The term “raw feel” originates in twentieth-century psychology to name the inner, conscious properties of experience. This article redefines the raw feel as a phenomenology of feminine queer body experience that responds to instances of gaslighting. Reading Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (2017) to explore raw feeling’s relations to sex, numbness, and finding agency in unexpected places, I show that raw feeling challenges distinctions between surface and allegorical modes of reading.

This content is only available via PDF.
© 2022 by The Regents of the University of California
2022
You do not currently have access to this content.