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.