A WOMAN’S TOUCH: QUEERIOD DRAMA AND THE SCENE OF WRITING
A WOMAN’S TOUCH: QUEERIOD DRAMA AND THE SCENE OF WRITING

Summary/Abstract: A Woman’s Touch: Queeriod Drama and the Scene of Writing. This paper addresses the representation of women of the long eighteenth century as writers on the contemporary screen. It focuses on the experimentation with time in such representations, the seeking out of closeness and distance in the past through relationships with ‘lost’ texts or scenarios. This in two respects: first, the sense of a lost relationship to manuscript and manuscript ‘hands’ in letters and diaries in the new mediations visual and verbal of the screen; second, the sense of what has been helpfully termed by Elizabeth Freeman ‘temporal drag’ in the representation of same-sex relationships of the past in our media present. I focus in particular on a recent ‘queeriod’ drama about the life of Anne Lister, landowner and lesbian: the series Gentleman Jack developed and directed from her screenplay by Sally Wainwright (BBC /HBO TV series 1, 2019 and series 2, 2022). I look closely at a scene designed to illustrate intense affect formed in and through writing: a moment when we are invited to feel with, or to be touched by, the feeling of the protagonist. A turning away is also a turning toward, a perception of affect. What is transmitted is feeling itself. Writing itself ‘makes’ affect rather than representing it.

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