Among strangers: Protocols of an occulted social type

As part of a general cultural reconfiguration in 17th century England, two modes of male sexuality were constructed. Practices and traditions adhered to both, thus determining various characteristics of those whose identities were constructed within either of the two sexualized "spheres". One mode--the "heterosexual"--was socially defined as moral, correct and open. The other--the "homosexual"--became socially occulted.; This division continues to be maintained in contemporary Anglo-American culture. Men who are both Anglo-American and homosexual are predisposed to behaviors and modes of thought and understanding that are associated with the occulted type, a group referred to in this dissertation as "strangers". While one can be "strange"--i.e. carry the behaviors and tendencies of the type--without being homosexual, the magnetized locus for the type, both socially and individually, is eroto-sexual.; Characteristics and aspects of strangeness are either obliquely illustrated or directly exemplified in the works considered in this dissertation. These characteristics include a valorization of ornament, detail and incompletion (reactions to "power"); a rejection of logic and overview; the equation of the physical and the numinous; a tendency to exist in or tend toward congregates (both physical and symbolic); a mode of understanding that is based not in Ramistic outline or syllogistic logic but in wit, image, juxtaposition and "abductive" or interruptive reasoning (i.e. illogical leaps and guessing); a propensity for anagrammatic malleability in all forms.; The Anglo-American stranger (generally but not exclusively co-equivalent, then, with the white male American homosexual) is a translational nexus within the culture. With the decline in social, cultural and political importance of the previously monolithically hegemonic Anglo-American heterosexual modality, the ways of the stranger are now being brought into light and used, co-opted under such desexualized and de-eroticized rubrics as "post-modernism", "post-literacy" or "post-disciplinarity" by the larger culture in an attempt to stabilize order and power in the face of an increasingly fragmented and chaotic cultural milieu.; Works by Laurel and Hardy, Tom of Finland, Busby Berkeley, Christopher Rage, DJ Jerry Bonham, John Cage, Jesse Green, and John Ashbery are considered.