Article ID: CBB672329835

Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices in Teleny (2022)

unapi

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

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Authors & Contributors
Robert E. Abrams
Debenham, Clare
Harrington, Christopher
Ashley Elizabeth Bashaw
Rothe, Johanna
Nichols, Marcia D.
Concepts
Sexuality
Science and literature
Homosexuality
Pornography
Science and gender
Medicine and gender
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Renaissance
20th century
Places
Great Britain
France
United States
Italy
Austria
Ireland
Institutions
Habsburg, House of
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