Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond
Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond
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酷儿之美：从温克尔曼到弗洛伊德及其他的性与美学
DOI：
10.1080/10848770.2012.753035
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发表时间：
2013
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
C. S. Lewis
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作者：
C. S. Lewis
惠特尼·戴维斯（Whitney Davis）的《酷儿之美》（Queer Beauty）调查了18、19和20世纪主要作家如约翰·温克尔曼（Johann Winckelmann）、伊曼努尔·康德（Immanuel Kant）、约翰·阿丁顿·西蒙兹（John Addington Symonds）、查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）、爱德华·卡彭特（Edward Carpenter）和米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）等作品中性与美学之间的一系列交叉点。在一本由十篇个人散文组成的文集中，戴维斯沿着线索将这些不同的作家、他们的学科以及他们对他所谓的“性美学”和“审美性”的评价联系起来（4）。通过追溯重要的西方知识传统中特定的同性恋倾向，戴维斯认为其中出现的艺术和科学哲学是如何“真正奇怪”的，即使那些支持它们的作家不想承认他们的想法。戴维斯首先考虑温克尔曼的Nachahmung理论，这是一个在1750年代发展起来的批判模型，植根于温克尔曼的信念，即古希腊胜利的、肌肉发达的摔跤手的地位激励了后代效仿摔跤手的身体和道德成就。也就是说，这些雕像激起了对所代表的人物的同性恋欣赏和欲望。戴维斯认为，温克尔曼的Nachahmung的概念是由鸡奸制度的动机，因为，根据Nachahmung，“自我的出现”发生在“跟随另一个崇拜和模仿他的形象的人，反过来模仿他的形象”（35）。到1790年，康德借鉴了纳查蒙的恋童癖理论，声称美是一种不断完善的理想;然而，他通过坚持审美和性的不感兴趣是评估给定对象之美的必要条件来缓和纳查蒙的同性恋主义。康德对同性恋的否定继续影响着西蒙兹19世纪的美学理论。虽然西蒙兹的艺术方法是由同性的欲望，根据戴维斯，其同时基督教轴承不允许明确的同性恋欣赏和模仿。戴维斯说，像康德的，西蒙兹的美学理论依赖于“同性恋，不知道自己是这样的，或作为自己的”（132）。《酷儿之美》接下来讨论了卡彭特这样的性学家是如何在一个主要颂扬达尔文主义和（异性恋）性选择的时代将同性欲望合理化为一种审美冲动的，以及这些世纪关于美和同性恋的思想是如何影响福柯最近的作品的。《酷儿美人》的巨大优势在于它的范围。戴维斯汇集了来自各种学科和时代的思想家。他令人信服地证明了同性恋和同性欲望是如何成为自温克尔曼以来西方美学家的症结所在。特别引人注目的是戴维斯对Catasetum tridentatum或Monk's Head兰花的阅读，以及达尔文对它的接受。原产于加勒比海，这种花迷惑了维多利亚时代的植物学家，因为它的“性变态”（136）。它有两个阴茎，但似乎缺乏植物学家认为任何特定植物繁殖所必需的雌性对应物。然而，对达尔文来说，兰花的美在于它的变态。它代表了整个人口的受精需求以及美丽的“性生活的多样性”（139）。同样重要的是戴维斯与福柯的接触，他认为福柯通过宣扬同性恋S&M文化的奇迹，挑战了恋童癖的美学和性制度，这种文化需要像“主人”，“奴隶”，“爸爸”和“男孩”这样的头衔，但这并不意味着他们会被称为同性恋。
Whitney Davis’s Queer Beauty surveys a range of intersections between sexuality and aesthetics in the work of major eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writers like Johann Winckelmann, Immanuel Kant, John Addington Symonds, Charles Darwin, Edward Carpenter, and Michel Foucault, among others. In a collection of ten individual essays, Davis follows the threads that connect these varied writers, their disciplines, and their assessments of what he calls “sexual aesthetics” and “aesthetic sexuality”(4). By tracing the specifically homoerotic inflections of significant Western intellectual traditions, Davis considers how the philosophies of art and science that emerged therein were “truly queer”(7), even when those writers espousing them did not want to recognize their ideas as such. Davis begins by considering Winckelmann’s theory of Nachahmung, a critical model developed in the 1750s and rooted in Winckelmann’s belief that statuary of victorious, muscled wrestlers in ancient Greece inspired subsequent generations to emulate the wrestlers’ physical and moral achievement. That is, the statues provoked a homoerotic appreciation and desire for the figures represented. Davis argues that Winckelmann’s concept of Nachahmung was motivated by the institution of pederasty, for, according to Nachahmung,“the coming-to-be of oneself” happened “in coming-after another who admires and imitates his image modeled in turn on someone coming-after-his image”(35). By 1790, Kant drew on the pederastyinformed theory of Nachahmung in claiming that beauty worked as a continuously perfected ideal; however, he assuaged the homoeroticism of Nachahmung by insisting that aesthetic and sexual disinterest were necessary to assess the beauty of a given object. Kant’s disavowal of homoeroticism went on to inform Symonds’s nineteenth-century aesthetic theory. Though Symonds’s approach to art was informed by same-sex desire, according to Davis, its simultaneously Christian bearings did not allow for explicit homoerotic appreciation and emulation. Davis says that, like Kant’s, Symonds’s aesthetic theory depended on “a homoeroticism that does not know itself as such, or as its own”(132). Queer Beauty moves on to discuss how sexologists like Carpenter rationalized same-sex desire as an aesthetic impulse in an age that mostly celebrated Darwinism and (hetero) sexual selection, as well as how these centuries of thought on beauty and homoeroticism informed the more recent work of Foucault. The great strength of Queer Beauty lies in its scope. Davis brings together thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines and eras. He persuasively demonstrates how homoeroticism and same-sex desire have been sticking points for Western aestheticians since Winckelmann. Particularly compelling is Davis’s reading of the Catasetum tridentatum, or Monk’s Head orchid, and its reception by Darwin. Native to the Caribbean, this flower mystified Victorian botanists because of its “sexual perversion”(136). It had dual phalluses but seemingly lacked the female counterpart that botanists had come to understand as necessary for any given plant to reproduce. For Darwin, though, the orchid’s beauty lay in its perversion. It represented the need for fertilization across a population as well as the beautiful “diversities of sexual life”(139). Also important is Davis’s engagement with Foucault, whom he believes challenged the aesthetic and sexual institution of pederasty by proclaiming the wonder of gay S&M culture, which required titles like “master,”“slave,”“daddy,” and “boy,” but which