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Conflicts in Appraising Lesbian Pulp Novels Julie Botnick IS 438A

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Pulp Frictions: Conflicts in Appraising Lesbian Pulp Novels
Julie Botnick
IS 438A: Seminar in Archival Appraisal
June 14, 2018

Abstract

The years between 1950 and 1965 were the “golden age” of lesbian pulp novels, which provided some of the only representations of lesbians in the mid-20th century. Thousands of these novels sit in plastic sleeves on shelves in special collections around the United States, valued for their evocative covers and campy marketing language. Devoid of accompanying documentation which elaborates on the affective relationships lesbians had with these novels in their own time, the pulps are appraised for their value as visual objects rather than their role in people’s lives. The appraisal decisions made around these pulps are interdependent with irreversible decisions around access, exhibition, and preservation. I propose introducing affect as an appraisal criterion to build equitable collections which reflect full, holistic life experiences. This would do better justice to the women of the past who relied on these books for survival.

1
“Deep within me the joy spread…
As my whole being convulsed in ecstasy I could feel Marilyn sharing my miracle.”

From These Curious Pleasures by Sloan Britain, 1961

Lesbian pulp novels provided some of the only representations of lesbians in the mid-20th century. Cheaper than a pack of gum, these ephemeral novels were enjoyed in private and passed discreetly around, stuffed under mattresses, or tossed out with the trash. Today, thousands of these novels sit in plastic sleeves on shelves in special collections around the United States, valued for their evocative covers and campy marketing language. Devoid of accompanying documentation which elaborates on the affective relationships lesbians had with these novels in their own time, the pulps are appraised for their value as visual objects rather than their role in people’s lives. The appraisal decisions made around these pulps are interdependent with irreversible decisions around access, exhibition, and preservation. Rather than build vast, standalone pulp collections, archivists can introduce affect as an appraisal criterion to build equitable collections which reflect lesbians’ full, holistic life experiences.
The years between 1950 and 1965 were the “golden age” of lesbian pulp novels. Begin-

ning with the publication of Tereska Torres’s W o men ’ s B arracks and Marijane Meaker’s Spring

Fire, published under the pseudonym Vin Packer, lesbian pulp fiction emerged as a distinct commercial and literary genre, with thousands of men and women publishing in the space. Written in the context of the shifting gender and social roles of the post-World War II era and reflecting Cold War anxieties, these novels are today generally discounted as campy, low-brow, and homophobic, by readership numbers alone likely appealing more to the “prurient interests”1 of straight men as much, if not more, than to lesbians, but in their own time, they “mattered intensely” to lesbians, “suppl[ying] a nourishment” that they “found necessary to their survival — lesbian representation.”2 Especially outside of coastal urban centers, these novels were often isolat-

1 Wooten, Kelly. n.d. “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” Duke University. https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps.

2 As quoted in Keller, Yvonne. 2005. “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?’: Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” American Quarterly 57 (2): 385.

2ed lesbians’ “only source of affirmation of sexual identity”3 even if these narrow, fictional representations of their lives were distorted and cruel.4 As Donna Allegra recalls, “No matter how embarrassed and ashamed I felt when I went to the cash register to buy [pulps], it was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.”5
The pulps all fulfill similar expectations in their readers through parallel structures of form and characters. The “requisite tragic ending”6 is a defining feature, not just a pattern, of the genre. Because of censorship laws, a legal defense was needed to justify the books’ circulation and differentiate the genre from and elevate it above mere pornography, which overwhelmingly manifested in “moral” conclusions “to balance out the licentiousness of her actions”7 — punishments, accidents, suicides, murders, or redemption by marriage to a man — or as one young, queer-identified student put it, “the ‘go straight or die’ ending.”8 The genre reified lesbians’ low place in society by portraying “the general misery of a lesbian existence” even while offering some comfort or inclusion to lesbians around the country.9
Even more than the content, though, the genre is defined by scholars today by the books’ covers.10 Michael Denning, writing about dime novels, gives a “commercial definition” for these books within genre studies, in which a genre is defined by its status as a product within the marketplace. Scholars, then, can look at what publishers signify in their marketing decisions rather

3 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

4 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

5 Donna Allegra, as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 385. 6 “Passions Uncovered: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Pulps,” n.d., University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php.

7 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

8 Cheryl Cordingley, Interview with Julie Botnick, Los Angeles, CA, June 12, 2018. 9 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

10 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 393.

