Non-Heteronormative Attachments: Melancholy and Intimacy in J.M. Coetzee’s Autofiction

This essay offers a theoretical lens, through which non-heteronormative attachments in Coetzee’s writing might be uncovered, a lens sensitive to feelings and affective intensities animating the intimacy between self and other. This new interpretive possibility, inspired by Lauren Berlant’s concept of minor intimacy 1998 , reckons with the modes of attachment and belonging that flourish in the shadow of heteronormative intimacies. This essay specifically explores melancholy, desire, and longing that appears throughout Coetzee’s autofictional trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life. It draws on the analytical insights offered by phenomenological literature on emotions, studies on heteronormativity, and existentialist thinker Martin Buber’sideas on intimacy.