Queer Formula

In literary studies, queer theory came on the scene around 1990 wielding its formalism as the sign of its politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's cheeky description of queer theory for the profession, "Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" published in PMLA in 1995, is exemplary in its insistence that the content of the form of thought named by queer theory is null and void, its power laying rather in its capacity to "wrench frames."1 The affordances of form seemed self-evident if the alternative was reductive identity politics. Minoritarian theory more broadly has similarly articulated an antipathy to being reduced to content — digestible, reproducible, disciplinary — a position Kandice Chuh concisely telegraphs in the phrase she nominates as the refrain of minoritarian fields: "it's not about anything."2 The refusal to be "about" oneself, to be a content generator, to make oneself into a datum of one's own oppression—these positions proceed from the recognition that minoritized subjects most often do not set the frame of their own representation, and unless they wrest the frame directly from the hands of its makers they will not see themselves within it. This is perhaps what Octavio González means when he proposes that "what is queer about form is not form itself, but a special relation to it." He calls this queer "desire for form" a "queer formalism."3 Queer theory invests form with desire as the antidote to a violent reduction of queers to content.

González's suggestive phrase condenses the received wisdom of the field, in which queer desire for form has functionally circulated as the definition of queer formalism as such. In a much-cited passage of "Queer and Now," Eve Sedgwick went so far as to name formalism not only the signal method of queer theory, but further still as "a prime resource for survival."4 Sedgwick describes queer scholarship as fundamentally premised on "a kind of formalism, a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for, at the level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme."5 Over the course of the essay, she identifies queerness with world-making practices, an attunement to the productive possibilities inherent in contradiction, and an investment in the "numinous" power of literature and culture to provide resources for remaking the social field more expansively. Sedgwick identifies queerness with an excess of meanings, an "open mesh of possibilities," a wealth of textual attachments, and a practice of "ardent reading."6 This is powerful stuff, setting the stakes of queer formalism sky high: it is a matter of life and death — and, as Sedgwick says, "this is not a figure of speech."7 Indeed, Sedgwick opens her essay by speculating that the alarming rates of suicide among young queer people, which attest to the eradicative attitude dominant culture adopts towards queer life, provide the "motive" for the entire project of "gay and lesbian studies." "Queer and Now" begins: "A motive. I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents. To us, the hard statistics come easily."8 Sedgwick proceeds to list some of them, citing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, before ushering the reader into the safe harbor of the literary limned by Emily Dickinson's poetic inscription of the "miracle" that is the survival of anyone given "the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives."9 The essay promptly proceeds to its discussion of "queer formalism," and what has become some of the most-cited definitional work outlining the projects and protocols of the then-emergent critical discourse we have come to call queer theory. In Sedgwick's account, investing queer viscera in literary form keeps gay kids going; the text holds the guts that the world hates. Identifying queer formalism so completely with this "visceral near-identification," Sedgwick is compelled to admit "it's almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it."10

It would indeed be hard to imagine another way of arriving at queer formalism if "becoming a perverse reader" is conceived primarily as an effect of "the surplus charge of my trust in [texts] to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary" — an expression of "ardent" investment.11 As Sedgwick's remarks on the haunting motive of the field make clear, this visceral attachment that is the expression of queer desire for form may first and foremost be the inverse of the gut-punch that gay suicide statistics land on those who survive. Queer theorists are "haunted" by the ghosts of gay suicide, the manifest form of appearance of which in the queer and now is an unbidden intimacy with "hard statistics." How is the statistical haunting that Sedgwick names as a "motive" of the field invested in the queer formalism that she goes on to describe as its defining method and sustaining object-relation? Sedgwick's influential identification of queer formalism with "visceral near-identification" requires suicidality and its statistical registration to be abjected as their ghostly instigator, preserving a space of vitality, curiosity, and fantasy in relation to sustaining cultural texts for queer survival. This is crucial work, as its overwhelming uptake by the field has confirmed, making an opening for queer world-making, and making the work of literary criticism feel like an extension of queer life practices and survival strategies. But it does leave one to wonder over questions Sedgwick finds it hard to imagine, namely: do queers need to love their objects to learn from them how to survive? Is there a queer formalism that loves its objects less to keep their capacity for damage from becoming ghostly? If queer survival — queer life — is premised on formalism, how has that formalism contended with its haunting by the statistical registration of queer death? Conversely, one might wonder whether an intimacy with "hard statistics" always signifies a haunting proximity to death, or whether hard statistics can only be admitted into the field as ghosts. In the present moment, amidst the algorithmic overhaul of the social world, of the world as such, it seems worth asking whether there is a mode of queer formalism, of queer survival, that could seize upon the quantitative to animate a collective vitality. Love and literature have indeed been "prime resources for survival," but there are other routes out.The queer desire for form has not always seized upon the literary as its best bet. The genealogy of queer theory that finds its most significant antecedent in the politicized formalist literary criticism of the 1990s — in a definition of queer formalism as "visceral near-identification" with literary texts — eclipses some of the more chaotic animations of the form-content dialectic that characterized the inscription of queer life into letters in the decades prior to the consolidation of deviant careers into minority identities. In what follows, I explore the notion of queer formula — an anti-foundationalist formalism unprecious about its proximity to derogated representational modes and canny about its flirtation with derogatory ones. I pursue queer formula through the midcentury sociological interval in lesbian pulp writer Marijane Meaker's career, proposing a queer genealogy of form that finds among its precursors a queer obsession with reductive content — stereotype, data, number. I offer the notion of queer formula to interject a hiccup into the history of queer formalism that might allow the field to avow its intimacy with hard statistics, born as it is of a hard intimacy with queer death. Formula is halfway between literature and its theory, the form that mediates between them, giving form to the intermediate representational realm to which queer life has too often been relegated.

