13 - Homobonding and the Nation

Summary

The history of modern nationality unfolds in tandem with transformations in the realm of intimacy and intimate affiliation with the history of sexuality. Walt Whitman's is of course not the only investment in the volatile conjunction of national belonging and sexual exchange, but he does bring to the scene of an erotically charged national feeling a singular clarity. The erotic vibrancy of encounters between strangers becomes, in fact, a chief point of fascination, and a central figure, in Whitman's work, especially in the infamous 'Calamus' cluster of poems from 1860. The nation has the tumultuous, affiliative force of impassioned intimacy already built into it. As decades of scholarship have made clear, campaigns of racial violence, from eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Indian killing to twentieth-century technologies of racial terror like lynching, work often as affiliative practices. Violence reroutes the homophilic bondings of the nation-form outward, making racial terrorism a sanctifying outlet, an alibi of sorts, for the passionate attachment it simultaneously solidifies.