"Is There a Queer Ethics?"

How can one possibly introduce succinctly a special issue of Victorian Poetry devoted to, and including diverse applications of, some of the most complex theory in use today? "Sexuality" and "desire" as subjects of inquiry in literary and cultural studies invite (and have long invited) such varied and expansive investigations of the rules governing human behavior and organization and the ways in which social meanings are made, replicated, and contested, that any brief overview seems doomed to laughable failure. One might offer here, I suppose, some facile generalizations about the late-twentieth-century influence of Foucault on a field previously dominated by Freud, or about its invigoration during the same time period with the immediacy and intensity of the identity political--life-and-death--struggles of the lesbigay/queer movements. But such generalizations would do little except fill a few pages and waste all of our time. I would suggest that you read Joseph Bristow's Sexuality, David Halperin's Saint Foucault, and/or Annamarie Jagose's Queer Theory: An Introduction if you need or desire such background information. ¹ They do much more than Dennis Allen and I could possibly do here, and they do it quite well.

Indeed, and as I have argued elsewhere at length, ² I feel strongly that introductions need, at the very least, to attempt to do something cogent and significant or editors should simply keep their mouths shut and let their contributors speak, and since I am not going to repeat that argument here (and obviously am not going to keep my mouth shut), let us simply move quickly to what the present piece is going to do: open a brief dialogue between two co-editors on our, perhaps differing, perceptions of the most pressing issue facing studies in sexuality and desire as we move into a new century of work in the field.

And in keeping with the particular interests of this journal, a Victorian poet will figure prominently in my discussion, though frankly it will be one for whom I really don't care very much: Oscar Wilde. While my personal preferences are probably of very little interest to you, the reasons behind my impatience and discomfort with this icon of queer culture are actually rooted in my perception of a pressing (even if now long continuing) crisis in sexuality studies of the iconoclastic sort, one that will serve as the focal point for this introductory provocation. Indeed, that Wilde-the-haughty-aesthete-as-iconoclast has served as an icon is itself quite troubling, but much more so is that Wilde's particular form of hasty, poorly theorized iconoclasm--so disastrously enacted and harshly punished in his own day--is still manifested over a century later in radical sexual engagements with surrounding, conservative cultural forces.

That may sound like a very harsh assessment to some, but certainly I am not alone in my perception of serious trouble with the Wildean legacy. In Effeminate England, one of the most incisive recent investigations of Wilde, his literary output and continuing relevance today, Joe Bristow argues that

the impulse to heroize Wilde--if an understandable part of reclaiming the gay past in a period of sexual liberation--should be conducted with some circumspection. Although his life and work went far towards fashioning a familiar modern queer identity, Wilde's achievements also exemplify the high costs involved in doing so. It is not that Wilde's emergence from Reading Gaol a broken man sounds a warning to us all, for it does. But one more troubling thought remains. Wilde established his homosexual difference in a marketplace that ultimately used him more than he could comfortably manipulate it. ³

And actually I would go even farther than Bristow, for it is not only the tactical failure of Wilde's attempts at manipulation that disturbs me; it is also their stunning self-centeredness, their general lack of a responsible, well-theorized, and...