Queer Footing: Pedestrian Politics and the Problem of Queer Difference in The Princess Casamassima

Abstract

This essay picks up the figure of the street-walker, not, as has been done, as an emblem for transformative modes of subjectivity, open to proliferating difference, but as the manifestation of stubborn sameness. Through this, it seeks to question the heteronormative ideologies underwriting a perceived privileging of difference in James studies and queer studies. James’s established importance to queer work makes him an important figure of sameness and this rhetorical force is used to engage and critique recent queer theory (principally Lee Edelman’s No Future ) by re-engaging the queerness attached by extant criticism to Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima .