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  • The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History by Patrick R. Mullen
  • Margot Gayle Backus (bio)
THE POOR BUGGER’S TOOL: IRISH MODERNISM, QUEER LABOR, AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY, by Patrick R. Mullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. vii + 213 pp. $65.00.

As its subtitle makes clear, The Poor Bugger’s Tool both draws from and draws together key terms from four fields of significance for Joyce studies: Irish studies, queer theory/sexuality studies, Marxist theory, and postcolonial studies. As we might expect from Patrick R. Mullen’s titular choice of a Joycean synecdoche enfolding colonial resistance/oppression, class, sexual deviance, and production, Joyce’s extravagant textual strategies are both structurally and conceptually pivotal to Mullen’s project. Joyce’s centrality to Mullen’s work here is confirmed in the study’s fourth chapter when the author positions a reading of Joyce’s incorporation of Roger Casement in Ulysses.

Structurally, Mullen’s Joyce chapter affords a transition from early sections devoted, respectively, to Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, and Casement to two final chapters focusing on the Irish cultural production of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill. As Mullen explains, the “queer sensibilities that emerge in Wilde, Synge, Casement, and Joyce” are analyzed as “experimental aesthetic forms” whose excess is “a critical response to the strictures of a British imperialist imaginary” (16). In its later chapters, “the study [suggests] that these aesthetic experiments were a success” and that “Irish modernists were able to transform affective excess into forms of cultural value” (16). Conceptually, it is in Ulysses that the “subterranean vein of queer sexual discourses” Mullen traces within fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century Irish culture becomes legible as “a dynamic framework for thinking critically about colonial and capitalist exploitation,” allowing for “potentially reparative forms of cultural production beyond an American model of identity politics” (8).

For decades, Irish, modernist, and Joyce-studies scholars have sought a vantage point from which to theorize such reparative forms. Yet these efforts, though widespread, earnest, and often ingenious, have in one respect proved surprisingly unfruitful. On the whole, scholars remain as polarized as ever with reference to gender and sexuality and nation and empire. This polarization persists despite many successful individual efforts to bridge the material or cultural divide so as to produce analysis that attends to racial, national, and cultural identities as mediated and mediating between economic- [End Page 856] political and sexual-gendered axes of privilege and oppression. While there are doubtless many factors contributing to this dismayingly chronic disconnect, Mullen has persuasively identified one that may be a key factor.

A major impediment to any political theorization of sexuality—and the modern identity categories that sexual acts, desires, and prohibitions make palpable—is traceable to Michel Foucault’s famous demolition of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, Volume I.1 Mullen argues that the disconnect between identity categories and economic and political structures can be traced to the differing uses of Foucault by those trained as queer theorists and those trained as postcolonialists. Queer theorists, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s lead,2 focus on Foucault’s dismissal of the so-called repressive hypothesis and his (possibly misinterpreted) claim that, around the turn of the twentieth century, “homosexuality”—an aggregate of disparate and more or less random sexual activities—was reified into one coherent and recognizable social identity (43). Postcolonialists (exemplified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri3) draw upon the work’s final section on biopower and biopolitics. Once grasped, Mullen’s opening claim is blindingly obvious, and yet it has gone heretofore unnoted.

From the outset, Mullen’s crisp explication of the ways in which different moments in History of Sexuality, Volume I have hypostasized within queer and postcolonial theory exposes a dynamic that has been muddling conversations within and beyond Joyce studies concerning the significance of sexual desires and acts within imperial capitalism. As Mullen elegantly argues, “Sedgwick … takes up the thread of Foucault’s analysis that attends to the discourse of sexual definition, but she does not follow this thread through to its knotted entanglement with capitalism” (12). Hardt and Negri, in a symmetrical set...

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