18 - Turn-of-the-Century Decadence and Aestheticism

Summary

This chapter begins with the premise that decadence and aestheticism were queer sites of cultural production that helped to define both literary and sexual modernity. It explores how the complexities and contradictions of queer modernity are contained within them. The literary traditions of decadence and aestheticism preceded nineteenth-century sexology's creation of the homosexual as an abnormal sexual type and developed their own forms of eroticism that served as a counterdiscourse to the medicalized model. For Walter Benjamin, the slogan l'art pour l'art is about the attempt to isolate art from technology and the commodification of the marketplace. Benjamin links the cult of art to the cult of commodities, arguing that both fail to confront the social relations that undergird nineteenth-century culture. Finally, the chapter focuses on the decadent dandy and his relationship to queer literature and culture of the fin de siecle.