ABSTRACT
In what follows, I wish to examine in particular the figure of the hustler, who has been prominent in the cinematic and literary gay imaginary for quite some time, and who can be seen as emblematic of the queer road movie protagonist. Like his female counterpart a century ago, the male prostitute is a subversive figure. Mary Ann Doane notes the increased fascination in the literature and art of the late nineteenth century with the figure of the prostitute as emblematic of the new woman’s relation to urban space – the prostitute as the epitome of the female flâneur. Doane also suggests that “the prostitute represents the collapse of sublimation as a concept and hence the downfall of the ‘sublime’ – the ‘end of the aura and the decline of love’“ (264). The concept of the sublime (the sublime as “the locus of non-exchangeability,” in accordance with Kant’s understanding of it as indissociable from an individual subjective experience) is “seriously threatened” when “the body becomes a form of property which is exchangeable, when subjectivity and sexuality themselves are perceived as being on the market” (264-5).
