QUEER HISTORY | QUEER CITATION

Scholars of eighteenth-century gender and sexuality have principally examined how institutions and discourses of disciplined desire in Europe were reproduced throughout the colonized world. Literary scholars and historians, such as Jonathan Goldberg, Madhavi Menon, Valerie Traub, Abdulhamit Arvas, and Jen Manion, among others, have sought to recover historical queer identities, moving beyond an earlier emphasis on gay and lesbian desire to explore transgender, nonbinary, asexual, and gender fluid positions, and interrogate intimacies that existed beyond the norms of heteropatriarchal Euro-American cultures among the broader and longer early modern world.⁸ Yet, we acknowledge the methodological obstacles of extricating desire from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archives, which largely reflect the material conditions of surveillance that governed identity and intimacy. These conditions produced, as Mark Rifkin argues, a narrowly defined “common sense” that elided other possibilities for expressing gender and sexuality.⁹

As a method for moving through and beyond the heteronormativity of colonial records, we turn often to representations of alternative sensations—sight, sound, touch, taste—as illustrated so powerfully in Monkman’s subversion of the gaze and portrayal of haptic connections between Indigenous and Black figures in Welcoming the Newcomers. We are thereby influenced by Elizabeth Freeman’s Beside You in Time (2019), which attends to notions of sense, what Freeman identifies as “sense methods,” in continuation of the project to map queer temporality, what we see as a necessary tenet of queer horizons. For Freeman, “sense methods” engender “a queer theory of relationality and sociability” that imagines queerness as “a drive toward connectivity, conjugation, and coalescence”—a powerful counter to the colonial “common sense” Rifkin describes.¹⁰ If we accept the provocation that queer methodologies can promote a temporal and phenomenological hypersociality, then we can embrace opportunities to, as Freeman puts it, “rearrange the relations between past and present, linking contemporary bodies to those from other times in reformulations of ancestry and lineage.”¹¹ In this embrace of sense—common, queer, methodological, transhistorical—we welcome new formations of history and desire, temporality and intimacy, embodiment and identity, and queerness and transness that can account for our ardent intent to unsettle, reimagine, and re-enliven.

In our own exercise of sense methods, these essays bring to the fore questions of citationality. While citation is too often considered de rigeur, or pursued merely performatively, we acknowledge that citation is a deliberate practice that telegraphs inclusion, exclusion, appropriateness, and appropriation. Citational circulation is a craft and technique of always deliberate (even if purportedly unintentional) relation. Scholarship as citational accountability and responsibility makes evident to readers who is cited, how they are cited, and the extent of that citation. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), Ahmed invokes the verb “to path” as a means of establishing an intersectional and antiracist citation that lays out “paths we call desire lines.”¹² Katherine McKittrick, in this same vein, writes in Dear Science and Other Stories (2021): “I am not interested in citations as quotable value. I want to reference other possibilities such as, citations as learning, as counsel, as sharing.”¹³ Ahmed and McKittrick identify concerns that bespeak conversations at eighteenth-century conferences, especially in caucuses, panels, or roundtables that incorporate marginalized voices.

To that end, this collection is committed to giving voice to scholars whose work, presence, or placement in the academy have long been marginalized, providing a useful place of theorizing and recuperating. Marginalia, indeed, can be harnessed for queer liberation. This is why the authors included here represent a wide spectrum of academic placements and, of course, the precarities experienced therein. While academics who have found a home through the ladder system are featured here, so too are individuals who are in the throes of doctoral candidacy or those who have thrived in contingent roles. A few are independent scholars. Other contributors are publishing for the first time; one is even an undergraduate coauthor. By welcoming junior, emerging, and established scholars, we want to give voice and allow others to find their own. In our commitment to polyvocality, UnsettlingSexuality desires an assemblage that endeavors to deprivilege hierarchies of domination that too often are reified through the academy and its publishing arms.

