paper examines same-sex intimacies formed by and among older Chinese lesbians and bisexual women who were born from the late 1930s to the late 1950s through qualitative interviews and participant observation conducted in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. For this paper, I aim at complicating cultural notions of love, romance and intimacies, that were brought up within interstices of connected histories, gender roles and marginalized sexual subjectivities. Based on ethnographic data collected during 2016–2018, I elaborate on the moments of longing and waiting as redefining modern notions of love and intimacy across time and spatial dimensions. Then I bring up a methodological episode where inter-Asian referencing intersects with Chinese modernities to illustrate how gender and sexuality meet, intersect and influence each other in the cultural imagination and eventual materialization of women’s same-sex desires. The last section will examine the politics of butchness as protection and as a form of politeness.

George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays

George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays

Intimatopias and the queering of Australian war fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines how two works of fiction depict male same-sex desire in Australian military history. The protagonists in the novel Bodies of Men and the short story collection The Boys of Bullaroo do not identify as gay or bisexual, yet they develop intensely intimate friendships that become sexual. The texts come from different literary and popular genres, but they both represent what Elizabeth Woledge refers to as intimatopias: ‘a homosocial world in which the social closeness of the male characters engenders intimacy.’ Intimatopic fictions of war are queer texts that challenge binary and normative understandings of sexuality because the characters’ sexual identities are not defined by (homo)sexual acts. Bodies of Men and The Boys of Bullaroo are intentionally ambiguous about the protagonists’ sexualities, which are neither fixed nor fluid, but rather expressed as demisexual extensions of intimacy. The texts also challenge Australia’s digger and Anzac mythologies by presenting soldiers as sensitive, vulnerable and non-heterosexual. As such, intimatopic fictions of war reimagine Australian military history and offer new, queer conceptualizations of same-sex intimacy, mateship and desire.

Internalized Homonegativity and the Challenges of Having Same-Sex Desires in the Lebanese Context: A Study Examining Risk and Protective Factors

ABSTRACT Internalized homonegativity (IH) has received increased attention in the literature on sexual minorities. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research on IH in conservative Arab cultures like Lebanon. The present study aimed to cover this gap by exploring risk and protective factors of IH in Lebanese sexual minorities. A hierarchical multiple regression (N = 210) revealed that religiosity, parental rejection (actual or anticipated), and legal discrimination were significant risk factors of IH, while sense of belonging to the LGBT community was a strong protective factor. Although self-compassion did not emerge as a predictor, it had interesting interactions on the bivariate level. Results, limitations, clinical implications, and recommendations for future research and policy making are discussed.

The Gay Teachers Association of NYC and LGB Students: 1974–1985

Background/Context This study deals with an intersection of educational history, queer history, and labor history involving the activities of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) teachers. The history of LGBT teachers, particularly before the 1990s, has been addressed by only a handful of historians. The prior research most relevant to this study is Jackie Blount's Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (2006) and Karen Graves's And They Were Wonderful Teachers (2009). Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study focuses on the activities of the Gay Teachers Association of New York City (GTA) between 1974 and 1985 as they related to teachers’ job security and the safety of LGB students in NYC public schools. It aims to illustrate the sense of responsibility toward LGB students developed by members of the GTA and how they acted on that responsibility. Research Design This is a historical study, relying primarily on archival research and secondarily on interviews conducted by the author. Conclusions/Recommendations The teachers of the GTA developed a comprehensive concept of their responsibility as LGB educators. They came to believe that they had a particular responsibility to LGB students. Finally, GTA members actively pursued equity for LGB students in New York City's public schools through counseling, community outreach, political lobbying, and public debate.

Public service broadcasting and the emergence of LGBT+ visibility: A comparative perspective on Ireland and Flanders

Public Service Broadcasting in Europe and its centrality to cultural diversity has been established in relation to race, multiculturalism and gender, but LGBT+ sexual identity remains relatively absent from research. This article aims to address this gap by fostering a historical approach to examine the ways in which LGBT+ identities emerged on Public Service Broadcasting within Western Europe, specifically in Ireland and Flanders during the 1950s–1990s. Through a small-scale comparative case study analysis between these two regions, this article contends that the emergence of LGBT+ visibility is intrinsically linked to Public Service Broadcasting in both landscapes. Specifically, the article argues that this emergence shares two distinct structural qualities in the emergence of this LGBT+ visibility. First, the comparison points to the ways in which Public Service Broadcasting production cultures incorporated external expertise regarding LGBT+ diversity, presenting itself as a practical operationalisation of the social responsibility of publicly funded media in both regions. Second, later parallels in the introduction of LGBT+ characters to television fiction series illustrate how Public Service Broadcasting responded to various forms of competition from international and commercial broadcasters, engendering particular implications for the visibility of same-sex desire. While contributing to historical treatments of LGBT+ visibility familiar within Queer Media Studies, this article goes against the Anglo-American dominance of the field by examining more local contexts outside the US/UK centric paradigm, diversifying the contexts in which Queer Media Studies research takes place.

