OA

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Erotohistoriography of Pets

In ‘The Cat’ (1901), the American regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman attempts to retrace an affective history of domestication, while coming to terms with the increasing regulation of queer affects that was taking place at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This leads her, this chapter argues, to experiment with a corporeal, sensuous method of doing history that queer theorists have since called ‘erotohistory’. Domestication and queerness sit at the intersection of private and public history, of feelings, corporeal sensations, and human politics – and Freeman’s feline tale reveals the importance of what the history of one could teach us about the history of the other.