1. Introduction
[1.1] "I don't need to talk to any more dead white people," declares Hattie, a household servant in "The Only Ghost I Ever Saw," episode 2.3 of Apple TV+'s Dickinson (2019), in response to Emily Dickinson's request that she serve as the medium for a séance to help Dickinson determine whether to seek fame through publication. An example of what Sarah Mesle (2021) classifies as the "many head-jerky lines" of "metacommentary" embedded in Dickinson, this moment reflects a broader frustration that is prominent in queer online spaces with the rise of the "lesbian period piece." Although these films and shows offer representation, they foreground a class- and race-specific vision of queer womanhood that conflates historical with wealthy and white.
[1.2] I explore here the popularization of media about real historical figures, such as Anne Lister and Emily Dickinson, whom scholars identify as part of a longer queer female genealogy. Through television shows like Dickinson and Gentleman Jack (2019), films like Wild Nights with Emily (2018), and, most importantly, the fandoms that have sprung up around them, these women have emerged as loci of lesbian history made more widely accessible, even as they also help perpetuate a narrow vision of just who might be included in such a history (note 1). The practices of amateur historicism that developed around Dickinson and Lister make visible the ways whiteness functions as the unnamed ground upon which fandom so often envisions, writes, and speaks of queerness.
[1.3] However, these practices also contain methods for reimagining the scope of their own (re)deployment, suggesting new, fannish modes of approaching the historical archive that might better enable us to see and recognize those forms of queerness made illegible under contemporary rubrics of sexual identification (note 2). My larger project offers the concept of "too close reading" as a fan-inflected scholarly methodology that could, when situated in a historically grounded framework, help readers better recognize less overt forms of queerness across these media. Decentering wealthy, white narratives not only opens space for a more capacious queer imaginary in the present but also allows a more nuanced depiction of historical queer life—and the many forms it took—to emerge.
2. Too close reading
[2.1] Against a disciplinary—and disciplining—tradition of critical reading that idealizes the putatively objective reader, too close reading foregrounds readerly affect, particularly desire. Such readers linger in the details of texts not often deemed worthy of close study, scouring them for traces of a queerness they long to find. In collapsing the distance meant to remain between text and reader even in typical close reading practices (note 3), too close readers risk the accusations that inhere in that impermissible, excessive "too." Like fans who are dismissed as projecting their own desires in identifying romance and eroticism within pairings deemed platonic or even familial by showrunners and other viewers, too close readers open themselves to charges of indulging in "uncritical reading" (Warner 2004, 13), "bad reading" (Bradway 2018, 190), or even "misreading" (Seitler 2021). After all, there seems to be very little objectivity in a method that embraces readerly investments and desires.
[2.2] Yet it is precisely this method's proximity to its objects that enables too close readers to notice the quieter forms of queer intimacy that threaten to pass by unnoticed under existing rubrics for reading. While a critical close reader might note the use of "frigid" in an early-twentieth-century text and connect it to the sexological tradition's vocabulary for classifying female perversion, the too close reader may locate queer possibilities in absences—for example, the lack of a male suitor's mention in an otherwise detailed diary—or in the unspoken implications of seemingly minor details—for example, the protracted description of another woman's dress that reads like a caressing gaze. The too close reader ventures into the territory of what might be true, finding the conditional to be just as fruitful as the indicative, the fleeting just as meaningful as the established. When taken up as an archival practice, too close reading allows its practitioners greater access to those subtle threads of desire and intimacy that wind their way through the recorded stories of working-class and nonwhite historical people who were frequently subjected to a greater degree of sexual scrutiny than their wealthy, white contemporaries. Like Black women fans who "pull a secondary character of color from the margins, transforming her into the central protagonist" (Warner 2015, 39), too close readers spin narratives of possibility from parentheticals, marginalia, and trace evidence. Such an approach facilitates the convergence of paranoid and reparative reading practices (note 4), bringing with it the paranoid reader's anticipatory conviction that there is something queer to be found if one only reads or watches enough, but proceeding through "a sustained seeking of pleasure" rather than an aversion to surprise (Sedgwick 2003, 137). It foregrounds the reparative impulse toward accretion and "extracting sustenance" from its archives, even those archives where queerness seems nearly absent, salvageable and made legible only through affectively intense, granular attention to what might appear merely momentary glimmers of affect, desire, and relationality (Sedgwick 2003, 150). Given that fandom is nothing if not a community of seasoned close readers invested in these minute textual details, it could serve as the locus for such an approach.
3. Claiming (white) queer history
[3.1] At present, though, the project of fan history making remains centered on the same wealthy, white subjects foregrounded in early queer historical scholarship. With same-sex desire and intimacy shown on screen, fans have not taken up the too close reading methods cultivated in fandoms where such content could be found only on the subtextual level. Paradoxically, the explicitness of the canonical representation has foreclosed the search for a wider range of queer possibilities just out of frame—perhaps in, for instance, the servants' quarters that serve as the unspoken, rarely seen backdrop for the wealthy, white protagonists' lives.
