Compton Mackenzie’s 1927 roman à clef Vestal Fire features as a supporting character an Italian queer who performs for an audience of Northern white cosmopolitan readers as an “idealized primitive figure” (Pérez 25). In this novel, the youthful pansexual brown body—modeled on Nino Cesarini, lover of Baron Fersen—is Italian (Champagne “Are Italians”). This final chapter examines several Anglophone and French works of queer travel literature that are similarly characterized by a miscegenating of race, class, age, gender, and nationality. Whatever potential such works had for fostering transnational same-sex intimacies and challenging the parochialism of the nation is typically derailed by homonationalism (Puar), a countervailing impulse to secure the queer’s status as agent of neo-colonialist expansion.

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Categorical Miscegenation and Early Queer Travel Literature About Italy

  • John G. Champagne

摘要

Compton Mackenzie’s 1927 roman à clef Vestal Fire features as a supporting character an Italian queer who performs for an audience of Northern white cosmopolitan readers as an “idealized primitive figure” (Pérez 25). In this novel, the youthful pansexual brown body—modeled on Nino Cesarini, lover of Baron Fersen—is Italian (Champagne “Are Italians”). This final chapter examines several Anglophone and French works of queer travel literature that are similarly characterized by a miscegenating of race, class, age, gender, and nationality. Whatever potential such works had for fostering transnational same-sex intimacies and challenging the parochialism of the nation is typically derailed by homonationalism (Puar), a countervailing impulse to secure the queer’s status as agent of neo-colonialist expansion.