Even though I still need to finalize the conclusion (and add a final example of text analysis), I'm deeming the first draft of my first chapter complete. It's been nearly a year, and the thing has taken so many shapes, texts, interventions in the meantime. Although there's still a little more work to do, fleshing out some text analysis with Python, the thing is being set aside. It doesn't feel totally done -- in fact I feel slightly guilty for setting it aside -- but I know that any attempt to finalize it right now will just have to be revised once I progress through other chapters and my intervention develops.

Below is an abstract for the project, which I recently submitted to the [ACH conference][https://ach2021.ach.org/]:

Queer Distant Reading: Quantifying Gender in Woolf’s “Orlando”

This project explores how Queer Studies and quantitative text analysis might work together to analyze queer identity in 20th and 21st century literature. In recent years, practitioners of distant reading have been grappling with the problem of quantifying gender and sexuality, among other aspects of minority identity. My project intervenes in this debate by exploring one of the stickier aspects of distant reading--reproducibility. I trace a genealogy of reproducibility from distant reading’s inception in Franco Moretti’s call for a “falsifiable criticism” to more recent experiments in which researchers “reproduce” their assumptions about social categories in the results of their analysis. However, rather than condemn the reproducible, this project unpacks its radical potential by reworking it to engage with Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. Bringing Butler’s foundational ideas about “performative citation” from Queer Theory to distant reading, I propose a methodology that achieves displacement through repetition, subversion through iteration, and resistance from within the flattening processes of quantification. This method illustrates how the iterative practice of analyzing text computationally can surface new textual structures and resignify elements of that text. I demonstrate this critical method with an analysis of Virginia Woolf's text, Orlando: A Biography (1928) to explore how the terms "man" and "woman" can be re-signified to multiply our already complex understanding of gender in that text. This method harnesses the reductions of reproducibility within text analytical methods in order to advance the study of queer identity in Queer Studies.