The Materiality of Desire Between Two Men in the American Civil War

Embodiment, claims Amico in "The Materiality of Desire Between Two Men in the American Civil War,  is crucial to the history of sexuality. Instead of historicizing the idea of the body as it relates to understandings of... [ view full abstract ]

Embodiment, claims Amico in "The Materiality of Desire Between Two Men in the American Civil War,  is crucial to the history of sexuality. Instead of historicizing the idea of the body as it relates to understandings of desire and other emotional states at a certain time, Amico seeks to materialize embodiment as an ever-unsettled web of affective ties that structures social relations. The coordinates of this web include not just people but places, movements, gestures, artifacts, and words as objects themselves. This paper will focus on the first few weeks of the two-year long relationship between two Union soldiers, Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment, to demonstrate how to use places, artifacts, and primary source letters to materialize a web of relations on the page. This engagement with the materiality of a scene of the past will show how embodiment rests on the feeling of incompleteness, and will afford a new way to ascertain the social place and import of the intimate relations between men who are also fighting in the name of a larger social Union.