Critical analysis of Henry James's novella "The Beast in the Jungle" tends to offer imperatives for the main characters that endorse new productive ways of existing within the world, ways that typically reject or pathologize the protagonist John Marcher's characterized inactivity. This article critiques these predominant readings of Marcher, James, and "The Beast in the Jungle," suggesting that through attenuating to the specific modes of time and knowledge that cluster around Marcher, a new structure for understanding Jamesian modes of queer subjectivity and sexuality arises: one that neither rejects nor transcends imperatives but instead exists without them.
Beginning in the 1960s, American males began to plead the “Homosexual Panic Defense” (HPD) when charged with the murder of a homosexual male. Over the next 50 years, legal and literary academics decried the use of the HPD affirming that it relied on prejudicial stereotypes of “bad” homosexuals as sexual predators. This article revisits these critical debates and shows how these legal critics attempt to gentrify the “homosexual” into a good subject in order to justify his right-to-life. I argue that sexuality should never be considered a justification for murder, regardless of the particular homosexual’s status as good or bad.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.