Modern love: Queer subjects and the contradictions of modernity

This dissertation proposes a theory of how and why gay and lesbian subjects came to be privileged emblems of the modern. Both lesbian and gay subjectivities are located at the opposite poles of modernity by a wide range of modernist writers, cultural critics, and historians and theorists of modern culture. The figures of the lesbian and the male homosexual are depicted as, on the one hand, distinctly modern subversions of sex and gender norms and, on the other, as subjects who stand in opposition to the industrialization and commodification of modern life. This project aims to bring these opposing models of queer identity together by showing them to be inextricably bound up with each other, and with the history of capital. Gay identity is itself paradigmatic of a new form of consciousness that capitalist social relations engender, embodied most recognizably in the bourgeois subject: a radically split, contradictory subjectivity that is constructed around the opposition between public and private, outside and inside. Offering a new account of the late-nineteenth-century "invention" of the homosexual, this study argues that "the queer" emerges out of the specifically modern, capitalist contradiction between the public world of production and industry and the private world of consumption and pleasure. A wide-ranging and interdisciplinary project, the dissertation combines cultural theory, cultural history, and British, French, and American literary texts from the fin-de-siecle to the 1930s. This analysis focuses upon pivotal cultural figures such as the nineteenth-century, Wildean dandy, the "perverse" lesbian of decadence, the mannish lesbian, and the black dandy of the Harlem Renaissance in order to trace the transformations and continuities of the contradictions that define modern gay and lesbian identity.