Queer Kinship after Wilde - Paperback

by Kristin Mahoney (Author)

"Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family draws on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, to tell the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who rethought and revised kinship, community, and the concept of the family in the early twentieth century. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists turned to the fin-de-si疇cle past for ideas that might allow them to operate outside of the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family, and they engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaboration in pursuit of different models of connection that might facilitate their disentanglement from conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde attends to the successes and failures that resulted from these experiments, the new approaches to affiliation inflected by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that occurred within these networks, and the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism"--