Queer Modernism

Abstract

In this essay, the author seeks to account for the conjunction of queerness and modernism. The first half of the essay maps three major discourses which provide the constitutive possibility for the emergence of queer modernism: German sexology, French Decadent writing, and the English scandals of Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall. All of these discourses are both literary and extraliterary; they are simultaneously rooted in national traditions and resonate with international significance. The second half of the essay moves from the work of creating a genealogy of queer modernism to outlining its formal features and defining characteristics. As a working definition, we might say provisionally that “queer modernism” delineates the sexually transgressive and gender deviant energies that help fuel modernism's desire to thwart normative aesthetics, knowledge, geographies, and temporalities.

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