Queering, gazing and containment in Giovanni’s Room

This article traces the relationship among three ubiquitous critical terms and the ostensibly disparate concepts they encompass: containment, intervention and the male gaze. Though these terms became prevalent late in the twentieth century, when they began to pervade ‘literary theory’, my article demonstrates how James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room, proleptically lays the ground work for the interplay among these concepts and how Baldwin remained preoccupied both avant la lettre and throughout his career, as a novelist, critic and polemicist, with many of the questions that late twentieth-century-intellectuals, literary theorists, feminist critics addressed, including Salman Rushdie, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cornel West and John Gaddis. In providing a context for the evolution of these preoccupations, this argument also highlights some of Baldwin’s formative influences and connections among such contemporaries of his as Norman Mailer, Wilhelm Reich and Lionel Trilling.