Document Type
Article
Abstract
David Leavitt’s most recent novel, The Indian Clerk (2007) runs afoul of the standard position in relation to the politics of sexual identity among modern Anglo-American writers. While working in the same tradition as Christopher Isherwood or Edmund White, for whom being a gay writer is a politically necessary self-identification, Leavitt, in his latest work of fiction, fights against such a designation. The Indian Clerk explores the potential limitations of sexual identity, which originated in the medical and scientific discourses of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. [1] According to Chris White, these discourses “produce[d] science as the means of truly understanding what is fixed and universal part of human sexuality, and which has an essence which is not provisional or culturally produced” (68), and, in the words of David Halperin, “... took the form of establishing norms of self-regulation... by constructing new species of individuals, discovering and implanting perversions and thereby elaborating more subtle and insidious means of social control” (47).
Repository Citation
Gurfinkel, Helena. "Reverse Sexology: Turn-of-the-Century Discourses of Sexuality and the Limits of Identity in David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1–27. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss4/6