Inventing a Gay Race: Racial Desire and Queer Colonialism in Hollinghurst’s Fiction

Abstract

This article offers a sociologically informed analysis of queer racial and spatial politics in Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction. Through a close textual analysis of The Swimming-Pool Library, The Line of Beauty, The Folding Star and The Spell, the study reveals how queer spaces, while supposed to be inclusive, indeed reproduce colonial and orientalist exclusive discourses. Nonwhite gay men are represented as feminized, hypersexualised, and subordinate to their white British counterparts, echoing the master-slave dynamic of colonial narratives. Drawing on the works of such theorists as Mercer, Crenshaw, Foucault and Said, the study examines how these characters are simultaneously desired and degraded, constructed as the exotic other in contrast to whiteness and masculinity functioning as organizing principles of desirability in queer culture. By unveiling these racialized dynamics and sexualized structures of domination, the study, adopting a multi-theoretical approach, intends to address a significant gap in current scholarship by problematizing the intersection of racial and sexual disenfranchisement and contribute to the discourse on intersectionality in queer literature, especially regarding the entanglement of race, class and gender.