This panel demonstrates how queer theory animates the methods, and frames the objects, that scholars have developed for the study of early America. Following the important collection Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (eds. Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly), the papers presented here situate the field of early America in broader, more interconnected forms of cultural analysis that have the potential to speak to a variety of other fields. As such, these papers show how early American studies contributes to a variety of fields, from Transnational Studies to Indigenous Studies, and from sexuality studies to material text studies. Through bringing together both transnational and hemispheric frames—in addition to more local and material textual questions about queer sexuality and privacy—this panel illuminates the profound breadth of possibility that emerges when queer as a heuristic is deployed in scholarly analysis. The thinking on display builds from recent scholarship by Greta LaFleur, Scott Larson, and Jordan Alexander Stein, who all in various ways demonstrate the environmental and book history contexts for rethinking how queer intersects with sexuality.

The panel is organized with four speakers who will speak for 15-18 minutes to allow for a robust concluding conversation. Leah Thomas in “Third Space: Queering America in Early American Literature” builds out a global perspective for thinking about the status of North America to situate the gendered performances of the protagonist in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism. This approach demonstrates the expanding frames that trouble colonial categories that would otherwise contain and constrain, showing how decolonial possibilities emerge. In a similar transatlantic lens, Rajender Kaur in “Of Topeewallahs and the Zenana: Queering Narrative subjectivity in Bartholomew Burges’ A Series of Indostan Letters (1799)” considers a little known early American travelogue for how it traverses a variety of gender boundaries and norms. Through this focus on transatlantic crossings, Kaur shows how these improvisations of gender index the shifting terrain of identification in the eighteenth century. Next, and turning from these larger, global frames, the next two papers take a microscope to individual novels that continue to inspire queer analysis. Nicholas Adler in “‘Arrayed in a White Robe Devoid of Ornament’: Early American Virginity and Queer Theoretical Sex,” considers the category of asexuality within the canonical novel Charlotte Temple, commenting on the works of Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, and Lee Edelman who have all in various ways thought about the status of sex in queer analysis. By providing a new way to think of intimacy, Adler develops specific language that attends to desire outside of a psychoanalytically informed model of repression. Maggie Muehleman in “Intimate Interruptions: Fragmentation, Withdrawal, and the Queerness of Privacy in Foster’s The Coquette” similarly delves into the unstated and undone by focusing on how the novel queers the line between the scene of private writing and the moment of interruption that frames the novel’s repressed representation of intimacy.

Through bringing together scholars from various positions in the academy, who also have diverse histories of multidisciplinary training, this panel will provide an important cross-section of recent work in early American literary and cultural studies and the global implications of such work. Additionally, the advancement of thinking about the objects and methods that collate together the various forms of queerness responds to contemporary efforts that would marginalize and stigmatize queer modes of inquiry; instead, this panel demonstrates the creative and generative possibilities that emerge when queer, as a category of analysis, provides a way into thinking of power, relationality, and identification.