Queer History & Literature
Shelly's Leg
I first found out about Shelly’s Leg while doing a zine about queer spaces in Seattle for an English class called The Poetics of City Living. I thought the story was funny, so I added a page to my zine about it.
However, when I took a queer history class with Laurie Marhoefer the next quarter, I once again had an opportunity to focus on that silver of Seattle history. I created an episode of a podcast about Shelly’s Leg, which gave me to chance to run my mouth about the story and create fifteen minutes of content about it, rather than two paragraphs for a zine.
Not content with that being the end of my Shelly’s Leg endeavors, my junior year, I pitched a story to the Archives of The Daily about Shelly’s Leg. This was my chance to get further into the weeds that I ever had before — what was originally a 1500 word piece with two pages of sources got cut down to a tidy 1,000 with a fun illustration for the paper.
And then — my biggest accomplishment — Marhoefer asked me to be a guest lecturer about the topic in their queer history class winter quarter 2024. Going back to the class with a super silly presentation and being treated as if I 1) knew what I was talking about and 2) my words were worth listening to was... wild.
This was the first enduring academic project I took on that both allowed me to get into the weeds of queer history and explore different modes of presenting that information. While the story of Shelly’s Leg is great fun at parties, it was also the first time I seriously pursued my interest in queerness and had that interest met with academic validation.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
If the approximately 200,000 words of Back Again, Back Again didn’t clue you in, dear reader, I like things with knights n’ swords a lot. And I also really, really like stories that can be read as queer, and that create, in the words of Jose Munoz, a trail of “ephemeral” queerness.
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Sir Gawain, the poem, is one of those things. Written in Middle English by a poet we don’t know the name of, it’s a poem of 2530 (2525 lines + a 5-lina coda, the author really likes 5’s, like, really) about Sir Gawain, the most perfect of Arthur’s knights, losing that status of perfection through kissing a dude and the dude’s wife — kind of. It’s weirdly hopeful in its queerness, despite it all, and one of my deepest wishes is to turn it into a wildly and joyfully queer book someday — after I deal with the one I’ve already written.
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Every quarter of my junior year, I took a class that had Gawain on the reading list, and every time, I based my final project around him, culminating in a 16-page research paper for my thesis class about queer futurity, the charmed circle, and the narrative pressure within Gawain to return to heteronormativity. While it’s not fully edited yet, as this presentation is happening before my class is over, I want to do one last round of edits on it and try to publish it, as well!