Jewett's Queer Norman Love

Pressuring homonationalism as an analytic, Samaine Lockwood’s paper argues that emergent queer identities for elite Northeasterners in the late 1800s depended on re-imagining white belonging through an international frame.... [ view full abstract ]

Pressuring homonationalism as an analytic, Samaine Lockwood’s paper argues that emergent queer identities for elite Northeasterners in the late 1800s depended on re-imagining white belonging through an international frame. Specifically, Lockwood observes that Sarah Orne Jewett and other women regionalists claimed affiliation with white French identity. Such claims overlapped unevenly with Confederates’ insistence on having distinct Norman roots and with Boston bohemia’s increasing tendency to associate Catholic art with emergent homosexual identities. Exploring this field of associations, Lockwood’s paper assesses what it means that the mobile, aristocratic legacy to which Jewett and her queer colleagues laid claim was specifically Norman. Pushing beyond the idea of national belonging to imagine a larger, transnational, Euro-American form of white belonging, regionalists participated in and paved the way for a possibly more capacious modernism, one aligned with alternative sexualities as well as racist constructions of whiteness.