Queer Modernism

Abstract

Wiley-Blackwell Critical Theory HandbooksEach volume in the Critical Theory Handbooks series features a collection of newly-commissioned essays exploring the use of contemporary critical theory in the study of a given period, and the ways in which the period serves as a site for interrogating and reframing the practices of modern scholars and theorists. The volumes are organized around a set of key terms that demonstrate the engagement by literary scholars with current critical trends, and aim to increase the visibility of theoretically-oriented and -informed work in literary studies, both within the discipline and to students and scholars in other areas.

Editors' Note: Speculations on the Queerness of Dance Modernism

“…5.Compare Love's claim with regard to literature: “What makes queer and modernism such a good fit is that the indeterminacy of queer seems to match the indeterminacy, expansiveness, and drift of the literary—particularly the experimental, oblique version most closely associated with modernist textual production” (2009, 745). Given that modernist novels, such as Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), forge an “aesthetic of queerness” by imagining “a space where the body and sex (in the biological sense) are completely malleable” (Kahan 2013, 356, 358), and movement (whether of the performing or the journeying body) is eroticized, dance was predestined to play a prominent part in imagining the ambiguously gendered self in new ways. See also Caserio (2010).…”

Legalization Conflicts and Reliance Defenses

“…92:907 conduct, law shapes behavior. 348 People who search for clever ways to get around the societal norms embedded in criminal law are viewed as morally culpable actors and in the context of traditional reasonable mistake-of-law doctrine, courts have not been hospitable to granting excuses. 349 Because of the utility of law's expressive function in shaping behavior and communicating norms, people may be concerned about diluting the message by granting excuses based on a contradictory legalization regime.…”