Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Virtual Book Talk hosted by American Antiquarian Society)

Join us virtually as Ben Bascom speaks on his new book Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (2024), which looks at the paradoxical nature of masculine self-promotion and individuality in the early United States. Much of U.S. cultural production since the twentieth century has celebrated the figure of the singular individual, from the lonesome Huckleberry Finn to the cinematic loners John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but that tradition casts a backward shadow obscuring how the “singular” in America was previously marked as unwanted, outcast, excessive, or weird.  Through a collection of singular life narratives, Bascom draws on a queer studies approach that uncovers how fraught private desires shaped a public masculinity increasingly at odds with the indifferent norms of republican public culture.