Thesislog

Inspired by a discussion yesterday with Sophie in which she raised some really good points about class context:

Here’s a paragraph from Jonathan Ned Katz’s book, in the context of an 1836 story about a man who was robbed by a prostitute whom, he later discovered, was in fact a man dressed as and passing as a woman:

“Bowyer also discovered,” said the Sun, that the prisoner, “to sustain his pretension, and impose upon men”—here seventeen words in clumsy Latin complete the sentence. Translated, the phrase says that the woman impersonator “had been fitted with a piece of cow [leather?] pierced and opened like a woman’s womb [“vagina” is the intended word], held up by a girdle.” Educated, Latin-reading, upper-class men could apparently contemplate such details without harm; women and lower-class persons of either sex could not.”

It seems as if, by printing this discussion of a homosexual encounter in Latin, the tabloid is itself validating the classical and upper-class connotations of homoeroticism, even as it also condemns the morality of the behavior? I wonder what sort of impact the popular culture like this had in spurring young men who could decode this article and found themselves interested by it to work homoeroticism into a classicist and classist framework. And I also wonder (if the Sun isn’t the only tabloid doing this in this one instance) whether this—and not just fears about masculinity—is what makes working-class and non-Anglo/-Western-European immigrant Americans slower to embrace a sexual-object-choice model of sexuality (our modern “homosexuality”) in place of a gender-identity model (“inverts”).

I should call a chapter of my thesis “Class(ic)ism.”