Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel
Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel
Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Natasha Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. She revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language.
Circulating Queerness outlines a queer literary history founded in ‘rogue circulation’—the surprising pathways and unexpected affinities that emerge when texts stray beyond their expected circuits—rather than identity. Natasha Hurley’s attention to the way queerness accrues through rereading and recirculation constitutes a powerful intervention into how we understand what queer literature has been and what it might become.
Dana Luciano, Georgetown University