Queer Time on the Frontier: Hawkeye’s Asexual Masculinity and the Reimagining of American National Identity in The Last of the Mohicans

Abstract

This article reinterprets James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans through the theoretical frameworks of asexuality studies, queer temporality, and reproductive futurism, arguing that Hawkeye’s frontier masculinity is defined as much by his celibacy as by his racialized heroism. Rather than reading his absent sexuality as repression or latent desire, this article treats it as a deliberate narrative construction that both reinforces and destabilizes nineteenth-century nationalist ideology. Hawkeye’s refusal of heterosexual romance and reproduction positions him outside the chrononormative life path, aligning his identity with homosocial loyalty, cross-racial alliance, and perpetual mobility. His celibacy, while historically coded as the preservation of white masculine purity, simultaneously undermines the reproductive logic of settler colonialism, reframing the frontier as a queer space where belonging is measured by elective affinities rather than lineage. Expanding on classic interpretations of Cooper’s novel that emphasize homosocial male bonding, this article draws on recent developments in asexuality studies to reconsider how absence, restraint, and non-sexual intimacy function as structuring principles of Hawkeye’s heroism. By situating Hawkeye within theories of queer temporality, the article highlights how his life unfolds in a perpetual present, suspended outside the reproductive future demanded by the emergent American nation. His temporal and spatial deviance, connected to the heterotopic wilderness, allows us to see the novel as staging an alternative mode of intimacy and kinship. Ultimately, Hawkeye emerges as both a national folk hero and a queer figure whose celibacy discloses fissures in the cultural imagination of early American nationalism, reminding us that even canonical myths contain latent alternatives to heteronormative futurity.