We are, to be certain, responding to concerns over citation that have surfaced in our field, though these feelings and anima have undoubtedly simmered below the surface for decades. Sal Nicolazzo, for example, questions how to decenter whiteness and its pernicious historical instantiations in eighteenth-century studies. Drawing from Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color critique, Nicolazzo contends that “the field, in its citational practices, its orientation toward knowledge, its definition of expertise, and—most crucially—its relation to the distribution of material resources (both within the university and beyond)” often reaffirms the status quo of whiteness through a citational circulation that operates through/as epistemology (and vice versa).¹⁴ Megan Peiser (Choctaw Nation) has similarly addressed how conventional academic modes of citationality and publication reproduce settler colonialism.¹⁵ Through her experience as an Indigenous scholar, Peiser rightfully demands more accountability in oftentimes cursory or half-hearted attempts at decolonizing the fields in which we are embedded and complicit. To truck with the academy is to commit to systems of white supremacy and settler colonialism that were (and continue to be) engineered on the premise of exclusion. And in another reflection published by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, one of this volume’s editors, Jeremy Chow, has recently called for an “enlightened citational praxis” that perverts the Enlightenment’s hegemony and “invites us to circulate our own work—the work that honours difference, identity, relationality—among one another because you are my audience, you are my ally, and you are my advocate.”¹⁶ These collective calls for action are motivated by experiences of marginalization and actively broadcast a desire to shift the adamantine structures of our profession in hopes of refusing unabashed, even if unintentional, white supremacy and its alibi of “good-intentions.”¹⁷

Our goal remains, as we noted previously, to produce a concerted and intentional citational praxis for the purpose of enrichment that follows unsettling the ontological and epistemological regimes that shape the study of eighteenth-century sexuality and gender. The citational models promoted by this collection speak both to the primary and secondary sources we approach. For instance, several authors interrogate narratives that have been deified as pillars of the canon, while others introduce popular or marginalized figures who have only recently become part of scholarly conversations. Rather than holding canonicity harmless, we path with intellectual interlocutors—many outside of eighteenth-century studies, as Monkman or Norval Morrisseau, whose work graces this collection’s cover, are—who may help us revisit critical conversations and modes of inquiry that are too important to belong to only the fields of contemporary theory, literature, or art. We stage possibilities of listening to archives that exist across historical periods and genres. Queer horizons demand these types of transversal and transhistorical longings—a critical concept with which Eugenia Zuroski concludes this collection.

Unsettling Sexuality draws from recent and emerging criticism in Middle Eastern and Asian studies, African American studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies to argue that colonial modernity imbricated both European settlers and people of color into a narrow uniform of sexuality as part of the colonizing project, strictly organized around the nuclear family, patriarchal property relations, and the cultural reproduction of colonial norms.¹⁸ Put differently, we argue that sexuality and gender are expressed within a matrix of colonial modernity, which Catherine E. Walsh and Walter Mignolo remind us is an epistemological settler projection that seeks to segregate relationality in favor of the fictions of autonomy and ontology.¹⁹ These fictions are predicated on the coloniality of being—structures and recognitions of the colonial matrix of power—which is reinforced and subtended by racism, sexism, able-bodiedness, and anti-queerness. In response, we take up María Lugones’s contention that what is required from us is to improvise a vibrant “decolonial feminism,” which in its intersectional outlook cannot be unmoored from queerness, queer gender, and sexuality.²⁰

One intervention of this collection is to explore how racial embodiment becomes a material site for conflicts over intimacy, desire, and kinship. Essays by Humberto Garcia, Shelby Johnson, Nour Afara, and Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke take up Iranian travelers, a Mohegan pastor and a nonbinary white preacher, dark-complexioned sex workers, and mixed-raced women, respectively, to interrogate how people of color in the long eighteenth century understood and resisted their conscriptions into what Rifkin calls a “competent” performance of modernity.²¹ While not every essay in the collection overtly takes up racial embodiments or colonial settings, we collectively acknowledge that settler structures shaped all acts of literary production in this period, in large and small ways.

And we hope to open new questions and methods for continuing the work of this volume in future collections, projects, and critical conversations. This is precisely what Walsh and Mignolo mean when they, like Aníbal Quijano before them, name coloniality—a violent, immuring logic and infrastructure left in the wake of colonialism that determines governance, surveillance, and identity, as well as distinguishes the human from the nonhuman.²² In our efforts to center decoloniality through an ethics of citation, we are mindful that these frameworks are grounded in Indigenous and postcolonial sovereignty struggles, and thus have dimensions far beyond academic research. This is part and parcel of the desire to make this collection open access, which has been generously supported by the University of Delaware Press’s investment in this work. In addition, we are invested in thinking through decoloniality not only for Indigenous, African diasporic, Middle Eastern, and Pan-Asian experiences in the early modern period but also for canonical texts of the eighteenth century.²³ We thus share a commitment to unsettling academic disciplinarity itself.²⁴ In this way, the collection provides new insights into how queer persons and writers of color contest—unsettle—the intimate colonization of their bodies, minds, spirits, and communities.