Motivated by midcentury censorship of literary portrayals of queer lives, some queer writers pursued their desire for form by entertaining promiscuous relations to that constellation of normative fictions that comport themselves as facts — scientific, legal, medical, and otherwise. Those decidedly extra-literary domains ironically served as unwitting forms to hold the promissory notes of a queer literature unwilling to cede control of its form to its publishing context. I examine Meaker's oeuvre across the second half of the twentieth century to show how queer theory's attachments to form obscure a more complicated scene of midcentury negotiation between literary and scientific modes of representing sexuality in print. Meaker wrote pulp fiction and amateur sociology, making her, in one sense, a consummate queer content producer, and thus perhaps the last person one might associate with queer form, let alone queer formalism. But she is the figure I turn to here precisely for the paradox she makes plain: the stakes of queer form at midcentury were being hashed out most tenaciously not just within a given work, exemplary or otherwise, but at the level of genre. To write about queer life was to enter into a discursive field already riven by disciplinary, legal, literary, and local debates about sex and its experts. Meaker traversed the many genres of the paperback market, mobilizing a strategic relation to the formulaic fictions that degraded queer existence in order to generate an opening for lesbian life in letters. In the midcentury context of obscenity prosecution and pulp publishing, portrayals of queer life in literature were subject to outsized censure while ostensibly scientific investigations of deviant sexual behavior proliferated in paperback. Pseudoscience thereby became a repository of queer representation, and a site to invest the queer desire for form. Responding to these circumstances, Meaker identified stereotype as the raw material of sexual discourse in both its literary and scientific modes. The conditions of literary censure recommended the unimaginative, reductive, and stereotyped as resources for the elaboration of queer representation, and nominated the sociological as the mode in which to put them to work. Sociology became the clearinghouse for the mixed media of queer representation: a place to intermix cliché and anecdote, fact and fiction, narrative and data, numinous texts and hard stats, and to recombine variously their matrix of meanings.

In this account, form appears less as a quality of a given work than as the interface between political and aesthetic modes of representation, and the site of articulation of the many and various answers to the desire to count. As I will show, the midcentury queer desire for form compelled its practitioners to alight upon formulaic fictions and generic codes iteratively, identifying queerness less with any particular genre than with a genre system collectively constituting the problem space in which minoritarian aesthetics might manipulate a habitual reduction to content into an expansive elaboration of form. Queer literary innovation in its explicit forms, prohibited in literature, thereby flourished beyond it. While some queer authors, faced with the prospect of reproducing "narratives of damnation" — or else — devised abstracted, sublimated, or otherwise avant-garde modes for encoding queer desire into literary form, this was but one strategy.12 Meaker and others, no less committed to literary representation, took to the pseudoscientific to explore representational modes for queer life not allowed in literature. The question of the course of queer form's literary history cannot be answered by literature alone. Scientific discourse provided publishers cover for queer content; but it provided authors fodder for queer form.Meaker's career is instructive on this count, as a writer who inhabited multiple literary genres, prose forms, and narrative modes, both fictional and non-fictional, moving deftly between them in a way that she describes less as the execution of an authorial vision than as a function of the fickle market for queer representation. Her traffic between and among genres, forms, and modes counts time for queer writing's dance with censure across the better part of the twentieth century, marking the contingent limits of the literary as representational resource and limning nonfictional forms for queer life. Meaker's debut novel, Spring Fire (1952), published under the pseudonym Vin Packer, was the first lesbian paperback original in the US and sold over a million copies. But the novel had been edited to forestall anticipated censorship, and its author had mixed feelings about the price of its popularity — in the end, one of the lesbian lovers succumbs to madness and the other disavows their love. Meaker resisted republication of the novel until recently (it was reissued with her new preface in 2004), and in the interim she had resolved not to make the same mistake twice. After Spring Fire, Meaker decided to split her aims and her names; she would keep writing straight crime fiction as Vin Packer, and continue narrating lesbian life under a new pseudonym—Ann Aldrich — and in a new register — the sociological. Meaker would return to the lesbian literary later, making her Aldrich books appear in retrospect to have been a sociological interval in a longer history of queer literary form.

