Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste by Carrie D. Shanafelt (review)

Carrie Shanafelt’s Uncommon Sense is part of a recent resurgence in Bentham studies, driven by the ongoing, decades-long work of the Bentham Project at University College London on a complete critical edition of Bentham’s work, including previously unpublished works. The volume Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality (edited by Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin, and Michael Quinn), published in 2014, is a startling read. It is difficult not to believe that the mid-late twentieth-century reception of Bentham via Foucault would have been very different had Foucault had access to these manuscripts. In contrast to the stern utilitarian picture of Bentham popularized by Dickens’s Gradgrind, or the disciplinary panopticist picture of Foucault, this volume reveals Bentham as an astonishing sexual radical, not just in terms of his proposals for legal reforms but in the promotion of the joys of sexual exuberance. (Louis Crompton published some of Bentham’s work on sexuality in 1978, in the Journal of Homosexuality, but it seems to have received little attention at the time.) Shanafelt’s book is the result of an encounter with Bentham’s work on sexuality and an attempt—perhaps the first—to locate it within his larger intellectual project of reform.