INTIMATE METHODS

Queer horizons inhabit the intimate. This collection centers intimacy—as intersubjective proximities, as material and tactile sensations, as modes of desire and yearning, as everyday routines of being and belonging, as well as quotidian communal formations, in their plural refractions in transatlantic and global eighteenth-century literatures. For this work, we think with Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), which defines intimacy as “a means to observe the historical divisions of world processes into those that develop modern liberal subjects and modern spheres of social life.”²⁵ Recently, Lowe has reflected on responses to “intimacies as method” and argues: “Intimacies as method emphasizes relation, convergence, and interdependency, and attends to residual and emergent knowledges that may be elided by the dominant disciplines in which we work.”²⁶ Lowe further suggests that “identifying such connections often means breaking with customary modes for organizing history,” prompting us to rethink the canons, geographies, vocabularies, and conceptual frames that principally organize eighteenth-century literary studies.²⁷ Queer horizons extend alternative methods. In this way, we hope to build on Lowe’s interventions by channeling scholars such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, who urges us to attend to alternative forms of life, which exist as “persisting and repressed forms and formations of being in the world, shaped by and through intimate knowledge of the world and its secrets, of its multiple natural, spiritual, political, and cosmological taxonomies preserved and transmitted over generations.”²⁸ Queer histories are often secret, hidden, implicit. They thus urge us to unsettle dominant regimes of legibility and visibility in the archive.

The essays in this collection cultivate intimacy as method by addressing how varied cultural formations and lived experiences become differential entry points into representations of race, gender, and sexuality in the archive. Indeed, intimacy in this volume often arises from messy proximities to borders and boundaries—the tactile and sensuous lines between skin and air, water and soil, human and nonhuman bodies, nations and empires, temporal periods and chronological experiences. The essays featured here turn to encounters like these to unsettle imperial systems and illuminate ways of living otherwise, a project we see recast in Welcoming the Newcomers. Contributors to Unsettling Sexuality thus consider manifold formations of eighteenth-century gender and sexuality but at scale, shaped by intimate histories, geographies, cultures, and contacts. For this, we draw from historians and literary scholars working in queer of color critique, Black feminist studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies.²⁹ As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig) argues from the perspective of Nishnaabeg thought: “Heteropatriarchy isn’t just about exclusion of certain Indigenous bodies, it is about the destruction of the intimate relationships that make up our nations, and the fundamental systems of ethics based on values of individual sovereignty and self-determination. The more destruction our intimate relationships carry, the more destruction our political systems carry, and the less we are able to defend and protect our lands, and the easier it is to dispossess.”³⁰ Acknowledging how and where eighteenth-century archives are complicit in these dispossessive maneuvers—and where queer and trans figures imagine liberatory alternatives—is part of the path this collection pursues.

While scholars who work in historically inflected fields might contemn these methods as presentist or ahistorical, the praxis at work intercedes in Western understandings of time, which principally center a linear telos of historical “progress” that refuses non-Western, non-European, and Indigenous formations of embodiment, kinship, and intimacy. Katherine Binhammer contends that the “long eighteenth century” that frames this collection reflects a vexed colonial periodization that frequently elides global Indigenous epistemologies—a decolonial provocation that we aim to take up.³¹ We also heed Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt, who reminds us that “the potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study, or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader systems of (neo)colonial power.”³² Essays by Shelby Johnson and Ula Lukszo Klein, for instance, engage with methods in Native American and Indigenous studies to address settler colonialism as a structure that violently elides non-Western gender rituals and imposes narrow norms on lived Indigenous subjectivities.

