Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Hammer, Langdon
Abstract
This dissertation reads the lives and works of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Bryher, and Langston Hughes to understand love’s potential for queer flourishing for American subjects in the pre-Stonewall era. Through readings of literature that run the gamut of genre from memoirs to poetry, novels to cookbooks, it teases out what love means to each of these authors and explores their orientations toward cisheteronormative constructions of kinship in twentieth-century America and Europe, while they resist, recontextualize, and sometimes capitulate to the complex of forces that constitutes normativity. The last three decades have generated manifold theorizations of queer desire, but very little writing addresses the issue of queer love, and a significant body of literature exists that situates love squarely within the bourgeois project of modern normative kinship formation. This dissertation contests that thesis. The introduction theorizes love as a resource for identificatory and relational experimentation, drawing upon the work of Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray, and bell hooks. Love is a curious phenomenological suspension of force that occurs in an intersubjective moment of maximal identificatory and relational fecundity and provides the possibility of new scripts for identification and relation. The introduction posits the possibility that love is a queer resource available to everyone, not merely to those people whom we identify as queer. Chapter One investigates the centrality of the domestic to Stein’s and Toklas’s conceptualizations of both love and queerness, arguing that their famous home at 27 rue de Fleurus provided the material conditions of possibility for their experimentations with gender and sexuality and their relationship to one another, which they considered a marriage. Their Saturday night salon was also a testing ground for the development of queer expatriate American identity generally, allowing for the flourishing of many others. Chapter Two onH.D. and Bryher formulates love as a transcendence of the epistemological boundaries of the modern empirical frame. Focusing on the importance of their occult work to their relationship, the chapter studies the way their experimentation with ulterior forms of knowledge-production opens up the possibility of experiment with ulterior genders, sexualities, and intimate configurations. Chapter Three on Hughes explores the queerness of being a bachelor and of being closeted, arguing that Hughes looked to literature to find avenues for intimacy he did not have in his relational life. Hughes’s writing animates Harlem in such a way as to afford him intimate knowledge of the figures within his neighborhood, situating him as lover and beloved to the entire community. In his poetry for children, Hughes enacts a kind of family-making-in-text, an effort to adopt Black children across the country into his vision of what love is and means. The coda argues that the queer lifeworld of modernism must be understood as an inconvenient mix of contradictory desires and positionings, rather than a reflection of contemporary queer subjects.
Recommended Citation
Abraham, Michael, "The Avant-Garde of Feeling: Queer Love and Modernism" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1099.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1099
