Immigration and Libidinal Violence in Gore Vidal’s Duluth

Though Gore Vidal seldom spoke of immigration in his nonfiction essays, his novel Duluth (1983) is centrally concerned with the question. Duluth presents a fantasy version of the American city, but one whose concerns are strikingly contemporary: sexual repression, racism, police brutality. In Duluth , Vidal suggests that these three elements are in fact linked. He suggests that race-based brutality against undocumented workers is, at the ground level, libidinal in nature. These brutalities are then used by government powers to stoke racial tensions and maintain power; however, even that governmental action is ultimately based in the libidinal drives of individual actors. This article argues that Vidal’s linkage of these two forces, the libidinal and the conspiratorial, makes an important intervention in discussions of race and immigration both in the 1980s and today.