Naked Lust: Obscene Relationality and the Turn to Queer Experimental Literature

Abstract

This chapter argues that William S. Burroughs turns to experimental literature to displace queer social imagination from explicitly representational narrative forms to the affective relations of reading. I locate this turn against the Naked Lunch obscenity trial, demonstrating that the obscenity of queerness in the pre-Stonewall period rests on the representation of homosexuality as a political collectivity. In response, Burroughs creates an aesthetics of queer spectrality that immerses readers within the text’s eroticism, rewriting reading as a collective yet phantasmatic encounter with queer affect. The chapter traces the emergence of this aesthetic politics through Queer, Naked Lunch and the cut-up trilogy of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

“Lest anyone take this seriously, of course, obviously [Naked Lunch] is fantasy.”

—Massachusetts Supreme Court

“I’m not queer,” he thought. “I’m disembodied.”

—William S. Burroughs, Queer