A Boys' Book
“[Leslie] Fiedler argued that American literature was characterized not by homosexuality but rather by homoerotism - a subtle distinction that he assigned increasing importance. Reading the key texts of the American canon such as Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and the Leatherstocking tales through the lens of Freudian theory, Fiedler suggested that the American literature trope of interracial male-male couplings against the background of wilderness were part of an idyllic masculinist fantasy from which women were excluded.
While remaining conscious of the potency of this fantasy, Fiedler suggested that it was indicative of American literature’s failure to deal with mature (heterosexual) desire. The male-male relationships of American fiction - with their focus on chaste, adolescent desire - were, Fiedler argued, regressive fantasies that threatened to subvert the heterosexual social order. By bonding with the non-white male Other, the hero of the nineteenth-century American novel failed to engage with the real demands of heterosexual society and thereby risked losing himself to the non-procreative sterility of homosexuality”.
“By replacing heterosexuality with “chaste male love” the nineteenth-century American novel must always be, in Friedler’s own terms, a “boys’ book” which refuses to move towards social responsibility, heterosexuality, and procreation”.
“That the homoerotic should be situated between the engagement with the feminine that heterosexuality demands on one side and homosexuality on the other side is indicative of Fiedler’s implicit understanding of homosexuality as a feminization of the male subject”.
“The implicit assumption of Fiedler’s discussion of the homoerotic is that if Huck and Jim were ever to consummate their relationship they would no longer be part of masculine tradition, since the confirmed gay man must always be effeminate”.
“The exodus of American youth into the deserts of North Africa to join the Wild Boys is at once an update of the American literary trope and also a radical queering of its Fiedlerian exposition. While Fiedler remains unable to conceive of homosexuality as anything other than the feminization of the male subject, Burroughs reverses the hierarchy of subject positions that Fiedler’s texts establish, in order to suggest that the real threat to the male-male relationships of the American canon is the heterosexual dominant.
In Burroughs’ texts, the abandonment of the masculine idyll of the frontier does not initiate a journey towards experience, adulthood, and masculinity, but rather precedes the castration, conditioning, and feminization of the male subject as he is forced into the heterosexual order and made to confront the feminine Other”.
Jamie Russel, Queer Burroughs
Литература для подростков гомоэротична или же "гей-культура" избегает зрелости, поскольку "взрослые варианты" однополых отношений в современном обществе, в лучшем случае, копируют традиционную семью?
И еще кое-что о подростковом чтении. Пару месяцев назад меня at random зафрендил какой-то школьник. В общем-то, это обыкновенный дневник городского балбеса из хорошей семьи. - К чему для сугубо личных записок заводить живой журнал и кого-то френдить? Я в этом возрасте обходился простой тетрадкой.