Weak Feelings: Femininity, Affect, and Sexuality in Modern Fiction and Theory.

Abstract

Weak Feelings: Femininity, Affect, and Sexuality in Modern Fiction and Theory recuperates what I call “weak feeling” in the period during which libidinal desire was the primary mode of constructing gender and sexuality. Early twentieth-century psychoanalytic discourses of the libido imagined erotic attachment and gender identification as an energetic and biological instinct. As these discourses of sexuality inundated public consciousness, women who lacked libidinal desire were labeled repressed or perverse. Against this pathologization, the four “weak feelings” that I trace—liking, susceptibility, influence, and interest—cluster around femininity within modern fiction not as symptoms of diseased libido but as forms of attachment in their own right. Each chapter explores the limitations presented by the libido as a hermeneutic device for sexuality in modernist fiction and psychoanalysis and offers a “surface reading” of a literary text that sets erotic desire aside in order to explore how weak feelings function. Reading “liking” within Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel, Chapter 1 examines how the assumption of libidinal energy in queer and feminist theory pigeonholes femininity as the failure of lesbian desire. Chapter 2 takes Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer as an occasion to juxtapose lessons from the history of sexuality alongside the theorization of sentimentality. It proposes that the “susceptibility” to affective encounters deployed by the novel’s sentimental mode disorients the subject/object binaries that sustain libidinal desire. The reading of E.M. Forster’s Howards End in Chapter 3 troubles the relationship between libidinal desire and political desire through an analysis of feminine influence. Finally, the reading of Henry James’s The Awkward Age in Chapter 4 critiques the emphasis on confession within theories of sexuality in order to analyze the opaque ways that women encounter knowledge around sex, gender, and sexuality in the past. Throughout, Weak Feelings sticks with the impasses within critical methods of knowing sexuality afforded by placing femininity at the center of one’s investigations. In so doing, it argues that femininity is not only an occasion for identification and/or desire—including queer desire—but also a site of epistemological trouble for both what we know about sexuality and how we go about knowing it.