Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
631. "one thing that collaboration teaches you is that there is no last word on anything. someone looking over your shoulder or over your draft is going to find a better word or cross out your word entirely"; there's a disciplinary disconnect "over the word original in the demand that the dissertation be a 'significant and original contribution to scholarship. each of us knew how much her work depended on the scholarship she had read and how much the shape of her work had been affected by conversations, in reading groups or over coffee, with other graduate students, professors, friends, bartenders"; "we certainly felt like frauds"; "to write a book that had two signatures, we mused, would formally acknowledge that authors depend on other authors and would as well trouble the notions of original and originary. intellectual honesty seemed to require the candid dismantling of the solitary author, of the original and originary genius."
632. "unable to keep our hands off each other's bodies, we soon became similarly incapable of keeping our hands off each other's sentences. so steeped were we in the ideology of the solitary author that touching each other's sentences seemed the much riskier activity"; "we first came out as collaborators at the 1992 MLA convention" & "...wayne koestenbaum's double talk, on male collaboration and his claim there that men (at least the turn-of-the-century writers he examines) 'who collaborate engage in metaphorical sexual intercourse and [...] the text they balance between them is alternately a child of their sexual union, and a shared woman'(3)"--to coin the phrase precisely, it's "the erotics of collaboration": "we also see our concrete erotic connection as--in part, of course--the literalization of the erotic always inherent in the collaborative process and see our concrete collaborative projects as literalizations of the collaboration always inherent in the erotic process. collaborators are always in some sense lovers and lovers always in some sense collaborators"
633. "the charge of lesbianism has haunted and dogged the history of women's coauthorship and...female collaborators have felt compelled to defend themselves against it. london argues that one of the standard questions asked of collaborative authorship, 'which hand held the pen?, 'reflects both a fundamental disbelief in collaboration and a certain prurient interest--a desire to make collaboration render up its bodily secrets' a certain voyeurism" has always surrounded it: "how do you do it? who does what? how do you position yourselves?" they always ask; "roland barthes's the pleasure of the text long ago got us to think about the connections among writing, reading, and the erotic"
633. "and if the autoerotic is the model for textual pleasure in our discipline, then any doubling of that pleasure--for example, the pleasure of writing--is transgressive and hence queer"; "as a term that assimilates a variety of unconventional practices, desires, and social positions, queer seemed to us an apt label for collaborative writing"; "collaborative writing is queerly related to--and is the queer relative of--single-author scholarship"; "from this perspective, all collaborative scholars, no matter what their self-identifications and practices, become queer practitioners": "to speak openly about one's desire for the pleasures of discursive collaboration, to encourage, entice, recruit others to practice it, refused the discipline's values and challenged, much as queer activists do, the categories through which we live and work. and given the professional impediments and risks...we could say that writing collaboratively was, well, perverse."
634. "the pleasures are intimately bound up with the risks, so too with collaborative writing"; "a collaborator will disrupt that line, offer an alternative reading, challenge the categories through which you produce your text, encourage you to deviate from the straight and narrow of your usual habits of thought and expression, seduce you into territory that feels new, strange, odd, unnatural, recruit you to new methods, practices, positions....this can be upsetting, but it is never boring." "like good sex (or at least our notion of it), collaboration requires not just passion but generosity, improvisation, and risk. like good sex, it sometimes isn't civilized; the back-and-forth runs the risk of impoliteness; it can get fierce."
635. "a worry: perhaps we make collaboration too fraught, too significant, too transgressive....it seems to come quite naturally....but feminist and queer theories have if nothing else taught us to be suspicious of that 'naturally.'"

resources:
london, bette. writing double: women's literary partnerships (spec. the introduction & p. 26)