Tenuous, liminal, decentered, defined by dissonance and by opposition to hegemonic norms that shift over time: these are terms that might describe the central projects of Penny Farfan’s Performing Queer Modernism. Farfan explores queerness through the lens of modernism and modernism in terms of queerness, even as she notes that the instability of each subject can complicate any attempt at criticism. Farfan proposes that queerness is understood as a non-normative way of relating to social and behavioral practices of gender and sexuality, while modernism is understood—among other framings—as an aesthetic or literary attempt to render internalized disjuncture or discomfort. In her collection of five short essays, the prose is layered and yet still approachable, distilled without being oversimplified. Farfan considers queerness as a modern(ist) sexuality and as a performative practice and space for queer spectatorship; she analyzes individual incidents of staging queerness; and she finds a slippery, queer poetics through adopting a reflexive attitude to her own writing. The emergence of queerness as a modern phenomenon is frequently understood through the historical framework of a gradual liberalization of sexual politics in the early twentieth century—as driven by popular attention to sexuality. The publication of the Kinsey studies and the emerging belief that homosexuality was biological, not pathological; the public availability of queer magazines and literature; and the popularity of “slumming” tours and “pansy” fashion in large American cities made questions of sexuality newly visible. As the historian Sharon Ullman points out, the creation of modern sexualities was a publicly constructed and highly contentious process, negotiated in live and cinematic visual media, divorce proceedings, and obscenity trials, with results that “often reflected the embedded limitations of middle-class morality—particularly concerns about social order suffused with class and racial prejudices.” Farfan offers us ways to understand the visibility of queerness, albeit in openly policed

中文翻译：

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看鬼，读影

脆弱的、阈限的、去中心化的，由不和谐和对随着时间推移而转变的霸权规范的反对来定义的：这些术语可能描述了彭妮·法凡的表演酷儿现代主义的核心项目。Farfan 通过现代主义和现代主义的视角探索酷儿性，尽管她指出每个主题的不稳定性都会使任何批评尝试复杂化。Farfan 提出，酷儿被理解为一种与性别和性行为的社会和行为实践相关的非规范方式，而现代主义被理解为——在其他框架中——是一种审美或文学尝试，以呈现内化的脱节或不适。在她的五篇短文集中，散文是分层的，但仍然平易近人，提炼而不过于简单。Farfan 认为酷儿是一种现代（主义）性行为，是酷儿观众的表演实践和空间；她分析了上演酷儿的个别事件；她通过对自己的写作采取一种反思的态度，找到了一种滑溜溜、古怪的诗学。酷儿作为一种现代现象的出现，通常可以通过 20 世纪早期性政治逐渐自由化的历史框架来理解——这是由大众对性的关注所驱动的。金赛研究的发表以及同性恋是生理性而非病理性的新观念；酷儿杂志和文学作品的公开性；“贫民窟”旅游和“三色堇”时尚在美国大城市的流行使性问题的问题重新浮出水面。正如历史学家莎伦·厄尔曼 (Sharon Ullman) 指出的那样，现代性行为的创造是一个公开构建且极具争议的过程，在现场和电影视觉媒体、离婚诉讼和淫秽审判中进行协商，其结果“通常反映了中产阶级道德的内在局限性——尤其是对社会秩序的担忧弥漫带有阶级和种族偏见。” Farfan 为我们提供了了解酷儿可见性的方法，尽管在公开监管下