Introduction: American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought

Seminal: how ideas are assumed to originate from male bodies.

—Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017), 15

This Legacy special issue addresses a key contradiction in the development of contemporary American queer theory: on the one hand, queer intellectual history has clear roots in feminism and women's writing; on the other hand, many of queer theory's most defining arguments draw inductively from narrow archives that occlude women's embodiment, history, desires, and experiences. The issue engages this contradiction by bringing queer thought into dialogue with American women's writing from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. How does our understanding of queer theory and its history change when examined through a longer and more diverse archive than it has typically been afforded? How does our understanding of women's writing and its history change when it is deliberately examined as a conceptual participant in the genealogy of queer thought?

To familiarize readers with the stakes of these questions, our introduction proceeds in two parts. The first traces the centrality of what we are calling "queer white men's theory" within the academic field that has come to be known as queer studies. The second part previews this special issue, with a particular eye toward the methods its contributors employ to examine how women's writing and feminism have informed alternatives to queer white men's theory. Our aim is not to say that women's writing offers a panacea to the conceptual impasses that many have diagnosed in a field overdetermined by white gay men's experiences. Nor is it to smooth over the complications that queer and trans thought have presented to the category of "women's writing."¹ There is much to be learned from looking to new archives as conceptual resources. The recuperative work of feminist literary studies—and of journals like Legacy—brings into our classrooms and our research not only new voices but also new concepts. Our contention is that concepts deriving from American women's writing have not yet been comprehensively read and situated in queer literary studies. Scholarship on women's writing—through its conscientiousness about gender and the state, heteropatriarchy, and the lives of women as sexual minorities—lends itself to a contemporary queer discourse that is still finding its way out of patriarchal assumptions in its historiography and archival practices.

Queer white men's theory

Decentering archives of men's writing does not relegate men. In a very real sense, men are an object of critique in this special issue. For one thing, feminist standpoint theory teaches us that those most marginalized by heteropatriarchy will comprise the keenest sources of knowledge production about its effects, including those pertaining to the practices and beliefs of those who perform normative white masculinity. For another, this issue has been edited by two white queer men. This work is driven not only by our own research interests in American women's writing but also by our sense that, as a source for the production of knowledge, women's writing amplifies and enhances the very questions—personal as much as intellectual—that drew us to queer thought in the first place.² And, finally, this project began with the invocation of a special kind of man: a straw man, whose status as such has rendered him no less influential. It is this figure to whom we turn first.

We tend to think of this straw man as an academic with tenure, status, and influence over the direction of queer theoretical work. His research tells a story about male alienation, implicitly white, which is bound up with the latent-to-explicit thematic of a specifically gay male homoeroticism. At the center of this story, often referred to as antisocial or antirelational, is a white queer antihero whose detachment from social ties becomes a synecdochal projection for the dissatisfaction all queer men experience with the constraints of modern life and the pressures of domestic propriety. Exemplified in works like Walden, this antihero leaves society out of desperation but also as a way to form...