Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family

By: Kristin Mahoney

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Synopsis: Queer Kinship after Wilde investigates the afterlife of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period within a global context. Drawing on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, it tells the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who turned to the fin-de-siècle past for inspiration as they attempted to operate outside the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists 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 as well as the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.