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 demystifies orchestration by offering insights into how a good understanding of balance, timbre, and instrumental technique is used to imagine and create interesting sonorities. The chapter begins with an overview of the development of the modern orchestra, before explaining how composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have explored the limits of idiomatic instrumental writing to create dramatic and compelling orchestral textures. It concludes with an explanation of how to approach orchestrating from a ‘short’ piano score.

In April 1960, the conductor Kathleen Merritt (1901–85) led an all-woman programme at London’s Wigmore Hall. Despite the fact that concerts entirely of music by women composers had been performed in Britain since at least the 1920s, by 1960 it was still unusual to find a woman’s name on a UK concert programme. Merritt’s concert, therefore, attracted press coverage focusing on her gender, and that of the composers whose music she was performing. In a promotional interview, the Sunday Times gave an account of the conductor that today reads very much like a description of a feminist, declaring: ‘[She] fights not only for women, but for new music by living composers.’1 Merritt herself, however, was adamant that she was ‘not a feminist’.2 The Sunday Times was quick to reassure readers that ‘Merritt has none of the alarming if admirable trappings of women who fight for women’s causes.’3

This chapter uses music analysis to understand two different strategies for unfolding musical material from initial ideas, one by Debussy and the other by Schoenberg. This approach considers how pieces might be formed from a small fragment of musical ‘DNA’ for a composer to expand, before looking further to understand this process of ‘unfolding’ are shaped by different aesthetic, cultural and historical conditions.

From 31 October to 12 December 2015, Rumpsti Pumsti, a record store in Berlin devoted to experimental music and sound art, hosted an exhibition of early works by the German artist Christina Kubisch (b. 1948), one of the world’s foremost sound artists. The Vibrations exhibition focused on a series of works titled Dirty Electronics that Kubisch created between 1975 and 1980 in which she paired orchestral instruments with vibrators. On the floor were four wooden boxes each holding one flute and one vibrator, creating a jittery, buzzing flute quartet. Mounted on one wall was a photograph of a cello with a vibrator held to its strings. On another were technical diagrams. Kubisch, best known for her works with electronics, had produced intricately detailed diagrams of how to construct and use vibrators in various musical settings.

Here we provide space for three living composers to reflect on their careers, and on their works. Together they form an indicator of the ways in which women composers have gained increasing recognition in contemporary culture. Among other distinctions, Nicola LeFanu was featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 to mark her seventieth birthday, while both Roxanna Panufnik and Shirley J. Thompson were among those commissioned to produce new compositions for the coronation of King Charles III (6 May 2023).