My name is Lexus Root and I'm an English PhD student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. There, I work as an editorial assistant for the Cather Archive and teach.
I'm primarily concerned with male homosexuality, especially how
its depictions in English-language, mass-market erotic fiction have
changed over time ( ... hence the url
pulps.lgbt). If queer life was made more bearable
through the widespread, if secretive and taboo, availability of
these stories, what might we learn from them—either from their
emergence or their disappearance? Are there methods that cohere in
these texts, as disparate and ignored as they are, that we might be
able to incorporate into queer living? What would it look like to
integrate the visions of queer life that these texts offer? Would
it make life feel any more tolerable?
But to get there, shouldn't we know what is actually there—what sorts of 'methods' or 'visions' these texts contain? The digital humanities, or the incorporation of computational methods into humanistic inquiry, is uniquely situated to gather the sorts of evidence at stake in these questions. So, my research sits at the conjuncture of queer theory and dh: the use of computers to answer the larger question of how queer life might be made possible.
Most text is displayed in Equity by Matthew Butterick. Nikita Prokopov's Fira Code is used for code examples.
The only js on this website is for the rotating quotation on the home page. Quotations are taken variously from Stephen Tennant's unpublished poetry, Leo Skir's letters and published writing, Lionel Birch's Pyramid, among others.