Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain by Declan Kavanagh, and: Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World by Peter McNeil (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain by Declan Kavanagh, and: Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World by Peter McNeil
"Masculinity is not one thing in the eighteenth century, any more than it is one thing in the twentieth." –George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century1
It's not like Judith Butler woke up one day in 1990 and said, "Gender is now performative. And that's only for postmodern subjects." No. As Butler, Michel Foucault, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others demonstrate, gender, sex, and desire are historically constructed and maintained, and explorations of such constructions and maintenances need to be historically situated. Both Declan Kavanagh's Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Peter McNeil's Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World serve as significant contributions not only to eighteenth-century studies, but also to the crucial work of historicizing and (subsequently) denaturalizing easy, flat understandings of gender, sex, and desire. Both critics engage with mid-century British literature and culture, keying in on the 1750–70s to trace the contours of mid-century masculinities.
In Effeminate Years, Kavanagh focuses on Charles Churchill, John Wilkes, Alexander Pope, Edmund Burke, and others who mobilized discourses of effeminacy and anti-effeminacy during the political landscape of mid-century Britain (1756–1774). What emerges is an incredibly sharp and insightful study of fantasies of autonomy, privacy, and liberty as they created modern genders and sexualities. Pretty Gentleman considers a similar mid-century archive, surveying the material conditions through which "macaroni" men fashioned themselves and their world. [End Page 449] Taken together, Effeminate Years and Pretty Gentleman remind eighteenth-century scholars that genders are not inherently tied to ahistorically, prediscursively sexed bodies. More importantly, these works demonstrate that heterosexuality and cisnormativity are historically constructed positions that secure freedom and liberty for some while excluding others—and that such formations were never natural or apolitical.
What Kavanagh keeps at the foreground of his critique is the awareness that the ways we do the history of sexuality contribute to the normalizing or depoliticizing of heterosexuality. There is always a danger that in talking about eighteenth-century queerness, we use heteronormativity as a strawman of sorts—an ahistorical given. After a stunning review of queer theory and queer early modern critiques (which deftly references both foundational work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David Halperin and the recent debate about un-historical queerness among Mahdavi Menon, Carla Freccero, and Valerie Traub), Kavanagh teaches his audience that the drive of queer critique "should be the forceful unsettling of the ahistoricism that underwrites heterosexuality and serves to naturalize its universalizing tendencies" (xxi–xxii). As literary and cultural critics, we must be aware of "the potential to naturalize heterosexuality further" (xxii). Modern heteronormativity works by relying on the fantasy that other sexualities are political, whereas heterosexuality is natural and, by extension, neutral. Kavanagh's keen eye for rhetorical structure allows him to consistently remind readers that heterosexuality is not an a priori desire, natural and without origin; instead, heterosexuality is and always has been a political project.
In fact, it is through Wilkesite political discourse that heteroerotics were strategically folded into the fantasies of liberty, privacy, and property. The second chapter of Effeminate Years, "Enlightenment Closets," begins with a reminder that the homosexual closet is a regulatory tool for heterosexism. Extending Sedgwick, Kavanagh argues "that the hetero closet," that is, the presumption of the entitlement of heterosexual men to free pursuit of sexual pleasure within the private sphere, "provides, in the first instance, the necessary basis in the eighteenth century for the autonomy and coherence of … representations" of heterosexuality as "healthy and normative" and of an increasingly formalized opposition of privacy to publicity (37–38). Kavanagh fleshes out...
