Champagne John
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Station Road, Erie, PA 16563, USA.
J Homosex. 2008;55(4):648-64. doi: 10.1080/00918360802498617.
This article surveys the critical debates around Walt Whitman's "Calamus" cluster, arguing that a "queer" reading of Whitman--one that does not see him as, for example, a closeted homosexual who censored his work for fear of being "outed"--is both historically accurate and politically efficacious. While previous efforts to reclaim Whitman as "our great gay poet" are understandable--particularly given critical readings of Whitman that denied the homoeroticism of his poems--today, a reading of Whitman as homosexual threatens to simplify our understanding of the history of homosexuality and to blunt the power of Whitman's poetry to continue to "queer" normative understandings of sex and gender identity categories and their relationship to politics.
本文审视了围绕沃尔特·惠特曼《菖蒲集》展开的重要争论，认为对惠特曼进行“酷儿”解读——即不把他看作比如因害怕被“曝光”而对作品进行审查的隐秘同性恋者——在历史上是准确的，在政治上也是有效的。虽然此前将惠特曼重新塑造为“我们伟大的同性恋诗人”的努力是可以理解的——尤其是考虑到对惠特曼诗歌的批评性解读否认其诗歌中的同性恋倾向——但如今，将惠特曼视为同性恋者的解读有可能简化我们对同性恋历史的理解，并削弱惠特曼诗歌继续使关于性与性别认同类别及其与政治关系的规范性理解变得“酷儿化”的力量。
