Eleri Anona Watson
I am a scholar of post-45 Anglo-American literature. My research is interdisciplinary and centres on notions of kinship within feminist, queer, trans, and African-American activism, literature and theory.
I am a Lecturer and Tutor in English Literature (UG/PGT) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (PGT) at the University of Oxford. In March 2024, I was named the University’s first Fellow in Queer Studies (Humanities Division).
Research:
My doctoral thesis examined the nature and (im)possibilities of queer kinship. Looking to canonical works of queer theory, I argued that queerness cannot be untethered from an ethics of experimental kinship. This implicates the pursuit of new, ever-changing and expanding kinship possibilities by crossing, querying and playfully deconstructing hetero-capitalism’s dividing lines of class, race, and sexuality. By continually changing/supplementing/questioning the borders of ‘identity’, queer kinship deconstructs the notion of unified identity (identity politics) for an identification politics of being-together in difference.
For many queer theorists, this vision of queerness is tied to Michel Foucault’s quasi-manifesto for a gay ‘way of life’. The ‘crossing points’ of Foucault's ‘gay’ way of life’ might, at first glance, echo queer’s relational politic, And indeed, these theorists have recast Foucault’s gay as a queer ‘way of life’. However, I contended that this conflation is a misnomer, overlooking contradictions and exclusions of Foucault’s quasi-manifesto. Wilfully delimiting relational choices and rejecting even the possibility of deconstructing binaries of male/non-male identity, Foucault’s gay ‘way of life’ is, I argued resolutely ‘un-queer’.
While foundational notions of queer/queering establish deconstructive relationality as their basis, Anglo-American feminists and queer theorists have declined to acknowledge or engage with queer theory’s basis in the deconstructive thought of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Through a radical queer reading of Derrida and Cixous’ forty-year-long intertextual dialogues regarding the nature, (im)possibilities of, and strategies for sustaining their own loving friendship [aimance], I interrogated this refusal. Countering narratives of domination/absorption that characterise friendship in the Western philosophical tradition, aimance implicates a deconstructive ethics involving: a wilfulness to continually welcome the other (hospitable approach) and identify with/against the other (voler/différance)—deconstructing one’s own ‘identity’—all the while respecting and sustaining the otherness/unknowability of the other. Aimance, I argued, articulated an ethics of queer kinning, while their dialogues offer a playbook for queer scholars and activists in how to allow for and sustain queer kinship.
In addition, I offered a radical re-interpretation of the ‘approach-as-event’ that overturned criticisms of deconstruction’s untethering of theory from context. This understanding of aimance’s possibility as context-dependent facilitated my examination of the (im)possibility of queer kinship in the post-war writing of Christopher Isherwood and his contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal.
I focussed on Isherwood’s depiction of cross-identarian ‘fag-hag’ friendships. While these offered potential sites for queer kinship, I contended that in the face of Cold War hetero-capitalism, and the emergence of ‘identity politics’, such writers collaborated to produce a homosexual identity politics that was fundamentally incompatible with the possibility of the loving, cross-identification that characterises queer kinship. For such authors, a queerly loving kinship between ‘fag’ and ‘fag hag’ thus appears impossible.
My current research expands the critical insights of my doctoral thesis. I am currently preparing two projects: the first, ‘Between Men: Isherwood, his tribe, and their women’ traces the development of Isherwood’s misogynistic gay politic and its primary expression in the gross figuration of the ‘fag-hag’. In my second project, ‘Derrida and Cixous: A Friendship for Now/for Life’, I question the fraught relationship between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’ deconstructive ethics of ‘loving kinship’ and the ‘return to the subject’ in queer, trans, and Black literature, art, and thought.
I have published on topics relating to deconstructionist, queer, trans, Black and feminist thought, literature, art, and film 1900-present. My recent publications can be found in Exchanges (2015), Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories (2020), The Journal of Modern and Contemporary France (2022), U.S. Studies Online (2024), and The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2024).
Supervisors: Professor Lloyd Pratt and Ms Jeri Johnson
Address: Oxford, UK
I am a Lecturer and Tutor in English Literature (UG/PGT) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (PGT) at the University of Oxford. In March 2024, I was named the University’s first Fellow in Queer Studies (Humanities Division).
Research:
My doctoral thesis examined the nature and (im)possibilities of queer kinship. Looking to canonical works of queer theory, I argued that queerness cannot be untethered from an ethics of experimental kinship. This implicates the pursuit of new, ever-changing and expanding kinship possibilities by crossing, querying and playfully deconstructing hetero-capitalism’s dividing lines of class, race, and sexuality. By continually changing/supplementing/questioning the borders of ‘identity’, queer kinship deconstructs the notion of unified identity (identity politics) for an identification politics of being-together in difference.
