I am interested in the role that a modern time and thus a modern history plays in regulating attachments and desires. At the same time, I am interested in the role that a queer and fat history can play in helping us imagine alternatives and thus to create different attachments and communities, across time. As literary theorists observe, time and thus history plays a central role in making certain identities desirable, and others undesirable. Queer studies, fat studies, and early modern studies all have reasons to "queer" history because a modern form of reductive history makes the study of these subjects of inconsequence. The queer, the fat, and the early modern are made into the "before" of our much-desired "after."
Several of my publications discuss the role that a reductive form of modern time plays in regulating our attachments. See especially the two articles, "History Straight and Narrow" and my "Burning in Sodom" in my selected list of publications. I begin in these works to offer an alternative history insofar as I encourage us to see figures like Marvell through a different temporal lens. In two personal essays, "'So Much Meat'" and "Making the Impossible Possible" I explore one strategy that can be used to write a history that queers modern time. Rather than pretending to write a history that is objective or empiricist in form, we can write a history that focuses on subjective experiences, including our own experiences of our body and of pain.
A queer and fat history needs to reject the teleological thrust of modern history by promoting attachments across time. In "History Straight and Narrow," I promoted such an attachment to a "lesbian" Marvell, who is a lesbian to the extent to which he refuses the militant, militaristic triumphalism of a General Fairfax and aligns himself, instead, with the wayward "lesbian" nuns and his pupil, Mary Fairfax.
I pursue a similar fat history in my book (in press, Palgrave Macmillan), The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Shape in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton. A consideration of the early modern period helps us see beyond the late modern construct, "obesity," which seems all-too natural to us. Although the civilized elite in the period begin to promote a thin aesthetic, several of the authors I examine, especially Skelton, Shakespeare, and Jonson, actually align themselves with the defiant fat bodies of their characters. We can learn from them about the power and pleasure that comes from aligning ourselves with the past over the future, with the queer over the straight, and with the fat over the thin.
- For a list of selected publications, click the following link: Selected Publications.
- For a list of selected conference presentations, click the following link: Selected Presentations.
- For a list of the courses I teach, click the following link: Courses.