In fact, Meaker's five Aldrich books, published from 1955 to 1972, might themselves be read as a sociology of queer literary form. Across them, Meaker incidentally produces a longitudinal study of the damaging social consequences of the way Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) gave form to queer life. She records how Hall's narrative of damnation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for the midcentury readers who found themselves within it, despite the vast material differences between their lives and Stephen Gordon's, that novel's preternaturally doomed protagonist. In the preface published with the first run of The Well of Loneliness, the utility of its content as a contribution to science and society was ratified by the sexologist Havelock Ellis. But Meaker turns this appraisal on its head, showing how conformity to its content had hemmed in the lives of lesbians since, and offering a new composite queer form for embedding the novel in its contexts of reception. Rather than write in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness, Aldrich writes of the cultural suffusion of that novelistic tradition, its shaping force in emergent lesbian lifeworlds long after its relevance would seem to have waned. Even the last Aldrich book, from 1972, begins by measuring the aims of gay liberation against Stephen Gordon's concluding cries for clemency in The Well of Loneliness. With Aldrich, Meaker does not take leave of the literary—rather, she offers a decades-long narrative sociology of literature's troubling efficacy.13

The Aldrich books were published by Gold Medal Press, which had been in the business of peddling pulpy fictions, making Aldrich's social science fictions something of a novelty. Four of the Aldrich books are nominally non-fiction monographs. The fifth Aldrich book (published third in the series) is an edited collection, Carol in a Thousand Cities (1960), titled after a line in the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt (1952) by Claire Morgan, pseudonym of Meaker's erstwhile lover Patricia Highsmith. Aldrich's anthology collects perspectives on "the lesbian" in three sections, as seen "through the eyes of the writer," "through the eyes of the psychoanalyst," and finally "through her own eyes." In this triangulation, Carol in a Thousand Cities formalizes the implicit logic of all the Aldrich books, casting literary representation as one mode of queer registration situated among medico-scientific and auto-critical ones.14 Not only does Aldrich innovate a style of literary narration in the sociological mode, she also uses sociology as a tool to interrogate the life of the literary in queer self-making. Escalating her running feud with The Daughters of Bilitis by turning an empiricist eye on their publishing efforts, Aldrich devotes one chapter of Carol in a Thousand Cities to analyzing all the lesbian fiction published in issues of The Ladder in the year 1958.15 She concludes that despite announcing itself as a homophile celebration of the variety and richness of lesbian lives, the literature in The Ladder amounts to little more than a series of retreads of Hall's tired tropes: according to her sample of lesbian literature, it would have its readers believe lesbians cannot hold down a job and can only attract mates by self-fashioning in the form of gender stereotype. Aldrich ends up citing the literary among the greatest generators and perpetrators of stereotype — not because of its inherent representational protocols but rather because of the historically specific social pressures, legal and otherwise, exerted especially upon explicitly imaginative queer forms. Aldrich expressed her preference in no uncertain terms for the explicitly unimaginative as the best defense against a conformist taming of the imagination. Repeatedly, she proffers long lists of lesbian stereotypes as inventories of incoherence: it is self-evident that they cannot all be true at once, which means that perhaps none of them is true at all.Meaker's quasi-sociological insider accounts of lesbian life published pseudonymously as Ann Aldrich throughout midcentury are thus a capsule study in the history of queer social form as it takes shape in the negative space of the literary. Her debut, We Walk Alone (1955), conjures a lonely crowd, encoding the uneasy relation between individual and group in a minoritizing logic that isolates its subjects as the precondition for their recognition as members of a pathologized class. Alluding to the opening lines of Donald Webster Cory's sympathetic study of gay men, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951), Aldrich announces in her first sentence that "this book is the result of fifteen years of participation in society as a female homosexual." "Participation" is a weird way to say it, signaling askance to the methods of participant observation, but also conferring an awkward A-for-effort upon lesbianism's labors at social integration. We Walk Alone purports to offer an insider account of lesbian life, but it does so in the pathologizing idiom of heteronormative culture. Speculating authoritatively on the stunted developmental trajectory of the lesbians among whom its author counts herself, the authorial voice of We Walk Alone belies its own claim to minority knowledge. It symptomatizes a tension between what Eve Sedgwick has named the "minoritizing" and "universalizing" discourses of sexuality, laying claim to a local knowledge of the lesbian underworld while also attempting to speak normative pronouncements about it in the terms of the world at large. This double bind is captured best by the cover copy, which sets for its text the impossible task of telling the truth of the "love that cannot be told." Aldrich was stuck somewhere between being a case study and its analyst, and she wrote her way into the heart of that tension without resolving it.

