INTRODUCTION: The Ontology of the Couple

S. Pearl Brilmyer is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on nineteenth- century European literature, sexuality, philosophy, and science. Her current book project, “The Science of Character: Matter, Form, and the Ends of Victorian Realism,” develops theory of late Victorian realism as a descriptive science committed to understanding what brings characters — literary and natural historical, human and nonhuman — into existence.

Filippo Trentin is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on film and psychoanalysis, European art cinema, and queer cinema. His work on the relationship between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Walter Benjamin, on Federico Fellini’s entropic aesthetics, and on queer representations of Rome appeared in journals such as Modern Language Review, Forum Italicum, and the Journal of Romance Studies. He is the coeditor of Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape (2016).

Zairong Xiang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the DFG Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” at Potsdam University, Germany. His research intersects feminisms and queer theories, literary and visual studies, and philosophical and religious inquiries in their decolonial variants in Spanish, English, Chinese, French, and Nahuatl. He is the author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018).