Aaron J. Stone

Aaron J. Stone (they/them) is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Their primary research interests span queer and trans studies, multiethnic U.S. literature (C20–present), modernist studies, and narrative theory. Stone’s book project, Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life, explores the social crisis of form that Black and white queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America and the narrative strategies queer subjects employ in imagining what shapes their lives might take. The project makes two counterintuitive claims: first, that experimental queer texts often represent desires for traditional ways of life; and second, that ostensibly “conventional” narratives—a label most often applied to nonwhite modernists—have been equally essential to the project of queer worldmaking. These claims are explored by comparing realist narrative forms deployed by Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman to formal experiments by Djuna Barnes, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Taylor, and Gertrude Stein. At stake here is a queer and trans theory that accounts for both antinormativity and the longing for models that facilitate reimagined, nonnormative ways of being.

Stone’s published and forthcoming work includes articles on Nella Larsen and queer experimentalism (Modernism/modernity, forthcoming) and Black American novelists and/as American sexologists (GLQ, 2023), as well as book chapters on drag and genderqueer life writing (A History of American Gay Autobiography, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and the resurgence of punk and alternative aesthetics within drag performance (The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Intellect Books, 2021)