This is perhaps the signal feature of queer form, a highly specified self-alienation the content of which is homophobic self-knowledge. It is a symptom of the double imperative to exemplify one's own perversion as well as theorize it, making for the wink of queer camp that avows that one cannot possibly perform both tasks credibly, though one may perform both hilariously. This double bind, between case study and analyst, is an expression of the incoherence of a moment of transition in the broad historical trajectory of non-normative sexuality from pathology to identity, in which the pathological case study of deviance gives way to the authority of identity and the evidence of experience. The queer trajectory from pathology to identity alighted upon shape-shifting formalism as the signal modality of its style and its politics both—a refusal to be "about" anything, a refusal to be reducible to ballistic content or diversity content or curricular content with reproducible norms and quantifiable effects. But this forward march risks disavowing the many and various ways queers have devised to make the imperative to be "about" oneself in all of one's pathological particulars less of a trap and more of a trapdoor: the queer penchant for activating the dialectic by which reduction to content flips into a formalism of its own, if taken far enough.16 Sociology, pseudoscience, and narrative non-fiction broadly, appeared to many authors as more capacious domains for queer experiments in aesthetics than the novel could be at the time due to publishers' pressure on authors to self-censor lest they land their peddlers in hot water.17 Writers wrought queer forms from the raw materials of expert discourse, creating queerly scientific texts in an experimental eddy, operating under the nose of censorship and of science, and folding back into the literary multiply and variously in different ways and at different moments.It is not so straightforward to count oneself among queers. The ontology of queerness is fundamentally bound up with the quantitative logics of demography: the collective isolation of deviant outliers, counted to be discounted. Aldrich took this paradoxical fusing of singular and plural as her premise: "Who is the lesbian? She is many women."18 We Walk Alone sold over a million copies, and Aldrich kept writing in the first person plural that would come to stand in for the community she never quite had, despite the world apart in which she found herself. The Daughters of Bilitis took care to circumscribe Aldrich's claim to community commentator. Its co-founder, Del Martin, penned "An Open Letter to Ann Aldrich" that began by inquiring whether Aldrich had been invented whole-cloth by her publisher to voice coded condemnation of lesbian life, and concluded by addressing Aldrich flatly: "your sampling is just not very representative."19 Aldrich both demystified and pathologized lesbians, claiming to smash stereotypes even as she herself propagated them. Her maintenance of this tension ultimately discloses the radical unreliability of her sociological perception—it is "just not very representative"—and reveals in its stead a representational strategy that identifies queer life with ambivalence, tension, and incoherence, and queer form with strategic reduction to the minimally subjective codes of sociological description. Aldrich's later effort, We Two Won't Last (1963), concludes with excerpted letters from readers of We Walk Alone.20 The final excerpt begins "I have read all of your books very carefully, and I am curious about them" but ends with a question that seems to belie that understanding entirely: "what do stereotypes do together? . . . I hope you will answer."21 This hope itself ends the book, as Aldrich presents it without comment, assuming it speaks for itself. And indeed it does: as the writer's confusion makes clear, "stereotype" is functionally a synonym for homosexuality in Aldrich's world. Her books collectively are an answer to what "stereotypes do together," when their generic codes come into close enough contact to generate an animating friction.

