Queering Virility: Visual Geographies, the Airplane, and Empire/Janet Lee

This paper heeds Laura Doan’s call for a queer critical history that moves beyond discovering queer subjects towards ‘queerness as method’ by stepping outside the logic of identity history and recognising the ways knowledge informed by the modern organisation of gender and sexuality precedes and overdetermines what can be understood about the past (Disturbing practices, xii). In particular, I explore the dominance (and oppositional logic) of the geographies of heteronormativity through interrogation of gendered affective spaces inhabited by British airmen of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) during the First World War. I investigate these emotional landscapes with their prescriptions for homosociability and proscriptions against homosexual practices through analysis of diaries and letters written during combat by airmen serving with the RFC and housed in collections in the RAF and Imperial War Museums. Recognising relationships between imperialism, modernity, and the promise of mastery through expanded aerial vision, I make the case that airmen were produced as virile subjects enabled and constrained by gendered and sexualised performances of militarised mobility. This paper seeks to contribute to knowledge about the fictive and insecure nature of the homosexual/heterosexual binary and the role of gender performances in the establishment of these categories. Questioning what these histories might teach us when we read them outside of the binaries that construct the knowledge about them, this paper makes the case for thinking queer as part of a broader cultural historical practice.