3than the words books contain.11 By this definition, the covers were “the most important” aspect of these books; “certainly it was to lesbians at the time.”12 The cover illustrations, sordid and sultry tableaus of “‘butches’ and cowering negligee-clad femmes, of Greenwich Village street corners and meaningful glances, and paranoid and lustful blurbs,”13 rarely even matched the plots of the novels. They were not-so-subtly coded with soapy images and words like “strange,” “odd,” and “shadows” in the titles or teasers.14 On a drugstore wall or a newsstand rack, the covers, not the content, drew in readers. As Lee Lynch writes, “their ludicrous and blatantly sensational cover copy were both my signals and my shame.”15
Pulps, by design and by function, were ephemeral. Published outside of mainstream channels, they were so cheaply made that they could be hidden, burned, left on a bus seat, or thrown in the trash with hardly a dent in one’s change purse. The stories are tame or even hilariously campy by today’s standards, but they were so threatening in their own time, they were rarely kept on a bookshelf. Once just a dime a pop, because of their ephemerality, pulps are highly valuable, collectible materials for private collectors and repositories today.
There are collections of lesbian pulp novels at repositories around the country. The major collections are within academic special collections and lesbian community archives, with the two types of archives having often contrasting appraisal, acquisition, and access criteria, policies, and implications. Some of the more prominent collections will be discussed here as case studies to highlight specific appraisal issues, though this is by no means an exhaustive survey of all the major lesbian pulp collections.
Most university repositories with lesbian pulp collections appraise and acquire these novels within broader collections of either human sexuality or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-

11 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396. 12 Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396. 13 “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965,” n.d., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/02/23/lesbian-pulp-novels-1935-1965.

14 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps

15 Lee Lynch as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 396.

4gender (LGBT) Studies. At Cornell University, the Lesbian Popular Fiction Collection of around 100 novels is nested within their Human Sexuality Collection, which “seeks to preserve and make accessible primary sources that document historical shifts in the social construction of sexuality, with a focus on U.S. lesbian and gay history and the politics of pornography.”16 The University of Saskatchewan’s collection is part of Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual Diversity, a project “to improve access to information on gender and sexual diversity available in the province’s libraries and archives.”17 Duke University’s collection is housed within the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and includes not just the original pulps but “several literary antecedents” and later reissues of pulps which offered “critical reappropriation and recontextualization of these works.”18 Mount Saint Vincent University’s collection is functionally restricted to scholars within the areas of Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, History, English, Sociology, and Psychology.19 At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the collecting area of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies focuses on pre-Stonewall documents of LGBT life and culture and local LGBT history, but with a “particular emphasis” on pulps.20
Community archives are eager to collect pulps as well. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in
Brooklyn holds a large collection of pulps — “These days every variety of sexual activity, described in great detail, is available from lesbian writers. Lesbian pulp was one of the starting points for these publishing movements and influenced many lesbian writers and publishers. Lesbian survival literature is one of the cornerstones and most-examined portions of the Lesbian

16 “About Gay and Lesbian Popular Fiction,” n.d., Cornell University Rare and Manuscript tions, https://rare.library.cornell.edu/collections/HSC/contents/books/popfiction.
Collec-
17 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php.

18 Wooten, “LibGuides: Lesbian & Gay Pulp Fiction: Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” https://guides.library.duke.edu/queerpulps/lesbianpulps.

19 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

20 “Special Collections Development Policy,” n.d., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, http:// uwm.edu/libraries/crm/collection-development-policy/special/.

5
Herstory Archives”21 — as does the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive in West Hollywood: “We also treasure our collection of out-of-date Lesbian fiction that captured the hearts of so many Lesbians who relied on Lesbian fiction to give them assurance and validation of their love of women.”22 Though these repositories generally do not collect mass-market, published fiction, pulps were so essential to the continuity of the lesbian community in the mid-20th century that they are a high collecting priority, and are collected in duplicate.
Regardless of the nature of the repository, New York University’s (NYU) Gay and Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection is the only one to emphasize the content of the books and not their covers. The finding aid to the collection notes “the political issues explored by our writers” who “grapple with contemporary issues such as crime (including hate crimes), racism, homophobia and misogyny, fascism, as well as the personal/professional opportunities available to gays and lesbians in the second half of the 20th century.”23 Otherwise, with the unspoken assumption that the content is too low-brow for serious scholars, the repositories universally emphasize the relevance of the covers for design and media arts, pop culture, and commercial history students and

,

scholars.24 25 If “Archival appraisal aims to make decision-making processes evident, not to document society,”26 these collections do their jobs; they evidence the process of deciding the cover design for commercial purposes and signaling to the consumer. This is evidence of a straightforward, commercial transaction, devoid of affect.