[3.2] Bringing stories of women like Dickinson and Lister to the big and small screen has facilitated a new generation of fans' investment in them as individuals and in the larger project of queer history they represent. A viral tweet from author Anna Borges (August 15, 2019), for instance, reads, "i can't believe the american education system led me to believe that emily dickinson was some spinster shut in when she was actually busy writing super gay love letters to her brother's wife." Of course, Borges is hardly the first person to discover the complicated woman behind the myth of the reclusive "belle of Amherst," but moving a more nuanced depiction of Dickinson out of scholarly books, queer gossip, and college classrooms and into popular culture has widened its circulation (note 5). For many younger fans, seeing, often for the first time, someone like them in the historical record is a key part of this joy of recovery. They are seduced by the "overwhelming desire to feel historical" (Nealon 2001, 8) (note 6). Popular tweets and Tumblr posts claim Dickinson and Lister in a decidedly lesbian genealogy, decrying both a heterosexist educational system that would deny the existence of queer lives and loves in history and a scholarly apparatus that would caution fans away from presentist assumptions about subjects who lived before the incursion of modern sexological regimes (note 7). For many fans long accustomed to queerbaiting in media, the refusal to collapse desire into identity appears just as suspect as the refusal to acknowledge that desire at all.
[3.3] In lieu of the received academic histories, fans have cultivated their own—those desire-driven histories of the queer amateur, to borrow terminology from Carolyn Dinshaw (2012)—in which the division between past and present gives way. Longing "for origins" and "connection" with a queer past so often denied to them (Dinshaw 2012, 29), fans find deep value in seeing their "current [lives] reflected in the historical times" (Rackham 2021). Like the philosophy professor who wrote to John Boswell after reading his Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), confiding in him, "I had never felt—until I read your book—that I had gay friends across the centuries" (quoted in Dinshaw 1999, 28), contemporary fans have also found more than historical referents in these shows and films. Through queer attachments, past figures become present friends and more; desire suffuses the viewing process.
[3.4] Not limiting themselves to studying or recording those newly discovered histories, fans literalize Dinshaw's "touch across time" (1999, 3), writing and sketching their favorites into modern alternate universe (AU) works of fan fiction and art just as surely as they submerge themselves into an imagined nineteenth-century queer world. Joining us in the twenty-first century, Dickinson becomes a bored college student, Lister an English professor, her lover Ann Walker a bookstore owner. And, in turn, fan creators—perhaps those bored college students or English professors who populate the pages of their AUs—transport themselves to the past, finding new queer pleasures in, for instance, imagining Lister and Walker discovering an illustrated work of French erotica and learning the joys of a godemichet. Through fan works and attachments, these historical figures and contemporary creators and consumers come to inhabit a new world that yokes together past and present, real and imagined, under the auspices of a fannish desire for history.
[3.5] In stitching together past and present, this fan recovery project nonetheless reproduces existing hierarchies insofar as it makes wealthy, white histories legible, leaving others unclaimed and unrecognized. Despite the calls for a greater diversity of LGBTQ representation in film and television, when such works do arrive, (white) fandom fails to follow. Star-studded, critically acclaimed films such as Bessie (2015) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) bring early-twentieth-century Black queer life to the fore, yet neither Bessie Smith nor Gertrude "Ma" Rainey have garnered the same online fan followings as Dickinson and Lister. The Archive of Our Own lists a single work for Bessie—inclusion in a multifandom video featuring more than twenty other films and shows—and nothing for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. This disparity in levels of investment reflects fandom's "structural whiteness" (Pande 2018, 8), which is often waved away under the naturalized logic of preference—a logic Stitch (2021a) unpacks to make visible the racism that underlies those pervasive preferences for white texts, ships, and characters. After all, as Stitch (2021a) writes, "personal preference, fantasies, and desire itself are never apolitical or neutral."
[3.6] In refusing to take up these Black queer ancestors, fans consign them once more to the archives of "girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures" (Hartman 2019, xv), thereby relegating to the margins a more capacious transhistorical queer community. Although characterized by its communal dimension, it is in the nature of fandom to allow individual desires—in this case, desires to claim particular individuals for queer history at the expense of others' inclusion—to impact the larger fan imaginary. And when those individual desires seem to coalesce into a unified whole—fandom, writ large—it becomes harder to see the fissure lines beneath and between them where other possibilities emerge. "Queer texts entextualize their own history," Natasha Hurley argues, "framing and reframing other queer texts in their circulation, curation, and consumption by reading publics" (2018, 3). In scaffolding a popular lesbian genealogy on a curated canon of white, largely wealthy women, fans not only refuse affective connections to a more expansive history but also frame the future reception of other texts and characters—including those still to come—around standards for reading queerness that are indelibly marked by an unnamed whiteness (note 8). Deep fan investment in this white genealogy not only authorizes an ongoing conflation of queerness and whiteness—a conflation reflected in ongoing debates over whom fandom is for and what politics and behaviors it will condone (note 9)—but also forms the basis from which queer futures are imagined.
4. Conclusion
[4.1] In the hands of the amateur, the attachment to and exploration of the past emerges "from desires to build"—and write, sketch, and vid—"another kind of world" (Dinshaw 2012, 6). Appointing themselves the inheritors of the queer utopian impulse that José Esteban Muñoz describes as "a backward glance that enacts a future vision" (2009, 4), fans inhabit and enact fantasies of history to imagine new possible futures. Those imagined futures, however, risk remaining as structurally white as the histories out of which they have grown.
[4.2] Although I do not have space to enact a too close reading here, I find in fandom's ongoing investment in this practice the potential for more capacious dreams of the future and readings of the past to emerge. As Muñoz reminds us, potentiality is always contingent; it is "a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense" (2009, 9). Yet the granular attention fans afford to (ostensibly) straight, (often) white texts holds out the possibility of recognizing and drawing out traces of those queer lives that fall aslant wealthy, white histories. Practiced in the archives and across media, too close reading will be my guiding method to reveal new and more robust queer possibilities as fans move ever closer to the texts in which we invest so much of ourselves, our identities, and our futures.