Nostalgic Masculinity: Homosocial Desire and Homosexual Panic in James Ellroy's This Storm

The second volume in James Ellroy's ‘Second LA Quartet’, This Storm (2019), offers a complex miscellany of war profiteering, fifth column sabotage, and institutional corruption, all of which is starkly projected against the sobering backdrop of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Whilst presenting Ellroy's most diverse assemblage of characters to date, the narrative is, nonetheless, principally centred on the intersecting bonds between men. Although the prevalence of destructive masculine authority in Ellroy's works has been widely discussed, what has often been overlooked are the specifically ‘homosocial’ dimensions of these relationships. Whilst these homosocial bonds are frequently energised and solidified by homophobic violence (both physical and rhetorical), this paper will argue that they are simultaneously wrought by ‘homosexual panic’; the anxiety deriving for the indeterminate boundaries between homosocial and homosexual desire. This panic is expressed most profoundly in This Storm in the form of corrupt policeman Dudley Smith. Haunted by a repressed homosexual encounter, Smith's paranoid behaviour and increasingly punitive violence derives from his inability to establish clear boundaries between his intense homosocial bonds and latent homosexual desires. Thus, whilst Ellroy's ‘nostalgic masculinity’ attempts to circumscribe the dimensions and inviolability of male identity, the paranoia and violence that underscores the various machinations of Ellroy's crooked cops ultimately exposes the fragility of such constructions.

Stein, Van Vechten and Modernism’s Queer Gaze

This chapter offers a counterpoint to Stein’s and Hemingway’s mutual aggression by focusing on her queerly productive friendship with modernist impresario Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten’s friendship with Stein and Toklas was flirtatious and never soured. Rather than deriding Stein’s writing—as Hemingway and Picasso occasionally did—Van Vechten helped place her manuscripts, edited her Selected Writings, organized her 1934-1935 lecture tour of the United States, and took photographs that furthered her celebrity image. To track the vicissitudes of their bond, this chapter reads Stein’s temporally warped account in The Autobiography of her first meeting with Van Vechten; examines her two word-portraits of him (“One Carl Van Vechten,” 1913, and “Van Or Twenty Years After,” 1923); and analyzes several of his photographs of her and the “Woojums” family of choice they formed with Toklas. In a circuit of masculine homosocial desire that was markedly different than those addressed in chapters Five and Six, Stein returned Van Vechten’s affection with verbal portraits that show none of the ambivalence at work in her writings about Picasso and Hemingway.

Takemura Kazuko

Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) was a key figure in feminist studies and queer theory between Japan and the U.S. In her late essay, “The Renaissance of a Discipline,” she asks fundamental questions about what it means to do queer or feminist work with a focus on a culture other than one’s own. Herself a Japanese Americanist in a field born from Japan’s “homosocial” desire to emulate and come closer to the British Empire, Takemura looks to Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the ambivalent founding father of her field, as a model for a new kind of comparative literature described by Gayatri Spivak (1942– ) in her book, Death of a Discipline. By drawing connections between Sōseki and F. O. Mathiessen (1902–1950), the closeted gay man who founded American Studies with his 1941 book American Renaissance, the essay examines the foundations of both American and Japanese Studies, and imagines their queer rebirth.

“[ T ]‌his feverish, jealous attachment of Paula’s for Ellean”

This chapter focuses on Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) to demonstrate how a seemingly conservative play that met with great success on the fashionable London stage might be regarded as a highly visible if inadvertent instance of queer modernist performance. As a fallen woman, Paula Tanqueray is a version of a conventional cautionary figure of patriarchal heterosexuality. Her redemption, however, depends on the love of a good woman: her husband’s daughter by his deceased first wife. This queer dilemma generates currents of homosocial desire that unsettle the heteronormative plotting and thematics of Pinero’s play as Paula’s passionate obsession with her stepdaughter exceeds not only her attachment to her past and present male partners but also the playwright’s thematic concern with the sexual double standard. The play’s queer subversions in turn invite reconsideration of both its primary audience and its relation to modernism.