Queer Impersonality: Compulsory Visibility and the Politics of Form in Modernist Women's Life Writing

Author

Margot Kotler, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Nancy K. Miller

Committee Members

Tanya Agathocleous

Wayne Koestenbaum

Subject Categories

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Women's Studies

Keywords

Modernist literature, queer theory, feminist theory, Virginia Woolf, affect studies, life writing

Abstract

Modernist impersonality is an aesthetic practice typically associated with Anglo-European formalism and the doctrine of artistic autonomy. Although central to the modernist canon, impersonality has not been taken up by queer and feminist studies because critics have considered its implied evacuation of emotion and personal identity to be apolitical, and even dangerous. At its worst, impersonality reproduces an unmarked, white, and masculine subjectivity, yet it also questions the parameters of selfhood, posing a radical challenge to liberal-humanist conceptions of identity. Queer Impersonality moves beyond this critical impasse by tracing impersonality’s queer and feminist histories among modernist women writers whose engagement with it have been obscured. My research emerges from the intellectual affinities between two seemingly distant concepts: queer theory and impersonality. Queer theory that glorifies invisibility, anti-sociality, and self-annihilation shares with impersonality the idea of freedom in the destruction of the subject, as well as the corresponding problem of the privilege implicit in a rejection of community and futurity. I intervene in both conversations by advancing a new understanding of impersonality as an aesthetic strategy and affective stance primarily deployed by minoritized—queer, racialized, gendered—writers as a form of emotional and autobiographical refusal. Drawing on affect, queer, and critical race theory, I challenge the idea that the subject’s formation through emotional expression is liberatory—an assumption I refer to as the “expressive hypothesis”—, and recognize the refusal of visibility, not as a pure site of resistance, but a complex process through which marginalized people negotiate the political and aesthetic.

I focus on two contexts in the early twentieth century where minoritized modernist writers developed critical discourses on impersonality: British feminism in the interwar period and Harlem Renaissance women’s writing. In both contexts, autobiographical visibility and emotional transparency were in the process of becoming compulsory political and aesthetic gestures for women writers and writers of color. Impersonality, rather than a retreat from identity, becomes a critical practice for engaging with emergent contemporary discourses on identity and visuality. These discourses include the classification of personalities, sexualities, and other forms of identity in psychology and sexology; the rise of personality theory and celebrity culture; and the development of the New Biography. I explore several forms of strategic impersonality that engage with these developments among writers including Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, primarily through genres of life writing. Chapter two, which explores the practice of “impersonal biography,” contains original archival research on Woolf and Holtby, including previously unpublished correspondence from Woolf to Holtby, and the manuscript of Holtby’s biography of Woolf, which was the first biography and critical study of Woolf published in English. The strategic forms of impersonality explored in the chapters—including anonymity, inauthenticity, performance, and self-erasure—offer alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between identity and the political, as well as a queer hermeneutic practice.

More than demonstrating affinities between marginal modernisms and queer theory, this shadow tradition of impersonality historicizes the feminist claim that “the personal is political.” Second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the civil rights movement consolidated the relationship between representational politics and the personal narrative, contributing to the contemporary assumption that impersonality is outdated and inimical to projects of liberation. Queer Impersonality explores alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the personal and the political that existed before the identity-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the epilogue to the dissertation, I suggest that at a moment in time when the personal has never been more political, and the political never more personal, the practice of queer impersonality offers us a way of navigating the present.

Recommended Citation

Kotler, Margot, "Queer Impersonality: Compulsory Visibility and the Politics of Form in Modernist Women's Life Writing" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5723