A01=Dominic Janes
aesthetes
appearance
art
Author_Dominic Janes
british
byron
camp
caricature
caricatures
cartoon
Category=JBSJ
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
clothing
corps de beaux
culture
dandyism
deportment
desire
effeminate
emotion
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fashion
feeling
gay
gender
history
homosexuality
identity
lgbt
lgbtq
lgbtqia
literature
macaronis
manliness
masculinity
men
nonfiction
performance
queer
same sex
sentiment
sodomy
sophistication
spectacle
style
theater
victorian
Product details
- ISBN 9780226358642
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 10 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad," Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom which erupted in laughter accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury's horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this "queer moment" in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century.
He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.
Dominic Janes is professor of modern history at Keele University, United Kingdom. He is the author of several books, including most recently Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
