Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain by Declan Kavanagh (review)

Declan Kavanagh has produced a learned, elegantly written study of mid-eighteenth-century Britons’ obsession with effeminacy as well as an incisive primer on the gendered political culture of the 1760s. Focusing on the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and its legacy for modern democratic thinking, the book explains why today’s struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights are both overdue and overdetermined. As Kavanagh demonstrates during the course of five chapters examining mid-century aesthetic, literary, and political thought, modern conceptions of privacy, rights, and permissions are not just implicitly heteronormative. These democratic touchstones have often been promoted as a bulwark against non-normative gender and sexuality. Who is afforded a right to privacy and what areas of life are protected as private? If Effeminate Years answers, not unexpectedly, straight masculine men and their sex lives, it also tells the less obvious story of how the push to expand democratic rights has simultaneously involved the semiotic and legal marginalization of queer life.

An origin and paradigm of our political modernity, Kavanagh argues, is the radical journalist and politician, and unabashed libertine, John Wilkes. Effeminate Years examines the political and sexual controversies surrounding Wilkes in the 1760s, when Wilkes and his supporters fought to restrain government power and to make political institutions more transparent as well as more accountable to their constituents. How much you know, or do not know, about Wilkes and the populist movement he inspired will undoubtedly shape your experience of reading what is at times a densely detailed account of Wilkes, his allies, opponents, and intellectual descendants. This is not said as a criticism. One of the strengths of Kavanagh’s book is its density, a quality that describes, as well, the introduction’s efforts to situate its account of effeminacy in relation to the history of sexuality and, more generally, lesbian and gay historical studies. Effeminate Years, simply put, covers a lot of ground, often in the discrete space of a chapter subsection. Kavanagh does a good job of signposting his arguments, and the book is clear about its priorities. The book’s concern is not really Wilkes, but rather the “rhetorical construction of masculinity” in Wilkesite discourse (xxvii). Used as a noun and an adjective, “Wilksesite” does not simply designate a supporter of Wilkes or, for that matter, a single ideological position. This term describes the authors, idiom, and point of view that engendered the modern civically and politically empowered actor—a Habermasian male subject whose property includes his own heterosexuality, a thing to indulge in the privacy of his own home and to relish, defend, and bond over in the homosocial environs where men mingle: the gentlemen’s club, Westminster, and the pages of the popular press.

The Wilkesite libertine is not your grandfather’s (or Wilkes’s grandfather’s) libertine. In contradistinction to the aristocratic gentlemen of Rochester’s poetry and Restoration comedy, this figure seems more at home among the middling sort, and his legible yet unostentatious heteroeroticism rules out same-sex desire. Beginning with the introduction’s treatment of Edward Ward’s The Secret History of Clubs (1709), Effeminate Years demonstrates the degree to which effeminacy, though not always associated with sex, often functioned as code for the “sodomitical”: that is, not only acts of sodomy and the desire to engage in them but also political and social states of subjection. Reading the understudied popular satiric poetry of one of Wilkes’s staunchest defenders, Charles Churchill, chapter 1 shows how such poems as Churchill’s Independence (1764) and The Conference (1763) represent aristocratic patronage as an exploitative power dynamic that Kavanagh often describes as “pederastic asymmetries of power” (18). These readings throw into relief a Wilkesite shibboleth; Churchill had his own sexual skeletons in his closet (having eloped with the young Elizabeth Carr), but he nonetheless successfully projected himself as a champion of liberty whose public virtue was...