Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless accounts of The Well and its trials, with Douglas’s “resonant acid sound bite” generally and mistakenly taken as evidence of widespread homophobia and mainstream moral panic. For Hall, however, the “poison” part of Douglas’s comment—which he borrowed from Lord Campbell, orchestrator of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act—may not have been as remarkable or as objectionable as the “healthy boy or a healthy girl.” Responding to an enquiry from literary critic Gorham Munson in 1934, six years after The Well’s publication and UK ban, Hall made it quite clear that her novel had not been written for children, healthy or otherwise: “I consider that the young should be guarded in their homes, that parents and guardians should be the only censors. I, personally, have never set out to write books that are suitable for the nursery.” Hall’s acerbic (if belated) rejoinder to Douglas is followed by an unexpected leap from reality into metaphor. Having considered parental responsibilities toward real-life child readers, Hall goes on to denounce the irresponsible creation of “dirty, unloved, lewd” book-babies:

Although I have been living alone for a few years, I still remember having roommates and how communal living shapes domestic space and the rhythms of daily life. I remember how thin walls, bleary mornings, and long evenings in shared kitchens and living rooms inevitably lead you to learn more about your cohabitants than you’d perhaps like, the mutual exposure to daily patterns of work and leisure, mood shifts, and the vicissitudes of bodies creating an intimacy that emerges from the slow...

In the introduction to her 500-page unpublished manuscript, A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the writer, teacher, astrologer, farmer, and herbalist Silvia Dobson recounts her first correspondence with H.D. in 1933—a “rapturous” fan letter sent to a poet whom she did not know was “a man or a woman? Alive or dead?”

As Janine Utell writes of her experience in the opening post of this forum, reader reports can helpfully push our work forward towards publication. But she also points out that they can (perhaps unintentionally) dismantle our attempts to draw attention to what is excluded from conventional scholarly inquiry. I, too, recently was struck by a particularly provocative comment on an article I submitted on the writer Katherine Mansfield, and similarly have now come to realize that traditional...

Personal writing is having a moment. The recent attention to autotheory has enlivened longstanding debates about the politics of the personal as a critical scholarly mode, opening out new lines of inquiry into genre, method, and argument specifically around minoritarian aesthetics and the potential of scholarly work to elaborate forms of social justice. [1] Across what Robyn Wiegman has called “identity knowledges,” the institutionalized fields of study that focus on gender, race, ethnicity...

Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her lover Freda Ward rocked their well-to-do Memphis community and scandalized the nation. The masculine Mitchell slashed Ward’s throat in broad daylight when Ward decided not to marry Mitchell. Lisa Duggan has provided the richest account of the murder to date and has exhaustively detailed the way that it was sensationalized in the period press as “a Very Unnatural Crime,” representing “a new narrative-in-formation—a cultural marker of the emergence of a partially cross-gender-identified lesbian.”

In 1990, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick declared the closet “the defining structure for gay oppression in this century,” she followed that claim with a reference to the legal discourses of privacy, specifically those concentrated around the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the existence of anti-sodomy laws. As she describes them, the conversations following this case zoomed in on “the image of the bedroom invaded by policemen,” implicitly affirming that queerness belongs behind closed doors, while policemen belong in the street.

In a scene midway through Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, the little tomboy Bechdel sits with her father in a small-town Pennsylvania luncheonette when, together, they look (or rather he swivels to glower and she stares moon-eyed) at a bulldyke standing at the counter. “Is that what you want to look like?” her father hisses derisively across the laminate table, compelling his child to answer, falsely, “no” (fig. 1). This glimpse of a butch truck driver “sustained” the queer child...

