By Josh Hughes
Last week in the Special Collections floor of the library, Associate Professor of English Kristin Mahoney presented her paper “Out and Out from the Family to the Community: the Housmans and the Politics of Queer Sibling Devotion” as the final talk in the Distinguished Speakers series that Western and Heritage Resources put on every year. These talks focus on esteemed individuals who have in one way or another utilized resources from the community and library to aid in their ongoing research. Mahoney’s paper, which only entailed a small portion of her current book “Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Aestheticism and the Family”, addressed the Housman siblings’ attitude of sexual radicalism, feminism, and anti-colonialism in a succinct one hour lecture.
Mahoney’s work has previously focused on aestheticism and decadence, specifically within the Victorian era and the bridge towards modernism in the early 20th century. Her current work, then, talks about queer kinship in the Decadent movement, specifically Laurence and Clemence Housman, siblings of the more well-known poet A.E. Housman. The two, who lived together for practically the entirety of their lives, advocated for looser conceptualizations of sexuality and feminism within politics, and Mahoney suggests that the unlikely and strange relationship that the two maintained allowed for their progressivism and activism throughout their respective careers.
In her hour-long talk, Mahoney talked about the collaborative relationship that the Housmans shared and how this came to light in their literary and artistic craft. The two never married, and lived co-dependently for their whole lives, allowing for an unconventional kinship to break open their thought in new ways. Laurence defined his understanding of love as a form of giving, and he maintained a progressive, radical outlook on the range of intimate relationships that can occur throughout one’s lifetime. This way, his relationship with his sister allowed for an unconventional bond to shape, which he considered an accessible pathway to broadened thoughts and emotions.
Mahoney went on to talk about how the Housmans’ ideologies that broke into the domain of the 20th century were guided not entirely by the advent of modernism, but also of the Victorian ways in which they grew up. The importance of familial ties informed their political and societal progressivism in an unusual way: since Laurence shared a bond with his sister that generally is reserved for a spouse, it allowed for his understanding of feminism to grow out of a curious place. This relationship also informed Laurence’s forms of storytelling in his fairy tales by articulating queer politics in a way unheard of for the time.
While her discussion on the Housmans’ works is but a piece of her overarching goal to dissect the aestheticism of kinship at the turn of the 20th century, Mahoney provided an articulate lecture on some of these ideas and questions that began to arise as a result of modernism and the end of the Victorian era. Be sure to look for her work at Western as she continues research of the overall project.
While the Distinguished Speakers series is done for the year, look out for Facebook events and fliers by Heritage Resources this coming year for information on upcoming speakers.