Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s

It is well known that many of the best-known queer writers of the 1930s were involved with leftist politics. Why, then, has there been no extended examination of this striking juncture of dissident sex and socialism? Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love addresses this question, among others, to transform current narratives of midcentury literary, cultural, and intellectual history from a queer Marxist perspective. It provides a unique exploration of the transnational formation of queer leftist writing in 1930s Britain informed by detailed research on Weimar Berlin, Civil War Spain and the Soviet UnioQueer Communism reconstructs queer writers' engagements with a series of wide-ranging Marxist aesthetic debates, social forms and political strategies. Through case studies of Christopher Isherwood and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Salton-Cox argues that queer writing of the 1930s was deeply embedded in a network of transnational leftist formations stretching across Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, Spain and China. Probing the left's mounting heteronormativity in the late 30s and 40s in chapters on Katharine Burdekin and George Orwell, Queer Communism also traces the genesis of post-war sexual politics in Popular Front antifascism. Salton-Cox's study transforms current narratives of mid-century literary, cultural and intellectual history from a queer Marxist perspective.n.