The octopus and the pelican: queer “efforts of affection” between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the first decade of the 2000s, the friendship between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop was drawn into one of the most acrimonious debates to befall Queer Theory. Known as the “antisocial thesis,” this debate erupted around the question of whether queerness should be understood as a negative withdrawal from normative social modes of being or as a desire for social togetherness that normative social scripts prohibit. In accounts that have yet to receive sustained attention, Kathryn R. Kent and José Esteban Muñoz – siding with queer relationality – turned to the Moore-Bishop friendship to illustrate ostensibly divergent modalities of queer being in the world, with Bishop modeling a queer poetics of “invitation” in contrast to an antisocial Moore. This essay refutes these portrayals by thinking of queer relationality as “efforts of affection,” a term both poets used to name the freedoms and the burdens relationality entails. In close readings of Moore and Bishop, and by drawing on canonical and recent Moore scholarship, the efforts of affection that pass between Moore and Bishop will resemble what Jacques Derrida thought of as the work (or effort) of mourning.