Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

The history of sodomy carries a long association with magic, the occult, and alternative forms of knowledge. This connection persists in relation to homosexuality, most obviously in the figure of the fairie (with its associations of enchantment) and with the poetic experience of “magic” or “mystical” forms of alternative knowledge in queer countercultures. This chapter explores the way that two gay San Francisco Bay Area groups — the Beats and the Berkeley Renaissance — took magic, spiritualism, and other forms of alternative knowledge as central to their poetics and authorial practice. Mystical forms of sexuality offer modes of contact at a time when physical intimacy was outlawed and heavily policed in midcentury America. Further, this chapter argues, contemporary poets writing in the wake of these midcentury movements offer new ways to understand how these mystical forms of sexuality constitute institutional critique.

It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

This essay on the American literary history of trans before the inception of modern transness examines such practices and their critiques prior to modern technologies and taxonomies of trans subjecthood. By reading slave narratives, poetry, short fiction, and other genres from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the chapter unravels the preoccupation with individual figures as trans or otherwise gender diverse in order to highlight how the uneven processes of colonial biopolitics attempt to discipline the messiness of lived collective expressions and embodied experiences. By foregrounding works on transing and gendering by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian writers alongside writings better known about white gender nonconformity, this chapter unsettles the racial innocence of transness and triumphalist claims about gender variance as universal. Through attending to structures that produce embodied legibility and practices of meaning-making, the aim is to orient readers to historically informed and theoretically nuanced ways of reading American literature before the twentieth century against tendencies to approach transness through the overrepresentation of whiteness.

The chapter examines imaginative writing about AIDS in light of improved medical treatments for HIV, suggesting that every example of AIDS literature functions as a time capsule documenting its historical moment. Yet, the literature of AIDS is haunted by unfinished pasts that scramble its temporalities and unfix its historical locations. This chapter introduces and conceptualizes an emerging “literature of PrEP” (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in work by Jericho Brown, Matthew Lopez, Jacques Rancourt, and Sam Sax, showing how developments in biomedicine have inspired diverse literary reflections on the epidemic’s four-decade history. As exemplified by Lopez’s epic play The Inheritance, PrEP literature engages crucial questions concerning what one queer generation inherits from, or owes to, another. The chapter argues that, in contrast to scientific or sociological accounts of HIV/AIDS, literary representation is uniquely effective at capturing the haunted quality of AIDS writing because it can reveal how ostensibly outmoded forms of the past persist in the present.

This chapter explores interactions among sexual scientific models of homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their uses in American fiction during the same era. The medical framework had a less pervasive influence than the historical research sometimes suggests. Queer-inflected writing in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1930s features a varied cast of characters, ranging from winsome youths who fall under the spell of an older, trollish brute; to tortured souls striving to understand themselves and to be understood by others; to enigmatic figures who charm and fascinate everyone around them without offering much in return; to fey, frantic queens who’ll do anything for a laugh. Many of these characters might be taken as expressions of a queer, and even specifically homosexual, identity—but they often bear few if any signs of medicalization unless we contend that all identity-based conceptions of sexuality are necessarily rooted in a medical framework. If we ask what the concept of medicalization contributes, such that it helps to make sense of these works, one answer is that the medical case history, in particular, exhibits generic features that queer fiction borrowed, imitated, satirized, questioned, challenged, and sometimes ignored.

This chapter traces a strand of contemporary queer American drama that replays key figures and texts of the modernist era. With its recurrent return to canonical works and figures of literary and theatrical modernism, this late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century drama literalizes Marvin Carlson’s notion that theatre is a fundamentally haunted art, in this case by the queer figures and texts of its cultural past, and resonates with Carla Freccero’s view of spectrality as a mode of queer historiography. Adaptations, too, are ghostly, haunted, as Linda Hutcheon notes, by their source texts and dependent on repetition and change. In the contemporary queer replays, the modernist era serves as a touchstone against which to consider continuity and change in the historical and cultural representation of gender and sexuality. Queer modernism thus haunts contemporary queer drama, often literalizing this haunting by featuring ghosts. This chapter considers linked works spanning these two temporalities to suggest key moments in and features of the history of queer American drama, and theatre’s role in representing and reimagining how queer lives have been, are, and might be lived.

In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

This essay revisits Emerson’s iconic transparent eyeball passage to rethink it as a moment of crossing over into queer embodiment and sensory expansion. If “trans” is “to move across” and “scandre” to climb, the point is not to rise above the physical world, but to move into it in such a way as to be in touch with its divine energies. To do so was to climb out of the enclosure and isolation of subjectivity and inhabit something much more capacious. Expanding the scope of Transcendentalism proper, the essay tracks this queer “I” into a number of other texts in which a similar experience or phenomenon of ecstasy opens onto novel social, sexual, and gender understandings. Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sweat, women trance writers, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Jacobs animate the “trans-” in Transcendentalism in their critical crossings and dynamic reassemblages of body and soul, self and other, and sex, gender, and race.

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

This chapter traces a select anthological archive to examine how Chicana/Latina lesbian feminist editors and writers of the late twentieth century—through collective efforts to write their lesbian feminisms into existence—made significant contributions to U.S. lesbian feminist literature and thought. Chicana/Latina lesbian feminist writers have been important contributors to the formation of multiple U.S. literary movements, including U.S. lesbian feminist literature, especially through the editing of anthologies. This chapter considers how an archive of Chicana/Latina lesbian feminist willfulness has been instrumental in constituting and anthologizing lesbian and women of color feminisms.

This essay considers the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) on the production of a particular kind of queer subject, a subject coded by the court as a part of heteronormative queer couple. After tracking the court’s representation, I turn to fiction published since this decision, demonstrating that fiction offers the nuanced and complex sense of queer subjectivity that is erased in the Lawrence representation. Contemporary queer fiction, I demonstrate, disrupts the court’s representation by offering representations of kin formations that are far more complex than a homonormative assimilative couple. These depictions explore the worlds inhabited by characters who more closely resemble Lawrence and Garner—kept out of the public view—than the metropolitan, privileged queer subjects of the Lawrence ruling. The representations of contemporary fiction disrupt the homogenizing national implications of the Supreme Court as well, by locating queer subjectivity in both diasporic and transnational subjects. Finally, the growth of queer speculative fiction challenges the concept of the normative more broadly, in both form and content.

This chapter seeks to understand ‘legal science’ from the internal point of view of each tradition and society, in order to avoid a conception too heavily influenced by contemporary views. To do so, reference is made both to the set of activities carried out by ‘legal experts’ in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counseling and education), and to the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societies. This approach requires first to establish the extent to which, in each society under consideration, knowledge of law was considered as autonomous knowledge. A sociological perspective is then adopted, identifying who in each society were considered legal experts, i.e. persons deemed to possess the legal knowledge to such a degree that it characterized their social position and/or function. The chapter then proceeds in a progressively more content-oriented manner towards a comparative description of legal science, focusing on how legal training took place in each society under consideration and in what literary forms the legal experts expressed themselves, to finally arrive at the core question, namely the description of the respective forms of legal reasoning.