are there any convincing queer readings of 'the importance of being earnest'?

Wait... there's a nonqueer way to read it?

well, when i was twelve and had heard a little about That Oscar Wilde and expected it to be full of the gay sexing, i recall it being not exactly choc-a-bloc with it.

i've been watching the old movie version, which is a treasure. i dunno tho, i got it out bcz of the stuff in that alison bechdel book where she mentions homosexuality being, uh, encoded as algy's uncontrollable gluttony, and that seems strangely unconvincing. although there is "a bunburyist? whatever do you mean?", that seems to be the gayest moment. i've seen gayer performances of the merchant of venice f'r'example. tho admittedly a 40s version is maybe not the place to look.

i guess i'd be curious as to where it stands in terms of parody, or rather camp, maybe, to victorian stage drama, i suppose that might be ultimately more productive than trying to prove there's rampant sodomy going on between acts.

on wikipedia there's a very civil and minor edit war going on as to whether "queer readings" ought to make it onto the page, ha

It has been a very long time since I actually read it. But reading it as an impressionable gay teenager type, I wasn't -- well, I didn't actually expect it to be full of gay sexings, but I was expecting it to be, uh, camp or something like that. To feature the sense that "the mainstream way of looking at things is not the only way" and "we can turn the tables on the expected order of things as a tool to gain a political toe-hold" with some "knowing sohpistication" in there as well.

But! Gluttony has been tied up with homosexuality, certainly. They have, at times, both been seen as "giving into your baser urges despite society considering it a no-no". That isn't how homosexuality is thought of these days, of course.

ah, point. the different conceptions of homosexuality stuff - presumably this is where one cites foucault, ecch - is an odd one with wilde, how his wife and kids are somewhat elided from his myth - bechdel calls it his "martyrology", which is marvellous

i think - over here at least, tho i wouldn't presume it's different in america - the play is a "safe" classic, like austen, dickens, etc - so the stuff you're filing under camp gets passed over in favour of "wittiness", leaving it somewhat defanged. (that said: it's not like i've seen any production of it, so i could be wrong.)

curious: does camp in your sense here get used much in america? tho i'm aware of that sense of it, in british english usage it's far more used to denote mincing, limpwristedness, like it's one step further up the slur ladder from "poofy".

I think the British use seems like a subset of the American use (as we've identified them etc.). I mean, the mincing and limpwristedness is all about "the mainstream way of looking at things is not the only way" and "we can turn the tables on the expected order of things as a tool to gain a political toe-hold"; the "knowing sophistication" comes from both the mastery of an arcane set of slang and the shall-we-say "oh Mary, don't I know it?" world-weary familiarity with it all. Street savvy, world savvy, but also a sense of -- at its height -- culturally savvy as well (although not intellectually savvy, I suppose -- able to talk about art or music but not so much about physics, and really much more interested in talking about sex or gossip anyways).

And you're certainly right to point out how Wilde's heterosexual moments are ignored -- see also Whitman. But also, at the time there was apparently this other role -- heterosexuality was contrasted with "proper" godly progentive sexuality; heretosex for the joy of heterosex rather than as a function of a proper marriage/society. So Wilde was fulfilling the roles of dutiful husband as well as of indulgent homosexual but was perhaps not what turn-of-the-century types would have considered heterosexual (even though our categories are of course based on different criteria etc.).

Or, another way to put it: The idea that gay men wouldn't have wives and kids is a fairly recent thing! People who were teenagers when Stonewall happened are perhaps the first generation where it would be odd for them to be homosexual and NOT have wives and kids. So there is this whole discourse (shall we say) about Wilde that went on for decades where it didn't matter that he had a wife and kids, that had no bearing on his sexuality -- and it's only now that we're so used to the idea "but gay people don't get married to women and have sex with them!" that it strikes us as something worthy of comment.

And but so queerdom isn't expressed through teh buttfuckery between scenes, but rather through ways of thinking, right? It's (yet another?) way of being different from normal, but one that is/can be more hidden and denied than other ways of being different (race/sex/etc.). And so having to deal with that, whether it's a big deal or a really big deal, that leads to a different set of thought patterns, (or at least does for some people). And that's what a queer reading is -- not that Algy is secretly queer, but that it's hard to imagine someone who hadn't gone through the process of dealing with being queer coming up with the kinds of thoughts Wilde put into it.

So, say, when I was reading "Philosophical Investigations" -- that seemed clearly, screamingly, to be a queer text (perhaps despite the British translators' insistance on using the word "queer" for "odd"), and I was surprised that some of the other (straight, probably Christian) students in the class not only didn't see that it in but were actually surprised that W was queer at all. (Although also this showed that they weren't paying any damn attention at all, since the prof had gone over that on the first or second day of class.) I kept thinking, how does this text make any sense -- from a sort of creative/imperative view -- if you don't take that into account?

Although then again it didn't seem to make much sense to them. Ah well.

Enough rambling, I should go to sleep.

whitman had no heterosexual moments, unless you meant the stories he spread about fake wives and fake children in nola, which is queerer then fucking ass on rosies cruise

Yes, I hear that is how his life is being spun these days. There's a question mark around the specific details of any heterosexuality in his life, and Occam's razor now says it makes more sense that he wouldn't have had any heterosexual experience, whereas it used to say that it made more sense that he would have.

When I read LoG (as a teen, I haven't really looked at it much since) I was surprised that there was so much heterosexuality in it, little of which, at the time, felt like Proustian gender-changing. I might feel differently about it if I reread it now, though.

they're talking about definitions of camp on the doctor who thread over on ILE now! it's pretty interesting, actually. probably moreso if you saw doctor who tho.

haha i really need to get around to looking at wittgenstein again, last time (god, years now) (i haven't read any philosophy since i got to college, i wonder if that proves anything) i got stuck on the biography and never got back to w. himself.