Colm Tóibín

Attending closely to Colm Tóibín's trio of gay-themed novels ¬– The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004) – we encounter a paradox: when their political imaginary is most closely aligned with a progressive sexual politics is also when these novels are most fully in conformity with the hegemonic neoliberal norms. But when the concerns and obsessions of the fiction seems furthest removed from progressive sexual politics is when its political imagination is potentially most radical. When Tóibín writes about the male body in pleasure and pain his fiction aesthetically and tonally generates affects which unsettle the hegemonic 'common sense' of neoliberalism – even while his characters and stories are committed to endorsing a resigned and 'realistic' submission to neoliberal political rationality.