123422 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2024W)

This Literary and Cultural Studies Seminar explores representations of queer kinship in women’s movements and literatures from the period of early-to-high modernism (c. 1880–1945). Through close readings and in class presentations and discussions, together we will consider alternative visions of kinship that centre feminist and queer partnerships and social relationships, from Boston and Lavender marriages to queer nuns and feminist celibates. A key organising theme will be the changing meaning of ‘the female celibate’ in the modernist period, from the 19th-century essayists who advocated celibacy (in the sense of remaining unmarried) as a tool of women’s independence, to the modernist writers who explored the identity of ‘the celibate’ (in the sense of living a non-heteronormative life) as an expression of queer practices, creative communities, and revolutionary politics between women. By historicising the changing meanings of sexuality, identity and kinship in this period, students will develop analytical and critical tools to read literary genres and images such as the ‘Women-Only Utopias’ of first-wave feminist science fiction, the Boston Marriage Novel, the Lesbian Modernist Novel, and the ‘Celibate Plot’, which charts a character’s development not towards integration into patriarchal social structures through marriage (as in the ‘Marriage Plot’) but rather towards a meaningful rejection of the limits that such structures place upon women.
The syllabus will include writing by modernist women and trans writers which represents alternative forms of kinship that centre non-marital and non-heteronormative partnerships, families and relationships as forms of feminist and queer social identity and practice. These will include literary essays, short stories, poems, plays and novels by canonical modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, and Kate O’Brien, alongside less well-known works by Christabel Marshall, Natalie Clifford Barney, and Eva Gore-Booth. By coming to understand the historical context and cultural logic in which new expressions of feminist and queer identities and relationships emerged in the modernist period, we will also be able to engage in conversations about how these ideas are re-emerging in the gender and sexual politics of the present day.