Numbered Erotics: Quantified Sexualities and Enumerative Aesthetics in Nightwood and The Young and Evil

Abstract:In the twentieth century, sexology became a quantitative enterprise. Yet queer novels from the 1930s, such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil, often replete with scientific jargon, are also full of inaccurate numbers. This essay examines the aesthetic and figurative use of quantitative representations in these two queer fictions. Psychometry and sex research established a rhetoric of numberiness for same-sex acts and identities. But these novels reject the objectivity of numbers, challenging their capacity to shore up the statistical rhetorics of heteronormativity and scientific fascism in this decade.