The Literariness of Sexuality: Or, How to Do the (Literary) History of (American) Sexuality

Queer literary studies and the question of identity categories

“…The arguments of the critics I've outlined in this section might be seen as supporting what Christopher Looby in a provocative essay calls the “literariness of sexuality”—that is, that “sexual identities … need to be articulated, promulgated, circulated and encountered in order to be received and adopted and performed, and this requires a literary public sphere” (Looby, , p. 843). Looby's argument refers mainly to the 19th century, but its basic claim can be extended throughout at least much of the 20th century and applied, mutatis mutandis, to other media forms such as TV and film, for which the literary representations of sexuality often supply the templates (as can be seen in the case of Tales of the City ).…”

“…Thus, one scholar of modernism, Robert Caserio, celebrates what he calls the “unregulated eros” (Caserio, , p. 201) observable in early 20th‐century experimental literature, and another, Christopher Looby, contrasts what he calls the “utopian” flux of representations of same‐sexuality in modernist literature with the implicitly less interesting literature of midcentury that tends to take “the homosexual category of person for granted” (Looby, , p. 433). This is scholarship that is not trying to establish the precise date of the Great Paradigm Shift but that very much assumes a “before and after” homosexuality, in which the before is a prelapsarian moment, ended forever by the crashing down of “restrictive” or “entrapping” sexual definitions (Looby, , p. 849; Coviello, , p. 19). These kinds of Foucauldian analyses elaborate what we might call the “captivity narrative” of sexuality, according to which the modern regime of sexuality “represents a seizure of the body by an historically unique apparatus for producing historically specific forms of subjectivity” (Halperin, , p. 103; emphasis added).…”

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body

“…When Christopher Looby describes sexuality as "essentially a literary phenomenon," for example, he indicates how literature brings into existence the very terms and categories through which we understand bodies and their desires, those of others as well as our own: "Sexual identities (or labels or categories or scripts) need to be articulated, promulgated, circulated, and encountered in order to be received and adopted and performed, and this requires a literary public sphere." 11 The chapters in this volume provide careful, patient accounts of precisely these relationships. Yet they take an additional step as well, finding in literary representation a resource that helps us follow theorist E. Patrick Johnson's insistence that we identify concepts for describing not only how the body "is brought into being, but what it does once it is constituted and the relationship between it and the other bodies around it."…”

The pornification of America: How raunch culture is ruining our society By BernadetteBarton. NYU Press, 2021

“…In Pornification , raunch culture faces three primary charges: (1) it “presents a formulaic, heteronormative version of ‘hot’ female beauty that monolithically features thin, big‐breasted, tiny‐waisted, and barely clad women with Caucasian features” (17); (2) it “is sex‐negative because it promotes appearance over pleasure”; and (3) it “enables rape culture, a culture in which rape and sexual violence are common and attitudes, norms, practices, and media normalize, excuse, tolerate, and condone sexual violence” (19). Recently reviewed by Kathleen Lubey (2023) as an example of “how not to study porn,” Barton's Pornification commits a number of egregious missteps in its attempts to substantiate these claims. Most important are two: first, the book reduces its concepts to handy buzzwords, the definitions of which serve to demonstrate their validity in place of evidence; and second, what evidence does appear is unreliable at best and potentially dishonest at worst.…”