Queering the Underworld

Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

By: Scott Herring

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Hardcover | 30 December 2007 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.29 x 1.6 x 0.21

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Herring presents a sustained and well-written argument, working closely and effectively with a range of texts. His interesting and informative book attempts an important - and welcome - intervention into our present historical moment, when the potentially emancipatory project of queer politics threatens to collapse into a race to the altar." - Susan Edmunds, Syracuse University"

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Society & Culture Social Groups Gay & Lesbian Studies Lesbian Studies Family & Health Relationships & Families: Advice & Issues Sex & Sexuality: Advice & Issues Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature General Literary Studies Literary Studies from 1900 to Current

Gay Studies for Gay Men Sociology & Anthropology

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Queer Slumming	p. 1
Underworld Unknowing	p. 1
The Hermeneutics of Sexual Suspicion	p. 4
The Suspicion of Sexual Hermeneutics	p. 13
Rotten Politics	p. 20
Terra Incognita: Jane Addams, Philanthropic Slumming, and the Elusive Identity of Hull-House	p. 25
Disappearing Acts	p. 25
Spinster Panic	p. 31
Queered Cosmopolitanism	p. 39
Twenty Years in Cedarville	p. 49
The Limbo of Forgotten Spectators	p. 61
Willa Cather's Experiment in Luxury	p. 67
Cather's Case History	p. 67
In the Company of Tramps	p. 74
Decadent Movements	p. 79
The Miseries of Pittsburgh	p. 83
Fairy Worlds	p. 87
Slumming on Park Avenue	p. 96
Capitalism and the Erasure of Gay Identity	p. 100
"Slightly Known Territory": Renaissance Admixture and the So-Called Van Vechten School	p. 104
A Caucasian Storms Harlem	p. 104
The Signifying Slummer	p. 111
Parties and Mixers	p. 121
Friendship beyond Understanding	p. 127
Nugent's Shtick	p. 138
"Just a Case of Mixed Signs"	p. 144
Antisapphic Modernism	p. 150
Les mysteres de Djuna Barnes	p. 150
Looking for Bohemia	p. 156
Stephen Gordon's Slumming Tour	p. 165
Lost in transition	p. 173
Watchman, What of the Night?	p. 177
Hidden from History	p. 182
The Obscure Life	p. 188
Epilogue: Secrets of the African-American Bisexual Man; or, Double Lives on the Down Low	p. 193
Straight Outta Compton	p. 193
Never Apologize, Never Explain	p. 199
Undetectability	p. 203
Beyond Subcultural Studies: A Manifesto	p. 207
Notes	p. 211
Works Cited	p. 237
Index	p. 265
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Queering the Underworld

Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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