Pathologization and the Homophile Re-Collection of Walt Whitman
Open Access DepositedConstitutional Completeness
Downloadable Content
and the pervasive nature of science and medicine as sites of knowledge production about normativity and health. By the early 1950s, homosexuals found themselves, through a range of mechanisms, denied the widely-shared rights and privileges ostensibly shared by all American citizens, a status theorized here as Constitutional incompleteness, or the embodied state of non-citizen-subjecthood that arises out of exclusion from the body politic. This dissertation asks questions about how gender and sexual minorities managed the discourses used to pathologize them
how and why the Lavender Scare marks a moment of community, subjective, and political formation centered specifically around shared modes of desire and practices of pleasure
the Lavender Scare purges of homosexuals
a flexible relationship to temporality
an underlying faith in American democracy’s place in a teleological arc of civilization
This dissertation engages mid-twentieth century Los Angeles-based ONE Magazine, the first regularly-issued and openly-sold homosexual publication in the United States, alongside American poet Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistasand English sexologist Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex to investigate how homosexual men in the 1950s worked toward crafting and embodying an early gay politics that attempted to address the contemporary issues many gender and sexual variants faced
and an abiding belief in the affective politics of American poet Walt Whitman. What emerges out of this politics of Constitutional completeness is, I argue, the first figurations of a modern, self-consciously homosexual political subject rooted in masculine able-bodiedness and bound up in a co-constituting relationship with the State.
and who was included and excluded from this emerging critical mass. What I uncovers is neither a radical cripqueer liberation politics, nor a conservative retreat into conformity as a means of demonstrating homosexual health and patriotism, but an early politics of sexuality that accepted, to a degree, the pathologizing conclusions of science and medicine. However, rather than this acceptance reflecting a self-critical, internalized homophobia, or the outright embrace of second-class citizenship, this dissertation demonstrates that it allowed early homophile men to critically engage those very same discourses and, in the process, articulate and practice what I theorize as an early homophile politics of Constitutional completeness, or an embodied and affective approach to socio-political non-being that was deeply informed by the sciences of race, gender, sex, and sexuality
shifts toward gender and sexual conformity and the homophobic policing of affective and embodied alterity
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.