Transhistorical methods are not limited to interventions in Indigenous studies, of course. Scholars in early modern and eighteenth-century sexuality studies have improvised historically supple and “unhistorical” methods, including David Halperin in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1989) and, more recently, Susan S. Lanser in The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic (2014) and Heather Love in Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (2021). In this vein, Carolyn Dinshaw argues that placing texts in promiscuous, transhistorical proximities can illuminate new possibilities for approaching the past— “a queer touch across time”—while warning that this method may also only reveal what we desire to know about queer lives and pleasures in the past.³³ Ziona Kocher’s essay, to this point, unsettles received historical methods to re-encounter eighteenth-century literature by taking up Frances Sheridan’s epistolary novel The Memoirs of Miss. Sidney Bidulph (1761) as a text that challenges chrononormative structures reflected in Sidney’s intense desire to return to a time before her unhappy marriages. In particular, Kocher argues that Sidney’s asexual yearning for union with her friend Cecelia counters heteronormative orientations to time and conjugality.

Turning to transhistorical methods to illuminate queer possibilities and pleasures is not without risks. From the perspective of Black Studies, we take seriously Saidiya Hartman’s contention that the subjunctive—“a grammatical mood that expresses doubt, wishes, and possibilities”—can enable a speculative practice that she names “critical fabulation,” which reflects an intention “both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”³⁴ In this sense, “critical fabulation” must “reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance,” but can never entirely repair archival aporia.³⁵ Hortense Spillers and Christina Sharpe likewise call us to recognize how eighteenth-century archives are constitutively shaped by violence.³⁶ Recent scholarship on the Black Atlantic, as in work by Jessica Marie Johnson, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others, has taken up Black women’s improvisations of resistant intimacy across time and space, thus modeling methods for reading within these aporia for Black feminist, queer, and trans thinking.³⁷ Critics like Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, for example, have turned to “queer imaginings of the Middle Passage” to recover how “unnamed rebellions took place … in erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them.”³⁸ For many of our contributors, our positionalities as queer and trans scholars and/or as scholars of color differently inflect our efforts to model speculative engagements with the long eighteenth century, and we draw from citational conversations across an array of fields to pursue these reparative undertakings.

Intimacy as method animates not only our attention to lived experiences for queer and trans figures of the long eighteenth century but also to the lived environments within which decolonial struggle occurred (and is occurring still). Given histories of colonial expansion and settlement at work across eighteenth-century trade networks and global connections, several contributors explore the imbrication of gender and sexuality within the intimacies of environments. They build on scholars like Greta LaFleur, who describes discourses of “environmental sexuality” whereby Euro-American scientific writing and fiction came to portray racial and sexual difference as the products of discrete ecologies and climates—discourses, in other words, within which white settlers became vulnerable to degeneration.³⁹ Chapters by M. A. Miller and Tess Given, in concert, explore differently desired forms of life in Caribbean settings that countered colonial efforts to bound intimacy, specifically by interrogating how the homogenizing presumptions of Western settlement and plantation projects encountered human and more-than-human resistances.

In these and other interventions, Unsettling Sexuality is influenced by intellectuals such as Melissa K. Nelson (Métis and Anishinaabe), who engages with “eco-erotic” practices whereby Indigenous oral traditions, among other non-European traditions, model alternative reproductive processes—what Nelson calls “a messy, visceral, eco-erotic boundary-crossing entanglement of difference that can engender … a lived environmental ethic.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, scholars in Black studies, such as Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, and Tiffany Lethabo King, have traced modes of Black “being human” habituated within “an unstable ecozone and nervous landscape,” where human and nonhuman persons encountered each other in new, tense, and complicated formations.⁴¹ The intersections of new materialism, environmental humanities, and gender and sexuality studies thus generate invaluable perspectives on how subjugated human and nonhuman figures cultivated disordered worlds queerly recalcitrant to eighteenth-century colonial aspirations for managed lands and bodies.

