Patrick Kindig on Jess Shollenberger’s *Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism*

Jess Shollenberger’s Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism begins with a simple observation: “queer people lead ordinary lives” (2). In other words, classical queer theory may like to imagine queerness as definitionally extraordinary, “in excess of, beyond, and against the ordinary world, its expectations and its patterns,” but such a stance fails to account for the way most queer people spend most of their time: cooking, cleaning, letting the dog out, calling the plumber—in other words, performing those small acts of care that sustain everyday life (1). This is not to say, of course, that queers do not engage in radical political activities or non-normative sexual practices; it is simply to acknowledge that queer life is also filled with (and given meaning by) mundane, daily tasks.

Ordinary Queerness takes such tasks seriously, arguing that the ordinary represents “a meaningful part of queer life, a doing within which queerness happens, grows, gets taught and learned, configured, practiced, reinvented, valued,” and “loved,” particularly in the context of American modernism (4). Such “a doing,” it moreover suggests, has historically been most important to queer women writers, as the ordinary is often feminized. To make its argument, the book examines the work of four women it identifies as queer (though not all of them are homosexual) and modernist (though not all of them are typically viewed as such): Sarah Orne Jewett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gertrude Stein, and Elizabeth Bishop. Each of these figures receives her own chapter, and each is associated with a particular form of ordinary queerness. As a whole, the book demonstrates that, in the modernist canon, ordinary queerness often hides in plain sight, “present yet unremarkable, neither hidden in the closet nor spectacular in plain view” (147).

The book’s project is keyed to a very real oversight in scholarly accounts of modernist queerness, and its analysis usefully illustrates how we might conceive of queerness beyond the walls of the closet or the bedroom. Take, for example, the fourth and final body chapter, which argues that Bishop’s practice of describing mundane but elusive things in her poetry represents an ordinary instance of queerness. Noting that this practice “names those things that slide away just when you are trying to name them” (such as, most memorably, the armadillo that appears at the end of Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo”), Shollenberger shows that conventional understandings of queerness as a force of illegibility and indeterminacy might inflect everyday acts of poetic attention (123). In doing so, they lay out a vision of queerness that is neither sexy nor socially radical, one that manifests in profoundly ordinary ways.

In some of the book’s other chapters, however, the relationship between ordinariness and queerness is a little less clear. The second chapter, for example, examines how a straight writer (Brooks) uses two straight characters (Annie Allen in Annie Allen and Maude Martha in Maude Martha) to “invest…the Black ordinary and specifically Black women’s lives with literary and political value” (66). Though nothing about either of these characters seems, at face value, to be queer—both marry men, and neither expresses any erotic interest in women—the chapter argues that, because they exhibit a kind of excessive attachment to everyday scenes and objects, we should think of them as “queer enough” (70). In arguing this, the chapter effects a subtle reversal of the book’s central thesis: rather than suggest that queer people lean on the ordinary for sustenance, the chapter claims that leaning on the ordinary might itself make a person queer. And while the ordinary certainly constitutes an important but understudied dimension of queer life, it also constitutes an important dimension of non-queer life. It is thus a bit difficult to buy some of the chapter’s claims, such as its suggestion that we read Annie Allen as queer when she romantically daydreams about “impossible men” (72). (What, after all, could be straighter than that?) Though the book’s overarching argument may be compelling, then, some of its individual readings—particularly in the Brooks chapter (but also, to a lesser extent, in the Jewett chapter)—are perhaps less convincing.

Nonetheless, Ordinary Queerness offers a useful corrective to the queer-theoretical tendency to celebrate libidinal flux, fluidity, and rebellion over everyday practices of care. Rather than call for a toppling of the social order, the book merely aims “to glimpse a livable world” for queers (148). Today, more than ever, this seems like a laudable goal, and it is no minor achievement that Ordinary Queerness brings us one step closer to it.