Book Review: Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman by Dominic Janes. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman. By Dominic Janes. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, Pp. x + 257. $50.00.)

This series of case studies uses queer as "that which sets itself up against the normative" (10), and queer martyrdom as religious images, practices, ideals, and persons that employed suffering (including social marginalization, secrecy, sexual restraint and/ or lapses) "to develop . . . same-sex desire that projected the self as dutiful and penitent rather than shameful" (5). "Queer martyrdom" thus involves techniques of "redemption from sexual shame in exemplary service and suffering, whether or not that process was eroticized" (27). Janes stresses that this nineteenth-into-the-twentieth-century Anglican phenomenon aimed not at sexual activity but containment and re-deployment of desires considered sinful. His impressive command of bibliography positions his work amidst literatures on British homosexuality, gay studies, and queer theory, arguing that post-gay-lib studies have denigrated creative dimensions of "closeted" experience. He occasionally affirms, but does not fully analyze, the compatibility of same-sex desire and/or activity and Christian life.

Janes uses historiographical bricolage as his forms...