Canon Fodder
As with so much of the melodrama of hegemony, the establishment of a canon is infused with the subtle flavor of camp. Like Sontag’s “Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it… saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient!” the canonizer, too, is “not kidding”; like all genuine makers of Sontagian camp, the canonizer, too, is bound to fail.
Somehow simultaneously reverent and self-important, he (for it is usually a he) tears a leaf or two from the expansive history of literature — thin white paper over a truer palimpsest — and “Voilà! the West!” But as the struggles for recognition of women, people of color, native peoples, and other Others amply demonstrate, the finality of his Voilà is really only the beginning.
There is no single queer homeland. No shared queer language has come down to us. Queerness is older than history; queerness is wider than the world. Having lost a paradise that never was, a queer canon is all the more urgent — but if no less camp, must needs be different. Blasted out of the dull rigors of scholarship, a queer canon would be a canon of affinities. A queer canon would be a canon of cruise, a canon of kinks — a fetish object desired for the fetish that it is. A canon of craving, wet with variation, and a canon of care.
Against the conventional notion of canonical exclusion, we set a notion of canonical embrace — of the promiscuity of taste and the freedom that comes from choice. Voilà.
Be a part of the new queer canon. Pitch your work to Ignota Magazine.
We’re tweeting about: “Dogmas for the Use of the Ages.”
We’re watching: Justin Bond, “You’re So Vain.”
We’re reading: The “Conclusion” to Walter Pater’s 1873 Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
We’re drinking: Issue #1 contributor John Leavitt’s “Faithless Elector.”