21 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

22 “Lesbian Book Collection,” n.d., June Mazer Lesbian Archives, http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org/ special-collections/lesbian-book-collection/.

23 “Guide to the Gay and Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection 1955-1988 MSS 116 MSS 116,” n.d., New York University, http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/gaypulp/scopecontent.html.

24 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

25 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php.

26 Angelika Menne-Haritz, “Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by Selecting Content?” The American Archivist, 57, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 541.

6
This emphasis on design, first, shapes scholars’ and the public’s expectations of the value of the books, second, justifies repositories’ decisions to restrict pulps, and finally, informs the appraisal decisions repositories make around digitization. Repositories themselves showcase and support scholarship on the cover designs. The University of Saskatchewan’s “Passions Uncovered,” for example, was a physical and now a digital exhibition of pulp paperback book covers.27 “Queer Covers: Lesbian Survival Literature” is one of Lesbian Herstory’s signature traveling exhibits, a pictorial history of the covers of pulps which plays on founder Joan Nestle’s term for them: “survival literature.”28 It is thus the study of design, and not textual content, of the books that repositories advertise to scholars, and what the public sees and expects to see of the materials.
Thus, these pulps are available for the public to see but not to read, as they were first encountered. At Mount Saint Vincent University, noting the fragility and scarcity of the pulps, the collection “is shelved in a locked case adjacent to the Reference area of the Library.”29 This ironically parallels the experience which initially drove some lesbians to pulps in their own time. As Judy Grahn remembers, “In 1961, when I was twenty-one, I went to a library in Washington, D.C., to read about homosexuals and Lesbians…The books on such a subject, I was told by indignant, terrified librarians unable to say aloud the word homosexual, were locked away…Only professors, doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers for the criminally insane could see them, check them out, hold them in their hands.”30 Pulps were so important to Grahn because they were touchable, out in the open, and available for her as a layperson, unlike the other materials in which she was represented. Now, as materials housed within special collections around the country, they are the books restricted to scholars with a stated research purpose rather than available

27 “Passions Uncovered,” University of Saskatchewan Library, https://library2.usask.ca/srsd/pulps/contact.php.

28 “Exhibits,” n.d., The Lesbian Herstory Archives, http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/ exhibits.html#queer.

29 “Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” Mount Saint Vincent University, http://www.msvu.ca/en/ home/library/aboutthelibrary/policiesprocedures/collectionpolicy/ lesbianpulpfictioncollection.aspx.

30 Judy Grahn as quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 402.

7to lesbians to discover and read. By emphasizing the covers over the texts, these restrictions can be easily justified and difficult to counter.
And so, restrictions are placed on these items because of the delicate nature of the medium, but this access restriction stems directly from an appraisal decision. Pulps are so named for their medium: they were printed on wood-pulp paper, which becomes highly acidic and brittle within a short period of time, prompting important discussions about priorities around preservation and conservation decisions today. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has a collection of pulps that are so fragile, they are kept in closed plastic sleeves. Yet, they have digitized 25 of these books’ covers.31 Similarly, during reappraisal of materials, the Library of Congress microfilmed their entire pulp serials collection, almost 14,000 issues, because of the quickly deteriorating nature of the materials. However, the vibrance of the covers was not captured by the microfilming process, so they made the decision “to give new life to the lustrous, eye-catching covers”32 through conservation, while handing the textual contents to the Preservation Reformatting Division, a euphemistic label for the department which destroys the pulps’ textual contents during the microfilming process. They decided that the original covers were the only conservation priority. These reappraisal and selection decisions along the interdependent lifecycles of the digitization, exhibition, and preservation processes shows the single value these repositories ascribe to their pulps: the value of their covers’ designs.
However, while covers signaled lesbians to the materials, the value of pulps in their own time was not in the covers alone, but in the texts. Pulps are not remembered for their covers, but for their content, as Lee Lynch puts it: “At last, lesbians! . . . I read every one of these mass-market paperbacks I could get my hands on. . . . I was driven, searching for my nourishment like a starveling, grabbing at any crumb that looked, tasted, or smelled digestible.33 Special collections’ emphasis on collecting pulps, particularly their covers, as part of larger fields of study fulfills

31 “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965,” n.d., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/about/blogs/room-26-cabinet-curiosities/2009/02/23/lesbian-pulp-novels-1935-1965.

32 Erin Allen, “Saving Pulp Fiction,” Library of Congress Blog, September 5, 2013, blogs.loc.gov/loc/ 2013/09/saving-pulp-fiction/.

