![]() ![]() ![]() Take, for instance, a description given by H.F., Defoe’s narrator, concerning the “dreadful Cases happened in particular Families every Day” (69). Using Lee Edelman’s conceptualization of “reproductive futurism,” I read Defoe’s Journal as a site for queer renderings of intimacies during epidemics. The reproductive family becomes an anxious unit under assault by disability, disease, and even domestic intimacies. Defoe also illustrates several vectors of disease ranging from raving, naked men on the street to kind kisses within the conjugal family. Defoe’s city is populated with images of swollen sores, suffering patients, and fearful child-bearing. ![]() Bodies are not what they appear to be, and contagion is everywhere. For queerness can never define an identity it can only ever disturb one.ĭANIEL Defoe’s 1722 historical novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, renders London as a terrifying landscape during the Great Plague of 1655. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |