Published: Mon 24 January 2022
By Filipa Calado
In text encoding .
The work on chapter two has been taking longer than I thought-
there were three weeks of heavy revision in October/November, where I
made the following changes at the request of my peer reviewers. Then
a round of copyediting, which is done, and the final round of
proofreading, to be completed next week, after which the thing will
finally go to press. The major revisions included:
Clarifiying and foregrounding the central arguments w/r/t/ “queer
encoding” and “queer form”
Expanding sections on TEI, particularly discussion on my
customization and the limitations of the tool
Expanding engagement with Queer DH and Queer Historiography
scholarship
Cut down the overly descriptive sections on the history of the
Manuscript
Standardizing the writing style and in-text citations (to Harvard
style)
Including links to online images of the manuscript, rather than
images I took with my phone, as the Morgan did not let me use my
images for free.
As I was doing this work, I was also preparing fellowship and grant
applicaitons. I applied for the ACLA, Ford, and Graduate Center
Dissertation Fellowships. I also applied for two research grants (was
awarded one of them so far) and to a postdoctoral position at the New
School. This is to say, I've been spending a lot of time theorizing my
project across cover letters, proposals, abstracts, and research,
personal, and teaching statements.
One thing that I've been carefully theorizing is the importance of
form as a connection between the queer and digital---specifically
looking at how queerness takes certain forms in literary narrative and
voice, on the one hand, and how textual data takes certain forms when
it is digitized and/or computed. To explore queer form, I've been
marshalling Kadji Amin, Amber Musser, and Roy Perez's definition of
the term. They discuss queer form as a strategy for avoiding
compulsory visibility:
For our purposes, queer form means challenging the primacy of the
visual, which has too often been a site for pernicious power
relations [...]. At their base, such operations of surveillance and
classification rely on the concept of immutable difference, on sharp
boundaries, and on the possibility of exhaustively knowing the other
[...]. We see queer form as an aesthetics that moves persistently
around the visual, thereby avoiding this flattening. To the extent
that form operates behind the scenes as ideological impulse and
materiality, queer formal practices can resist the dictates of
transparency normally required of non-normative subjects by
illuminating the unseen. In this way it not only troubles the
epistemic assurances of the visual regime, but it also asks how
shifting away from static visuality can circumnavigate questions of
objectification. A move toward the diffusely sensual, and away from
the linearity of visual gazing, articulates difference in terms that
are not about dominance or norms, but that underscore the importance
of thinking with other modes of knowing, theorizing, and
experiencing. Queer form is about other ways of understanding
relationships to power and relationships to being. 232-3
My work strives to show how Queer Form as an "aesthetics" can
productively mirror and offer openings to study digital forms. I've
been plumbing this connection between "queer formalism" and
"deformance" --- "queer formalism" is a term from Tyler Bradway's
PMLA article, "Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of
Form"; and "deformance" I take from Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel's
foundational essay, "Deformance and Interpretation." Bradway describes
that, while Queer has been seen as a disrupter of form, such as
narrative form by disrupting chronology, linearity, or "reproductive
futurism," etc, Queerness is still accessible through form. He admits
that "Queerness tells no tales. It only disturbs, troubles, or
shatters them" (711). However, taking Amin, Musser, and Perez's ideas
about form as a strategy for opacity, he points out that "Queerness is
shaped by passionate attachments to certain forms," such as the "the
vivid interleavings of narrative and social theory in Gloria
Anzaldua's Borderlands , Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Tendencies , or
Jose Esteban Munoz's Cruising Utopia " (712). In my reading, McGann
and Samuels take a similar stance in their turn to digital forms, by
valuating any formal shift in text (such as from print to digital) for
the way it opens interpretive possiblities.