Anglosexuality

A quick reminder from Foucault’s History of Sexuality and a bit of emphasis : “Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

Brilliant study by Emily Eells of Proust’s English readings and the drafts to La Recherche. Here is the lay of the land:

The two mainstays of the following discussion of Proust’s work — homoeroticism and Victorian culture — become entangled in a form of sexuality which I propose to call Anglosexuality. His 30-page narrative essay — Sodome et Gomorrhe I — presents homosexuality as a kind of inter or third sex, the man-woman or woman-man combining the masculine and the feminine. Male and female homosexualities are confused in what Proust prefers to call inversion, a notion which complies with Foucault’s definition of homosexuality in The History of Sexuality. Foucault dates its emergence as during the nineteenth century […] This book does not intend to engage in the current critical debate about the classification of Proustian sexuality into fixed categories such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality and the physical practices which they involve. It posits that Proust’s work creates an ambiguous third sex, whose very ambiguity defies definition and whose subtly understated associations with British culture justify the choice of the term ‘Anglosexuality’. Anglosexuality fuses and confuses the eroticism and aestheticization of same-sex desire. It is a form of sex and sensitivity which is closer to psychological androgyny than biological hermaphroditism. It is more of an aesthetic stance than a physical sexuality; as Mario Praz wrote: “The Androgyne is the artistic sex par excellence.” [ref. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 320]

Emily Eells
Proust’s Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture (2002)

And so for day 1384
27.09.2010