Above all, what different essays in Unsettling Sexuality strive to do is center queer and sexual creativity, intimacy, and joy, even while acknowledging and tracing how imperial violence and settler colonialism sought to govern and surveil queer persons (and especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous queer and Two-Spirit persons). This is the impossible story at the heart of this collection’s improvisation of intimate methods. Chow and DeBaecke, for instance, read the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808) to interrogate the sociocultural and literary conditions that made happiness an exclusive attainment largely unavailable to mixed-race women. Moreover, Cailey Hall engages with contemporary queer historical romances set in the long eighteenth century as counternarratives to established conventions in which queer relationships uniformly ended in tragedy. Too often in eighteenth-century studies the emphasis is on mourning—on grieving Black enslavement, Indigenous displacement, anti-queer and transphobic violence—but criticism that ends with a metonymic association of queerness with death or loss may only reinscribe these correspondences and deny other possibilities for queer being and belonging in myriad geographies of the eighteenth century. We seek here not rose-colored optimism but also not a mind-numbing nihilism; if such a happy medium is possible, Unsettling Sexuality reaches for it. The volume’s critical emphasis on a multitude of lives and pleasures ultimately reflects variations on what Deborah Miranda (Chumash/Esselen), writing of the difficulties of excavating Indigenous intimacies from settler archives, calls an “indigenous reading” praxis: a method “that enriches Native lives with meaning, survival, and love.”⁴² Broadly, Unsettling Sexuality turns to intimacy—a way of placing archives, temporalities, persons, communities, and ecologies into promiscuous proximity—to reimagine the methods we assemble and mobilize.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The essays in this collection are organized into four categories, which reflect new directions in canons, frameworks, and methods in eighteenth-century gender and sexuality studies: “Gender Nonconformity: Embodiment, Sociality, and Politics,” “Novel Intimacies,” “Queer Ecologies and Cartographies,” and “Racializing Affect, Queering Temporality.”

The essays in “Gender Nonconformity: Embodiment, Sociality, and Politics” employ different entry points, including Indigenous and Persian studies, for analyzing Anglo-American eighteenth-century iterations of masculinity and gender-nonconformity as challenges to dominant configurations of social and political affiliation. In chapter 1, “Transgender Citizenship and Settler Colonialism in Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter,” Klein draws on formulations of Indigenous nonbinary and transgender identities in Native scholarship to take up Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1676) as a drama that, in Behn’s depictions of cross-dressing Indigenous and British characters, foregrounds the imbrication of imperial whiteness and queerness with the imperatives of settler expansion.⁴³ Klein suggests that terms like “cross-dressing” are colonialist projections that cannot fully account for Indigenous transgender routines and rituals.

In chapter 2, “Samson Occom, the Public Universal Friend, and a Queer Archive of the Elsewhere,” Johnson reads Mohegan pastor Samson Occom’s encounters with white nonbinary preacher the Public Universal Friend, which were facilitated by the ongoing legacies of Indigenous land theft. Johnson argues that Occom and the Friend embraced, in different ways, queer intimacies at odds with emerging early American norms of gender and sexuality, and these norms were significantly shaped by histories of population displacement and resettlement in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Their experiences of communal displacement and hope for new organizations of social life inflect the queerness of their writings, what Johnson denotes a “queer archive of the elsewhere.”

In chapter 3, “Refashioning Masculinity in Regency England: Female Fashions Inspired by the Persian Envoy Mirza Abul Hassan Khan and His Circassian Wife,” Humberto Garcia turns to Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary from the Qajar ruler Fath ʿAli Shah. Tracing reactions to Abul Hassan in British periodical culture of the day, Garcia argues that Abul Hassan’s fashionable clothing unsettles and restructures heteronormative sexualities in Regency England in such a way that fashion came to entail a normative pull. In this way, Garcia trenchantly reorients our understanding of how Islamicate fashion could both signify gender nonnormativity and recalibrate Regency formations of heterosociality in Britain.

In the essays included in “Novel Intimacies,” Ziona Kocher and Cailey Hall engage with critical conversations on epistolary fiction and romance novels, respectively, to trace transhistorical orientations to intimacy improvised in both eighteenth- and twenty-first-century novels. In chapter 4, “ ‘My sister, my friend, my ever beloved’: Queer Friendship and Asexuality in The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph,” Ziona Kocher considers the asexual potential of both the themes and form of Frances Sheridan’s epistolary novel. Kocher argues that the novel presents a critique of compulsory sexuality that hinges on Sidney’s failed attempts at marriage while her relationship with her closest friend Cecilia illustrates the potential joy of queer friendship. Though Sidney is unable to pursue a life outside of marriage, the centrality of her relationship with Cecilia highlights possibilities beyond compulsory sexuality, a structure that proves destructive not only to the novel’s protagonist but also to numerous other characters within the text.

