Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
- 39 Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy
- 40 Gender Variance before Trans
- 41 Female Friendship
- 42 The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing
- 43 “Flung out of space”
- 44 Quantifying Sex
- 45 The Pleasures of Reading Camp
- 46 The Queerness of Religion
- 47 Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time
- 48 Queer Print Culture
- Index
44 - Quantifying Sex
from How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2024
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
- 39 Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy
- 40 Gender Variance before Trans
- 41 Female Friendship
- 42 The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing
- 43 “Flung out of space”
- 44 Quantifying Sex
- 45 The Pleasures of Reading Camp
- 46 The Queerness of Religion
- 47 Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time
- 48 Queer Print Culture
- Index
Summary
Quantification can be a double-edged sword. Converting lived experience into quantitative data can be reductive, coldly condensing complex thoughts, feelings, and actions into numbers. But it can also be a powerful tool to abstract from isolated instances into patterns and groups, providing empirical evidence of systemic injustice and grounds for collectivity. Queer lives and literatures have contended with both these qualities of quantification. Statistics have been used to pathologize queer desire as deviant from the norm, but they have also made it clear how prevalent queer people are, enabling collective action. Likewise for queer literature, which has sometimes regarded quantification as its antithesis, and other times as a prime representational resource. Across the history of queer American literature this dialectical tension between quantification as reductive and resource has played out in various ways, in conjunction with the histories of science, sexuality, and literary style. This chapter covers the history of queer quantification in literature from the singular sexological case study through the gay minority to contemporary queerness trying to transcend the countable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature , pp. 786 - 800Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024