The bad homosexual: Genet’s perverse homo-politics

The Wolfenden Committee met between 1954 and 1957 to consider the laws pertaining to street prostitution and homosexual offences. As the first ever statesanctioned inquiry into homosexual vice, it was formed as a reaction to a string of high-profile buggery and importuning cases involving famous social elites in early 1950's Britain. The committee's recommendations to decriminalise consenting homosexual acts in private has often been incorporated into Whiggish 'progressive' narratives that propagate the three-year review as a landmark event in liberalising the laws relating to homosexuality. I do not dispute the significance of the Wolfenden Committee. But rather than interpreting it as a watershed for gay rights movements, this dissertation offers a more cautionary tale. By invoking Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a theoretical backdrop, I explore the ways in which modes of punishment changed in the Wolfenden era. I argue that there was a self-reflexive movement from the theatre of trial by smear and humiliation, to more subtle and insidious modes of control of individuals. In as such, my thesis engages with an emerging post-structural strand of historiography on the Wolfenden Committee, which considers the inquiry's creative technologies and its capacity to shape homosexual 'identity' in its own preferred image. However, there are important differences. I am keen to stress that the Wolfenden Review was not a monolithic juggernaut and a spectacular demonstration of the states power to tackle homosexual offences. I argue that extant scholarship on Wolfenden is marked by a tendency to misconstrue the very nature of power itself. It is conceived of in juridical and excessively negative terms. My thesis contends that within an atmosphere of secrecy and containment, the Wolfenden Committee worked at fragmenting power between a whole team of medico-scientific professionals. Psycho-therapeutic analysis, probation schemes, reformative regimes, all became crucial bodies in a new tactic of regulating, disciplining, and normalising homosexual offenders. Moreover, I also suggest that the agency of key actors at the committee has been neglected in recent scholarship. By investigating the testimonies of the three self-confessed homosexual men at Wolfenden, I suggest that those who stood to gain from the committee's recommendations -namely the respectable, discreet queer -helped to shape new ways of imagining homosexuality; an emerging selfhood that was subject to covert constraints, and which was to have far-reaching and ultimately ambiguous consequences.

The 1950s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

This chapter examines the proliferation of the ‘homosexual novel’ in Britain in the 1950s. This mode of fiction has broadly been understood to have served first and foremost as a vehicle for arguments for the decriminalization of homosexual relations. I show that these books demand closer attention as their alignment with reformist logic is far from unambiguous. Indeed, I demonstrate how the decade’s homosexual novels variously sustain, evade and problematise the prevailing liberal discourse on homosexuality; I contend that they cannot therefore be recruited straightforwardly to a progressivist history of sexuality. Novels by authors such as Martyn Goff, Rodney Garland and Mary Renault are ambivalent about the principal paradigm for appraising homosexuality in the post-war period, the social problem. Meanwhile, the investment in comedic modes of authors such as Angus Wilson, Michael Nelson and Brigid Brophy helped to shape visions of homosexual life that differed from those produced by mainstream reformist agendas. Further, I argue that all of these works of fiction show a deep investment in pleasure – including pleasures that derive from disreputable narrative modes – which undermines appeals to the respectable, restrained homosexual subject that were central to reformist discourse.

Chapter co-authored with Sonya Andermahr. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th edition, ed Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf), 1997

Introduction Lesbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe. Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist persecution and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The movement utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repressive character of mainstream heterosexual society. Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘hetero-sexism’ to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological condition, ‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power relation, and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism: the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sex Roles, 2008

2015

Cet article se propose d’analyser l’expression des sexualites non normatives dans une selection de nouvelles modernistes anglophones. L’etude part du concept de « scenarios » sexuels (sexual scripts), emprunte aux sciences sociales, qui est adapte par le biais d’instruments theoriques recents centres sur les axes litteraires et critiques. On trouve un apport interessant dans les ecrits inspires par le recent « tournant affectif » (affective turn) des etudes LGBT, en particulier dans Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History d’Heather Love, qui propose une relecture de textes litteraires publies avant l’ere de l’emancipation sexuelle. Love examine ce qu’elle appelle, avec un terme emprunte a Anne Cvetkovich, « des ‘archives de l’affect’ cruciales, un recit des dommages corporels et psychiques de l’homophobie ». Cet article a pour objet de confirmer les arguments de Love sur un plan culturel plus large, en etudiant trois nouvelles tirees du Penguin Book of Lesbian Short...

Neophilologus

This article examines the interplay between homosexual desire and anxiety in the poetry of Blai Bonet, one of the most important, complex, and problematic figures in modern Catalan literature. Bonet is usually presented as a homosexual author, but the way his poetry articulates same-sex desire is far from straightforward. Critics have highlighted the sensuality and eroticism of his poetry, as well as the importance of mysticism and Catholic imagery. However, a specific analysis of homosexual desire in Bonet’s poetry has never been undertaken. Through a psychoanalytically-oriented reading of various poems by Bonet, this essay traces the movement and the effect of anxiety in a textual corpus characterised by a tension between a body mortified by pain, illness, and guilt, and an ecstatic body that seeks satisfaction in the social underworld, in voyeurism and fantasy, and in textual play. Blai Bonet’s literary project promotes a textual revolution through the dissolution of genres and t...

Cadernos de Tradução, 2008

This paper is an exploratory study of how lexical choices and grammatical structures adopted in translation seem to carry ideological burdens that sustain, perpetuate and challenge existing power relations present in source texts and their transfer to target texts. Supported by Critical Discourse Analysis and Genre Analysis, this article suggests that the more gay translation wins apparent recognition in the target social system, the more it is seen as a minor literature subject to diverse interpretations. The data source analyzed was Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and its translation into Brazilian Portuguese. During the analysis some excerpts of the novel were chosen at random, in order to select some lexical and grammatical constructions of the way ideologies and power relations are represented in texts. Hence, this article aims at demonstrating that far from finding a favorable reception in the target culture, gay translation is likely to give rise to such a hostile reception which shows that minority issues are yet considered a subaltern subject.

Scandinavian Studies

This article presents comparative readings of works of fiction depicting homosexuality published between 1927 and 1941, with an emphasis on Scandinavian literature. It argues that the story of Tantalus, the mythical king whose thirst and hunger were never satisfied, functions as a catachresis that conveys the unattainability of homosexual desire. The article further makes the case that allusions to Tantalus carry a political significance in a context where homosexuality is perceived as a threat to incipient Scandinavian welfare states. Through readings of one novella, two novels and two poems, the article seeks to show that the Tantalus trope can support heteronormativity, but that it may also function as a potentially subversive symbol of the naturalness of same-sex love.