H.D.'s poem "The Master" (1934-1935), which works through her ambivalence about having been Sigmund Freud's analysand, has long been viewed as challenging his theories of castration and penis envy. Although the speaker's repeated statement that "woman" is p"erfect" has justifiably led scholars to read "The Master" as revaluing "woman " over and against her diminishment by early psychoanalysis, the poem also inscribes non-binary subjectivities. It foregrounds a "woman . . . beyond women" who "is" the "dart andpulse of the male," and imagines a future in which "men" such as Freud will embrace transfemininity's insights to "feel / what it is to be a woman." In so doing, "The Master" shows that by leaving H.D. "free . . . to prophesy"-to invent new forms of gender subjectivity-the analysis created a space well beyond Freud's initial premises in which H.D. could figure the subjectivities of both analysand and analyst as nonbinary.

This film review argues that Paul Preciado’s 2023 Orlando: My Political Biography creatively re-envisions Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography in light of contemporary transgender politics. I contend that despite Preciado’s outward repudiation of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it critically revises trans-positive Lacanian psychoanalysis to account for non-binary modes of trans subjectivity.

799 Avant-garde photography, too, gained from its encounter with the era’s aestheticist and decadent sensibilities, as so-called pictorialist photographers rejected a drab realism for a sumptuous artificiality that strove for “painterly” effects in which beauty of subject matter, composition, and tonality held sway over documentary verisimilitude. (See the 1993 museum catalogue Pictorialism into Modernism for a fine account of this crucial episode in the history of photography.) The decadent/modernist dyad in literature examined in this collection prompts one to wonder, too, how decadence informed the music of modernist composers. The musicologist Richard Taruskin has noted of the “decadent” work of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, the unusual use of “semitonal adjacencies” that allowed for once “exotic or recondite harmonies and tonal relations” to seem acceptable.2 To be sure, there are some shrewd observations on Wilde’s “Salome” as it morphed into Strauss’s opera in Ellen Crowell’s essay in this volume. Crowell points to the tension in the opera between the gruesome head of John the Baptist and the symbolist fantasy that eschewed ugly naturalistic elements. There is a telling anecdote, shared with me by the musicologist Charles Rosen, that recounts how Strauss stopped the rehearsal of the first production of “Salome” in Dresden when the soprano playing Salome swung the head of the Baptist too ostentatiously. “Please, please, my dear,” the composer supposedly wailed. “The music is disgusting enough.” Disgust, so prevalent in decadent writing and art, is yet another feature that decadent fin de siècle aesthetics bequeathed to modernist artistry. With an introduction that manages to be both succinct and encyclopedic, Decadence in the Age of Modernism is an illuminating and ground-breaking consideration of an under-examined subject, one that ably demonstrates that the fin not only outlived the siècle, it thrived in a new century.

This is the first of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early twentieth-century genders, loosening up and ultimately rejecting the rigid constructs of masculinity she encountered in Otto Weininger’s misogynist Sex and Character. Chapter Two focuses on cross-gendered identification in Stein’s earliest literary efforts—the prose narratives Fernhurst (1904-5), Q.E.D. (1903), and Three Lives (1909). In these works, Stein rejects the category “woman” while questioning the limitations of patriarchal ideologies about masculinity and femininity alike.

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

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.

This chapter uses The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to frame and advance this book’s central argument about Stein’s masculine homosocial relationships with her colleagues. Tracking the dynamics of vision that animate The Autobiography, I argue that it uses Toklas’s loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein’s masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds. The Autobiography depicts those ties as very congenial with men such as Sherwood Anderson and with masculine women such as Jane Heap, but more fraught—and more likely to induce perspectival vacillation—with Hemingway and Picasso. This multiperspectivalism structures the book and mobilizes multiple narratives of modernism’s emergence. In so doing, The Autobiography reframes Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Toklas as part of the appearance of the new that the text initially attributes solely to the formal properties of modern art and writing.

This is the second of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early twentieth-century genders, loosening up rigid constructs of masculinity she encountered in Otto Weininger’s misogynist Sex and Character. Chapter Three argues that her innovative writings from the 1910’s and 1920’s—such as the long poems “Lifting Belly” and “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927)—use Toklas’s feminine positioning to establish Stein’s masculinity. Whereas Stein’s earlier fiction presented more subtle challenges to Weininger, Stein’s experimental poems from the 1910’s and 1920’s explicitly and jubilantly use linguistic innovation to articulate a flexible and feminist transmasculinity.

