In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Notes Introduction 1. Most of the research into same-sex relationships in the South has paid attention to the twentieth century, as indicated in Sears, Growing Up Gay in the South and Lonely Hunters; Dews and Law, eds., Out in the South; Howard, Men Like That; and Howard, ed., Carryin’ On. Somerville’s Queering the Color Line discusses the connections between racial segregation and the ideological construction of homosexual bodies at the end of the nineteenth century but does not examine those connections in relation to the postbellum plantation. Carryin’ On contains a few articles about the nineteenth-centurySouth,includingMartinDuberman’sessay“‘WrithingBedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence” (153–68). Yet this inclusion supports my claim about the paucity of queer southern historical research, for Duberman’s essay was first published in Journal of Homosexuality in 1980–81, and reprinted again in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History. While this essay is certainly important and insightful, the fact that it keeps getting republished in anthologies that intend to introduce something new to the study of sexuality exposes the absence of much else written about the South. In a provocative footnote to a recent essay, Noel Polk and Richard Godden briefly address the scant instances in historical records when white masters appeared to have sexually exploited their male slaves (“Reading the Ledgers,” 308 n. 7). But perhaps the best-known description of an antebellum sexual encounter between two people of the same sex appears at the end of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, where she describes the humiliating sexual domination experienced by Luke at the hands of his corrupt master (192). For an interesting reading that situates this narrative with the history of homosexuality, see Abdur-Rahman, “The Strangest Freaks of Despotism.” 2. The only book-length study devoted to queer readings of southern texts is Richards’s Lovers and Beloveds, although Gwin’s The Woman in the Red Dress also discusses queerness in some southern works. Articles that consider plantation literature 250 / notes to introduction within a queer framework include Gebhard, “Reconstructing Southern Manhood”; and Forman, “This Promiscuous Housekeeping.” 3. Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi; Goldman, “Who Is That Queer Queer?” 174. 4. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8–9, original emphasis. See also Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62. 5. King, A Southern Renaissance, 27, see also 20–38. 6. Bersani, Homos, 39, 149–50, 41. 7. Bersani supports this theory in part with a reading of Freud’s Wolf Man. He argues that Freud misreads the Wolf Man’s dream of the primal scene when he suggests that the father is castrating the mother in the sexual act. Instead, Bersani argues , the infant is actually frightened for the father and defecates to offer him a gift. The budding homosexual identifies with the father, not the mother, because he recognizes their sameness. Hence, homosexual desire is grounded in the identification with someone who is perceived as the same, not in the recognition of difference or lack (Homos, 108–12). His later essay “Sociality and Sexuality” supports this theory in more detail with a reading of Plato’s Symposium. Similarly, Sheila Jeffreys argues that what we call “‘homosexual’ desire” should be understood as a “sexuality of equality” because it is “desire based upon sameness instead of difference of power, desire which is about mutuality and which is more suited to the egalitarian future that feminists wish to create” (“Heterosexuality,” 78, 77). For Jeffreys, heterosexual desire is not necessarily “desire for the opposite sex, but a desire that is organised around eroticised dominance and submission,” especially along the lines of gender. She writes that equality “should, in theory, be easier to achieve in same-sex relationships where the institutionalised power difference between the sexes does not intrude. If heterosexual desire is to be created, then ‘gender’ must be imported, or some other form of power difference which can take the place of gender, such as age, race or class, must be eroticised ” (78). Jeffreys goes further than Bersani, however, by suggesting that any desire for egalitarian mutuality must be read as essentially homosexual, even if an oppositesex couple finds a way to achieve this kind of mutuality. I want to broaden Bersani’s theory of homo-ness by mapping the ways that homosociality is structurally joined to homosexuality within the larger continuum of egalitarian relations. But I also want to stop short of Jeffreys’s claim that...

Share