‘Torquere’: Stein’s and Hemingway’s Queer Relationality

This chapter examines Stein’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway, whose initial supplication to her tutelage transformed into aggression in the wake of his observation of Toklas’s power over Stein. Whereas Stein admits in The Autobiography to having “a weakness for Hemingway”, Hemingway—who spoke of wanting to “lay” Stein—spitefully attacked her relationship with Toklas in A Moveable Feast in retaliation for her calling him “yellow.” Differences between the public and private Hemingway precipitated crises as he disavowed the possibility that his attraction to the masculine Stein may have been driven by a far queerer configuration of gender and desire than the heteronormative logics that governed the works he published during his lifetime. Considering A Moveable Feast as well as Stein’s and Hemingway’s shorter poems about one another—Stein’s “He and They, Hemingway” (1923), “Evidence” (1929), “Genuine Creative Ability” (1930), and “Sentences and Paragraphs” (1931); Hemingway’s “The Soul of Spain” (1924)—this chapter argues that their relationship’s troubling vicissitudes reverberated across their lives and works.

Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

Coda: Gertrude Stein Icon

The coda expands on the implications of the textual and visual artefacts of Stein’s masculine homosocial desires by cross-reading her ambivalent reflections on celebrity in Everybody’s Autobiography (1936) with her frequent appearances in the public consciousness from 2011 to 2012. Although Chapter One showed that by the early twenty-first century Stein had emerged as an icon both of modernism and of queer culture, that high standing has recently been challenged because of her homonational attitudes and masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy. If Gertrude Stein’s Masculinity uses psychoanalytic theory to present Stein as an important character in the stories of modernism and queer theory, that story will continue as she circulates into new contexts. As she does so, there will likely be further changes to the ways that her masculinity is made available for view, with unpredictable consequences for her iconicity.

Reading Stein’s Genders: Multiple Identifications in the 1900s

This is the first of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early twentieth-century genders, loosening up and ultimately rejecting the rigid constructs of masculinity she encountered in Otto Weininger’s misogynist Sex and Character. Chapter Two focuses on cross-gendered identification in Stein’s earliest literary efforts—the prose narratives Fernhurst (1904-5), Q.E.D. (1903), and Three Lives (1909). In these works, Stein rejects the category “woman” while questioning the limitations of patriarchal ideologies about masculinity and femininity alike.

Stein, Van Vechten and Modernism’s Queer Gaze

This chapter offers a counterpoint to Stein’s and Hemingway’s mutual aggression by focusing on her queerly productive friendship with modernist impresario Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten’s friendship with Stein and Toklas was flirtatious and never soured. Rather than deriding Stein’s writing—as Hemingway and Picasso occasionally did—Van Vechten helped place her manuscripts, edited her Selected Writings, organized her 1934-1935 lecture tour of the United States, and took photographs that furthered her celebrity image. To track the vicissitudes of their bond, this chapter reads Stein’s temporally warped account in The Autobiography of her first meeting with Van Vechten; examines her two word-portraits of him (“One Carl Van Vechten,” 1913, and “Van Or Twenty Years After,” 1923); and analyzes several of his photographs of her and the “Woojums” family of choice they formed with Toklas. In a circuit of masculine homosocial desire that was markedly different than those addressed in chapters Five and Six, Stein returned Van Vechten’s affection with verbal portraits that show none of the ambivalence at work in her writings about Picasso and Hemingway.

Introduction: Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity

The Introduction provides an overview of Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity as well as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Stein’s writings and her gender. By using psychoanalysis to complicate historicist imperatives and engaging recent debates over queer temporalities and relationalities, the Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s argument that Stein ultimately rejected early twentieth-century gender formations in favor of a flexible, feminist, and anti-identitarian mode of transsubjectivity inscribed in texts that cross genres. Pushing back against formalist and materialist critiques of biographical interpretation, the Introduction also makes the case for readings that trace visual artworks’ and her writings’ roles as nodal points for intersubjective desire. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s seven chapters and coda: four chapters that identify signs of Stein’s transmasculinity in her writings and others’ representations of her; three that track her masculine homosocial bonds with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten; and a coda that points to possibilities for examining the implications of Stein’s masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

Picasso’s Stein/Stein’s Picasso:Cubist Perspective/MasculineHomosociality

This chapter cross-reads Picasso’s paintings that reference Stein—Gertrude Stein (1906), Homage à Gertrude (1909), and The Architect’s Table (1912)—with her word-portraits “Picasso” (1912) and “If I Told Him A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1924) to argue that masculine homosociality was an important force in their dynamic. Tracking the ways their portraits of one another use cubist strategies to register the vicissitudes of their bond, I argue that whereas Picasso’s portrait of Stein reflects his trepidation about her masculinity and their masculine homosociality, her portraits of him instead show both fondness and concern about his uneven patterns of artistic production and imperial masculinity. If ultimately, Stein’s portraits of Picasso differentiate her queer transmasculinity from his misogynist masculinity, Czech artist Jiří Kolář’s reinflections of his portraits of her further transform the gaze through which her masculinity—and homosocial bond with Picasso—are made available for view.

Visual Economies of Queer Desire in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

This chapter uses The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to frame and advance this book’s central argument about Stein’s masculine homosocial relationships with her colleagues. Tracking the dynamics of vision that animate The Autobiography, I argue that it uses Toklas’s loving gaze to establish and recognize Stein’s masculinity, as well as to highlight the importance to modernism of her masculine homosocial bonds. The Autobiography depicts those ties as very congenial with men such as Sherwood Anderson and with masculine women such as Jane Heap, but more fraught—and more likely to induce perspectival vacillation—with Hemingway and Picasso. This multiperspectivalism structures the book and mobilizes multiple narratives of modernism’s emergence. In so doing, The Autobiography reframes Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Toklas as part of the appearance of the new that the text initially attributes solely to the formal properties of modern art and writing.

Reading Stein’s Genders: Transmasculine Signification in the 1910s and 1920s

This is the second of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early twentieth-century genders, loosening up rigid constructs of masculinity she encountered in Otto Weininger’s misogynist Sex and Character. Chapter Three argues that her innovative writings from the 1910’s and 1920’s—such as the long poems “Lifting Belly” and “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927)—use Toklas’s feminine positioning to establish Stein’s masculinity. Whereas Stein’s earlier fiction presented more subtle challenges to Weininger, Stein’s experimental poems from the 1910’s and 1920’s explicitly and jubilantly use linguistic innovation to articulate a flexible and feminist transmasculinity.