Where Liberals Fear to Tread: E. M. Forster's Queer Internationalism and the Ethics of Care LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD And this was the machine on which she and Mrs. Herriton and Philip and Harriet had for the last month been exercising their various ideas—had determined that in time it should move this way or that way, should accomplish this and not that.... Yet now that she saw this baby, lying asleep on a dirty rug, she had a great disposi- tion not to dictate one of them, and to exert no more influence than there may be in a kiss or the vaguest of the heartfelt prayers. E, M, Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. E. M, Forster, "What I Believe" Since the publication of his posthumous writings, it has become commonplace to think of E, M, Forster as a writer who depicted national difference, the pull of foreign parts, as a metaphor for queer sexual desire. Thus, according to Margaret Goscilo, Forster codes "foreignness ... to include the tabooed 'Otherness' of ho- mosexuality, displacing onto nationality" themes that he tackled more directly in such posthumous worlcs as Maurice (193), Yet, though the commingling of queer and internationalist accents in Forster's oeuvre may sieem plain, the observation leaves one to ponder the place of yet another notable strain—the iconoclastic liberalism first described in Lionel Trilling's seminal study, E..M. Forster (1943), Indeed, since Trilling's inaugural linkage between Forster and "The Liberal Imagination," perhaps no novelist has been more consistently regarded as liber- alism's literary standard bearer: the "archetypal" liberal-humanist of Benita Parry's description ("Politics" 136), and, for a range of recent critics, a precursor to contemporary liberal lights such as Richard Rorty and Jurgen Habermas,^ This essay is indebted to the generosity and wisdom of several colleagues: Eleanor Courtemanche, Jed Esty, Hina Nazar, Michael Rothberg, Julia Saville, and Siobhan Somerville. I am grateful to audiences at the Modernist Studies Association (including Tim Dean's re- sponse), the Modern Language Association (including Amanda Anderson's response), and the LIniversity of California, Irvine, I thank Nancy Armstrong and fellow board members at Novel for their crucial advice and Robert Caserio for a most careful reading. ' For a useful survey of Forster's reputation as a liberal-humanist, see Davies's "Introduction." Forster's alleged liberalism has been recast along Rortyan lines by Paul Armstrong, Born, and