Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 415 Walt Whitman’s oeuvre and person prove to be so riddled with ambiguities and ambivalences that despite, or because of, great advancements in recent researches, antipodal views rather than proximate agreements can still arise on any topic.1 Instead of seeing these as sources of nuisance that require greater efforts to overcome and (before that can be achieved) are often disavowed, this essay proposes to recognize them as inbuilt characteristics of Whitman that can be better accommodated, and illuminatingly exploited, by what I call historicist parallel reading. By parallel, I mean seeking to accommodate, rather than dissolving, different (levels of) significations of a text and/or an author on any single topic when they conspicuously conflict with one another; although the means of achieving this accommodation may differ for each occasion, it is found to be predominantly historicist in Whitman’s case, which is mostly the overdetermined result of the intermeshing of Whitman’s past and our present. This essay will demonstrate this by focusing on three of Whitman’s interrelated core thematics, namely: 1) the real transgression of his representation of intra-male intimacy (called homotextuality in this essay); 2) the programmatic politics put forth on the basis of this transgression (named homopolitics here); and 3) the intersection of this politics with US global ambitions and imperialist expansion (what would be critiqued as “homonationalism” today). While the early gay recoveries (since the 1970s) of Whitman, in the fight against mainstream erasure and cover-up, claimed him tout court as a pioneering gay author,2 later queer readings (since the late 1990s) have complicated the matter by pointing out not just his mostly pre-homosexual context but his textual/personal 1 As Matt Cohen acutely puts it, speaking of the latest developments of Whitman studies: “we get a Whitman whose very political radicalism, whose commitment to an expanded self and a deconstruction of the identity categories of his time, seems to have been as much a fertilizer of the seeds of today’s retrograde categories as the queer liberator or the poet of slave” (2020: 6). 2 The landmark works are of course Robert K. Martin’s series of articles that later constitute the first half of The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1998).
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