Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.
Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.
Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Emotional Rescue: The Demands of Queer History Chapter 2. Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Backward Modernism Chapter 3. The End of Friendship: Willa Cather’s Sad Kindred Chapter 4. Spoiled Identity: Radclyffe Hall’s Unwanted Being Chapter 5. Impossible Objects: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Longing for Revolution Epilogue: The Politics of Refusal Notes Acknowledgments Index
What People are Saying About This
Mark Simpson
Like Lot's wife, I like to look over my shoulder too much at salty scenes from the shameful past-- though I've yet to turn into a pillar of the community. The delightfully named Heather Love makes all that hankering after pre-gay sex on Hampstead Heath seem slightly romantic and illuminates why and how the queer past is not always about waiting for Stonewall and disco to happen.
— Mark Simpson, Editor of Anti-Gay
It seems to me this discontinuous book is a little bit like the stations of the cross. I mean if you like to stop, and most of us do. And sometimes the street was filled with us. All thinking about someone else. They are the past inside our present. He just put one in a cab. I like Feeling Backward... a lot.
Diana Fuss
Heather Love is the Marcel Proust of contemporary theory. Disappointed love and tormented desire find a compassionate commentator in Love, who turns to queer history's tragic, lonely, and despairing figures, not to sublimate or to save them, but to recognize and to respect them. A wise, worldly, and winning book. — Diana Fuss, Professor of English, Princeton University
Judith Halberstam
What does it mean to "feel backward"? By turning to, rather than away from, the texts of shame, injury, loss and failure that populate a queer past, Heather Love manages to shift queer studies away from the straight and narrow and back onto the slippery slope of stigma and dismay. Love refuses the triumphalist accounts of gay and lesbian progress and she insists on the spoiling of identity and on the political importance of "bad feelings." This is a rigorous book, a brave book, a wildly original and unrelenting book. It will be a central text in the backward future of queer studies. — Judith Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place
Robert F. Reid-Pharr
In supple readings of difficult, sometimes disturbing, yet always fascinating texts and contexts, Heather Love demonstrates that if we are to seriously engage with the queer past we must welcome the shame, fear, loneliness, obstinacy, and indeed backwardness that we encounter there. For all that, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, with its beautiful prose, stunning theoretical sophistication, careful attention to detail, as well as a hard-headed respect for the artists and critics whom it treats, is a stunningly hopeful book. Throughout Love links her critiques of celebratory queer criticism with a passionate concern for the opening up of progressive forms of intellectual and political life. — Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual
Eileen Myles
It seems to me this discontinuous book is a little bit like the stations of the cross. I mean if you like to stop, and most of us do. And sometimes the street was filled with us. All thinking about someone else. They are the past inside our present. He just put one in a cab. I like Feeling Backward... a lot.
— Eileen Myles, poet
D.A. Miller
Now that, in the latest twist of tolerance, gays are required to flaunt their well-adjustedness, Feeling Backward may feel backward indeed as it contemplates the pain, anger, isolation, and sheer crankiness, prominent in literary figures of our queer past. But it is harder than ever to pause for thought—and not simply revulsion or compassion—over these prickly and unwholesome feelings, which lead an increasingly closeted existence in ourselves. Heather Love is in astonishing possession of the negative capability required by her undertaking, and her analytic finesse proves well-matched to her ethical delicacy. This book—together with the constellation of work it gathers around itself—belongs to what may deservedly be called a new wave in queer studies. — D.A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley
