Not Feeling Right: Queer Encounters with American Women's Writing

Queer theory arrived on the critical scene in part as an outgrowth of feminist critique, but how has its anti-identitarian approach to gender and sexuality advanced the study of US women's writing? First, the deconstructive project of queer criticism unseats binaristic understandings of gender, productively destabilizing the very category of female authorship on which this field has largely depended. Moreover, queer theory reveals gender and sex norms to be culturally produced and historically contingent, an especially vital perspective from which to read nineteenth-century women's writing, a body of work that offers a veritable index and pedagogy of normativity. After all, isn't Harriet Beecher Stowe's breathless plea that readers must "feel right" at the end of Uncle Tom's Cabin a reminder that there are wrong ways to feel, that failing to feel the sympathetic identification ideally produced by the novel's maternalist antislavery politics is deviant? Together, queer and feminist perspectives allow us to understand this famous injunction—and the tradition of women's writing itself—not only as the apotheosis of sentimentality and its cult of domesticity but also as an articulation of how sex norms script political affect, embodiment, and womanhood.

What follows is not a comprehensive account of queer contributions to the study of women's writing, which would be far too prodigious a task (perhaps even an impossible one) for the space of this essay. This brief review of the rich work at this juncture will not touch on queer studies of childhood or the powerful incitements of queer disability studies, nor will it survey the prodigious queer critical archive generated by the work of Emily Dickinson alone. It offers instead a survey of some contours of the field over the last decade or so, focusing loosely on region, affect, kinship, and consumption as organizational categories, even though they are necessarily artificial and porous.

This essay asks how queer scholarship has challenged entrenched ways of reading women's writing, estranging us from texts we thought we knew. But it also considers how attention to the particular concerns of feminist literary criticism has in turn fed and expanded queer critique. Looking back to Deborah McDowell's 1986 introduction to Nella Larsen's Passing, it is clear that the study of women's writing has long understood both race and sexuality as slippery social constructions that cannot be treated in isolation. Thus, while it may be tempting for some to see queer theory as a dashing arriviste that might revive or even replace the long-standing critical tradition and political engagement that scholarship on women's writing represents, the works surveyed here reveal a far more complex and mutually constitutive interplay between these methods.

Indeed, the intersection of queer theory with women's writing has opened up rich possibilities for reading the outmoded, obsolescent, and old as sites where normativity is challenged rather than policed. One particularly verdant nexus for queer approaches to women's writing has been regionalism, a genre preoccupied with aging and decline. While scholars such as Susan Koppelman and Lillian Faderman have long identified Sarah Orne Jewett as a lesbian, queer theory is less interested in reading erotic desire as indicative of a static identity than in the instability of desire and identity, the openness, fluidity, and unpredictability of gender and sexuality.¹ In her short fiction, sketches, and novels, Jewett envisions a scene of sociality redolent with this sense of queer possibility.

Heather Love's work on "spinster aesthetics" marked an important turn in Jewett scholarship in its move away from the celebrations of self-sufficiency and proud iconoclasm that dominated 1990s criticism in favor of attention to the negative affects at the core of queer experience. In the critical vein of queer antisociality, Love's work returns to the "loneliness, abjection, and social exclusion that have largely defined the modern experience of same-sex desires and relations" (309). In other words, Love sees in Jewett's letters and sketches—and later in Willa Cather's work—an articulation of a melancholic affect (what she calls "the ache of standing outside of...