Male Sexuality under Surveillance
“Male Sexuality under Surveillance represents a significant contribution to American literary studies, gender studies, and queer theory.” —Calvin Thomas, author of Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line
“Male Sexuality under Surveillance is an intelligent, lively, and well-argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office, and it makes a substantial contribution to scholarship in the field.” —Dennis W. Allen, West Virginia University
“Thompson offers a sophisticated look at the sexuality of US businessmen on the job. The twist in this study is his application of queer theory—particularly Sedgwick’s work—to the subject. The result is an astonishing series of readings of novels one would not expect to see through this lens.”—Choice
Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combination of these themes produces a study that is fresh, insightful, and provocative.