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Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Pseudsday Tuesday

When Oliver Twist asked for more, he meant food, not abstract pluralities. But the pluralities are coming thick and fast. In this week's TLS, Matthew Ingleby reviews Queer Dickens - Erotics, Families, Masculinities by the pluralistically monikered Holly Furneaux. "Families" doesn't quite fit in that title, being an ordinary sort of plural - such singularities abound:

In one persuasive chapter, Dickens's fiction is shown to present positive alternatives to the heteronormative family unit (in David Copperfield, for instance) resisting what Furneaux calls the "bio-logical" tendency in conventional narrative, and favouring the "elective affinities" of nurturing relationships of choice over deterministic blood ties.

Bio-logical? What the Dick-ens is that hyphen doing? And it is one of multiple hyphenations

The management of same-sex desire through in-lawing (Steerforth's musing on Copperfield's non-existent sister), the Victorian fantasy of a queer elsewhere in the colonies (Edwin Drood in Egypt) and the erotics of male nursing (Herbert Pocket's tender rehabillitation of Pip) provide fruitful topics for sensitively hisoricist ways into Dickens that seem to leave him intact and, at the same time, appreciably different.

The plot Dickens.

Tags: Queer street, Dickenses, Menses, Mesnes, Menzies, Ming

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Posted on 08/10/2010 6:59 PM by Mary Jackson

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Comments

11 Aug 2010
Xanthippe

"Bio-logical" is obviously a bad pun on logical, biological, and possibly biographical as well, so all put together, "bio-logical" likely means something like this: "of or pertaining to the logic used to narrate biological experiences". See, easy, innit?

As for "sensitively hisoricist ways into Dickens that seem to leave him intact and, at the same time, appreciably different", these of course perpetrate metro-sexual acts (there's that hypen again) on a long-dead writer. And after being so sensitively deflowered, the poor bloke can never be the same again, can he?

I wonder where I can buy some erotics. They'd go well with my husband's masculinities.

11 Aug 2010

Mary Jackson

I wonder where I can buy some erotics.

They're everywhere - breeding like Rabbits.

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