For many queer theorists, this vision of queerness is tied to Michel Foucault’s quasi-manifesto for a gay ‘way of life’. The ‘crossing points’ of Foucault's ‘gay’ way of life’ might, at first glance, echo queer’s relational politic, And indeed, these theorists have recast Foucault’s gay as a queer ‘way of life’. However, I contended that this conflation is a misnomer, overlooking contradictions and exclusions of Foucault’s quasi-manifesto. Wilfully delimiting relational choices and rejecting even the possibility of deconstructing binaries of male/non-male identity, Foucault’s gay ‘way of life’ is, I argued resolutely ‘un-queer’.
While foundational notions of queer/queering establish deconstructive relationality as their basis, Anglo-American feminists and queer theorists have declined to acknowledge or engage with queer theory’s basis in the deconstructive thought of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Through a radical queer reading of Derrida and Cixous’ forty-year-long intertextual dialogues regarding the nature, (im)possibilities of, and strategies for sustaining their own loving friendship [aimance], I interrogated this refusal. Countering narratives of domination/absorption that characterise friendship in the Western philosophical tradition, aimance implicates a deconstructive ethics involving: a wilfulness to continually welcome the other (hospitable approach) and identify with/against the other (voler/différance)—deconstructing one’s own ‘identity’—all the while respecting and sustaining the otherness/unknowability of the other. Aimance, I argued, articulated an ethics of queer kinning, while their dialogues offer a playbook for queer scholars and activists in how to allow for and sustain queer kinship.
In addition, I offered a radical re-interpretation of the ‘approach-as-event’ that overturned criticisms of deconstruction’s untethering of theory from context. This understanding of aimance’s possibility as context-dependent facilitated my examination of the (im)possibility of queer kinship in the post-war writing of Christopher Isherwood and his contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal.
I focussed on Isherwood’s depiction of cross-identarian ‘fag-hag’ friendships. While these offered potential sites for queer kinship, I contended that in the face of Cold War hetero-capitalism, and the emergence of ‘identity politics’, such writers collaborated to produce a homosexual identity politics that was fundamentally incompatible with the possibility of the loving, cross-identification that characterises queer kinship. For such authors, a queerly loving kinship between ‘fag’ and ‘fag hag’ thus appears impossible.
My current research expands the critical insights of my doctoral thesis. I am currently preparing two projects: the first, ‘Between Men: Isherwood, his tribe, and their women’ traces the development of Isherwood’s misogynistic gay politic and its primary expression in the gross figuration of the ‘fag-hag’. In my second project, ‘Derrida and Cixous: A Friendship for Now/for Life’, I question the fraught relationship between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’ deconstructive ethics of ‘loving kinship’ and the ‘return to the subject’ in queer, trans, and Black literature, art, and thought.
I have published on topics relating to deconstructionist, queer, trans, Black and feminist thought, literature, art, and film 1900-present. My recent publications can be found in Exchanges (2015), Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories (2020), The Journal of Modern and Contemporary France (2022), U.S. Studies Online (2024), and The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2024).
Supervisors: Professor Lloyd Pratt and Ms Jeri Johnson
Address: Oxford, UK
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Published work by Eleri Anona Watson
This chapter is featured in Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories, edited by Duffy Enda, Kimber Gerri, and Martin Todd, 74-90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
This chapter was awarded second place in the Katherine Mansfield Prize (2019).
Since its foundation in 1995, the Women’s Studies course has strived to enact what the American feminist and activist bell hooks terms ‘education as the practice of freedom’.[1] Reflecting upon the discussions emerging from the conference, the conference organisers Charlotte De Val and Eleri Anona Watson ask: ‘what are the new and repeated challenges we face in fulfilling this practice of freedom?’ They also consider the changing scope of Women’s Studies as an academic field alongside present debates regarding its future in the UK and further afield. Examining debates of ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility’ within Women’s Studies—that is to say, materialist versus post-structuralist critiques—in conjunction with questions of accessibility and ‘intellectual gatekeeping’, this article proposes that the future of Women's Studies is not the ‘apocalyptic’ vision that its critics would often have us believe. Indeed, one of the themes emerging from the conference was that as long as the field practices radical self-questioning and self-critique, Women’s Studies will maintain its academically and socially transformative potential.
Keywords: Women’s Studies; Gender Studies; Feminism; University of Oxford; Education; Pedagogy
Selected conference papers, invited talks, posters by Eleri Anona Watson
Questions of intersectional oppressions render both parties in the fag-hag friendship precarious to the approach of the other. Looking at archival examples, as well as Isherwood’s works, I argue that fag-hag relationality involves living on a knife-edge, tottering between friendship and destruction. This unstable, ambiguous relationality is reflected, I argue, in Jacques Derrida’s theories of relationality. I restage Derrida’s Parages and its dance of proximity and distance, of fear and longing within the fag-hag kinship’s queer cross-gender, cross-sexuality framework. I contend that fag-hag relationality’s mode of crossed borders and unexpected meeting points may be epitomised as that of the ‘bump.’
