Aaron J. Stone (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is a queer and trans studies scholar and narrative theorist whose research examines queer desires for form—that is, how queer and trans subjects organize their own lives and self-understandings (social forms) in relation to the structural affordances of stories about gender and sexual nonnormativity (narrative forms).

Stone’s first book project, Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life, explores the social crisis of form that Black and white queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America and the narrative strategies queer subjects employ in imagining what shapes their lives might take. The project makes two counterintuitive claims: first, that experimental narrative forms often represent queer desires for traditional ways of life; and second, that ostensibly “conventional” narratives—a label most often applied to nonwhite modernists—have been equally essential to the project of queer worldmaking. At stake here is a queer and trans theory that accounts for both antinormativity and the longing for models that facilitate reimagined, nonnormative ways of being. This research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.

Building on this account of queer subjectivity, racialization, and narrative form, Stone’s second book project, Black Vernacular Sexology, attends to how African American novels engage sexual science. The project asserts that turn-of-the-century Black authors used narrative to refute the truth-claims of sexology and race science while also adapting sexual-scientific methods to generate new knowledge from Black standpoints.

Stone’s research on queer and trans form also includes projects examining drag as a cultural form and its representations in narrative life writing and in reality competition programs.

Areas of research and teaching: queer and trans theory, narrative theory, modernist studies, multiethnic American literature (1900–present), racialization, transfeminisms, drag culture, drag and genderqueer life writing

Selected Publications:

“Drag and Genderqueer Autobiography.” In A History of American Gay Autobiography, edited by Guy Davidson and David Bergman, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming, solicited).

“Passing’s Desires for Form: Black Respectability, Queer Narrative, and Wayward Experimentalism.” Modernism/modernity 31, no. 1 (forthcoming 2025)

“Toward a Black Vernacular Sexology.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 29.1, special issue on “The Science of Sex Itself” edited by Benjamin Kahan and Greta LaFleur (January 2023): 27–42.

“How Drag Race Created a Monster: The Future of Drag and the Backward Temporality of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula.” The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging?, edited by Cameron Crookston, Intellect Books, March 2021, pp. 81–107.

“Taste and the Tasteful: Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and the Culture of Queer Elitism.” Virginia Woolf and the World of Books: Selected Papers of the 27th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill, Clemson University Press, 2018.