Graduate Student, Draper Program in Humanities & Social Thought
Thesis Title: The Gilded and the Abject: A Genealogy of Queer Aesthetics in the Tradition of Aestheticism and Decadence
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Eckart Goebel
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About
My thesis traces a genealogy of queer aesthetics in literature that comes out of the schools of late 19th century Aestheticism and Decadence. One of my central concerns is how these movements provided discourses for queer artists to latch onto to fashion a modern gay male identity. Examples of this are seen in the works of Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Yukio Mishima, Quentin Crisp, and Jean Genet. While these authors may be thought of as children of these aesthetic movements (of Pater too, perhaps) some of them develop different conceptions of modern gay male identity. So, for instance, Wilde fashioned a model of gay male identity as the effeminate, if paradoxical, aesthete, while Gide fashioned another that had could only come about after having gone beyond good and evil and into nihlism; and still yet, Genet fashioned his own model based on abjection and criminality to elevate the homosexual to sainthood. On the other hand, such models of homosexuality are not isolated but respond to and inform each other. Gide had spent time with Wilde and Douglass, for instance, before he wrote L'Immoraliste, and the figure of Wilde haunts the novel. And Crisp was most certainly a twentieth century child of Wilde--perhaps it is not fair to claim that these figures are children of Pater, then, but of Wilde. We must pay attention then to the connections as well as to the differences. What is it about Aestheticism and Decadence that is so attractive for homosexuals? What is at stake in their attachment to these discourses? Because of these attachments, can Aestheticism be disentangled from Decadence or are they intimately intertwined? We must also pay attention to what was going on concurrently, as the rise of psychoanalysis and the pathologizing of sexual identities led to certain conceptions of the male homosexual. To what extent do these discourses inform or respond to each other? How might Freud's conception of homosexuality be on par with the Aesthetes and the Decadents? In addition to gay males, we may wish to consider how Aestheticism and Decadence provide a discourse for lesbians, such as Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon, bisexuals, such as Djuna Barnes' Robin Vote, and pedarests (or boy-lovers, or Uranians), such as Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen's Lord Lyllian.
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