Queer Feminist Excess in the Acoustics of Gertrude Stein’s Literary Portraits

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Conjoining the emerging field of sound studies with literary and cultural studies, this essay provides a new reading of Gertrude Stein’s two literary portraits, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” written in 1923 and first published in Vanity Fair in 1924, and “Ada” (1910), one that she wrote during the early years (1908-1913) in which she worked on her word portraits. The essay tunes in to Stein’s literary portraits to reveal how the acoustics of Stein’s work responds to the gendering of sound and at the same time critiques the male-centric visual paradigm that dominates Western thought. I propose the body and sound as the point of departure to develop a different line of thinking in the queer feminist poetics of Stein. To be precise, moving beyond the conceptual reading of Stein’s linguistic experiment, the essay attempts to excavate a new politics in Stein’s work, specifically in her literary portraits, by attending to the acoustic aspects of her writing. Not merely situating herself as the painter, in other words, the gazer, switching the gendered norm of the positionalities in the genre of portrait painting, Stein also makes her literary portrait a multisensorial acoustic space in which the collaborative making of each other becomes possible through an unending process of talking and listening. In doing so, she disapproves of both the gendered norm of sound and the conventional construction of the authoritative male figure in portrait painting.

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