This essay uses Slavoj Zizek's recent writings about transpeople - and their reactions to him-as a way to reconsider the contributions that Lacanian psychoanalysis could make to trans theory. Affirming that there is already considerable value to trans-affirmative theorizing in the work of Shanna Carlson, Patricia Gherovici, and Gayle Salamon, this essay nonetheless argues that Zizek's work offers-despite itself-a way of traversing the fantasy of sexual difference that structures Lacanian accounts of gender. By going beyond the assumption that the antinomy that structures subjectivity must always and only be named "sexual difference," this essay creates an opening for thinking sex, gender, and sexual difference otherwise.

This essay tracks the dynamics of vision that animate Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . It argues that the text uses Toklas’s loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein’s masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds with her colleagues. The Autobiography depicts those ties as very congenial with men such as Sherwood Anderson and with masculine women such as Jane Heap, but more fraught—and more likely to induce perspectival vacillation—with Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. This multiperspectivalism structures the book and mobilizes multiple narratives of modernism’s emergence. In so doing, The Autobiography eventually reframes Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Toklas as part of the appearance of the new that the text initially attributes solely to the formal properties of modern art and writing.

Monique Truong’s 2003 The Book of Salt crosses the lives of three queer migrants to early twentieth-century Paris: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and their Vietnamese cook, Binh. Highlighting the role of perception in subject-formation, the novel tracks how the play between the look and the gaze registers its characters’ experiences of embodiment. Truong makes imaginative use of details from the biographical and scholarly literature on Stein and Toklas: their fondness for photographers, reporters, and admirers who treat them as celebrities; the pet names and gendered divisions of space and labor that mark their butch/femme relationship. However, the novel also features three fictional characters whose stories reframe received images of Stein and Toklas: Binh, the novel’s first-person narrator and an imaginative composite of two “Indo-Chinese” cooks that worked for them; his first lover, Jean Bleriot, a French chef whose appearance in Binh’s Vietnamese workplace prompts his desire and eventual expulsion; and Binh’s lover in Paris, Marcus Lattimore, a mixed-race iridologist who passes as white at Stein’s and Toklas’s salon and who initiates an affair with Binh to gain information about the writer (Toklas 186). Recontextualizing Stein’s salon from within Binh’s backstory, the novel engages “the dominant culture” to “expose and critique” its conventions from the perspective of subjects “whose experience of identity is fractured and split” by colonial rule (Munoz 31). The result is a narrative fragmented by Binh’s “queer hybridity”—a space “of productivity where identity’s fragmentary nature is accepted and negotiated” (Munoz 77–79). Displaying deep knowledge of the material and psychical consequences of French colonial rule in Vietnam and framing its narrative by imagining that a brief affair with Ho Chi Minh convinced Binh to stay in Paris, The Book of Salt enacts what David Eng calls a “historical catachresis” that “shifts our attention from the problem of the real” lives of historical personages (that is, from the question of whether Ho Chi Minh or any of Stein’s and Toklas’s cooks slept with men) “to the politics of our lack of

This essay seeks to go beyond the arguments of Lee Edelman's 2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman's book uses Jacques Lacan's theory of the sinthome to critique the homophobic ideology of reproductive futurism, which seeks to guarantee the future in the name of the child. Edelman uses Lacan to argue that queer theory should forgo any engagement with a politics of the future, and that queers should instead embrace the position of the reviled sinthomosexual, whose embrace of jouissance in the Real undercuts reprofuturity. By contrast, this essay offers an alternative interpretation of Lacan's theory of the sinthome that sustains several productive accounts of a future that could lie beyond the fantasy of reproductive futurism - options that are far more promising for queer theory than Edelman's refusal of all politics and signification.

This essay argues that Lee Edelman's 2004 No Future, while most well known for challenging the heteronormative fantasy of reproductive futurism, also performs a systematic critique of Lacanian 'sexual difference'. This essay tracks that critique, showing its moments of success and of failure, and concludes that Edelman's neologism - the sinthomosexual, whose jouissance he believes to be capable of undoing the symbolic order - in fact supports rather than challenges it.

This essay tracks Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Jacques Lacan in order to expose and critique Žižek’s continued investment in a heterosexist account of sexual difference. Attending to Žižek’s politicized recasting of Lacan’s argument that one can traverse—and thereby alter—the fundamental fantasy that structures subjectivity, this essay argues that despite Žižek’s protestations to the contrary, sexual difference is not inalterable. Rather, sexual difference is the fundamental fantasy that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse in order to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities.

Book Review| June 01 2011 Theorizing Transgender Embodiments Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of MaterialitySalamon, Gayle New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xi + 226 pp. Chris Coffman Chris Coffman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2011) 17 (2-3): 423–425. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163587 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Chris Coffman; Theorizing Transgender Embodiments. GLQ 1 June 2011; 17 (2-3): 423–425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163587 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.