A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel

Abstract

The relationship of queer studies to literary text mining has been vexed by the latter's formative interest in large scales, clear categories and general trends, all at odds with queer investment in particulars, details, and persons and objects who resist normative patterns and labels. The history of queer bibliography, especially as embodied by early work such as Jeanette Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956) and Roger Austen's Playing the Game: the Homosexual Novel in America (1977), however, presents a compelling model for a kind of queer enumeration which is community-oriented rather than externally imposed, centered first and foremost on the task of guiding readers to new queer texts, and which is affectively invested in the task of counting itself: a kind of literary engagement that shows the queer potential of the question "how many?" Using a small corpus of queer novels derived from modern lists of book recommendations—a contemporary form of queer bibliography—I show that, while many kinds of textual queerness elude currently existing computational methods, these methods are nonetheless capable of identifying a variety of queer textual traces, both in queer fiction identified as such, and in presumptively straight novels. While future work in this area will ultimately require more sophisticated methods, these already extant tools offer scholars of queer literature an intriguing focus on surface-level features such as explicit terms of sexual identity—and the work of bibliographers such as Foster and Austen offers the theoretical foundations that new methods must be based upon.