Materializing Queer Desire

Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol

Elisa Glick

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781438427263, 9781438427256
• eBook ISBN: 9781438427386
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Uses iconic dandy and queer figures to explore relationships between homosexuality, modernism, and modernity.

How did the queer subject come to occupy such a central, and in many respects, contradictory place in the modern world of the early twentieth century? What role has capitalism played in the development of modern gay and lesbian identities? Materializing Queer Desire focuses on the figure of the dandy to explore how and why gay and lesbian subjects became heroes of modern life. Elisa Glick argues that the gay subject emerged out of the specifically modern, capitalist contradiction between the public world of production and industry and the private world of consumption and pleasure. Boldly bringing modernism into dialogue with Marxist and queer theory, Glick offers an innovative, materialist account of modern queer consciousness that challenges tendencies to oppose "private" eroticism and the systems of value that govern "public" interests. In the process she illuminates the connections between aesthetic, sexual, and social formations in modern life-between modernity's disruptive, "queer" desires and their unfolding in an increasingly rationalized society.

Table of contents

• Materializing Queer Desire
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Dialectics of Dandyism
• 2. The Seductions of Sapphic Decadence
• 3. Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Dandy
• 4. Harlem’s Queer Dandy and the Artifice of Blackness
• 5. Gutter Dandyism:The Queer Junkie in Cold War America
• 6. The Dandy Goes Pop: Andy Warhol’s Queer Commodity Aesthetics
• AFTERWORD: The New Dandyism?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index