Narrating eros and agape

Abstract Fin-de-Siècle A Hungarian version of the present paper was published as “Erósz és Agapé: Erotextus Edward Prime-Stevenson Imre: Egy emlékirat című regényének expozíciójában” (2019) in Literatura affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Supported by the ÚNKP-19-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology.” gay literature in English operated with a double narrative: one narrative offers a historical (and “innocent”) reading available to general readership; the other offers a personal (often illicit) reading available to the susceptible and initiated readers only. The double narrative, thus, allowed authors to give subtle visibility to same-sex desire in their works that would evade censorship. This paper argues that there is a similar double narrative in the exposition of Imre: A Memorandum by the American music critic and émigré writer Edward Prime-Stevenson. The double narrative of the novel, however, differs from that of prior gay literature. I argue that Prime-Stevenson thought it was a literary sin that prior gay literature offered a sensual, erotic, or even pornographic, subversive secondary reading to susceptible readers. In my reading, Prime-Stevenson consciously planted cues in the exposition of the novel, thus, created an erotext to trigger a similar subversive and illicit reading of his text. However, Prime-Stevenson used this technique to demonstrate that purely erotic literary representations denigrate same-sex desire; therefore, in what followed, he presented a different, agapeic view on same-sex desire. The paper substantiates that Prime-Stevenson’s intention was to break away from earlier narrative “traditions” of gay literature to offer a naturalised and legitimised representation and “script” of “homosexuality” per se. Prime-Stevenson did so in a crucial period of time, as the term “homosexual” just barely entered the English language and its pejorative connotations may not have been set in stone. The paper, as a result, casts a new complexion on sexuality as a literary phenomenon and the relevance of a complex narrative structure composed of “snares” and “false snares” in the exposition of Imre, which plays a crucial role in Prime-Stevenson authoring one of the very first openly homosexual novels in English, which has a happy ending.

Queer Music in the Queen’s Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.

Of Taming Carnal Desire

Abstract Focusing on Ethiopia, an empire off-center, this article argues against dominant narratives that link the regulation of sexual practices to colonial (Western) imperial relations. Within this context, the paper investigates struggles over the past by contrasting two versions of history, discussing how different groups mobilize the past in contemporary Ethiopia. It begins by exploring the imperial, Christian roots of the country’s penal codes, interrogating how the state mobilizes such histories to criminalize same-sex desires and practices. The article then focuses its attention on those deemed “outlaws” by such legislation, exploring their search for histories silenced by empire, and their assertion as longstanding, integral parts of the country’s past.

Potentiality and Possibility: An Overview of Beowulf and Queer Theory

In 1990, Teresa de Lauretis coined “queer theory”, which subsequently sparked discussion of non-normative gender and sexuality in literature. Despite the theory’s codification nearly 30 years ago, there are few queer approaches to the foundational Old English poem Beowulf. The two primary handbooks on Beowulf, A Beowulf Handbook (1997) and A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003) make no mention of queer theory. In 2009, David Clark’s article “Old English Literature and Same-Sex Desire: An Overview” gave a historiography for studies of early medieval English same-sex relationships and concluded future work should integrate queer theory in their approach. This essay aims to update all three reference-works by enumerating queer theoretical approaches to Beowulf since 1990 through two thematic strands: transgressive human behavior and queer monsters. By examining queer readings of Beowulf, I submit this theory’s usefulness in problematizing long-held assumptions and presenting new possibilities for understanding the Old English heroic world as diverse and plural.

Different Normativity and Strategic ‘Nomadic’ Marriages: Area Studies and Queer Theory

:This article embraces Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar’s recent recommendation ‘for a politics in queer theory that works to displace the United States as the prehensive force for everyone else’s future’ in order to ponder the scope and reach of queer theory through/as area studies (Middle East). The article draws upon personal experiences and narratives of homo-desiring men and women in/from Lebanon who perform hetero married life while pursuing same-sex desire elsewhere, in order to conceive ‘different normativity’ and ‘nomadic unions.’ The article posits ‘strategic nomadic marriages’ as a fluctuating and unsteady type of union that accommodates the particularity of the ‘sex/gender systems’ of global south societies.

<em>O-jōsama kotoba</em> and a Stylistics of Same-sex Desire in Japanese <em>Yuri</em> Narratives

<em>O-jōsama kotoba</em> and a Stylistics of Same-sex Desire in Japanese <em>Yuri</em> Narratives