In my last post, I started to organize my thoughts on feminist distant reading. My focus was to work out how we might open up the way we interface with queerness as "untouchable," as the raw data that cannot be quantified. The solution is to abstract and formalize so we can move or "interface" with it.

The past few weeks I have dived into the issue of the "untouchable"---what does it mean for the way we do critique? Primarily, I've been looking for ways that other fields have eschewed the impulse to verify, correct, or recover. In what follows, I outline the main argument from the first third of my chapter, where I lay out the state of queerness as "untouchable" by finding analogies in the fields of science and history.

First, queerness is defined as a desire for touch (the digital), a desire that cannot be satisfied, redeemed, or recovered. This impulse for satisfaction is observed in "paranoid" or "suspicious" reading practices, which seek to answer or discover the "hidden" meaning in text. These practices attempt to answer questions, but do so in a way that constrains inquiry. This is because paranoia only delivers the results that are imaginable within current knowledge structures.

We see the harm of paranoia, for example, in methods of science and history. We encounter excellent critiques of these methods particularly in recovery projects, such as slave history or the black atlantic. Here, the goal of recovery creates a system of inquiry that predetermines the results.

This is related to queerness, which is untouchable. It is a feeling of embodied disembodiment, estrangement, loss. The state of queerness is incommensurable.

The burden of my writing in this section is to draw the ties between racial critique and queer, in a way that doesn't diminish or wrongfully appropriate the POC scholarship. I'm not trying to suggest an equivalence, but pointing out that this kind of work has already been done in other contexts.

This section sets up the last part of the chapter, where I'll discuss the preferred method of speculation, drawing from speculative history methods by Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, and David Kazanjian, among others such as Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga. The harm of paranoia comes from the subject/object divide, where the dominant subject takes control/power over the other. Looking to work done in slave history recovery, in chicanx studies and literature, we find alternative ways of reading that involve speculation and play. They require formalizing and abstracting what cannot be touched into a touchable format. It involves playing with vantages (Lauren Klein), provisionality (Julia Flanders, Susan Brown), and performance (Katherine Bode, Tanya Clement).