Aldrich's texts are community reports that the community did not recognize, and that the mainstream exoticized despite her best efforts to speak from a position of expertise. She writes of her life among lesbians in the "language of isolation," a "noncommunicative" idiom that "approximate[s]" queer feelings without being able to "describe them or . . . express them," making for a queasy feeling that it would be convenient to call internalized homophobia if it did not more pressingly appear to be the substance of homosexuality itself.22 We, Too, Must Love (1958), the follow-up to We Walk Alone, concludes its first chapter, "Togetherness," with the promise that "we will see what it is that attracts the female to The Well of Loneliness, and whether or not there is only a choice between that and the hell of loneliness for the Lesbian of Manhattan."23 Alone in the well or together in hell, Aldrich's lesbian is preternaturally lonely, not least when she is among her kind. The uneasy apposition suggested by the homophony of We, Too, Must Love (1958) and We Two Won't Last (1963) already goes a long way towards establishing the shifty numeric semantics of homosexual half-world-making in the interregnum between pathology and identity. Across the brink of 1960, the humanist bid for pluralism (We, Too) congeals by force of its romantic imperative (Must Love) into the couple-form (We Two) whose prospects for social endurance are slim (Won't Last).In her final book, Take a Lesbian to Lunch (1972), Aldrich finally resolved her ambivalent relationship to minoritizing versus universalizing theories of homosexuality—not by nominating queer sex as benign variation, but rather by generalizing the perversity that supposedly inheres especially in the homosexual. In the closing chapter, "Gay Pride," Aldrich clarified her position: "I also used to lean towards the idea of homosexuality as a sickness . . . I don't believe that anymore. I believe everyone's sick, one way or the other."24 In 1972, on the far side of the Stonewall uprising of 1969, and just shy of the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Aldrich took her last stab at characterizing lesbian life. By the early 1970s, the love that dare not speak its name had been superseded by a fulsome social scene — Take A Lesbian to Lunch, Aldrich's last title enjoins its readers, in citation of the Lavender Menace.25 But that plea may as easily, on the other hand, be read as an admission of searing loneliness, if not a full return of the repressed grammatical paradox of We Walk Alone (1955). Alone, together. It is nice to have a seat at the lunch table, but there is a real price for the meal: what a drag to while away the midday giving an account of oneself. This return of the repressed isolation of pre-Stonewall sexual minorities refashioned as lesbians who lunch underscores a well-known thesis about queer politics, and indeed politics in general: the alchemy by which pathologized masses become individuated identitarian subjects is not simply a march toward progress.26 And this insight itself implicitly cues us to the pleasures of membership to a pathologized mass, which offers relief from the burden of being oneself under the sheltering sign of the antisocial. Twilight lovers will not last long self-narrating in the harsh light of the noonday sun, and the price of their day in the sun is precisely those anonymous pleasures endemic to the cities of night. The half-world offers innumerable pleasures that the world cannot sustain.

Meaker wrote non-fiction as Aldrich, short stories as Laura Winston, articles as Winslow Albert, confessions as Mamie Stone, detective stories as Edgar Stone, crime novels and stories as Vin Packer, young adult novels as M.E. Kerr, children's literature as Mary James, and essays about it all in her own name. Meaker maneuvered through the literary field with a high degree of attunement to the concept of the niche market and its motivated demography. Accordingly, she wrote in a pseudo-demographic style, adopting pseudonymous authorial personae as each job demanded. In the late 1940s, Meaker worked as an assistant file clerk at E.P. Dutton, biding her time collecting rejection slips for stories she submitted under her roommates' names. She resolved to publish by any means necessary: "After many attempts to interest an agent in my work, I finally realized that I should become one, and all my clients would be me, with different names."27 More succinctly: "My pseudonyms were my clients."28 Her breakout hit as Vin Packer, Spring Fire (1952), was reviewed by Anthony Boucher of the New York Times, who was unique among elite critics in his willingness to review paperback original crime fiction. She resolved to reserve the Packer name for the crime genre to keep the line to cultural capital open — and thus devised Ann Aldrich for her next generic efforts. After decades of crime novels and pulp sexology, in 1972 Meaker laid Aldrich to rest and became M.E. Kerr, hiding in plain sight as the author of children's books. She feigned to out herself in Me, Me, Me, Me, Me: Not A Novel (1983), the memoir she wrote as Kerr to give her young readers a look behind their beloved texts to the biography of the pseudonym who is their nominal author.But Me, Me, Me, Me, Me is not not a novel either. With echoes of Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon, the book is presented as an extended annotation of a journal her father ostensibly kept about her adolescence: "Marijane is ten [my father wrote in his journal]. She plays with boys and looks like one."29 Through her father, Kerr chronicles the events of her maturation as a young writer, including a formative period supposedly spent dating a boy named William Shakespeare (no relation). Here as Kerr, and in her oeuvre more broadly, Meaker erodes the line between fact and fiction to expand the remit of queer representation — going so far as to embed her relationship to the literary canon in an eroticized Oedipal scene of patriarch-mediated self-narration for an audience of young adult readers. This may, in the end, be Meaker's signature move, making clichés copulate until they beget the novel, multiplying the self until its iterative veracity appears most clearly as a negation of the novel on its way to another form. M and E spell out her name as well as name her self, and she is not a novel but if you write her enough times she may become one.