The bump is a moment of proximity and distance, of touching and not touching and, as I argue, of identification and disidentification. Looking to manifestations of the bump in popular, academic and literary texts, the bump’s nature appears ambiguous. It is both a felicitous ‘bumping into’ and a violent ‘bumping off’. For Isherwood, to bump into the fag-hag risks the destruction of the gay male. Yet, I propose that Isherwood’s invocation to repeat the bump—to develop the fag-hag relationality is in the ‘hope against hope’ of as-yet-unknown joys and possibilities. In turn, Isherwood offers us a dream of a queer relationality without fear of destruction.
Interviews/Articles featured in other publications by Eleri Anona Watson
Awarded Papers (Undergraduate and Postgraduate) by Eleri Anona Watson
In her modernist short fiction, Katherine Mansfield explores Virginia Woolf’s notion that “women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems” . Formulating a general world-view of the female, Mansfield reveals the suffering of the female’s unresolved issues of division between the rational and the physical. They do not engage in subjective experience and seem to have ‘forgotten themselves’ . Their inner thoughts are dictated by an external figure through the author’s free indirect discourse. These women, their outer selves in conflict with their inner desires, seem to perform the role of the female whilst an external narrator dictates their movements in directorial fashion. Mansfield’s women seek to both overthrow and become independent from the male. Such desire is manifested in intersexual symbolism expressing female desire to possess both male and female reproductive organs. However, not possessing the traditional male capacity of active knowledge and action, such individuals dwell submissively in the constrained space of the distilled form of the short story. They passively accept the world, its injustices and its symbols. Their condition remains unchanged and the female reaches no epiphanic conclusion.
Papers by Eleri Anona Watson
This chapter is featured in Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories, edited by Duffy Enda, Kimber Gerri, and Martin Todd, 74-90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
This chapter was awarded second place in the Katherine Mansfield Prize (2019).
Since its foundation in 1995, the Women’s Studies course has strived to enact what the American feminist and activist bell hooks terms ‘education as the practice of freedom’.[1] Reflecting upon the discussions emerging from the conference, the conference organisers Charlotte De Val and Eleri Anona Watson ask: ‘what are the new and repeated challenges we face in fulfilling this practice of freedom?’ They also consider the changing scope of Women’s Studies as an academic field alongside present debates regarding its future in the UK and further afield. Examining debates of ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility’ within Women’s Studies—that is to say, materialist versus post-structuralist critiques—in conjunction with questions of accessibility and ‘intellectual gatekeeping’, this article proposes that the future of Women's Studies is not the ‘apocalyptic’ vision that its critics would often have us believe. Indeed, one of the themes emerging from the conference was that as long as the field practices radical self-questioning and self-critique, Women’s Studies will maintain its academically and socially transformative potential.
Keywords: Women’s Studies; Gender Studies; Feminism; University of Oxford; Education; Pedagogy
Questions of intersectional oppressions render both parties in the fag-hag friendship precarious to the approach of the other. Looking at archival examples, as well as Isherwood’s works, I argue that fag-hag relationality involves living on a knife-edge, tottering between friendship and destruction. This unstable, ambiguous relationality is reflected, I argue, in Jacques Derrida’s theories of relationality. I restage Derrida’s Parages and its dance of proximity and distance, of fear and longing within the fag-hag kinship’s queer cross-gender, cross-sexuality framework. I contend that fag-hag relationality’s mode of crossed borders and unexpected meeting points may be epitomised as that of the ‘bump.’
The bump is a moment of proximity and distance, of touching and not touching and, as I argue, of identification and disidentification. Looking to manifestations of the bump in popular, academic and literary texts, the bump’s nature appears ambiguous. It is both a felicitous ‘bumping into’ and a violent ‘bumping off’. For Isherwood, to bump into the fag-hag risks the destruction of the gay male. Yet, I propose that Isherwood’s invocation to repeat the bump—to develop the fag-hag relationality is in the ‘hope against hope’ of as-yet-unknown joys and possibilities. In turn, Isherwood offers us a dream of a queer relationality without fear of destruction.
In her modernist short fiction, Katherine Mansfield explores Virginia Woolf’s notion that “women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems” . Formulating a general world-view of the female, Mansfield reveals the suffering of the female’s unresolved issues of division between the rational and the physical. They do not engage in subjective experience and seem to have ‘forgotten themselves’ . Their inner thoughts are dictated by an external figure through the author’s free indirect discourse. These women, their outer selves in conflict with their inner desires, seem to perform the role of the female whilst an external narrator dictates their movements in directorial fashion. Mansfield’s women seek to both overthrow and become independent from the male. Such desire is manifested in intersexual symbolism expressing female desire to possess both male and female reproductive organs. However, not possessing the traditional male capacity of active knowledge and action, such individuals dwell submissively in the constrained space of the distilled form of the short story. They passively accept the world, its injustices and its symbols. Their condition remains unchanged and the female reaches no epiphanic conclusion.