Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

Winner, 2023 CCCC Exemplar Award Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. In a time of political, social, global, and ecological unrest, how might we understand desire—the desire for things to be different, the desire for a better world—as a crucial dimension of contemporary human experience? What might such a recentering of desire offer us, personally and politically? And how is writing itself, as one of the primary ways through which we express and explore ourselves, central to the expression and exploration of desire? Drawing on recent theoretical work in queer theory and the new materialism, Jonathan Alexander studies a range of queer and trans writers and artists who center desire in their practice and argues that conceptualizing writing as desire allows us to reexperience both writing and our world as saturated with our dreams and wishes for change. In a book both elegant and unsettling, and by turns personal, analytic, and experimental, Alexander challenges us—and himself—to think about desire and writing as the deepest manifestation of our hopes for the future. Contents Acknowledgments Prelude. Beginning Again Movement One. Desiring Connection Intermezzo: Connecting through Pain, or the Case of Nayland Blake Movement Two. Desiring Material Intermezzo: Photographing a Bruise, or Catherine Opie’s Rhetorical Landscapes Movement Three. Speculative Desires Intermezzo: Come Together, or the Arts of Queer Desire in a Time of Social Distancing Movement Four. Desiring Time Intermezzo: Burning Time, or Memory and the Queer Imagination Coda. Desiring Legacy, Refusing Legacy Appendix. The Burning Time Poems Notes Works Cited Index