Modernist Art of Queer Survival

Whether we speak of queer bodies targeted for harassment, queer sensibilities derided as dangerous, or queer intimacies denied legitimacy, we acknowledge a close companionship between queerness and precariousness. Queerness remains continuously under threat; these threats to survival can be immediate, as in the AIDS crises, or more subtle and entrenched. Many queer lives thus end prematurely and drastically-but not all end in the physical expiration of life. Someterminate gradually and even unconsciously in the countless concessions to normativity demanded by dominant cultures that perceive, through a perverse set of projective identifications, their own survival as imperiled by queerness. The Modernist Art of Queer Survival explores an archive of modernistarchive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the five modernists examined in The Modernist Art of Queer Survival countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, humility, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and ecologically sustainablemodes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Authors and texts discussed include Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, E.M.Forster's Howards End and A Passage to India, and Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Lucy Gayheart.

The Modernist Art of Queer Survival is an invigorating book, and one that will endure. Queer theory has a future, and this is the kind of work that makes scholars want to be a part of it., Bringing foundational perspectives on queer theory to bear on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, Bateman delivers a monograph that is equally informed by the historical and the theoretical, the aesthetic and the philosophical. It is a work of depth and insight, and a profound contribution not only to modernist studies, but also to forms of queer theory that could reap substantial rewards from the kind of modernist literary perspective through which Bateman stages the terms of his argument., An astute contribution to queer, modernist, and eco-criticism, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival offers a powerful alternative to the tendency in much queer theory to disclaim futurity. Through readings of James, Wilde, Forster,and Cather, Benjamin Bateman mounts a convincing counter-argument for 'queer survival' as future possibility:an embracing of the disruptions of self that occur upon inviting the unexpected to enter and become part of oneself. It is here in the kind of future Bateman proposes, where the concept of queer survival can expose the elastic contours of life and dissolve the boundaries between the animate and inanimate., Bringing impressive nuance to queer debates about temporality, which sometimes seem to insist in overly stark terms that queerness exists only in an unrealized future or in no future at all, Benjamin Bateman helps us recognize the dignity and creativity involved in the quotidian work of hanging on and letting go that constitutes queer survival. In a series of brilliant readings of modernist texts, his study disentangles survival from normative ideologies of success and sovereignty, demonstrating the ways that Oscar Wilde, Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather ask us to rethink survival in terms of weakness, frangibility, and porousness. The result is a work of remarkable intelligence and ethical urgency, a vibrant resource not only for students of modernism and queer studies but for all of us trying to improvise our way into an uncertain future., Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Benjamin Bateman is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches modern and contemporary literature and gender and sexuality studies. He previously taught and served as the director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities at California State University, Los Angeles.