@article{THESIS,
      recid = {7583},
      author = {McDaniel, Sarah Adeline},
      title = {Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+  Life-Writing},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {203},
      abstract = {Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+  Life-Writing brings together a diverse array of literary,  aesthetic, and cultural artifacts spanning the twentieth  century under the rubric of “queer correspondence.” I use  “queer correspondence” as an analytical framework that  animates two axes of inquiry: on the one hand, it denotes a  genre of literary forms characterized by intersubjective  relation and address (such as letters, epistolary fiction,  and diary); on the other hand, it offers an interpretive  methodology, one that is uniquely attuned to the untidiness  of interpersonal encounter – the peculiar way in which  relational forms interpellate readers across time and  space. The transhistorical intervention of Queer  Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing is  twofold: the project argues that unfinishedness is a key  parameter of queer correspondence and charts a range of  critical approaches that grapple with this  open-endedness.

Conceptually, Queer Correspondence:  Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing pursues two  questions: How is correspondence queer? And how does  correspondence make queers of us? Methodologically, the  dissertation addresses these questions by assembling an  archive of largely epistolary life-writings produced by  North American and European LGBTQ+ artists and activists  spanning the long twentieth century. Each chapter animates  a set of parameters or features of queer correspondence in  the context of a specific intimate relationship or  lifeworld. Every chapter considers queer correspondent or  epistolary materials legible as such – the published  letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; Sylvia  Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland’s private  correspondences; faxes and open letters created by the AIDS  Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The project also  attends to life-writing artifacts that may not be overtly  “epistolary” in form but nevertheless engage conventional  protocols of letter-writing, and thus may be theorized as  surrogate letters, taking the form of published (indeed,  bestselling) novels, diary entries, political  demonstrations. These actual and surrogate letters may be  intimate, private between two, and yet accessible (even  addressed) to others; out of their epistolary  life-writings, they are formed into archives, narratives,  and gardens that will eventually meet with new  interlocutors and addressees. In assembling these diverse  materials under the rubric of queer correspondence, this  dissertation seeks to unyoke the generic construction of  correspondence from its expected forms, unspooling address  from its conventional coordinates.

Beyond epistolary forms  and stylistics, queer correspondences instantiate a field  liable to be breached by an outside interloper: a third (or  fourth) person who casts a shadow over the correspondents’  you and I. Address, Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form  and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing maintains, is unfinished business,  enduring beyond the specific historical present of its  diegesis to hail new addressees across time. By exploring  how each epistolary field of the dissertation alternately  beckons, summons, assembles, and/or imagines in a tertiary  reader, I argue for a renewed attention to address as a  critical parameter of queer activism, cultural expression,  and communal history and historiography.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7583},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7583},
}