The Susceptible Queer of the Nineteenth Century

Before the homosexual was a species, the queer was an effect of civilization. Susceptibility—to history, to environment, to influence, to familial taint—functioned as a key concept in the precipitation of... [ view full abstract ]

Before the homosexual was a species, the queer was an effect of civilization. Susceptibility—to history, to environment, to influence, to familial taint—functioned as a key concept in the precipitation of sexuality-in-formation across the nineteenth century. This paper builds on emergent frameworks in queer studies that signal the role of relationality, rather than identitarian concepts, in forging modern notions of sexuality developed by scholars such as Peter Coviello and Greta LaFleur. It argues for a biopolitical reading of the history of sexuality that positions queer as the improper mediation of object relations between self, others, and toxic environments, a phenomenon marked in nineteenth-century terms as susceptibility. It draws on Theodore Winthrop’s 1861 novel Cecil Dreeme and the anonymously-published short story “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” to unpack how accounts of subjectivity and same-sex desire materialize vis-a-vis states of porosity and permeability that were understood as physiological conditions of civilization. Susceptibility emerges as a naturalizing schematic that places the weight of subject formation on toxic milieus, rather than the individual. This biopolitical, rather than primarily discursive, account of modern sexuality emphasizes the significance of the racial structure of civilization to the emergence of queer social formations.