ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that queer modernists invoke animals and animality because they allowed works of art and literature to operate both concretely and abstractly. Most signally, texture, the tactile feeling of animal bodies, carries a palpable erotic charge, engaging concrete senses of pleasure and pain. At the same time, the muteness of animals and the epistemological opacity of animal instinct engage the idea of the animal as surface in a more figurative sense and make them readily available to modernist protocols of impersonality. Easily fetishized, animal surfaces thus trouble the ontological, sexual, and/or racial distinctions between surface and depth, exterior and interior, subject and object, colonizer and colonized, shaper and shaped. Additionally, this chapter briefly examines how animal figures help clarify the boundaries between queer modernism and other adjacent disciplinary and cultural formations, including Victorian realism, children’s literature, and postmodernism. Writers and artists discussed include T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Rudyard Kipling, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Doty, Marianne Moore, Glenway Wescott, Gertrude Stein, J. M. Barrie, Oscar Wilde, and Andy Warhol.
