"The Queerness of Character-Details" (original) (raw)
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Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life
Deep Blue (University of Michigan), 2022
Around the turn of the twentieth century, when sexual identity categories were acquiring new visibility, queer people began to construct communities around their shared experience of nonbelonging. Literary narrative was a crucial tool for queer individuals trying to forge senses of self and community. Scholars have argued that many avant-garde modernisms critiqued the sexual status quo and imagined convention-breaking modes of existence for queer people. Existing scholarship depicts nascent queer communities as triumphantly scorning social norms via their recourse to experimental literatures. Yet, many queer people found it difficult or unnecessary to abandon desires for traditional ways of life or for “conventional” literary forms. Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life analyzes queer modernist narratives to explore how Black and white queer communities navigated both desires for new modes of living and attachments to conventionality. At stake here is an understanding of queer identity that accounts for and respects desires for legibility, intimacy, and belonging.Desires for Form assesses how narrative form shapes representations of desire for stabilizing social forms through analyses of queer modernist novels informed by queer theory, narrative theory, and critical race theory. The dissertation contains two parts with two chapters each; each part juxtaposes a white-authored queer “experimental” novel with a “conventional” novel by a queer Black author. By explicating how each text defies critical expectations for traditional or experimental queer narratives, Desires for Form dispels the racializing assumptions that have historically separated white and Black modernisms. Part I, “Desire for Intimacy,” considers narrative representations of the social forms that structure personal relationships. Chapter 1, “Coveting the Couple,” examines Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), demonstrating that the novel’s deviations from linear narrative do not enact a queer refusal of conventional forms but rather mourn modernity’s erosion of the couple form and traditional romantic scripts. Chapter 2, “Securing the Family,” argues that while the realist narration of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) seems to uphold middle-class Black respectability politics, the novel ultimately accentuates how its protagonist has forcibly “straightened out” her own story, thus critiquing the very narrative teleology it employs. Part II, “Desire for Identity,” compares narrative modes of portraying queer longing for community. Chapter 3, “Trusting Gender,” analyzes the formal pastiche of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933), asserting that the text’s heterogeneous narrative form underscores how queer femininity allowed members of the fairy subculture to forge stabilizing interpersonal bonds. Chapter 4, “Seeking Sexuality,” argues that Richard Bruce Nugent’s realist roman à clef Gentleman Jigger (written 1928–33, published 2008) takes the form of a queer Bildungsroman while tightly controlling readerly perceptions of its protagonist, whose identifications with queer sexuality are initially a superficial escape from Black identity but ultimately enable an artistic and unconventional theorization of queer subjectivity.Desires for Form articulates a central paradox: within queer modernism, experimental narrative forms often reinforce traditional social structures, whereas narrative conventionality has facilitated radical reimaginings of queer ways of life. This insight disrupts the racialized hierarchies that have implicitly privileged the radical queer potential of white experimentalisms over Black realisms within modernist studies. By taking seriously queer desires for form, this dissertation also challenges queer studies to analyze how the longing for structure and stability has shaped queer subjectivity as profoundly as the desire to escape restrictive norms.
Masculinity behind the Masquerade: The Problem of Reading Queer Femininity
Queer Sexualities – Diversifying Queer, Queering Diversity. Vikki Fraser (Ed.), 2013
This paper focuses on the notion that particular ways of understanding femininity have been historically "othered" within critical gender theory. 1 From Pamela Robertson's discussions of female "camp" that positions women embracing feminine excess against a backdrop of male homosexuality, 2 to Angela McRobbie's critique of pleasure-seeking women whom she dubs "phallic girls", 3 this paper examines why masculinity readings are often privileged as a marker of resistance to hegemonic notions of femininity and why some aspects of the category of femininity are often not in and of themselves considered as centralising concepts for analyses of gender. Along these lines, this paper focuses on two central premises: first, within contemporary feminist writing, femininity is often viewed as symbolically representative of oppression and/or symptomatic of a problematic post-feminist raunch culture; second, queer theory perspectives allow for different viewpoints on the same phenomena as that considered within feminist writing (such as interrogating raunch culture) but tend to offer readings that predominately focus on appropriations of masculinity as markers of female resistance, rather than considering the subversive potential of femininity per se.
Speculating the Queer (In)Human: A Critical, Reparative Reading of Contemporary LGBTQ+ Picturebooks
Journal of Children's Literature, 2021
Utilizing queer theory as a complementary perspective to and point of departure from critical multiculturalism, this article reports on a critical content analysis and reparative reading across contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) picturebooks featuring (in)human characters. Following mermaids, unicorns, and shapeshifters, the authors suggest that these children’s texts’ rejection of liberal humanist conceptions of “the human'' can incite speculation by readers toward queerer futures. Reading across their analyses, the authors close by underscoring the theoretical and pedagogical significance of their project. As this article details, critically reading (in)human representation both reifies homonormative depictions of queer life and reparatively reconfigures it. The (in)human—as a concept—propels a potential and practice for queer world-making. As an analytic, it provides a revised ethics for reading queer life. Radically questioning and reparatively reading the (in)human, this article extends what counts as queer in critical multicultural children’s literature.