“Marvelous and somehow sad, flamboyant, and threatening .” The words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, writing in a letter to describe the extraordinary tropical plant life encountered at the Sítio Burle Marx, the hundred-acre home and nursery of Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil’s best-known landscape architect and a key figure in the country’s modernist movement. Although Bishop had already lived in Brazil for ten years when she wrote this, the Sítio Burle Marx, located on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, was and continues to be an incomparably rich showcase for botanical exotica collected on the designer’s many scouting expeditions to remote Brazilian biomes (fig. 1). A polymath, “one of the real Brazilian geniuses” in Bishop’s words, Burle Marx was a celebrated painter, tapestry artist, and muralist ( Words in Air, 361). But it was as a landscape designer where his influence was most profound. From 1938 onward, when he contributed a garden for a Le Corbusier–designed building in downtown Rio de Janeiro, his designs and writings served as a persuasive argument for the use of indigenous rather than European plants. (To some, his gardens were a living embodiment of antropofagia, the Brazilian modernist turn to indigenous traditions, alongside a cannibalistic digestion of colonial influence.) He increased the amount of greenery in Brazilian cities and, beginning in the 1960s, advocated fiercely for the protection of the Amazon and other threatened biomes. On a formal level, his crucial innovation was to isolate and concentrate a few extravagant species of plant, pruning back the dense ecodiversity of the rain forest into an expressive, “artificial” style. Indeed, while Bishop is ostensibly describing the qualities of plants she encountered at the Sítio, her use of the word “flamboyant” points beyond them to the camp manner of the designer himself (fig. 2).

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison calls for “studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. . . . Such studies,” she continues, “will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos.” In demonstrating the reflexive role that Africanist personae play in white American literature—the manner by which white people construct blackness as a screen for the projections that enable, through simultaneous disavowal and enforcement, their identifications as white—“Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one’s own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other” (Morrison, Playing, 53). In other words, the legacy of white American literature is such that the presence of a Black character often tells us exclusively about whiteness, rather than about blackness: knowledge of Black people or of blackness in general serves less as a contrast to the whiteness of the author or of their white characters than as what Morrison terms their “shadow,” an obscuration of the accumulation of contradictory affects—desire and revulsion, identification and antipathy, pity and fear—that grounds and enables whiteness in its literary (and, as we will see, psychic) manifestation. The presence of Black characters, or in Morrison’s language, Africanist personae, thus represents a need in the imagination of the white writer for a textual strategy that will allow the exploration of white identity without having to identify with its internal contradictions and both historical and present violence. The white writer accomplishes this evasion by projecting the psychic material of whiteness onto their representation of a phantasmatic Black body, overdetermining it. This study of Elizabeth Bishop attempts to answer Morrison’s call in Playing in the Dark. Alongside several letters spaced throughout her career, I here read three poems of Bishop’s for their representations of both race and desire, situating desire (and particularly sexuality) in Bishop’s writing as the point of most urgent identificatory instability wherein the sense of a white self is most obviously a projection onto a racialized Other. Across these poems, sexuality constitutes, in Morrison’s language, a situation of “external and internal chaos,” a situation which simultaneously demands the penetration of one’s own body to know it and the disguise of that intimate self-exploration as penetrative knowledge of the racial Other. The first two poems in this essay, “Cootchie” and “Songs for a Colored Singer,” come from the end of Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946). The third, “In the Waiting Room,” is the first poem in her final collection, Geography III (1976). The arc of my reading neither seeks to charge Bishop with racial animus nor to exonerate her from charges of racial insensitivity. Rather, what I seek to do is to reveal a long movement in Bishop’s thought from the notion of race as merely a marker of otherness to a recognition that whiteness is also a race, that she also occupies a racialized subject position. Such a movement seems like a rather small one on the page, visible only in minor rhetorical and perspectival shifts from poem to poem. My contention, however, is that the identificatory and affective mechanisms that these minor shifts disclose are operative on the deepest levels of self-fashioning, not only for Bishop, but for many white people (myself included) whose politics and lives skew progressive and cosmopolitan according to the standards of their times. More simply, fantasies of desire, broadly construed, offer themselves to many white people as sites wherein repressed racisms of various kinds may manifest.