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Starting from Freud's famous question, “What does a woman want?” Michael Warner, a scholar in the burgeoning field of queer theory, tries to define that endlessly mutating discipline. Determining queer theory's role as “elaborating, in ways that cannot be predicted in advance, this question: What do queers want?,”1 Warner establishes a link with the effort of psychoanalytic theory to map and define the rationale of human desire. He implies that female sexuality is among the outlaw sexualities embraced by queer theory. Since depth psychology is particularly useful at elucidating that strong sense of outlaw sexuality, this paper will employ psychoanalytic insight and methodology in order to elaborate on the viability of “queer” as a term for female sexuality, using the colonial sexualities of Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines as an example. In that novel, as will be elaborated, homosocial, gay, and female sexualities become geographically obscured, revealing the complexities of human fantasy as well as certain confusions of gender that Freud recognized as the human condition.
The unsstated but obvious sexual norm of this novel is homoeroticism, and a “queer” form thereof: The novel's three main characters, British men caught up in the colonizing of Africa, as was Henry Rider Haggard, never express sexual desire for each other, and never appear to be aware of it; on the contrary, heterosexual desire frequently appears to assert itself in their thoughts, fantasies, and actions. What queers this desire is extreme fear and loathing of female sexuality, coupled with intense homoerotic feeling. A Freudian precept—that all forms of sexual desire can be experienced unconsciously—helps in understanding