Ben Bascom has recently published his new book Feeling Singular, the following is a short interview offering some insight into its making.

Have you been eager to see this idea realized?

I’m thrilled to have finished Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States, which began as a dissertation for my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I sent off my completed draft of this book about a year and a half ago, and then it went through the process of being formatted and proofed. So yes, I’m very eager to see this project materialized!

How long have you been writing this book? What has the workflow been like?

I’ve been working on this book for nearly a decade. As a dissertation, it was just four chapters, which were written like case studies of queer figures in the early United States. I received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2019 through the American Antiquarian Society to conduct research and have time off from teaching to focus on writing. During that time, I wrote an additional chapter and then totally revised all the other chapters, shifting their order and writing a new introduction and conclusion. I initially sent the editor of Oxford University Press an email about their interest in my book back in the summer of 2021, and then submitted the complete manuscript that December. The manuscript went out for external review, and then I had a book contract in the summer of 2022. I was given about 9 months to put all the finishing touches on the manuscript before it got formatted for proofs.

What initially inspired you to explore queer masculinities in the early United States?

While I was taking coursework at the University of Illinois, I was introduced to a fraught steamboat inventor named John Fitch. He thought that he had single-handedly invented steam power, which he believed because he didn’t have access to contemporary scientific inventions. I was intrigued by the fact that someone could be so insistent on their own singular self and then be (nearly) forgotten by cultural memory.

What do you hope people can take away from your book?

This b0ok offers in-depth insights into lesser-studied personalities in the early United States and, with that material, theorizes the problems inherent to Western masculinity as an organizing social and cultural force.  I hope that readers will take away a sense of the need to see the history of norms and ideologies that continue to shape how we perceive sexuality, race, gender, class, and all other ways humans form and structure society. I’m particularly interested in readers coming to understand the long history of queer and trans gender identities and how such constructions of gender demonstrate the deeply fascinating history of masculinity itself.

Is this your first published book? How might you compare it to your other works?

This is the first book I’ve published, though I’ve recently had several essays published that focus on queer and trans literary histories.