AustLit

'What is this thing we call/name essay, and what is its relationship to queer? This paper claims that the joy of essay (and queer) is that there are no answers necessarily – the pleasure or jouissance is in what the search might bring and where it might take you; how the search is, or might be expressed. Essay (queer) elevates all that is tangential, oblique, unspoken, transitory, ambiguous, unsettled, peculiar, strange. Maggie Nelson sets the scene with an exposition of language, experience, and reasons for keeping on writing, giving us her why-I-write moment. What follows in this paper, with examples, is a consideration of etymologies, form, unconventions, and desire. In shaping a view, the approach taken ruptures the so-called borders between scholarly and creative to present a fluid, free-forming thing that does what Nelson suggests is ‘never as certain, but always as possible’ (2015: 142). It takes pleasure in Hélène Cixous’s imund or ‘not unclean’ idea of writing (1993).' (Introduction)