UC Irvine

Literary modernism’s “queer” textual forms and erotic meanings were inextricable from the construction of “normal” sexuality as a statistical, racial, and gendered category in the early-twentieth century. However, scholarship on modernist sexualities has tended not to historicize the languages and practices of normality, and have likewise passed over an archive of quantitative and statistical sex research in the period prior to Alfred Kinsey’s midcentury studies of sexual behavior. On the heels of Victorian sexology’s expansive taxonomies of perversion, twentieth-century sex researchers set out to construct more rigorous mathematical models for recording, organizing, and measuring social and sexual data. Equally fascinated and troubled by the formal possibilities of enumerated and aggregated desires, novelists like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Charles Henri Ford, and Parker Tyler crafted experimental prose forms that explore multiple, varied, and often competing models of normal/deviant binaries. These texts diverged from scientific idealizations of both numbers and prose as neutral languages that might embody and represent sexual normality at a mass level. At the same time, these authors express an intense interest in normalizing forms, presenting challenges to queer critics: what kinds of queer language can describe the emergence of “normal” sexuality as a statistical and social construct without recourse to the very category being constructed? The period covered by this study witnessed the emergence of “normal,” “straight,” and “hetero” sexualities—distinct but related discursive formations written through the aesthetics and erotics of numbers. While accounts of queer modernism tend to focus either on the queerness of form, or on the history of pathologized identities, this project argues that modernist texts also worked against the consolidation of a singular, totalizing ideal of transhistorical heteronormativity.