Critical Race Bottoming Studies and Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme

Travis Foster’s paper begins by noting that bottoming occupies a key convergence between critical race studies and queer theory. Much of this thinking situates bottoming as a combination of abjection and pleasure through... [ view full abstract ]

Travis Foster’s paper begins by noting that bottoming occupies a key convergence between critical race studies and queer theory. Much of this thinking situates bottoming as a combination of abjection and pleasure through which (neo)liberalism's autonomous self dissolves, becoming porous and newly open to alternative potential. Yet that argument becomes less certain when the bottom in question is a white American man whose desires focus on penetration by a nonwhite phallus, a configuration that brings into the sexual dynamic histories of racial subjugation and exploitation. Theodore Winthrop’s newly reissued Cecil Dreeme(1861) explores this tension. On the one hand, the novel’s monogenesis foregrounds climatological origins of racial difference, figuring bottoming as a precipitated receptivity to climate's racializing force and transforming the white bottom into a “race traitor.” On the other hand, interracial homosexual desire in the novel serves to normalize intraracial homosexual desire, enabling the threat of race treachery to compliment homonationalism and white supremacy.