Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Wayne Koestenbaum
Committee Members
Mario DiGangi
Eric Lott
Christopher Looby
Sarah Chinn
Subject Categories
American Literature | American Studies | Arts and Humanities | Digital Humanities | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | History | Pacific Islands Languages and Societies | Queer Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Keywords
Herman Melville, Philip C. Van Buskirk, Sailor Sexuality, Working Class, Sea Narratives, Moby-Dick
Abstract
This dissertation examines the seafaring journals of Herman Melville’s contemporary, Philip C. Van Buskirk, alongside Western archival accounts of South Pacific exploration and Indigenous scholars’ engagements with those archives, in pursuit of an encounter with the Real—that desired yet ungraspable, disruptive force that resists comprehension and symbolization. It investigates the forgotten and inadequately mapped historical contexts that populated Melville’s sexual imaginary, challenging presentist assumptions to recover and reimagine a disremembered then and there. By reading Melville’s tales of the sea in dialog with other texts from the time of their creation, the project seeks to reorient and queer our understanding of the most erotically charged nineteenth-century sailor narratives.
Adopting a reparative approach, the dissertation prioritizes local, detailed, and unsystematized readings of texts, focusing on fragments and passages without attempting to schematize entire works. The study argues that Van Buskirk’s journals introduce readers to a wet phenomenology—an embodied, sensory experience of seafaring life in which desire, labor, and intimacy take shape within an environment that resists the stability of land-based categories. Melville, in turn, communicates this through a wet epistemology: a mode of knowing shaped by immersion in the liquid world of the sea, where knowledge is unstable, shifting, and felt rather than fixed. Within these maritime spaces, sailors experienced sexual and social possibilities unavailable on shore—possibilities made legible only through the sea’s refusal of containment, its insistence on fluidity, transgression, and indeterminacy.
Melville’s sea narratives reflect the author’s efforts to understand and reclaim marginalized identities and desires, as he came to identify with behaviors and experiences that deviated from sexual norms—including those identified as queer or nonconforming—amid the transgressive dynamics of seafaring life. At the same time, these narratives expose how the wet ontology of the sea, with its perpetual movement and dissolution of boundaries, threatened the rigid structures of imperial power, order, and discipline. By foregrounding the sea as an ontological force rather than a mere setting, this dissertation reveals how seafaring environments not only shaped erotic and homosocial relations but also destabilized the very categories through which desire, identity, and knowledge were defined.
Recommended Citation
Knip, Matthew A., "Before Melville's Masts: Sex in the Age of Sail" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6367
Included in
American Literature Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, History Commons, Pacific Islands Languages and Societies Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
