‘Everything seemed very queer’: Virginia Woolf and queer phenomenology

Dicks, Daniel (2026) ‘Everything seemed very queer’: Virginia Woolf and queer phenomenology. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis employs queer phenomenology to explore how Virginia Woolf’s writing imagines and constructs non-normative ways of being, focusing on the presentation of queer temporalities, spatialities, and materialities. Building upon the rise in scholarly attention regarding Woolf’s depictions of time, space, and material objects, I read Woolf alongside theorists of phenomenology, and its recent, queer turn, including: Edmund Husserl, Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, and Eve Sedgwick, to suggest how Woolf’s writings present ways of being which resist hegemonic constructions of the three aforementioned areas. Alongside these (queer) phenomenological thinkers, in the course of this thesis I also draw on other theorists of narratology, temporality, spatiality, and materialisms in my reading of Woolf, such as: Paul Ricoeur, Mark Currie, Michel de Certeau, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The most prominent theorist engaged with throughout is Sara Ahmed who, despite her sustained theorisation of relationships between queer subjectivities and time, space, and objects in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), has been consistently underutilised by Woolf scholarship with regards to these subjects.

In the introduction, I use Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ to introduce the central concepts of queer phenomenology and its potential for reading Woolf. I will also map out the structure of this thesis. I then continue over the course of the thesis to consider: the queer temporality of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (chapter one); Clarissa Dalloway and Woolf’s ‘moment of being’ (chapter two); Septimus Smith and Jacob Flanders’s fugitive, queer spatiality (chapter three); Sapphic sanctuaries in Mrs. Dalloway and ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ (1926) (chapter four); and queer objects in Orlando: A Biography (1928) (chapter five). In the Coda, in a mirroring of the non-linear temporalities and resistances to hegemonic narrative considered in the course of the thesis, I return to the quotation included in the title of this thesis (MD: 23), to suggest how Maisie Johnson’s queer feeling in Regent’s Park symbolises and connects the arguments made over the preceding chapters.

As suggested by the chapter outline above, and the quotation used in the title of this thesis, Mrs. Dalloway serves as the primary text from which the majority of the chapters in this thesis advance, directed by the novel’s own preoccupations with resistances to heteropatriarchal hegemonies, particularly in relation to constructions of time and space. However, this is not to suggest that this thesis’s focus remains on Mrs. Dalloway for its entirety; as well as providing readings of the three texts noted above (Jacob’s Room (1922), ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’, and Orlando), other novels, essays, short stories, diaries, letters, archival materials, and autobiographical writing by Woolf, are touched on throughout.

Proceeding from close readings of key episodes within Woolf’s novels, and through sustained engagement with queer phenomenological theory, this thesis argues that across the texts considered Woolf not only depicts characters who desire queer love objects, but that queerness also manifests in her works through the fashioning of characters’ subjectivities, showing how Woolf’s writing offers imaginative models for ways of being which resist hegemonic constructions of time, space, and relationships with material objects. Furthermore, I consider how Woolf’s writing itself works to resist and subvert the forms and narratives born from and propagating compulsory hetero-patriarchy, imagining queer alternatives which in turn enable readers to imagine alternative possibilities for living.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies
• Supervisor's Name: Goldman, Dr. Jane and Randall, Professor Bryony
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86224
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 15 Sep 2026 09:06
• Last Modified: 15 Sep 2026 09:08
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86224