Queering the Underworld
Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
9780226327914
9780226327907
9780226327921
Queering the Underworld
Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
At the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it.
In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.
Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.
In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.
Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.
272 pages | 13 halftones, 1 line drawing | 6 x 9 | © 2007
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
Sociology: Race, Ethnic, and Minority Relations, Urban and Rural Sociology
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
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
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