Over the past two weeks, I continue to interweave discussions on queer theory and dh methods, focusing on what they share---the sensitivity to textual objects, mediated by the critic's self-consciousness of her distance from the object.
It has been difficult to keep a structure, and I continue to revise my outlines as I add more theorists. So far, I've come up with this master sketch for the chapter:
- touch as a reading method: making & opening connections
- anzaldua and sedgwick on touch as connective and multiplying
- queerness as untouchable: something we cannot fully grasp
- love and cvetkovitch on queer negativity
- data as unknowable: something we cannot fully grasp
- drucker and underwood on studying cooked data
- the illusion of critical detachment, we need bodies
- felski's affective method
- sedgwick on reparative reading
- abstraction as necessary in order to bring things into relation
- sedgwick on generative shame
- klein on figuring what is absent
- the parallels between DH and Queer theorists, different reading styles; refocus on touch
- feminist distant reading
- mcgann, ramsay on deformance, piper on close & distant.
- example of queer theorist who is guided by touching/feeling... affect theories? Munoz, Anzaldua, Ahmed...
- my reading of /voyant-tools/ & /waves/
The progression builds off the notion of touch, then immediately brings in that which is untouchable---queerness and data, and starts to plot how we might move from there, into a criticism that celebrates detachment by turning to the body and abstraction. Bodies engaging with the subject matter through abstraction. By abstracting data, we can move within them and interface with them. Something along those lines.
The writing process is slow, as I'm trying to coordinate my readings of the critics and bring them into a narrative. There are moments, however, when I break free from my critics, to articulate without substantiation the focus on touch and the necessity of critical distance. In those moments the writing is loose and easy.
At this point, I'm trying very deliberately to base my method on work done by women and especially queer women of color. When it comes to digital humanities, this has been tough, because as Sara Ahmed says, whiteness and maleness automatically reproduce themselves. We reproduce them without intention, and it takes a willful effort to center other voices.
In that vein, I tweeted out a call for "non-cishet-white-male distant reading." The responses I got were overwhelming, with people citing their own work and others. So I'm inundated with some exciting reading for the next couple of weeks.