Feeling singular : queer masculinities in the early United States / Ben Bascom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bascom, Ben (Benjamin D.), author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eccentrics and eccentricities--United States--Biography.

Eccentrics and eccentricities.

Eccentrics and eccentricities--United States--History.

Men--United States--Case studies.

Men.

Masculinity--United States--History.

Masculinity.

Individuality.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (281 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Much of US cultural production since the 20th century has celebrated the figure of the singular individual, from the lonesome Huckleberry Finn to the cinematic loners John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but that tradition casts a backward shadow that prohibits seeing how the singular in America was previously marked as unwanted, outcast, excessive, or weird. 'Feeling Singular' examines the paradoxical nature of masculine self-promotion and individuality in the early United States. Through a collection of singular life narratives, author Ben Bascom draws on a queer studies approach that uncovers how fraught private desires shaped a public masculinity increasingly at odds with the disinterested norms of republican public culture.

Contents:

Introduction: Feeling Singular in the Early United States

I.1. From Founders to Foundlings: State Affects and Republican Significance

I.2. Queering Masculinity

I.3. Feeling Singular, Becoming Eccentric, and Other Enlightenment Book Disorders

1 Memorializing the Republic of Failure

1.1. Textual Bodies That Matter

1.2. The Body of John Fitch

1.3. Feeling Singular and the Dawn of Dependence

1.4. Courting Empire

1.5. Feeling Steamed

2 Civic Virtue and State Power: The Politics of the Particular in the Racialized Republic

2.1. Bearings

2.2. Queer State Anachronisms

2.3. Vermont Contestations

2.4. Feeling Alone

3 Federalism in Drag: Timothy Dexter's Pickle and Other Perverse Properties

3.1. Timothy Dexter's Homespun Antics

3.2. Eccentric Pickles

3.3. Federalist Fantasies and the Phantasmatic Self

3.4. Anxiety of Legacy and the Production of Legitimacy

3.5. Dexter's Farraginous Domestic Scene

3.6. Memorializing Mess

4 Perambulations in Print: Norms and Normativity in the Itinerant Republic

4.1. Textual Insertions of the Queer Self

4.2. Queer Peddling

4.3. Dreams of Significance in the Early Republic

4.4. The Messy Submissions of Jonathan Plummer

4.5. The Sexual Secrets of Jonathan Plummer

4.6. Straightening the Early Republic

5 The Queer Hermit: William "Amos" Wilson and the Antisocial Republic

5.1. The Commonplace of Solitude

5.2. Solitude's Seductions

5.3. Executed Feelings

5.4. The Institutionalization of Solitude

5.5. Happy/Queer

Coda: Masculinity's Monumental Hair Problem.

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2024.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on February 16, 2024).

Other Format:

Print version: Bascom, Ben Feeling singular

ISBN:

0-19-768751-2

0-19-768753-9

0-19-768752-0

OCLC:

1417160955