Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond by Whitney Davis (review)

Among the reasons to welcome Whitney Davis’s Queer Beauty is the rare confluence of capacities and interests it embodies: an erudite, scholarly, philosophically informed mode of tracing intellectual history brought to bear on questions of queer sexuality. That is a rare convergence, and not just because scholars with the erudition to address large questions in aesthetics are often distressingly dismissive of queer concerns. Such an approach is also rare in queer studies. I do not mean to endorse the homophobic commonplace that queer studies is the domain of trendy intellectual featherweights; the field does, however, sometimes suffer from having too narrow (and too obvious) a canon—largely because, to gain a hearing, queer-centered work must make itself immediately legible as limiting its scope to the concerns of a minority sexual population. Too broadly conceived, the inquiry borders on questions that are seen to be trivialized by the focus on specialty concerns; narrowed to the limits dictated by the market, it thereby also secures its safe irrelevance for those waiting patiently for the trend to pass. For queer scholars, such external pressures often force them to resolve questions too quickly. By ruling out more capacious lines of inquiry in order to prove the relevance of their work to specifically sexual questions, such scholars also implicitly help keep sexuality safely quarantined, away from putatively higher realms of thought, and reassure us that sexual questions are rarely anything but obvious to discover and simple to resolve. Avoiding such compromises, Davis allows questions of aesthetics and intellectual history to develop on their own terms without ever sidelining sexuality as a focus.

In the broadest strokes, the ten essays in Queer Beauty address the relation between homoeroticism (or, more generally, the felt experience of desire) to a particular strand of thinking about beauty running from Johann Winckelmann and Immanuel Kant through John Addington Symonds and Vernon Lee to Sigmund Freud and Richard Wollheim. What is the relation between homoerotic desire and aesthetic judgment, aesthetic production, aesthetic reception, and canons of aesthetic taste? The book addresses these questions without reducing the aesthetic to the mere expression of desires (or to their repression or sublimation) or dismissing the lived experience of desire as purely irrelevant to ostensibly larger concerns. (“How can aesthetics be thought, indeed be lived, without a complete but artificial cleavage of its two terms or their complete but undesirable collapse?” [8].) These questions take many forms—for example, in his accounts of the fate of particular homoerotic or pederastic investments in the constitution of canonical or communal judgments of beauty in Kant; of Symonds’s Hegelian model of the relation of homoerotic desire to aesthetics; of Freud’s relations (of indebtedness, of misprision) to his homosexualist contemporaries; of Michel Foucault’s reading of S/M culture in San Francisco of the late 1970s and early 1980s; and of Wollheim’s work as articulating a model of aesthetic creation and apprehension that communicates the depths of psychic fantasy.

Repeatedly, Davis turns to recursive structures or feedback loops, which eschew reductive understandings of the relation of sex to art. In Winckelmann, the model for such a feedback loop is “pederastic Nachahmung” (imitation): sculptures of victorious athletes in the palaestra “inspired young men to physical and moral achievement,” while “the beautiful bodies of athletes who cultivated these artistic ideals” became “material prototypes” for the sculptor’s representations—“images that eventually returned to the wrestling grounds” to be “admired and imitated in due course by the next generation (and all later generations) of young male athletes admired by their lovers” (31). This recursive structure of imitation informs later thinking about the circuits linking homoerotic desire with aesthetic production and reception—meaning, among other things, that to express one’s desire in art is no simpler a thing than to find one’s desires reflected there—or, as in Oscar Wilde’s texts, to discover in art desires one didn...