33 As quoted in Keller, “‘Was it Right’,” 385.

8their mission of providing scholars with materials that, like the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee articulates, “hold long-term, historical research potential; possess unique physical characteristics, such as binding or printing; are seminal, original works in a relevant area of study; or are inherently rare or scarce.”34 Irreversible conservation decisions, for example, are made with the scholarly importance of the covers over the personal importance of the texts in mind. Though “archival appraisal prioritizes context rather than content,”35 there has been a cross-repository understanding that the context that matters is the commercial or visual context, and not the context of a woman’s relationship to the text.
This emphasis on the covers veers dangerously closely to F. Gerald Ham’s warnings in
1975 about the whimsical nature of archival appraisal. While the texts of pulps are largely ignored or even laughed at today, the covers are in demand for study. Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on making sure there is complete, broad representation of marginalized groups in archives.36 In the 1980s, especially, there was a movement to actively collect rather than passively acquire the detritus of the ignored, with archivists urged to make plans to actively fill in gaps in the archival record. Manuscript collecting became more concerned with subject collecting over collecting the papers of just the most obvious or prominent in society in response to scholars like Ham and Howard Zinn who called on archivists to play a less complacent role in shaping the historical record. However, making appraisal decisions based on expected use in narrow fields of study, even fields of study historically marginalized, risks “leav[ing] the archivist too closely tied to the vogue of the academic marketplace.”37 Ham uses as an example a concurrent increase he noticed in urban archives with the increase in historiography of the American city, which parallels the increase of LGBT collections in tandem with the rise of LGBT studies as a scholarly field. This, to Ham, was not a liberatory trajectory but a temporary corrective, which

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    The cover of Ann Bannon's Odd Girl Out as reissued by Cleis Press. Courtesy of Cleis Press. Pulp Paperbacks and Their Covers by Teresa Theophano Encyclopedia Copyright © 2015, glbtq, Inc. Entry Copyright © 2002, glbtq, Inc. Reprinted from http://www.glbtq.com As much an artifact of lesbian popular culture as a source of amusing kitsch in today's more tolerant political climate, pulp fiction paperbacks (named for the inexpensive paper on which they were printed) remain a fascinating slice of life from the 1950s and 1960s. It was hard to miss those cheap books with their lurid covers and "shocking" tag lines, such as "She Hated Men and Turned to a Lesbian for Comfort!" Strangely enough, unlike today, lesbian-themed novels were easily available in almost any drugstore--and their publishers unknowingly provided a kind of lifeline for gay women living in a terrifically oppressive time. While some of these books were penned by men using female pseudonyms, the majority were written by lesbians for lesbians. Despite the buxom cover models featured to help sell the books to a male audience, there was some fairly serious literature among the pulp ranks. Indeed, author Ann Bannon, whose first pulpy book Odd Girl Out was published by Gold Medal in 1957, refers to the 1950s and 1960s as the "Golden Age of lesbian writing and publication." Mixed in with the ultra-sleazy "adult" titles such as Satan Was a Lesbian (1966) and Killer Dyke (1964), which were clearly intended to function as soft-core pornography, were some profound examinations of lesbian life, such as Claire Morgan's [that is, Patricia Highsmith's] The Price of Salt (1952), Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker series (1957-1962), Valerie Taylor's A World Without Men (1963), and even reprints of Gale Wilhelm's Torchlight to Valhalla (1938) and Radclyffe Hall's classic The Well of Loneliness (1928).
  • Download PDF Datastream

    Download PDF Datastream

    Claiming History, Claiming Rights: Queer Discourses of History and Politics By Evangelia Mazaris B.A., Vassar College, 1998 A.M., Brown University, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Evangelia Mazaris This dissertation by Evangelia Mazaris is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: ________________ ______________________________ Ralph E. Rodriguez, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date: ________________ ______________________________ Karen Krahulik, Reader Date: ________________ ______________________________ Steven Lubar, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date: ________________ ______________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Evangelia Mazaris was born in Wilmington, Delaware on September 21, 1976. She received her B.A. in English from Vassar College in 1998. Mazaris completed her A.M. in Museum Studies/American Civilization at Brown University in 2005. Mazaris was a Jacob Javits Fellow through the United States Department of Education (2004 – 2009). Mazaris is the author of “Public Transgressions: the Reverend Phebe Hanaford and the „Minister‟s Wife‟,” published in the anthology Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Lesbian Histories, Volume I (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). She also published the article “Evidence of Things Not Seen: Greater Light as Faith Manifested,” in Historic Nantucket (Winter 2001). She has presented her work at numerous professional conferences, including the American Studies Association (2008), the New England American Studies Association (2007), the National Council on Public History (2009), and the University College Dublin‟s Historicizing the Lesbian Conference (2006).
  • LGBT Pulp Fiction Collection, 1928-1989 : Ms.Coll.54

