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> September 3rd, 2010
Holly Furneaux. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Pp. ix 282. $99. Queer Dickens is one of those books: the kind I am always hoping to read and seldom do. Informed and inspired by contemporary theoretical insights, it examines a body of literature and, as a result, both literature and theory are transformed for the reader. The theory–in this instance, queer theory–brings to the surface new and unexpected conjunctions and complexities in the works of Dickens, challenging orthodoxies about the author and his era. In turn, the literary texts “talk back” to the more recently established truisms of gender and sexuality and show that queer theorys accounts of “families of choice” and other forms of elective affinities as recent challenges to the heteronormative formations of the past in fact have a considerably longer history than often assumed. Furneauxs deliberately provocative title does not preface a reductive biographical reading of Dickens–the man or his work–that simplistically uncovers, for instance, a hidden (homo)sexual past. Rather, the author clearly establishes from the outset the significance of queer theory for allowing a fresh investigation of sexuality, gender and intimacy, “beyond the constricting binary of hetero or homo” sexualities (10). “I define queer,” Furneaux states, “as that which demonstrates that marriage and reproduction are not the only, or indeed the dominant or preferred, modes of being, and, in doing so, undoes an unhelpfully narrow model of identity as determined by a fixed point of sexual orientation” (9). Pursuing lines of enquiry opened up by the work of gender and queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Sharon Marcus, Queer Dickens is interested in forms of intimacy, affinity and family formation beyond the stereotype of the biological bourgeois family supposedly at the heart of Victorian culture. Furneaux makes a convincing case that in the period of Dickenss career, “there was a greater flexibility in the thinking of the erotic, less focused on object choice, and better able to articulate desires” beyond what are narrowly defined within the sexual (11). She also shows how Dickens contributed to this flexibility, citing numerous examples of same-sex desire, surrogate parents, nurturing masculinity and other alternative domestic configurations in his work. Queer Dickens begins by exploring “the exuberant diversity of Dickenss fictional families,” which incorporate unmarried foster fathers, same-sex couples, single and multiple parenting, as well as maritally-averse bachelors and spinsters (24). In this crucial first chapter, Furneauxs aim is to refute the orthodoxy that the reproductive heterosexual couple occupies the central place in Dickensian family formations. Through an examination of foster fathering and the plot of adoption in novels such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Dombey and Son, Furneaux argues that not only did Dickens consistently emphasize the constructed nature of family, de-privileging genealogy as a guarantee of nurture or intimacy, but that–from Sketches by Boz to the Christmas writings of the 1860s–his writing celebrated a broad range of elective affinities and created “space for other patterns of care and new understandings of family” (69). In the second chapter on “Serial Bachelorhood,” Furneaux brings together an examination of bachelor figures in Dickens with the history of serial publication, arguing that serials offer “a particularly attenuated experience of closure” and may thus effectively disrupt the “marital denouement” associated so strongly with the Victorian novel (83). This chapter demonstrates one of the strengths of this study, in that by giving as much attention to early works such as The Pickwick Papers and Master Humphreys Clock as to the later novels, Queer Dickens is able to track patterns, themes, devices and desires across texts, and persuasively support the revisionist claims contained in this book. Here, Furneaux draws a connection between the prevalence of bachelors in these early stories (some of whom return and circulate among texts) and the “rejection of marriage as a device for closure” (106), reading Dickenss serial bachelors as a means by which a space for “counter-marital, counter-reproductive” narratives could be sustained (84).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Establishing the Family-Friendly Campus: Models for Effective Practice, Jaime Lester and Margaret Sallee, Eds. (Stylus Publishing, 2009, $79.95 hardback or $29.95 paperback) With this volume on family-friendly policy and practice, editor (and OCWW contributor) Jaime Lester and editor Margaret Sallee have created a much-needed kit for retooling work–life balance in academe. Identifying a need for inclusivity that has expanded with the growth of womens academic roles, Lester and Sallee have compiled an informative baedeker for multiple routes toward institutions that are more family-friendly for both women and men. Highlighting approaches that range from institutional supports for parents (stop-the-clock options, lactation rooms, flexible scheduling) to the grassroots activism that buttresses those options, the book illustrates how effective cultural change connects at all levels of the institution.
symbol more often found in teens text messages. He hasnt discussed recent spy allegations, but then the ultra-open ethic of Twitter doesnt exactly lend itself to discussion of the world of espionage. David Cameron is now online chums with Medvedev, as is Barack Obama, who even joked that the new Twitter connection between the two states might eliminate the need for the red phone, a line that connects the offices of the two leaders. The sort of government that Twitter users would like to see is a pluralistic open forum, where everyone can chip in with very short messages and then help to shape policy, preferably into tiny, easily digestible clauses. This certainly happens in Britain, where most parties more or less force top brass to converse with supporters on Twitter, but not in Japan, where politicians and voters are banned from tweeting about the upcoming election. This is surprising, given that in Japan, murmuring (their name for tweeting) is wildly popular, with roughly eight million tweets written a day. Twitter users have long suggested that a healthy level of tweets tends to signify a healthy democracy. Obama used Twitter and Facebook to get him into office. In Iran, protesters used it to communicate during anti-government protests. But governments are cottoning on to the propaganda potential of 140-character tweets.