ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Marx’s figure of the lumpenproletariat—part mere slur, part descriptor of individuals and communities choosing to live outside the dominant relations of production—must be foregrounded in any discussion of queer modernism in the UK, the US, and Germany. For the lumpen is always already racialized, queered, and/or feminized as opposed to the sturdy working man: the abject remainder in Marx and Engels’s construction of the proletariat as a normative category. In readings of novels by John Henry Mackay, Claude McKay, and Djuna Barnes, the chapter demonstrates that liminal figures such as sex workers, fraudsters, and hustlers of all shapes and forms constitute a much-maligned social formation that was crucial to the emergence of a queer modernist literary canon—and to the development of the radical strains of queer theory that continue to revitalize twentieth-century studies today.