    LGBT Pulp Fiction Collection, 1928-1989 : Ms.Coll.54

    LGBT pulp fiction collection, 1928-1989 : Ms.Coll.54 Finding aid prepared by Sandra Glascock based on cataloging by Joan Lubin (2016) on October 24 2017 PDF produced on July 17, 2019 John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center 1315 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19107 [email protected] LGBT pulp fiction collection, 1928-1989 : Ms.Coll.54 Table of Contents Summary Information .................................................................................................................................... 3 Biographical / Historical ................................................................................................................................ 3 Scope and Contents ........................................................................................................................................ 4 Arrangement ................................................................................................................................................... 4 Administrative Information ............................................................................................................................ 4 Controlled Access Headings .......................................................................................................................... 5 Collection Inventory ....................................................................................................................................... 5 A ..................................................................................................................................................................
  • 209 Queer Serial Transcript

    209 Queer Serial Transcript

    American LGBTQ+ liberation from day 1 to Stonewall. Written & produced by Devlyn Camp Episode released August 5, 2020 [email protected] Season 2, Episode 9: “The Twilight Woman” Visit www.queerserial.com for resources and additional information. For images to accompany the story, follow the show @queerserial on Instagram & Twitter For this episode, begin with posts starting August 3, 2020. (Click above.) The original Mattachine Society jester logo is courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. This transcript includes text from real homophile-era publications, letters, organizational documents, et cetera. These texts contain identifying terms that may now be out of date. MARGE: She joined the trio of sexual perverts. The majority of the female customers were dressed in mannish costume. Agent recommends the revocation of liquor license for Mary’s First and Last Chance Bar on the grounds that it is a resort for sex perverts. HOST: Just two days before Christmas 1959, the ruling comes down on Mary’s First and Last Chance, a lesbian bar in Oakland, California. After the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board orders the revocation of the bar’s liquor license on the grounds that it’s a “resort for sex perverts,” bar owners Mary Azar and Albert Vallerga hire attorney Morris Lowenthal. Lowenthal has previously defended the Black Cat Café. Throughout Lowenthal’s appeals process, he defends Mary’s First and Last by using the Daughters of Bilitis as an example of the bar’s clientele. Look at these upstanding, law-abiding, gendernormative citizens! These women wear skirts and have long hair. On December 23, 1959, the California Supreme Court rules in favor of Mary’s First and Last Chance.
  • Exorbitance and Queer Futurities in the Well of Loneliness, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and Radical Feminist Manifestos

    Exorbitance and Queer Futurities in the Well of Loneliness, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and Radical Feminist Manifestos

    FEET DOWN, NEW PLANET: EXORBITANCE AND QUEER FUTURITIES IN THE WELL OF LONELINESS, LESBIAN PULP FICTION, AND RADICAL FEMINIST MANIFESTOS A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Sally Baker, B.A. Washington, DC March 19, 2018 Copyright 2018 by Sally Baker All Rights Reserved ii FEET DOWN, NEW PLANET: EXORBITANCE AND QUEER FUTURITIES IN THE WELL OF LONELINESS, LESBIAN PULP FICTION, AND RADICAL FEMINIST MANIFESTOS Sally Baker, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Jennifer Natalya Fink, Ph.D. ABSTRACT “Feet Down, New Planet” explores exorbitance and queer futurities in The Well of Loneliness, lesbian pulp fiction, and radical feminist manifestos. It extends queer theory to the texts as a way to expand them beyond the limits of their original sociocultural publication contexts. This thesis examines models of reproduction, queer embodiment, and world-building in The Well of Loneliness, lesbian pulp fiction, and radical feminist manifestos in order to examine how the authors write worlds beyond the limits of liberal feminist propriety, and imagine radical queer futures through oozing poetic sensibilities. “Feet Down, New Planet” contributes to queer theories of excess by mapping a cartographic and affective history of queer literary excess, and curates the exorbitant world-building frameworks Radclyffe Hall, Valerie Taylor, Jill Johnston, and Valerie Solanas imagine. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Feet Down…………………………………………………………………...... 1 Chapter I: Flesh Temporalities: Womb as Queer Counterpublic in The Well of Loneliness… 4 Introduction: The Well of Loneliness………………………………………………….. 4 Situating the Womb………………………………………………………………….