Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (review)

Queering the Moderns is an unusual book. Pitched to an academic audience, it is nonetheless written in a casual, belletristic style that non-professional readers will find appealing. Like Alain De Botton's best-selling books on literary travel and on Proust, Queering the Moderns is for scholars on a holiday who wish to be entertained as much as instructed.

This slim volume is engaging and eclectic, treating six modernist figures from literature and popular culture whose works Herrmann groups under the heading of the memoir. She takes liberties with that already informal and baggy genre to include fictional autobiographies and self-authored case histories, ranging from Amelia Earhart's The Fun of It to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Her purpose in assembling this motley collection of personal narratives, in which fact and fiction mingle promiscuously, is to "queer" or distort the genre itself.

Herrmann's larger and much more consequential intention is to expand our understanding of "queerness," a goal that she achieves admirably. Undoubtedly the most interesting aspect of the book is her linkage of the now old-fashioned yet, in the early 20^th century, still current usage of the term "queer" as "strange, odd, peculiar, [and] eccentric" (OED) with its postmodern sense as an anti-normative performance of gender and sexuality, a definition advanced by queer theorists such as Eve Sedgwick. Without getting bogged down in the conceptual intricacies of queer theory, Herrmann grafts the pre-modern notion of "queer" onto its postmodern meaning without losing sight of its unmistakable, modern implication of homosexuality. In so doing, she avoids the problem of anachronism that typically bedevils gay and lesbian scholarship on early 20^th-century texts and, more importantly, demonstrates the usefulness of queer theory for hands-on literary criticism. For her, queerness does not signify sexual inversion or a same-sex object choice, but instead the diverse avenues of desire that make strange one's identity—hence, her interest in memoirs that represent odd identifications. Quoting Michael Warner, she writes, "By focusing on the memoir, I seek to bypass a developmental model that posits identities as fixed and/or discovered by considering the process of queering [. . .] as 'resistance to regimes of the normal.'"

Herrmann's choice of memoirs is refreshingly idiosyncratic. The book is organized into three sets of paired chapters, each set focused upon a sub-genre of memoir: the first is devoted to female flyers (Earhart and Beryl Markham); the second, to female auto/biographers (Virginia Woolf and Stein); and the third, to male auto-ethnographers (James Weldon Johnson and "Earl Lind"). In an equally quirky fashion, the chapters are internally structured as a series of related topics, each introduced by a quotation followed by commentary. This loose structure allows the author to pick up and drop subjects at will and to interweave diverse narratives, yet it stymies the development of a logical argument. Coherence is not what this book is about, though; its design is imaginative and its aim, heuristic.

Aviatrixes are of interest to Herrmann on account of their androgynous style. Contemporary observers remarked on Earhart's boyish figure and short hair, not to mention her resemblance to Charles Lindberg, a similarity that she deliberately cultivated for publicity purposes. Earhart's memoirs, 20 Hours 40 Min. and The Fun of It, were published immediately following her 1928 transatlantic flight (the first woman to do so) and her pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic, from west to east, in 1932. Herrmann compares Earhart's memoirs to Lindberg's We, but her primary concern is Earhart's social image, not her writings. Earhart was a female dandy whose public allure as well as her books her were aggressively and successfully marketed by her husband, George Putnam. According to Herrmann, her "non-normative relationship to both masculine gender identity and lesbian sexual identity" is comparable to the figure cut by Beryl Markham, another boyish aviatrix whose solo flight across the Atlantic in 1936, from east to west...