Chapter 5, Cailey Hall’s “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels,” pivots to contemporary reimaginings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intimacies in recent queer romance novels. Hall considers Olivia Waite’s Regency romance novel, The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019), as an exemplum of the recent turn to queer historical romance within romance publishing. For Hall, Waite’s novel offers a counternarrative to the assumption that queer historical love stories are inevitably tragic and, in doing so, meditates on the affordances and limits of reparative archival practices that inflect romance novels’ speculative dimensions.

Essays in “Queer Ecologies and Cartographies” turn to Caribbean settings—real and imagined—to survey how ecologies and nonhuman beings shaped intimacy in the long eighteenth century. The two chapters draw from recent scholarship in ecocriticism on the imbrication of race and sexuality in imperial projects to suggest how eighteenth-century texts are central to the crises of our environmental present. Chapter 6, M. A. Miller’s “Matters of Intimacy: The Sugar-Cane’s Asexual Ecologies” turns to vegetal and soil life in and beyond James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar Cane (1764) to explore forms of life that exceed and transgress efforts to manage their reproduction. By tracking the porous entanglements between soil and “the proliferating scales of life and vitality that soil attends to,” Miller “unearth[s] responses and resistances to sexualities of containment produced by colonial acts of enclosure during the Plantationocene.”

Following, chapter 7, Tess J. Given’s “Fantasy Maps and Projective Fictions,” begins with a reading of the fictionalized map that prefaces Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Using this map as an entry point that opens a gap between projection and perception, Given explores the ways in which mapping projects necessarily have an embedded “erotics of non-relation” that occlude the possibility of relations as a form of colonial power. These erotics, Given argues, shape how relations are captured, spatialized, and made “real.”

Our last section, “Racializing Affect, Queering Temporality,” demonstrates that attention to race, gender, and sexuality must account for differential affects and temporalities as they appear throughout eighteenth-century archives. Chapter 8, “Dark and Delayed Labor: Sex Work and Racialized Time in Eighteenth-Century London” by Nour Afara, reshapes considerations of sex work in the eighteenth century, which have heretofore prioritized white women and eclipsed intersectional discussions of racialized sex work. Afara conceptualizes idleness as a racialized affect to recover evidence of dark-skinned sex workers in the fictionalized collection of memoirs The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, as Supposed to be Related by Themselves (1760). This archival work reveals important connections between eighteenth-century understandings of racialization and what were considered valid or invalid types of work and embodiment.

Chapter 9, Jeremy Chow and Riley DeBaecke’s “Unsettling Happiness: Blackness, Gender, and Affect in The Woman of Colour and Its Media Afterlives,” considers how the marriage plot reinforces formations of happiness that are whitewashed through hetero-domesticity. Chow and DeBaecke read Olivia Fairfield as one model to think through “Blackened happiness,” which, in its attempt to unsettle whitewashed notions of happiness, accounts for an intersectional experience by Black and mixed-race women in which happiness exists outside of or in contradistinction to the marriage plot. They trace this pattern and its complications further in Amma Asante’s Belle (2013) to reveal alternative horizons for racialized affects, especially happiness, that are constructed along racial and sexual vertices in the Caribbean and England.

Eugenia Zuroski’s “Coda: Eighteenth-Century Longing” concludes this collection by returning to Muñoz and the prospect of queer utopianism. In conversation with Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch on the utopian imaginaries of sausage, this coda-cum-conclusion proposes a series of questions that invite us to consider what is at stake in a project such as this one, in which collective (be)longing is proffered and established. Has, Zuroski asks, the long eighteenth century now—decades into the twenty-first century—become too long, and how might any attempt at coherence reflect a neo-imperial impulse at enclosure? For Zuroski, queer utopianism is one such skeleton key through which we might resist the territorialization of the long eighteenth century in favor of indeterminacy, unsettling, and queer longing.

In seeking to extricate whiteness from queer studies and reimagine it while also accounting for how decolonial reckonings do not exist on the fringe, Unsettling Sexuality intends to establish new directions in queer, sexuality, and decolonial eighteenth-century studies by examining their mutually informative crosshatchings. Through their jointure, new horizons can flourish, and this volume sets the stage for innovation, ingenuity, interdisciplinary, and insights aplenty. By moving toward and upon these queer horizons, this collection aspires, as Ahmed teaches us, to become collective—not as a homogenous monolith but rather as a fluid body leaching out for connection and alternative paths of contact.

