Queer Home on the Road: Lesbian Escape and the Great American Road Trip

The road trip narrative is a quintessentially American form of prose. Traditionally, road trip narratives not only exclude women, but female subjectivity more generally. There are, however, some notable early and midcentury contributions to the genre from a queer female perspective that have currently gone understudied. Novels like Patricia Highsmith's Price of Salt (1952), Lilyan Brock's Queer Patterns (1935), and Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Women (1932) posit an alternative paradigm for the iconic American road trip story. This paper explores how the road trip allows for lesbian escape from the confines of hetero-patriarchal gender norms and domestic constraints through a new, queer definition of "home" on the road. In Highsmith, Brock, and Thayer's novels, the road trip functions as a radical act of queer self-preservation and invention.