Melville and Sex and

chair: jordan alexander stein, fordham university

The second "and" in this panel's title is a conjunction in search of an object. With what might queer studies of Herman Melville conjoin? Sex and sexuality work in Melville's fiction at both literal levels (hustlers, sailors, Fayaway) and at metaphorical ones (dietetics, law, imperialism, spermaceti). Our job as readers of Melville is often to sort these levels out, and so this panel returns to this perennial work in order to ask two questions: why and how do the literal and the metaphorical come together in Melville's writings, and why does Melville's fiction make recourse to metaphor when it clearly can speak about sex frankly? By considering the kinds of personal and conceptual relationships sex creates, our discussion aims to map some of what sex is and isn't in Melville's fiction.

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A Lawful Rigor: Sex and Security in Melville
Peter Coviello
University of Illinois-Chicago

This talk asks how we might start to think together two strands in Melville criticism that have been both surpassingly generative and, in important ways, a little hard to make coordinate. These are the "law and literature" styles of response to Melville (which we might identify with scholars like Dayan, Nabers, DeLombard, Downes, Rogin) and those keyed to the history of sexuality (Sedgwick, Martin, Ohi, Looby, Stein). With its culminating trial, its discourses on laws human-built and putatively "natural," its scenes of discipline and punishment, Billy Budd offers itself to law-oriented modes of thought no less suggestively than to queer theory. The claim I pursue is that setting these registers into conversation might give us renewed purchase on a question that entangles both, but to which neither is reducible. This is the question of what we might call imperial modernity—of how we imagine Empire, its making of races and sexes, but also its idioms of autonomy, safety, "freedom" itself. I argue that sex and securitization are run together in this story of the disciplinary mechanisms of Empire, in which the glow of West Indian (and not only French) revolutionary fervor casts its temporally complex shadow. I suggest that Billy Budd in this way helps us thicken the hypothesis that queer theory provides an exceptionally rich conceptual resource for elaborating an anti-carceral sociality and that it does so without simply surrendering an ability to conceive or redress sexual violence.

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Sex and the City: Redburn's Hustler Aesthetics
Adam Fales
University of Chicago

This talk understands the intersection of sex, labor, urban space, and queer history in Melville's novel Redburn. Melville explores how the anonymity of urban space conflates the reproduction of life and capitalist exploitation, and he frequently depicts urban space as a site of exclusion and inequality. His frequent negative figurations offer us a way to think about the relationship between sexual identity, regimes of property, and the history of sexuality. In this regard, I follow prior queer readings of Melville, including those of James Creech, David Greven, Natasha Hurley, and Édouard Marsoin, as well as historians of homosexuality like Christopher Chitty and George Chauncey. Building on their work, I outline not just how Redburn illuminates the processes of labor and accumulation behind the production of queer spatial logics, from the gay bar to the closet, but also how inequality structures gaps in our understanding of queer history. I suggest that Redburn itself models alternative logics of collectivity, as Melville figures that which is lost both in capitalist exploitation and the history through which we experience it.

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Gormandizing (Human) Flesh: Erotics and Dietetics in Melville
Édouard Marsoin
Université de Paris

In Melville's fiction, images connecting sexuality and food, erotics and dietetics, are not merely rhetorical or dead metaphors, but "live" ones, in Ricoeur's definition of the notion. Percepts of bodies as food perform a textual transformation of bodies into food and vice versa, which entails a poetical—in the sense of the Greek poiesis—process of sensualizing, eroticizing, and "gormandizing" flesh (a paraphrase from Typee). Perceptions and representations of Typee bodies—especially female ones—as fruits or vegetables enhance their erotic attraction through...