NOTES

1. 1. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15.

2. 2. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 22.

3. 3. “Two-Spirit” was adopted in 1990 at the Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg, and rejects previous terms projected onto Native cultures by settler anthropologists. Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen argue in their introduction to Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 1–28, that Two-Spirit is not a stable referent for “authentic” Native culture but “was designed as a logic and method to confound such desires. Displacing a prior generation’s interest in anthropological authority, Two-Spirit became frustrating, complicating, and exciting by shifting the terms on which knowledge of Indigenous people would be produced” (17).

4. 4. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 3, 78.

5. 5. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25.

6. 6. Chris Mounsey, ed., Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015); Robin Runia, ed., The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2017); Jolene Zigarovich, ed., TransGothic in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017); Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska, eds., Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

7. 7. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 13.

8. 8. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (Oct. 2005): 1608–1617; Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Abdulhamit Arvas, “Performing and Desiring Gender Variance in the Ottoman Empire,” in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. Anna Klosowska, Masha Raskolnikov, and Greta LaFleur (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), 160–177.

9. 9. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3–6. For a discussion of “common sense” in eighteenth-century British philosophy, especially the work of Jeremy Bentham, see Carrie D. Shanafelt, Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), 11–15, 21–24.

10. 10. Elizabeth Freeman, Besides You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 12–13.

11. 11. Freeman, Besides You in Time, 15.

12. 12. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 15.

13. 13. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 26.

14. 14. Sal Nicolazzo, “Another 1987, or Whiteness and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 233–238 (234). See also Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

15. 15. Megan Peiser, “We Have Always Been Here: Indigenous Scholars in/and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 181–188.

16. 16. Jeremy Chow, “Queer Rage against the (Eighteenth-Century) Machine,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 3 (Spring 2022): 333–346 (344).

17. 17. See Ta-Nahisi Coates on the grotesque masquerade of good intentions, which exonerates hegemonic whiteness and its oppression of people of color, especially Black and enslaved descendants in the United States. Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 33–34.

18. 18. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.

19. 19. Catherine E. Walsh and Walter Mignolo, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 3. On decolonial methods and Indigenous studies, see also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), 12–13; and Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 4–22.

20. 20. María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 742–759.

21. 21. Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 36.

22. 22. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 533–580.

23. 23. On recovering African American queer and trans lives, see Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019). On the sometimes fraught intersections between Indigenous and queer studies, see Jodi Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?: Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, no. 4 (December 2020): 105–123; and Elizabeth Povinelli, Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For queer Middle Eastern and South Asian studies and the recuperation of queer and trans lives, see Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). These scholars represent vital citational nodes for this collection.

24. 24. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 1–40.

25. 25. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 17.

26. 26. Lisa Lowe, “Response: Intimacies as Method,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 207–213 (207).

27. 27. Lowe, “Response”; and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

28. 28. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 388.

29. 29. For queer embodiments and intimacies and early African American literature, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Brigitte Fielder, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). For early Indigenous Two-Spirit embodiments and relations, see Deborah Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 16, no. 1–2 (April 2010): 253–284; Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?; Kai Pyle, “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language,” TSQ: Transgender Quarterly 5, no. 4 (November 2018): 574–588; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resurgence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 119–144; and Qwo-Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). For a theorization of colonial gender, see María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, ed. W. Harcourt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 13–33.

30. 30. Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 123.

31. 31. Katherine Binhammer, “Is the Eighteenth Century a Colonizing Temporality?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2020–2021): 199–204.

32. 32. Sarah Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (January 2014): 27–32 (30).

33. 33. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 3. For an early American context, see also Jordan Alexander Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 855–869.

34. 34. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14 (11).

35. 35. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12.

36. 36. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12–13; Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229; and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

37. 37. See Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 6–10; Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 8–10; and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

38. 38. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2–3 (June 2008): 191–215 (198).

39. 39. Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 60.

40. 40. Melissa K. Nelson, “Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures,” Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 229–260 (232).

41. 41. For Black “human-being,” see Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); King, The Black Shoals, 78, 114; and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 1–8.

42. 42. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas,” 256.

43. 43. On the imbrications of settler colonialism with whiteness and queer embodiments, see Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 11–13; and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 39–40.