Ben Bascom
Ball State University
Ben Bascom is an Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature and culture. His research combines queer studies approaches with material text methodologies to reimagine the relation between archive and canon, republican norms and social outsiders, and masculinity and publicity in the early national U.S. His scholarship has appeared in Early American Literature and is forthcoming in Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life.
We approach “climate” in its broadest sense, encompassing atmosphere, mood, and opinion to conceptualize the space and proximity between bodies and texts, readers and representations, and experiences and witnesses. For us,... [ view full abstract ]
We approach “climate” in its broadest sense, encompassing atmosphere, mood, and opinion to conceptualize the space and proximity between bodies and texts, readers and representations, and experiences and witnesses. For us, climate is a historically messy term, signaling both a variety of relations and a seemingly endless possibility of contexts. As such, one could say that climate is a queer term, one that capaciously refuses stable definitions. Focusing on texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau, the three papers here theorize the queer climate of the nineteenth century, thinking queerly about race, gender, and sexuality in order to reimagine the stakes of such a climate for intimate readerships both then and now. More specifically, we seek to articulate possibilities and moments of queer relationality at three different “sites”—smell, typography, and the closet, joining together the stinky room of Thoreau, the intimate readerships of Walker, and the doubled spaces young Douglass finds himself in as he witnesses a troubling and intense violent scene. The smelly room, the evocative book-object, and the claustrophobic closet allow us to explore the idea of queer relationalities in affective, textual, and spatial registers, bringing into view moments that figure as both future possibility and present corrosion. As a whole, this panel shows the urgency that attends to considering the multivalent climates of nineteenth-century America and the queer figurations that our attachments to the period underscore.
Ben Bascom“Smelling Thoreau”
Henry David Thoreau’s writings have inspired more than half a century of ecological and nature-oriented scholarship. But in that turn to consider the larger climate of Thoreau’s writing, we lose the queer, messy particularity of the figure. The drive to locate a queer Thoreau has drawn upon an assortment of methodologies: Michael Warner turns Thoreau’s “sounding” of Walden Pond into a metaphor of anal sex; Henry Abelove follows Walden’s suggestive print culture reception to present a Thoreau who intentionally disrupts the social logics of heterosexuality; and Laura Dassow Walls’s recent biography implies a fraught Thoreau who refused himself the pleasures of sex (citing the seemingly unrequited love letters of Thomas Cholmondeley). This paper draws upon the work of these scholars to present an affective reading of Thoreau’s queerness, specifically offering a smell-centered reading of Thoreau that considers the climates of queer smell. In his private diary, Thoreau describes (in disgust) the scent of a mushroom’s “scrotum, for it is a perfect phallus.” Calling it “as offensive to the eye as to the scent,” Thoreau explains that he “was afraid to sleep in my chamber where it had lain until the room had been well ventilated.” Using a queer psychoanalytic lens, this paper will think about what Thoreau smells as he keeps company with this olfactory abjection, and how that scent alters ways to think about his public orientation toward solitude and his disavowal of public intimacy.
