Posture of the Phallus

In Queer Articulations, the second volume of The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Thomas A. King continues the exploration of the construction of male homosexuality he began in his earlier The English Phallus (2004). King emphasizes the difference between earlier understandings of sexuality and “modern” homosexual inscriptions on bodies, which begin in the “long” eighteenth century and continue into the twenty-first.

King’s two volumes offer exciting intersections among intellectual history, traditional queer and cultural studies, and the newer discipline of performance studies, especially as represented by the work of Joseph A. Roach.¹ Like the first volume, the second finds in the long eighteenth century the beginnings of a Foucauldian “rupture” that redefines the very meaning of sexuality. Eighteenth-century sexuality displays elements of what King calls “residual pederasty,” a union of theatricality and sodomy that asserts the performative effect of preferment and autonomy within a patriarchal society, with penetration not an act but a means to social mobility and finally to power.² Despite the century’s invention of the distinction between public and private, queer persons (among others) were able to resist the privatization of desires through “recoding” anachronistic aristocratic styles.

While the earlier volume focused on “structuration,” this second one explores “agency.” To understand queer agency, King calls on us to abandon universal and transcendent categories and to focus instead on the multiplicity of relations and practices. In their articulation of homosexual gestures and speech, queers do not succumb to the eighteenth-century domestication of sexuality but resist and critique it. After a theoretical introduction, King details this resistance in representations of “arms akimbo,” molly birthing scenes, the canting of boy actor Kynaston’s “quean,” Boswell’s male attachments, and the castrated bodies of eighteenth-century male sopranos.

Like its predecessor, this new account offers a monumental survey of eighteenth-century political and social discourse, with innumerable and fascinating examples, largely from understudied documents. The voluminous notes constitute a companion volume surveying seemingly the whole history of scholarship in the field. Perhaps King’s fundamental contribution to current queer theory is the addition to our archive of figures both famous and unknown—Charles I, Indigo Jones, Richard Holloway, and Gilbert Austin, among others. King’s account is especially impressive in its readings—of John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill, Colley Cibber’s autobiography, Mary Beale’s painting of Kynaston, and many other cultural texts—where we can see his categories in action. And it is hard not to applaud the fearless insouciance of an index with the entry “ejaculation, see semen.”

King’s volume is so rich that it seems almost churlish to mark its limitations. Since this full account obviously is the product of long preparation, King’s bibliography is not always up-to-date. “Recent” in his text usually means work of the 1980s, occasionally that of the 1990s, rarely that of the 2000s. King’s categories are so interesting that despite the book’s length at times we may wish for even more discussion. His Anglo-American study is better on British than American constructions: one would like to see his reading of George Washington’s arms akimbo, and how he would deal with the Puritans’ surprisingly permissive relation to homosexuality. He can sometimes be too optimistic about strategies for hegemonic resistance. His positive reading of Susan Sontag’s “notes” on camp ignores the 1990s critiques of Michael Bronski, Andrew Ross, and others who question Sontag’s repression of the homosexual origins of modern camp. His account at times elevates theorized specularity over more pedestrian everyday accounts. Arms akimbo certainly do make visible an aristocratic, effeminate homosexuality. Like folded arms across the chest, they also serve even today to hide midriffs while accentuating biceps and other arm musculature.

Most importantly, the parameters of King’s admirable account of agency can seem arbitrary. Claiming consciousness affords an agency that unconsciousness does not, King underestimates the individual character of some unconscious motivations. Moreover, his accounts of queer “resistance” to privatization and...