- Date added
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Nov. 18, 2024, 3:21 p.m.
- Description
- This implicit chronology — and Either/Or’s conceit of self-revision — is one example of a broader trend in queer literature that we might call queer presentism: a Whig history of sexuality that positions today’s LGBTQ+ writers as liberators of the closeted past. Queer presentism canonizes contemporary texts, but elides or delegitimizes older queer lives and artworks, specifically those predating the twentieth century. It’s been almost 50 years since Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality dispelled the “repressive hypothesis”: the theory holding that the rise of bourgeois capitalism suppressed discussion of sexual acts and deviant sexuality. Yet, we don’t seem to have internalized this lesson. In fact, our continued belief in the “repressive hypothesis” itself ends up repressing a great deal of queer history.
