Kristin Mahoney on Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family
November 5, 2025
In the winter of 2023, Johns Hopkins University Press published the first issue of a new journal. The three editors––Kate Hext, Alex Murray, and Michigan State University English professor Kristin Mahoney––introduced Cusp as a journal that would bridge the study of the literature and art of the late nineteen century with that of the early twentieth, the Victorian with the modern. What, they asked, do we fail to see when we separate one from the other? The fin de siècle was a turning point. Writers and artists felt that their world was “trembling on a threshold,” and Hext, Murray, and Mahoney, trading notes in Google Docs at the height of a global pandemic, could relate. Theirs would be, they wrote, a cuspy journal for “cuspy times.”
Mahoney had also, the preceding fall, published a cuspy book: Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family.
The book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, traces the contours of a overlooked queer movement that formed in the wake of and drew inspiration from late-Victorian Decadence––Oscar Wilde, most of all. Writers and artists living through the tumult of the early twentieth century experimented with forms of kinship that challenged conventional ideas about family and affiliation and that looked backward to the Victorian period as much as they looked ahead to modernism. Wilde, who died in 1900, found new life, Mahoney shows, as the patron saint of the Decadent modernists and the queer kinship they practiced. Their sexual and familial dissidence was also, she observes, a kind of temporal dissidence. They were living freely on the cusp.
Mahoney, the author of a previous book about the legacy of the Decadence movement, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge, 2015), admits that when she began the research for Queer Kinship after Wilde she imagined discovering “more ethical models of alternative affiliation.” And she did. But she also found Orientalism, racial fetishism, and enduring power imbalances that remind us that the Decadent modernists, for all the liberatory promise of their social and artistic experiments, still lived in our flawed world. Mahoney’s “fearless encounter with distressing and often inconvenient historical facts,” as Victorian Studies put it, allows her to create a “sense of intimacy” with the complex people about whom she writes and “offers us a model of responsible scholarship.”
In between issues of Cusp, Mahoney has begun another ambitious book project, tentatively titled “Love’s Cross Currents: Indo-Irish Affinities, 1880–1930,” which bridges centuries, nations, literatures, and postcolonial movements to reveal, once again, the connections we miss when we limit ourselves to received categories.
