The Introduction argues for a modernist art of queer survival that departs from the selfish competitiveness and compulsory heterosexuality of early twentieth century social Darwinism. As rendered by the literary imaginations of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather, queer survival is collective in nature and builds upon the interdependencies of proximate and precarious lives. This modernist archive is placed in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s ruminations on hospitality, Judith Butler’s writing on ethics and vulnerability, contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen’s theory of “mutual permeability,” and Lauren Berlant’s concepts of “slow death” and “lateral agency.” The resulting conversation offers a new perspective on modernist subjectivity and a more optimistic understanding of futurity than do reigning paradigms in queer theory.
