Dissertation: “Intimate Reading: Literary Qualities, Femininity, and Sexual Subcultures in Britain and France”
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 draw upon 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 intimate experience. 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 four chapters trace a linguistic shift from implicit homoeroticism to avowed queer solidarity by examining a series of literary and “feminine” qualities in English texts from the Victorian and modernist periods: levity, Sapphism, eccentricity, and delight. In Villette, Charlotte Brontë uses untranslated French as a defamiliarizing cue for Anglophone readers to interpret feminine levity as a sign of homoerotic availability; Algernon Charles Swinburne’s turn to Sappho’s poetry to evoke transness influenced later Victorian writers like Michael Field and Vernon Lee; Virginia Woolf reveals the queer practices of white British subjects through markedly eccentric silences; and the editorial excision of “delight” from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood explains forms of double signification around feminine cruising. My fifth chapter examines the quality of literariness by turning to Marcel Proust—a French author caught up in the same cross-cultural currents and who took up similar questions around the language of sexuality. My approach to British and French literary histories of sexuality provides an explanation for how certain forms of sexual experiences—which were, in other spheres, pathologized and criminalized—became, through the language of the literary sphere, grounds for queer communities across genders.
Peer-Reviewed Research
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 2020–2021, I served as the editorial assistant at Representations, where I edited the virtual issue “Unfixing Gender Studies.” I continue to work as the journal’s proofreader.