The aesthetics of minor intimacy: precarious attachments and queer feelings in the autobiographical fiction of J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

This essay offers a new perspective on the queerness of the encounters between self and other in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction. It attends to the dynamics of openness and reservation, immediacy and mediation, desire and longing played out between Anya and Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and John and his female cousin, who is represented by the characters Agnes in Boyhood: A Memoir (1997), Ilse in Youth (2002), and Margot in Summertime (2009). Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of minor intimacy—which asks us to pay attention to encounters without a canon and to desires too elusive for heterosexual conventions— it offers a framework for uncovering modes of attachment in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction that do not obey the strictures of the couple form. I draw on queer studies on intimacy and phenomenological studies on emotions and embodiment to explore the modes of attachment between self and other.