Queering the Underworld
Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Queer Slumming
Underworld Unknowing
The Hermeneutics of Sexual Suspicion
The Suspicion of Sexual Hermeneutics
Rotten Politics
Chapter One Terra Incognita: Jane Addams, Philanthropic Slumming, and the Elusive Identity of Hull-House
Disappearing Acts
Spinster Panic
Queered Cosmopolitanism
Twenty Years in Cedarville
The Limbo of Forgotten Spectators
Chapter Two Willa Cather’s Experiment in Luxury
Cather’s Case History
In the Company of Tramps
Decadent Movements
The Miseries of Pittsburgh
Fairy Worlds
Slumming on Park Avenue
Capitalism and the Erasure of Gay Identity
Chapter Three “Slightly Known Territory”: Renaissance Admixture and the So-Called Van Vechten School
A Caucasian Storms Harlem
The Signifying Slummer
Parties and Mixers
Friendship beyond Understanding
Nugent’s Shtick
“Just a Case of Mixed Signs”
Chapter Four Antisapphic Modernism
Les mystères de Djuna Barnes
Looking for Bohemia
Stephen Gordon’s Slumming Tour
Lost in transition
Watchman, What of the Night?
Hidden from History
The Obscure Life
Epilogue: Secrets of the African-American Bisexual Man; or, Double Lives on the Down Low
Straight Outta Compton
Never Apologize, Never Explain
Undetectability
Beyond Subcultural Studies: A Manifesto
Notes
Works Cited
Index
“Why read slumming narratives if not to get the lowdown on low life? With brilliant perversity, Scott Herring celebrates a group of American writers—among them, Willa Cather, Jane Addams, and Djuna Barnes—who remystified what slumming literature had appeared to demystify, thereby undermining the genre’s promise of subcultural legibility. In this original and important work of cultural history, Herring makes a very timely argument for what he calls ‘sexual unknowing’—an argument, essentially, for saving our underworlds by renouncing our fierce and destructive desire to reduce them to objects of knowledge.”
“Scott Herring’s bravely searching book deserves wide and careful attention. At once a compelling account of modern U.S. slumming literatures and a persuasive polemical intervention in contemporary queer studies, Queering the Underworld is original in conception, efficient in execution, and consistently engaging.”
“Beautifully written and boldly argued, Queering the Underworld makes an invigorating contribution to the fields of American studies and queer studies. In agile readings of varied sources, Herring not only resituates ‘slumming’ as a genre that could sometimes jam the signals of sexual modernity in the U.S., but also demonstrates the larger stakes of an unflinchingly queer approach to the history of sexuality.”
"Powerfully researched, passionately argued and often beautifully written. . . . Herring is scrupulous—and excellent—in setting his chosen texts in dialogue with each other, with the historical forces that produced them."—Denis Flannery, Times Higher Education
"This sprightly, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. . . . A fine, compelling, and original work."
“Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld stages a different departure from identity, whose strength is not its subtlety but its bravado—offering, perhaps, the most original conceptual account of queer identity since Epistemology of the Closet.”
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
Sociology: Race, Ethnic, and Minority Relations | Urban and Rural Sociology
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