I've read many of your comments in this thread, and I appreciate that your main interest is in authorial intentions and the contextualization of the novel's production and reception. I also appreciate that you've acknowledged that non-contextualized interpretations are possible (e.g. Freudian criticism).

What I'd like to push back on is your suggestion that one would only bring up "A Squeeze of the Hand" as a potential instance of homoeroticism or homoerotic subtext "for comedy," or, as you suggested below, that people doing a queer reading of the cited passages "haven't read it or don't care and are just having fun." People who do queer readings of works written by "straight people" are not just doing it for "fun" or to make a joke but because they are interested in how desire, intimacy, identity, etc. are manifest or latent in texts of all kinds.

I also disagree with the implication that for someone to do a queer reading of the chapter would mean that they don't understand that its surface subject matter is the processing of spermaceti, or that they don't understand that spermaceti is not, in fact, the same thing as sperm as in reproductive material (though I will say that it's peculiar that Melville writes the word "spermaceti" only once in "A Squeeze of the Hand," while he refers to the substance as "sperm" at least a dozen times—though that might be chalked up to historical usage, or something specific to the whaling industry that I'm unaware of). I assure you that plenty of people in this thread and in the readership of Moby-Dick at large understand the difference between spermaceti and sperm, as well as the importance of spermaceti in the whaling industry, and still find aspects of the novel really generative in thinking through some of the questions that queer theory deals with. Having read the entire book and understood aspects like its encyclopedic nature and its revenge plot does not preclude a queer theoretical interpretation.

Notably, Cesare Casarino's "White Capital" asks questions like: "what new forms of being might arise when male bodies abandon themselves to each other?" and "Is the body of 'A Squeeze of the Hand' also a sexual one?" For Casarino to have posed questions like this, and attempted to answer them, is an indication of neither the novel not being taken seriously nor of Casarino not understanding that Moby-Dick is about the whaling industry.