Introduction

Summary

The book begins with the mouth itself, demonstrating why the persistently undertheorized “lower sense” of taste is such a potent site for thinking about queer pleasure. Modernist writers’ interest in taste signals a shift in bodily figuration at the turn of the twentieth century. If, as Gail Turley Houston argues, the stomach often served as “the synecdoche of the Victorian body politic,” modernist writers turned to the mouth, substituting the embodied pleasure of taste for the cogitative metaphor of digestion. Rather than a metaphor for gradual understanding, queer modernists required a way of thinking past understanding, emphasizing immediacy, embodiment, and illegible forms of pleasure. As “gay” and “lesbian” subjects were becoming legible, modernists sought new ways to talk about queer subjectivity that weren’t delimited by these newly normative identities. As demonstrated through readings of early poems by H. D. and T. S. Eliot, this turn to the mouth both figured and enacted a queering of genre, as the depiction of new forms of pleasure enabled new forms of literary pleasure.