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Cruising Dystopia in Gulliver's Travels
Author(s) -
Coykendall Abby
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12708
Subject(s) - dystopia , sensibility , queer , utopia , ethos , aesthetics , art , art history , cruise , philosophy , psychoanalysis , literature , psychology , engineering , linguistics , aerospace engineering
This article places the curiously unqueer, because largely uncrip, reparative ethos of José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia in dialogue with the dystopian affect and aesthetic of Gulliver's Travels . To appreciate the queer dynamics of Swift's novel, we must adopt a suitably Swiftian stance: affirming the unbecoming, and decidedly crip, sensibility of the satire. Indeed, the novel's enablingly disabling ‘disability aesthetic’ helps controvert the continuing misimpression of queerness as perennially new: as at best materialised as fetish, a literally utopian ‘nowhere’ through which one may cruise, au flâneur , but never truly alight upon, muddy oneself within or, above all, linger in.