Meaker was a prolific author, mobilizing multiple pseudonyms across multiple genres, but her final foray into the novel terrain of memoir has left her most recognized as Patricia Highsmith's 1950s lover and pull-no-punches commentator.30 It is notable that Meaker's one memoir penned under her own name is titled with someone else's: Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. Highsmith, once consigned to cult favorite for queers with soft spots for spoiled culture, has more recently come in for formal consideration by literary critics as an exemplary postwar stylist.31 Appreciation for Meaker's writing is generally confined to her sociological signification rather than her literary innovation, making her a casualty of the well-documented tendency to read minoritarian aesthetic production narrowly in terms of its content, at the expense of its form.32 But rehabilitating Meaker's oeuvre by way of a purist literary formalism threatens to miss what is most interesting about her as a queer formalist: her commitment to the generic codes used to codify queer marginality — her commitment, that is, to the formulaic. In Meaker's hands the formulaic functions less as a template for literary production than as the enabling constraint for queer representation. Queer representation, which was by the 1950s over-identified with the hack genre writing that most expediently contorted all of its plots towards punishment, is here estranged from its formulas not by the power of authorial invention so much as the cumulative force of generic consolidation. Fictionalized vignettes, anxious epistolary inquiries, ad hominems, sedate expert appraisal — all of these and more rub shoulders in Aldrich's pages to generate the texture of a queer world in the interstices of interlarded formulas for subordinating minor genres to the culture that sets their terms.

Genre is the place where form and content minimally inform one another because they maximally converge upon one another, grounding not a formalism so much as a formula. Queer formula locates the literariness at the heart of even the most reductive, schematic, and generic theories of deviance that reduce queer lives to data substantiating their own marginality. Toeing the line between fiction and fact even as it seems to shore it up ever more robustly, literature makes its meanings in its relational field. Literary form is a shaping force organizing and disorganizing, ordering and reordering, the dynamics of that field, less a property of a given work than an interposition that sets the terms for relations within it and to it. Meaker cruises the generic to chart the contours of a queer world. As Kadji Amin, Amber Musser, and Roy Pérez put it, "queerness is best understood as a series of relations to form."33 Meaker's publications reveal the queerness of literary form as it manipulates the sociological toward its own aesthetic ends, iteratively cycling through and across discredited genres to map a workaday lesbian literary field less defined by its depth than its breadth. Meaker maps a genre system of linked forms for giving life in language to discredited literary subjects. Her queer desire for form manifests as a sociological formalism irreducible to its content, begging recognition of the sociological as a genre, rather than simply a knowledge project or disciplinary idiom. To recognize it as a genre requires understanding the historical forces that compelled queer authors to animate the codes and norms of sociological writing — that is, its form — to new ends.Through Aldrich, Meaker develops a speculative empiricism that encodes its ambivalence about the evidentiary capture of queerness as form. Her social science fiction already stretches the limits of the literary, taking us far afield from the proper province of literary form. But the queer desire for form has sought sites much more distant yet from literature, so distant in fact as to seem the antithesis of language itself. How did queers buck the constraints of the "narrative of damnation"? One way has been to try to tackle it head on and transform the parameters of the representable in the novel; but many found this unworkable, unwise, or both, and decided instead to take recourse to another form of narration, the sociological or non-fictional. Others yet ditched narrative altogether in favor of network and number, implicitly posing the question: why not embrace the reductive if it offers a potential alternative to the exceptional humanity for which one is brutalized by the police and harassed by the public? As Sam McBeam has noted of the singular prominence of the network form in The L Word, "the diagram is invested with a promise beyond 'documentation'"; indeed, it is invested with the promise of "sustaining queer life" itself, in the absence of extant social forms capable of doing so.34 While we might be rightly inclined to resist endorsing the emancipatory power of number, we can nonetheless attend to the historical constraints on queer form that have made data appear as a resource for aesthetic innovation and sexual politics alike. "Number must be thought," as Alain Badiou has put it, noting that no small part of the tyranny of number is premised on its apparent alterity to language and therefore its apparent imperviousness to critical thought.35

