ABSTRACT
Aesthetic autonomy is always the product of social circumstances, and Gertrude Stein’s work is no exception. Her characteristic style represents a solution to her particular social predicament. Stein’s identity left her disaffiliated from most forms of community, but she found herself welcome in the pre-war Parisian art world, a community open to many of the categories of human identity—foreign, Jewish, sexually and behaviorally unconventional—to which she belonged. To be truly valued in the Parisian milieu, though, she needed to trade in the kind of capital that mattered most there: genius. Her radically autonomous language gave her an aura of genius and a means to express her sexuality, helping forge a bond between queer identity and aesthetics.
