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Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, by Whitney Davis; pp. x + 354. New York: Columbia university Press, 2010, $45.00.
Among the reasons to welcome W hitney Davis's Queer Beauty is the ra re confluence of capacit ies and interests it embodies: an erudite, schola rly, philosophically infor med mode of tracing intellectual histor y brought to bear on questions of queer sexuality. That is a rare convergence, and not just because scholars w it h the erudition to address large questions in aest hetics are often dist ressingly dismissive of queer concerns. such an approach is also rare in queer st udies. I do not mean to endorse the homophobic commonplace that queer studies is the domain of t rendy intellectual feather weights; the field does, however, sometimes suffer from hav ing too narrow (and too obv ious) a canon-largely because, to ga in a hearing, queer-centered work must make itself imme- diately leg ible as limit ing its scope to the concer ns of a minorit y sexual population. Too broadly conceived, the inquir y borders on questions that are seen to be tr ivialized by the focus on specialt y concerns; narrowed to the limits dictated by the market, it thereby also secures its safe irrelevance for those wait ing patiently for the trend to pa ss. For queer scholars, such external pressures often force them to resolve questions too quick ly. By ruling out more capacious lines of inquir y in order to prove the relevance of their work to specifica lly sexual questions, such scholars a lso implicitly help keep sexu- alit y safely quara ntined, away from putatively higher rea lms of thought, and rea ssure us that sexual questions are rarely anything but obv ious to discover and simple to resolve. Avoiding such compromises, Davis allows questions of aesthet ics and intellectual histor y to develop on their own terms without ever sidelining sexuality a s a focus.
In the broadest strokes, the ten essays in Queer Beauty address the relation between homoeroticism (or, more generally, the felt experience of desire) to a partic- ular st rand of think ing about beaut y running from Johann Winckelmann a nd Imma nuel K ant...