If the refusal to read queer writing for its aesthetics in favor of its sociological commentary registers as an injustice in need of methodological redress, the willful reduction of queer lives to crunched numbers seems altogether irredeemable. But queer wit often turns perversely on the dehumanization that is a premise of queer life, and queer representation traffics in the reductive as the expression of its attachment to queer lives. There is a deep roster of queer engagement with the liminal space between narrative and data, an archive of queer edge-play with personhood that includes Samuel Steward's "stud file" of his sexual contacts, fictionalized and narrativized as the pseudonymous Phil Andros novel $TUD (1966); John Rechy's barely narrative novelistic chronicle of sexual conquests Numbers (1967); or more recently, Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Inventory," composed entirely of bullet-pointed sex scenes, or her novella "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU," which rescripts 12 seasons of SVU episode synopses as a piecemeal surreal queer doppelganger hallucination—not to mention her pseudonymous lesbian erotica career as Olivia Glass. No such list, however partial, would be complete without Samuel Delany, certainly the most prolific if not also the most compelling example of a queer formalist who stands (one might say, following Sedgwick) beside the literary, in the realms of the paraliterary, science fiction, memoir, theory, and indeed sociology—not because he could not cut it in the literary mainstream, but as a lifelong critique of its politics.36Data is hard for the humanist to swallow. But if data is rejected out of hand, then we may miss out on, among other things, an archive of queer strategies for evading the police — which have seized upon whatever is at hand, including numbers, data, and computers as much as stereotype and sexual science. Structural oppression has affiliated minorities with data, and once the link is made by history it is an open question as to what work one can make that association do.37 Numerical transubstantiation of the particularities that are the basis of an enforced marginality is a tried and true mode of evading the perils of personhood under conditions of oppression. Forfeiting the fullness of one's life to the reductive representational realm of number is a dangerous game, to be sure, but a risk many have been willing to take when the price for insisting on selfhood may be life itself.

Numeracy has often proved an intriguing if ambivalent representational resource for minoritized subjects of various kinds at various times. This is a phenomenon of note especially in Black studies, where a recent reckoning with the quantitative methods and "data portraits" of W.E.B. Du Bois, in particular, has infused an ongoing conversation about the racial and sexual politics of scientific objectification, empirical capture, datafication of the human, and quantitative representation with new interest.38 It is important to distinguish this work, which theorizes the epistemic and aesthetic utility of number for minoritized subjects attempting to imagine themselves into a sustaining relation to a hostile world, from other equally vital recent work that documents the ongoing racial, sexual, and gendered violences being enacted by means of computational obfuscation and the encoding of racism into the mainframe of an increasingly technologically mediated world.39 Far from being at cross-purposes with one another, it is rather the case that minoritarian reimaginings and resignifications of the quantitative and computational are crucial undertakings alongside and in conversation with critical analyses of the damaging and oppressive logics embedded in those modes of accounting in their hegemonic forms. Indeed, those reimaginings are themselves a form of critique.40While Aldrich and her kind hocked their lesbian identities for a lunch date, their gay counterparts took to the high-tech to remap the sexual field in the image of the database. In a 1970 mailer sponsored by the New York chapter of homophile organization The Mattachine Society, Man-To-Man, Inc. advertises the services of the IBM 360, the "gay computer [that] will cruise for you":

Dear Friend,

At last, to be able to sit at home and let an IBM 360 computer do the work. No more standing on street corners being harassed by authorities. No more searching through smoky bars with the hit and miss prospect of finding someone. No matter what you are looking for - a one night stand or a permanent relationship and no matter where you live - Man-To-Man can do the trick for you. The reasonable one time only fee assures you of meeting up to 14 new people a month for one year. You will receive a set of new data processing results at least once a month for 12 months no matter where you live. The gay computer will cruise for you and will serve to introduce you to the guys you've always wanted to meet, right in your very own area. Take a good look at our brochure. You will see that all the choices are yours to make. The men on your list will meet your standards and share your tastes - no matter what they may be. Our service is, of course, absolutely confidential and total discretion is our motto. Computer Cruising is fun and sure beats walking so don't delay - join today.41

