416 EURAMERICA wavering on the assumption of any “sexual” identity.3 That is why Peter Coviello’s earlier assertion on Whitman’s evasiveness would certainly beg the question when it is esteemed thus: Whitman’s refusal in “Calamus” to define sex as a quality of attachment fundamentally distinct from any other—his refusal to circumscribe sexuality in any definite set of acts or relations—constitutes what is arguably the most consequential intervention in American sexual ideology he would ever make. (2005: 144) For to call Whitman’s textual praxis of circumlocution a “refusal” and an “intervention” clearly presupposes the existence of a certain “sexual” knowledge, which might not have been as yet solidified at that time, though it was already in the air. In contrast, Coviello’s later revision is more on the mark when he emphasizes the messy misalignments—the uncoordinated points of partial overlap and unbridgeable disconnection—between the complex, modern senses of identity and affiliation that might be heard echoing in a commonplace term like “gay,” on the one hand, and on the other Whitman’s own experience of erotic being and erotic life. (2013: 6) The nineteenth century, as we have come to know, was actually a muddled transitional period between paradigms and “those [new sexual] definitions are neither historically stable . . . nor internally coherent” (Sedgwick, 1991: 155).4 3 The most influential is no doubt Michael Moon’s Disseminating Whitman, which sharply pinpoints the textual characteristics of Leaves of Grass as the “‘fluidity,’ substitutability, and indeterminacy of masculine identity and sexuality” (1991: 38). 4 By calling this “the earliness of the erotic being,” Coviello later means to capture “the experience of sexuality as something in the crosshairs of a number of forms of knowledge and regulation but not yet wholly captivated or made coordinate by them” (2013: 7)—in other words, pre- in “pre-homosexual” does not mean total ignorance or lack of connections but the condition before the consolidation and predomination of the homosexual paradigm. There are, after all, not just points of “unbridgeable disconnection” but of “partial overlap” in those “messy misalignments” (6).
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