Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Pérez, Hiram

Hardcover

Series: Sexual Cultures, Book 23

Literary CriticismGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 1479818658
ISBN13: 9781479818655
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Oct 30 2015
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Award presented by Lambda Literary

Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories--the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy-- Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence.

Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the birth of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Pérez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries--including Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Anne Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison--Pérez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of invert and homosexual, occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

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