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Swift's Queer Persistence
Author(s) -
Brunström Conrad
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 - 10.1111/1754-0208.12709
Subject(s) - swift , queer , persistence (discontinuity) , hegemony , politics , psychoanalysis , sociology , gender studies , psychology , aesthetics , art , political science , law , astrophysics , physics , geology , geotechnical engineering
This afterpiece considers the extent to which Jonathan Swift is as politically representative as he is eccentric, and assesses the persistent need on the part of biographers to assert his ‘queerness’ in ways that result in the explaining away of his political positions in terms of psychopathology. It is proposed that Swift's orthodoxies contribute as much as his heterodoxies to his unsettling fascination. In terms of his refusal to entertain any benign notion of ‘progress’, Swift is temperamentally cognate with the ‘no‐futurism’ of Lee Edelman, a posture characterised by a defiant rejection of hegemonic pieties relating to children and childhood.