Squeezing Sperm: Nativism, Queer Contact, and the Futures of Democratic Intimacy in Moby-Dick

It’s a little queer that Harper and Brothers first published Moby-Dick (1851). In 1844, James Harper briefly entered civil service after being elected New York City mayor as a nativist. That same year, he cofounded a nationalist society, the Order of United Americans (OUA), which promised to foster feelings of intimate fraternity among white American-born men and defend the nation from foreigners’ corrosive, antirepublican influence. In its eponymous newspaper’s inaugural edition, the OUA advocated for “protection against foreign influence, which affects our political condition; protection against foreign habits and opinions, which affect us socially and morally; protection against foreign labor, and if need be, foreign laborers.”¹ Herman Melville’s more progressive stances on foreign influences, habits, opinions, and laborers subverted the ideologies Harper and other antebellum nativists espoused.²

Unfettered transnational mobility and affection invigorate queer forms of democratic sociality in Moby-Dick.³ Melville does not write foreign-born people into an American national narrative so much as he rewrites it around the “queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts.”⁴ Foreigners, particularly Queequeg, inspire Ishmael to disidentify from the institutional and cultural templates of heteronormative intimacy that reproduced whiteness— templates that organized xenophobic conceptions of American nationality. In Moby-Dick, foreignness and queerness materialize as social and symbolic alternatives to antebellum nativist narratives about American democracy’s futures.

Ishmael does not let the cataclysms of the Pequod dissuade him from embracing, embodying, and extolling queerness and foreignness. He does not stop squeezing sperm with non-American men to marry a woman on shore, at least as far as we know. Rather, squeezing sperm fortifies his commitments to queerness and foreignness, as his body indicates. Wishing to preserve the measurements of the whale skeleton found in “A Bower in the Arsacides” (ch. 102), Ishmael tattoos its dimensions on his right arm. He must round the inches, he notes, because he “was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of [his] body to remain a blank page for a poem [he] was then composing” (WHM, 6:347). Ishmael’s body increasingly resembles Queequeg’s: tattooed. The tattoos that delayed Ishmael from visually discerning Queequeg’s race reappear to signal Ishmael’s dissociation from Americanness. As “A Bower in the Arsacides” suggests, this departure is ongoing and reflected by Ishmael’s progression of tattoos. Ishmael intimates that his poem and tattooing will end simultaneously when any remaining white skin will be blackened with ink. If Ishmael is Moby-Dick’s narrator, then is Moby-Dick his poem? Is Moby-Dick a full body tattoo, the completion of which marks Ishmael’s total disidentification with whiteness and normative forms of sexual intimacy?

If the answers to these questions are “yes,” then the older Ishmael (the narrator) rejects the American identity that contemporaneous nativists advocated. Subverting their doctrines, Moby-Dick demonstrates that white, sexually reproductive American-born men do not solely possess

M. Lafever and K. Gildemeister, “Order of United Americans,” [1850?], lithograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004665376/.

the capacity for self-government and democracy. In fact, as Ahab clearly demonstrates, these men routinely act irrationally because they cannot control their passions. As a response to witnessing the horrific outcomes this irrationality can produce, Ishmael extricates himself from heteronormative nativist narratives by emulating Queequeg’s queer appearance and actions. Thus, while many stories about immigrants written during this time focus on Americanization and assimilation, Moby-Dick imagines the exact opposite. Melville’s romance is about the de-Americanization of an American-born citizen and the democratic intimacies this process engenders. The unnamed greenhorn’s disidentification from nativist forms of intimate nationalism culminates in his Queequegification—that is, him calling himself Ishmael.⁵

This essay pushes against a pervasive pessimism in queer Melvillean scholarship, especially around Moby-Dick. Since the 1960s, literary critics have acknowledged the democratic potentiality of Queequeg and Ishmael’s homoerotic intimacies only to undermine them. Scholars such as Leslie...