Abstract
This article explores the concept of political and legal regimes of touching by analyzing Walt Whitman’s poems that envision a new political order founded on comradeship – a distinct kind of friendship characterized by physical intimacy. Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, I argue, demonstrate that touching is a political act. This study resists treating Whitman anachronistically as a “homosexual” and argues that comradeship as he understands it represents a model of queerness that can challenge the recent anti-social turn in queer theory.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.