Examinating

Tomorrow is my PhD special fields exam, where I'll be asked a collection of questions that I wrote, studied for, and otherwise thought were appointment. To say I'm nervous is not to get at the intensity of feeling that I'm experiencing right now. I feel unprepared, to say the least, and I worry that I'll have sufficient to say when things open tomorrow.

I'm supposed to briefly touch on what I'm interested in exploring: how queer theory might help me think about how the state operates in the legibility of gender and race in the nineteenth century. If queer theory questions the stability of identity, the foundations of subjectivity, then queer theory would help me think about the vectors of power and representation that foreground the worlds of the early national and antebellum US.

What would a literary history look like that began with John Marrant's meditations on Indian removal, that then turned to writings on the relationship between state power and education (or futurity, rather) and seduction? Marrant practices a mode of being that resists assignation into particular categories.

Alright, that's a rambling mess. What if I thought about conversion in relation to seduction? Wouldn't that allow me to turn from John Marrant to other seduction narratives, helping me get at the material that gets suppressed and unstated in the seduction narratives of Charles Brockden Brown?

As I write all of this out, I'm beginning to sense how unwieldy my archive is. I mean, I've really got a ton of material that doesn't entirely cohere on its own. Must. Work. Harder.