NegaTive eroTicism: Lyric PerformaTiviTy aNd THe sexUaL sUbJecT iN oscar WiLde's "THe PorTraiT of mr. W. H." by dUsTiN friedmaN in discussions about the methods and aims of sexuality studies in literary criticism, perhaps no other writer has been more central, or more controversial, than oscar Wilde. richard Kaye notes that Wilde's writings have occasioned a "creative dialectical rupture" between critical enterprises he refers to as "gay studies" and "Queer Theory." according to Kaye, gay studies authors have understood Wilde to be an uncomplicatedly self-aware homosexual man, while queer theorists have stressed Wilde's circulation within the culture "as [a] historical figure and cultural commodity." 1 Thus, while popular writings by stephen gee, richard ellmann, and byrne fone have perpetuated a sentimental account of Wilde as the tragic victim of victorian sexual repression and an early martyr for gay rights, studies by queer theorists such as eve Kosofsky sedgwick, ed cohen, alan sinfield, and gary schmidgall have brought together psychoanalytic and foucauldian theory to examine Wilde's mythical status as a cultural product who decisively influenced the discursive invention of the homosexual subject during the late nineteenth century. 2 consequently, there exist today two opposing critical accounts of Wilde: the one, an emotionally powerful but historically naïve narrative constructed by gay studies scholars that can be considered humanist, and the other, a rigorously historicized, anti-essentialist queer account of Wilde's subversive eroticism that can be construed as anti-humanist. 3 yet while Kaye criticizes the universalizing and normative impulses underlying gay studies readings of Wilde, he also faults historicist queer critics for "treating literary texts as simply another discourse." He argues that anti-humanist queer theories minimize Wilde's specifically aesthetic and philosophical significance by construing the writer's subjectivity to be a mere "refraction or residue of history." 4 in this essay, i examine how Wilde himself negotiates the dialectical opposition between humanist and anti-humanist understandings of sexual subjectivity in his novella "The Portrait of mr. W. H." (1889, rev. 1921). Wilde's fiction, which tells a complex story about the creation