Virtuous
Vice : Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Series
Q) by Eric O. Clarke
In this daring study of queer life and the
public sphere, Eric O. Clarke examines the effects of inclusion
within public culture. Departing from studies that emphasize
homophobia and its mechanisms of exclusion, Virtuous Vice details
how mainstream efforts to represent queers affirmatively
continually fall short of full democratic enfranchisement. Clarke
draws on contemporary writings along with late-eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century English and European cultural history to
investigate how concepts of value, representation, and
homoeroticism have interacted and circulated in the West since the
Enlightenment.
Examining the role of eroticism in citizenship
and why only normalizing constructions of homosexuality enable
inclusion, Clarke reconsiders the work of Habermas and Foucault in
relation to contemporary visibility politics, Kant’s moral and
political theory, Marx’s analysis of value, and the sexualized
dynamics of the Victorian cultural public sphere. The
juxtaposition of Habermas with Foucault reveals the surprising
value of reading the former in the context of queer politics and
the usefulness of the theory of the public sphere for
understanding contemporary identity politics and the visibility
politics of the 1990s. Examining how a host of nonsexual factors
impinge historically upon the constitution of sexual identities
and practices, Clarke negotiates the relation between questions of
publicity and categories of value. Discussions of television
sitcoms (such as Ellen), marketing techniques, authenticity, and
literary culture add to this daring analysis of visibility
politics.
As a critique of the claim that equal
representation of gays and lesbians necessarily constitutes
progress, this significant intervention into social theory will
find enthusiastic readers in the fields of Victorian, cultural,
literary, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as other fields
engaged with categories of identity.
