Book Project: Intimate Reading: Literary Experience and the Emergence of Queer Sexuality
My research revises the familiar narrative of homosexuality in the West from the mid-nineteenth century: instead of looking to institutional discourses (sexology, psychoanalysis, religion, the law) as the entry point for conceptualizing a turn from sexual practices (what one does) to sexual and gender identity (who one is), I take up linguistic anthropological concepts to analyze how the field of literary production in Britain and France made certain minor forms of sexual experience (how one feels) culturally legible. In its inventive capacities and in its mediation between the somatic and semiotic, the circulation of literature, I argue, produced a shared language for the intimate experience we now call “queer.” Drawing on a Victorian and modernist archive that reflects the field of literary production (novels and poetry, but also diaries, correspondence, drafts, editorial notes), I contend that the cultural legibility of queer sexual experience relied on the shifting indexical meaning of certain qualities (as a linguistic anthropologist might put it). Part of this shifting has to do with an apparent affiliation with femininity that, over time, became more elastic than “femininity” suggests: however “feminine,” the usage of these qualities often blurred today’s scholarly distinctions between lesbian and gay, female and male, or transmasculine and transfeminine.
My first three chapters elaborate how literary discourses have transformed raw sensuous experience into culturally meaningful qualities of queer sexual life: in Villette, Charlotte Brontë uses untranslated French as a defamiliarizing cue for Anglophone readers to interpret feminine levity as a sign of homoerotic availability; Virginia Woolf reveals the queer practices in British, and markedly white, forms of linguistic eccentricity; and the editorial excision of “delight” from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood illuminates the allure of cruising in the novel’s nocturnal demimonde.
The final two chapters situate these case studies within their broader literary-historical contexts by analyzing the work of textual interpretation within sexual subcultures. While it is accepted that the idea of Sappho came to index same-sex desire in the Victorian period, my work reveals that writers like Algernon Charles Swinburne, Michael Field, and Vernon Lee in fact used intertextual signaling around Sappho to celebrate trans possibilities. A few decades later, Marcel Proust echoed these literary practices and their investment in gender variance in À la recherche du temps perdu, where he stages textual interpretation as the foundation for subcultural intimacies across genders. Bridging sexuality and trans studies, Intimate Reading contends that the literary field not only made queer subjective experience culturally available but also cultivated historical sexual subcultures with relations to gender that are more elastic than previously appreciated.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“‘Crushed’: Monique Wittig, Djuna Barnes, and Mistranslating Lesbian Writing,” in “Monique Wittig: Sex, Literature and Politics,” ed. William M. Burton, Ilana Eloit, and Benoît Loiseau, special issue, L’Esprit Créateur 65, no. 2 (Summer 2025)
“Trans Sapphism,” Victorian Studies 66, no. 1 (Autumn 2023)
Editorial Work
With Margaret Speer, I guest-edited the summer 2023 issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, “Writing Aslant: Voicing across Genders in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Find our introduction here.
From 2020–25, I worked with Representations as editorial assistant (2020–21, 2025) and proofreader (2022–24). I also edited the virtual issue “Unfixing Gender Studies.”