A collection of notes, titles, citations, thoughts, images, acknowledgements, etc. relating to a senior thesis on the intellectual history of male homosexuality in the 19th century.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I’m struck by how neatly pre-1900 queer historiography breaks down into 20th-century essentialist, hetero/homo binary readings and 21st-century, neo-Foucauldian, contextually-contingent readings. It’s as if suddenly around 1999 there was some convention where every queer historian and literary critic in America and Europe suddenly decided to apply an entirely new methodology to their research. It’s almost eerie how orchestrated it is and how neatly it turns on the century mark—and yet it’s good, because I see myself squarely in the center of the 21st-century camp, inside which there’s still lots and lots of room to develop.
