Challenging the Outlaw Thesis: New Configurations of Sexuality, Politics, and Aesthetics

This chapter analyzes the “Great Replacement” thesis and its main proponent, the gay French novelist Renaud Camus. It contends that Camus’s history as both a celebrated, avant-garde gay author and as an odious right-wing ideologue forces us to hold these seemingly irreconcilable positions together in a way that challenges the deconstructive consensus that has, Blakeney argues, animated literary studies for decades. This reading of Camus also challenges “the outlaw thesis,” or the idea that homosexual subjects are somehow inherently outlaw to, and thus in some way outside of, the nation-state. Camus forces a re-examination of gay and even queer complicities with a range of racist and nationalist projects, and the chapter prompts us to consider the queerness of figures on the contemporary far right, if not the queerness of the far right itself. It emphasizes the coherent social self for whom homosexuality and racism, avant-garde aesthetics and reactionary politics, are not at all strange bedfellows.