The Queer Modernist Novel: Experimentations in Bodily Desire and Textual Aesthetics

My PhD research analyses modernism’s encountering moments with queer identities and non-heterosexual subjects within experimental fiction, primarily from a select few novels produced in the interwar period. Queerness in modernist texts is often masked and hidden by both formal—and informal—experimentation that accompanies the unconscious (de)representation of sexuality that such texts produce. My thesis will examine transgressive modernist textual practices in response to fictional representations of queer sites of nonnormative, or “slippery” desire within city/urban spaces such as bars, nightclubs, and alleyways. More specifically, it examines the queer fictional worlds represented during the 1930s, a period often referred to as the “Pansy Craze.” My research is primarily interested in how queer modernism, according to Benjamin Kahan, “delineates the sexually transgressive and gender deviant energies that help fuel modernism’s desire to thwart normative aesthetics, knowledges, geographies, and temporalities” (348).

Modernist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness allow us glimpses into how queer erotic entanglements and fragmented desires are performed in modernity. Queer-coded argot and illegibility within modernist experimental writing can provide, I argue, fruitful avenues and laneways where deviant sexualities are performed, tolerated, and even celebrated. The rise of modernism as a literary and aesthetic practice also coincided with the emergence of sexual identities and sites where these identities could manifest and engender active agencies. My project examines how LGBT bodies are (de)represented (or indeed, unrepresentable) in early twentieth century ‘queer’ novels to locate a structure within the disjointed trajectory of the ‘homosexual’ tradition. Through a sustained examination of transgender, queer, and nonbinary subjectivity in modernist fiction, I hope to disrupt any teleological assumptions about queer literary history. Queer narrative desire is, by its very nature, non-linear, experimental, and unable to be easily deciphered.

At present, the novels examined will include Strange Brother (1931) by Blair Niles, Twilight Men (1931) by André Tellier, A Scarlet Pansy (1932) by Robert Scully, and The Young and Evil (1933) co-written by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. These texts all present—to some extent and to varying success—an unstable, complicated construction of gender and sexuality due to the presence of the de-gendered “pansy” in these narratives. The figure of the “pansy” occupies a queer space in the regulation and construction of the homosexual/heterosexual divide, and its very nature complicates any linear understanding of modernity’s binary thrust towards linear progression. These queer writers engage with, and write about, moments of cruising, cross-dressing, drag, the legacies of sexology, the intersections of race and class with sexuality, transgender subjectivity, transnationalism and movements of culture, prostitution, sites of urban “slumming,” queer enclaves, political dissidents, able-bodied and disabled persons, all within—subconsciously or not—late modernism. These inversions and queer moments in time will be examined alongside new methodologies in modernist and queer studies, tied together with close-reading practices which will prioritise an innovative approach to reading queerness within modernity and inside the archive.

• Modernism/Modernity
• The Avant-Garde/Surrealism
• LGBT Identity in Fiction
• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Literary Theory
• Experimental Literature