Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
At the turn 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...
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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.
List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: Queer Slumming 1Underworld Unknowing 1The Hermeneutics of Sexual Suspicion 4The Suspicion of Sexual Hermeneutics 13Rotten Politics 20Terra Incognita: Jane Addams, Philanthropic Slumming, and the Elusive Identity of Hull-House 25Disappearing Acts 25Spinster Panic 31Queered Cosmopolitanism 39Twenty Years in Cedarville 49The Limbo of Forgotten Spectators 61Willa Cather's Experiment in Luxury 67Cather's Case History 67In the Company of Tramps 74Decadent Movements 79The Miseries of Pittsburgh 83Fairy Worlds 87Slumming on Park Avenue 96Capitalism and the Erasure of Gay Identity 100"Slightly Known Territory": Renaissance Admixture and the So-Called Van Vechten School 104A Caucasian Storms Harlem 104The Signifying Slummer 111Parties and Mixers 121Friendship beyond Understanding 127Nugent'sShtick 138"Just a Case of Mixed Signs" 144Antisapphic Modernism 150Les mysteres de Djuna Barnes 150Looking for Bohemia 156Stephen Gordon's Slumming Tour 165Lost in transition 173Watchman, What of the Night? 177Hidden from History 182The Obscure Life 188Epilogue: Secrets of the African-American Bisexual Man; or, Double Lives on the Down Low 193Straight Outta Compton 193Never Apologize, Never Explain 199Undetectability 203Beyond Subcultural Studies: A Manifesto 207Notes 211Works Cited 237Index 265
\ Times Higher EducationPowerfully researched, passionately argued and often beautifully written. . . . Herring is scrupulous—and excellent—in setting his chosen texts in dialogue with each other, with the historical forces that produced them.—Denis Flannery, Times Higher Education\ — Denis Flannery\ \ \ \ \ \ Choice"In this original, accessible, and important work of US cultural history, Herring contributes to scholarship on the anomalous position of slumming literature (sordid narratives about the underworld and its bizarre inhabitants) in the early 20th century."\ \ \ \ Gay & Lesbian Review WorldwideThis sprightly, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. . . . A fine, compelling, and original work.\ — Richard Canning\ \ \ \ \ \ American LiteratureScott Herring’s Queering the Underworld stages a different departure from identity, whose strength is not its subtlety but its bravado—offering, perhaps, the most original conceptual account of queer identity since Epistemology of the Closet.”\ — Jordan Alexander Stein\ \ \ \ \ \ Leo Bersani“Why read slumming narratives if not to get the lowdown on low life? With brilliant perversity, Scott Herring celebrates a group of American writers—among them, Willa Cather, Jane Addams, and Djuna Barnes—who remystified what slumming literature had appeared to demystify, thereby undermining the genre's promise of subcultural legibility. In this original and important work of cultural history, Herring makes a very timely argument for what he calls ‘sexual unknowing’—an argument, essentially, for saving our underworlds by renouncing our fierce and destructive desire to reduce them to objects of knowledge.”\ \ \ \ \ \ Christopher Looby“Scott Herring’s bravely searching book deserves wide and careful attention. At once a compelling account of modern U.S. slumming literatures and a persuasive polemical intervention in contemporary queer studies, Queering the Underworld is original in conception, efficient in execution, and consistently engaging.”\ \ \ \ \ \ Siobhan Somerville“Beautifully written and boldly argued, Queering the Underworld makes an invigorating contribution to the fields of American studies and queer studies. In agile readings of varied sources, Herring not only resituates ‘slumming’ as a genre that could sometimes jam the signals of sexual modernity in the U.S., but also demonstrates the larger stakes of an unflinchingly queer approach to the history of sexuality.”\ \ \ \ \ \ Times Higher Education"Powerfully researched, passionately argued and often beautifully written. . . . Herring is scrupulous—and excellent—in setting his chosen texts in dialogue with each other, with the historical forces that produced them."—Denis Flannery, Times Higher Education\ \ \ \ \ \ Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide"This sprightly, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. . . . A fine, compelling, and original work."\ \ \ \ \ \ American Literature“Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld stages a different departure from identity, whose strength is not its subtlety but its bravado—offering, perhaps, the most original conceptual account of queer identity since Epistemology of the Closet.”\ \ \
