Adaptation as Queer Touching in The Safety of Objects: Transgressing the Boundaries of Bodies and Texts

This essay elucidates “queer touching” as a nonhierarchical exchange between self and others that disrupts notions of the autonomous individual and configures the boundaries of identity as permeable and shifting. Building on psychoanalytic, queer, and trans theories of embodiment, Pellegrini argues that queer touching can serve as a method for adaptation studies as it challenges the bounded isolation of texts and reads them as interdependent and mutually constitutive. The method is demonstrated through an analysis of A. M. Homes’ short story collection The Safety of Objects and its film adaptation by Rose Troche, read as one heterogeneous text, focusing especially on characters as they are constituted intertextually and become sources of queer tension between self and other, inside and outside, part and whole.