The queer communism of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War love poems

This article theorizes how Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of 1936 Spanish Civil War (SCW) sapphic-modernist love poems imagines sexual and political liberation. Warner develops in her speaker a dually queer and communist perspective. The speaker rejects normative and reproductive logics in favour of distinctly queer logics. In doing so, Warner anticipates two longstanding conflicts in queer scholarship: queer historiography and the gaps in the historical record, and queer theorists’ tendency to critique the state but not offer an alternative vision. Warner imagines these conflicts as epistemic injustices that deny queer people an interpretive framework to understand their lives by severing them from their history and denying them a queer form of governance. With a focus on poems four and six, I argue queer time, messianic time, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “being singular plural” are employed as representational strategies for imagining liberation from these epistemic injustices. This article makes a vital contribution to the study of Warner’s oeuvre and of sapphic modernism by articulating a queer and communist epistemology that foregrounds proximity, longing, and love

Art · Communism · Literature · Physics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Townsend · Gender Studies · Law · Spanish Culture and Identity · Spanish History and Politics · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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