Being a sexual minority is hard work, here tantalizingly outsourced to IBM for a "reasonable" fee while you, "Dear Friend," simply "sit at home." While "all the choices are yours to make," the computer will "do the work — and even "do the trick" — on your behalf. In an advertisement full of remarkable things, it is perhaps most remarkable that the best endorsement Man-To-Man seems willing to muster on behalf of its service is that it "sure beats walking." The thrill of sexual prospects — and plentiful: 14 people a month, every month, for a year! — takes a distant second to the sheer relief at the prospect of being unburdened from the labor of walking through the world. Man-To-Man's promise to liberate its subscribers from the trials of walking circulated through the postal system in 1970, crossing paths with the Christopher Street Parade in which homosexuals made history by walking in a demonstration for gay liberation. On the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, already so fatigued by early onset identitarian pride, gays seem to have no energy left for the tiresome business of seeking out sex.

Man-To-Man was advertising computer-assisted respectability politics, marketed in terms of identity fatigue. Its advertisement expresses nostalgia for the social ontology of pathologized queerness (or a prescience about its loss in the face of incipient gay identitarianism) even as it simultaneously takes distance from its signal modalities (street hustling, smoky bars, the clandestine sexuality of massage parlors and bath houses). It promises the pleasures of anonymity attendant to the early scenes of necessarily anonymous sex ("total discretion is our motto") without the dangers of discriminating censure ("being harassed by authorities") that such anonymity also underwrites — the law can discriminate indiscriminately, because homosexuals as a class are treated as criminals.

It is relatively easy to emplot this advertisement, with its implementation of computers and circulation largely among the unevenly politicized middle-class, as a waystation in a genealogy of neoliberalization and datafication, a nodal point in the queer datalogical turn and forebear to the participatory biometric surveillance of sex apps and the like. But the gay computer is not merely a naïve celebration of the power of computers to technologically mediate a privileged subset of queers out of exposure to street harassment and legal censure. It is also a rhetorical encoding of proleptic fatigue with the burdens of identity that come along with becoming a sexual minority sloughing off the mantle of pathology and donning instead the yoke of identitarian subjection and its imperatives to self-representation. By contrast, becoming data promises a lot of pleasures. It is a way to count in the scene without having to give an account of oneself. The gay computer that cruises for you discloses the pleasures the database serves over and above the world it encodes. Numbers provide a form in which to circulate insulated by anonymity. There is, as they say, strength in numbers.It seems self-evidently wrong to be reductive.42 But the gay computer's reduction of its dear friends to data reorganizes a risky social field around pleasure, casting data as a form for converting spoiled identity into minimally revealing self-registration, and as a rich repository of figures, codes, and imaginaries for the transvaluation of statistically marginalized, criminalized, pathologized lives. Rather than playing into the reduction of queer representation to its capacity for sociological disclosure, the gay computer suggests that a certain style of reduction to content to which queers became accustomed as a consequence of marginalization itself became an occasion for formal innovation. Number and network, as much as stereotype and sociology, provided an answer to the ambivalent queer desire to count in a multiply circumscribed social field. For the forging of an incipient minority subjectivity out of a discredited demographic abstraction, numbers have not just mere literary utility, but aesthetic affordances over and above more obvious representational technologies like character and narrative. Such deployments of number are politically motivated by an emancipatory imperative attuned to what it means to be a minority — that is, attuned to the quantitative quality of minority experience organized in relation to and contradistinction from a larger population.

I would submit that its special relation to quantification makes queer a welcome modifier of form today — a solvent of the identity of method and politics that has unhelpfully consolidated around the poles of formalism and computationalism in literary studies of late.43 Need we always be looking for love? Sometimes cruising for numbers is its own reward. This is not to disavow the politics of knowledge production but precisely to insist on it, guided by the insight that the estrangement of letters and numbers is historically contingent and context dependent, and if they seem irreconcilable now that is an effect of the development of our discipline rather than a sign of its imminent demise. These are positions, not polarities. Far from the antithesis of the literary, data may be one of its numerous forms.

 

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Joan Lubin is a visiting scholar at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is finishing a book project about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another about the construction of science fiction as an object of literary critical attention and feature of English department curricula.

 

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Banner Image: IBM 360, Model 91, Front Panel, Living Computer Museum by MBlairMartin, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

 

In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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References