Lesbian Scholar/Gay Subject: Turn-of-the-Century Inversions

This autobiographical essay explores the peculiar pleasures and identifications that can drive one's scholarship. The author examines why she, a butch lesbian scholar, has ardently pursued a queer male subject, Clyde Fitch (1865-1909), an American playwright and sometime lover of Oscar Wilde, for the last seventeen years. Discovering how Fitch's "inverted" sexuality informed his repeated stagings of the national archetype of perfect femininity, the American Girl, has enabled the author to invert--and thereby survive--that icon's stultifying legacy. In the essay's key analytic inversion, she posits Aubrey Beardsley's Salome drawings, known to members of Wilde's circle, as a shadow text that worked in dialectical opposition to American Girl iconography to animate Fitch's historically influential career.