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Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (review)

This book’s fascinating account of the relationship between modernism, sexuality, and class is easily one of the best and most consistently rewarding treatments of American literary modernism of the past decade. Locating the work of the James brothers, Stein, Crane, Cather, and Dos Passos within the broader social transformations of modernity, Trask’s study underscores the “commutative relation” between the risky class dynamics of modernity’s social world and the swerves of wayward eros (18). Trask argues compellingly that in an era in which class in America is increasingly understood as “mobile, slippery, and restless, the period’s most serious thinkers adopted sexual science’s concept of evasive and unmoored desire to represent what appeared to be a seismic shift in social relations during the Progressive era” (1). And just as the language of sexual perversion everywhere tropes a social world adrift, so too “mobility and desire in this period stipulate each other through the irregular bodies of the underclass”—the tramps, vags, migrant laborers, and prostitutes whose “unsettling, disruptive, or defiant status” mirrors the epistemological decentering and social dislocation that come to define the condition of modernity itself (2, 3). Modernist sexuality studies have rarely been so rigorously embedded in the historical terrain of modern sociology as they are in this book. And conversely, Giddens’s modernity of disembedding has never looked so queer. Trask grounds this ambitious argument in his superb first chapter, “Pervert Modernism,” which tracks the promiscuous cross-troping of excessive desire and unstable sociality within a remarkable discursive ambit—one that includes the usual suspects of modern social thought (Durkheim, Ellis, Lippmann, Mumford, Stoddard, and Taylor, among others) and a motley retinue of less-familiar figures, including sociologists (James Roscoe Day, Edward Ross, and Lester Ward), economists (Carleton Parker and Rexford Tugwell), and thinkers of sexuality (Iwan Bloch, Will Durant, August Forel, and Edward Sapir). Trask’s chief goal here is to explain the “intellectual revolution” in social-scientific thought of the early twentieth century as a direct theoretical reckoning with the material instabilities of class structure and sexual norms (17). Thus, if modern social thought newly foregrounded the centrality of desire and sexual passion in explanations of socio-economic phenomena, this, for Trask, is the logical entailment of the “basic shared term” of modern economic and sexological theory: “the element of ‘change’ or ‘movement’ integral to both class relations and the order of desire” (17). Insofar as perversion becomes “synonymous with the breakdown, the vexing precariousness, of categorization itself” in both social and erotic domains, modern sociality is thus thoroughly perverse (36). Less Foucauldian than it appears, this claim allows Trask to challenge critical understandings of modernity as a disciplinary regime of social standardization and coercive identitarianism by returning to critical visibility managerial modernism’s “dialectical twin, anomie” (11). In this fashion, Trask’s swing through modern social thought underscores how modernity’s taxonomical projects of social and sexual order are unsettled by an erotic instability whose contingent threats and vagrant pleasures pervade American modernism. Consider, for example, Trask’s literary point of departure, Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, which he reads as a “sustained narration of the risk relations that modernity entails” (8). Here, Trask is particularly interested in how James arrogates the haphazard, migratory, and opportunistic existence of the immigrant to formulate a notion of choice unanchored in either truth, clear purpose, or the “common belief” that—at least in his brother’s pragmatist account—would stabilize modernity’s “radical pluralization of desire” (57). Instead, James opts for a risky account