Sodomy Re/verse: Reading and re-writing the sodomitical archive on nineteenth century New South Wales

Abstract

In “Queer Spectrality” Carla Freccero writes that “queer historicism harbors within itself not only the pleasure, but also the pain, a traumatic pain whose ethical insistence is to ‘live to tell.’” Historical trauma, she argues, appears in the form of the unresolved spectres, as the troubled past made present by their unresolved demands to be made right, in the returners’ demands to be mourned and to impel the process to an as yet achieved historical justice. This thesis is haunted: it is haunted by the minor sodomitical figures of nineteenth century New South Wales who sound relentlessly the conditions of the injustice they experienced, and who speak in the name of the “queer.” In this way I do not so much, or only, look back to history, but I encounter a history that looks back towards my present. If the conditions of state persecution and disciplinary regulation under sodomy laws and general antisodomy rhetoric in this context made “queer” lives less liveable, it is the force of their sodomitical queerness – gender transgressors, racial “abominations,” lumpen class rogues, criminal recidivists, the imprisoned (convict) poor and petty offenders – that speaks back to the still limited, intolerable and in too many cases unliveable conditions of present heteronormative hegemonies. Writing on the state of the antipodean convict colonies in 1832, William Molesworth, the Radical reformer, commented that the convict transportation system “barbarizes the habits, and demoralizes the principles of the rising generation, and the result is… ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’” In 1879, during the sodomy cases against William Albion (alias Moore, alias Ernest Steele), William Tindall, police constable at Sydney, stated that he found on Albion when arresting him in Sydney’s Hyde Park “a handkerchief” and a “silk turban,” and that “his face was powdered.” Furthermore, when cross examined by the defendant Tindall answered that he had watched Albion in the act, stating, “your posterior was turned towards each man as they came to you in turns.” The leitmotifs in each of these examples index the central tropes that animate the dissertational prose and poetry of this thesis: disciplinary disorder and gender inversion (in the above examples: disciplinary barbarization and demoralization, and the gendered turning of the posterior to the anterior). The central argument of this thesis is that sodomy in nineteenth century New South Wales, as articulated by commentators and lawmakers and as lived by sodomitical offenders, indexes question of reversals, principally in relation to disciplinary penal order and gender order; and I dilate on this thesis mainly through close readings in dissertational prose as well as in documentary poem form. Scholars have most often interpreted the history of sodomitical discourse in relation to the nineteenth century New South Wales as evidencing previously censored histories of homosexual subcultures (Aldrich; Wotherspoon), or in the case of penal reform documents as evidence of the hyperbolic rhetorics of this bourgeoise reform movement (McKenzie; Reid). I use a double headed approach by drawing on the fields of queer historicism and queer theory, (Foucault; Freccero; King; Edelman), as well as on archival poetics, and objectivist poetics and criticism (Howe; Reznikoff; Niedecker; Quartermain; Du Plessis) to add to and revise this scholarship. I also made many new discoveries in state archives in relation to individuals I document in poems, thereby adding to existing scholarship on the history of sodomy. For example, I document in poem the extensive criminal record of one Samuel Jones, an incorrigible convict proximate to multiple attempted mutinies and transported, once again, in 1834 for sodomy to the notoriously severe penal island, Norfolk Island, then commonly known as “Sodom Island.”