Introduction: Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social
ASAP/Journal, 2017
This special issue wagers that a focus on aesthetic form need not be a turn away from the politicized concern with race and social and geopolitical inequities so critical within contemporary queer studies. In making this claim, we simultaneously reach back to early queer literary scholarship engaged with structuralism and aesthetics and reach through and around contemporary queer theory into current conversations on racialization, materiality, and sensation.
Non-normative Bodies, Queer Identities Marginalizing Queer Girls in YA Dystopian Literature
Girlhood Studies, 2019
In this article we consider the absence of queer female protagonists in dystopian Young Adult (YA) fiction and examine how texts with queer protagonists rely on heteronormative frameworks. Often seen as progressive, dystopian YA fiction features rebellious teen girls resisting the restrictive norms of their societies , but it frequently sidelines queerness in favor of heteronormative romance for its predominantly white, able-bodied protagonists. We analyze The Scorpion Rules (2015) and Love in the Time of Global Warming (2013), both of which feature queer girl protagonists, and conclude that these texts ultimately marginalize that queerness. While they offer readers queer female protagonists, they also equate queerness with non-normative bodies and reaffirm heteronormativity. The rebellion of both protagonists effectively distances them from the queer agency they have developed throughout the narratives.
The butch, the femme and the surrogate mother: Representations of women in contemporary queer drama
Comunicacao E Cidadania Actas Do 5o Congresso Da Sopcom, 2008
The queer theatre that emerged in the '90's in England and the USA promoted a refusal of dominant sexual norms and an exploration of dissident sexualities. These dissident sexualities were primarily, though not exclusively, lesbian, gay and transgender. In its destabilization of sexual norms, queer theory focused upon the performativity of gender and sexual roles rather than casting them as fixed and essential. The hope was that in positioning gender and sexuality as performative, the inconsistencies within sexual norms could be highlighted and alternatives to them experimented. Much of this queer work was written by gay men and dealt with themes of interest to them, such as the effects of the AIDS pandemic on sexual behaviour. This often meant that women's roles in queer drama were marginal or non-existent. This paper analyses representations of women in two queer plays. The first, Mark Ravenhill's 1996 Shopping and Fucking includes the resourceful Lulu among the trio of main characters who invent schemes to survive amidst the debris of a commodified and mediatized society. The second, Phyllis Nagy's Weldon Rising (1992) takes place in the aftermath of a homophobic attack as the characters come to terms with the fact that they have not intervened to prevent it. It includes a lesbian couple for whom understanding what happened in the street before them leads to a redefinition of their sexual relationship. The paper raises questions such as the critique of traditional representations of women prompted by queer representation and the link between reconfigured representations of women and non-illusionist performance.
The Animal as Queer Act in Comics: Queer Iterations in On Loving Women and Nimona
This thesis examines comics' use of animal and otherwise non-normative bodies to portray queer identities and examine how the portrayal of the queer and monstrous can be seen as a reflection of the medium itself. Comics is a hybrid medium in which words and images coexist, favoring neither and flouting categorization in art or literature. Comics relishes the instability and subversive nature of its form, and has been a tool for challenging conventions of acceptable representation. Comics' refusal to accept a secure, unified definition is analogous to the object of queer theory, suggesting that comics are particularly well suited to depict queer narratives. Close readings of Diane Obomsawin's graphic narrative On Loving Women and Noelle Stevenson's webcomic Nimona serve as examples of the possibilities of reading comics through a queer lens. Both texts are examples of queer narratives that use animal, monster, and nonhuman bodies to articulate otherness. On Loving Women's anthropomorphic animals represent different lesbians as they recount short biographical sketches. This text layers narrative voice, giving the text a sense of polysemy and evoking the multiplicity of queer identity. Nimona follows the misadventures of a shapeshifting sidekick and her cyborg supervillain boss. Nimona depicts the threat posed by fluid and non-normative identities to heteronormative hegemonic institutions, ultimately demanding that the binary systems that persecute queerness be abolished. Both texts call into question the nature of identity in terms of sex, gender, and humanity. As examples of the possibilities of comics to attack exclusionary systems that place queerness as the ultimate other, these texts reveal the diverse ways in which representational space is queered. Comics repositions the body on the page, allowing for iterative acts of queering that cannot be limited to any singular form. The medium continues to develop new modes of representation that challenge and subvert normative systems.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016
As we transition into a cybersocial world of infinite 'glocal' intersections, much of our perceptions about beauty and body have come to be regulated by the reductive standards of the popular global media, mediated mostly in the US, that seek to gratify specific heterosexist, hypermasculine/ hyperfeminine notions about body image. To create stringently specified standards for men and women is to automatically confine the body into the duality of the masculine and the feminine, thus repressing the self-expression of alternate sexualities and genders. Situating our discourse within the critical paradigm gender performativity, this paper will navigate the processes involved in the visualization and performance of the queer body in Hollywood and American show business and chart the evolution of LGBTQ representations in media. Amidst the pervasive politico-cultural preoccupation with the body, can gender performance through queer bodies truly reach their full potential and self-expressivity, specifically in societies that impose normative regulations and restrictive labels on standards of beauty? Where, then, is the queer, transgendered body situated within the predominantly masculine culture of visual narcissism and cisgender body hysteria? The de-objectification of traditional body images in media, thus, becomes a vital agenda in queer studies. This paper will further interrogate the possibility of a postgender representational mode that can subvert the traditional binaries of the body and accommodate sexual/gender alterities within, what Habermas calls, the "media-steered subsystems".