The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–1930 , by Yvonne Ivory (original) (raw)
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Special Issue on Reading Queer in Literature, Film and Culture Part II: Literature and Queer
2015
Adolescence is a difficult time, filled with uncertainty about physical appearance, identity, sexual maturation, and the ability to 'fit-in' to a desirable community. For Calliope Stephanides, this time is especially difficult. Cal's a hermaphrodite, living in a world that has room for only two classifications of people: 'normal' and 'not.' An exploration of observable binaries in Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, Middlesex explores the formation of Cal(lie)'s identity through classical notions of identity construction and suggests the unlikelihood of his ever being able to achieve a complete understanding of self. 'To be or not to be, that is the question' (Shakespeare 995). Shakespeare's Hamletcontemplates the continuance of life in the wake of incredible difficulties. But what it means 'to be' has long been questioned in the philosophical ideas relating to man's existence. In Plato's text Theaetetus, Socrates explains: '...
(A2)‘Queer Theory’ Routledge Anthony Elliot.docx
In a relatively short period of time, Queer theory has been established as a major academic area of study, integrated into almost all disciplines, particularly the humanities and the social sciences. This perseverance in the realm of the halls of academia, however, has not led to a consensus on what exactly it is or what it represents. In its most general sense, Queer theory has encouraged a reinterpretation of standard views about peoples and cultures. As such, its development was a reaction: A reaction against noninclusion, against marginalization, against discrimination. It was also a reaction to the movements of the 1960s and what some judged to be failed theory incorporated into the organization of resistance. For many, then, it is simply an objectification of resistance to dominant theories and models of social life. For others, (and this is more in the public realm) its origins were a statement of an undefined "anti-establishment" position that have now become settled in post-secondary departments in much the same way that past social movements such as Women's Studies, Afro-American Studies, and the more broadly based "ethnic studies" are now mainstream fields of academic discourse, so that we can now say that Queer Studies and Queer theory are part of the same enterprise.
2016
ABSTRACT This thesis aims to elucidate previously obscured aspects of nineteenth-century women’s writing, through the development of original approaches to the reading of gender ambiguity, queer subjectivities and non-normative desire. It challenges the removal of the closet from feminist, historicist scholarship and constructions of female sexuality based on an adherence to romantic friendship and lesbian continuum models. This research proposes original work, which breaks the links between Michel Foucault’s dating of the disciplinary coding of homosexuality and the assumed relationship with the closet. New readings are proposed which acknowledge, define and foreground multi-functional closets, inside and outside of texts. In refusing this removal this study also aims to open up a space for the consideration of closets as protective and supportive spaces as well as symptoms of oppression. Underexplored links between literary form, the repelling of social restriction and the relationship between literary conventions and non-binary positions are also highlighted to emphasise the radical potential of performative subjects in women’s writing. This project proposes the recovery of queer selves and subjective forms of identification in the work of seven/eight women writers Anne Lister, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Adelaide Anne Procter, Michael Field and Amy Levy, spanning the long nineteenth century. It also offers new approaches by combining cross-genre analysis of poetry and life writing. Using activist language largely in advance of academic discourse, it asks questions about the changing significance of queerness as language and metaphor. This thesis uses diverse social, religious and literary bodies to illustrate the strength of same-sex communities and their role in providing safe spaces for queer, desiring interactions in the nineteenth century.
2015
Definition of Tragedy), does many things simultaneously. 1 As the title indicates, the play claims its place in the tradition of Greek tragedies, and its direct reference to Shakespearean work is unmistakable. 2 Written with the luxury of the playwright's seasoned craft, the play also evokes philosophical systems in its witty terse everyday exchanges. 3 But what is distinctive and provocative about the play is its treatment of human sexuality and the sexuality's relationship with subjectivity and language. Martin Gray, a happily married heterosexual man, falls in love with a goat, Sylvia, at a time when his professional success is at the pinnacle. Though the play does not end happily for him as Steve, his wife, kills the goat, his transformed subjectivity and the incidents in the play demonstrate that human sexuality is essentially a queer phenomenon-something that demands difficult exercise for its disciplining into straight performances. 4
"The Queerness of Character-Details"
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 2023
This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension of character as an aesthetic form. Character-details beckon for queer uptake, or the recirculation of characterdetails into contexts, genres, and media to unlock new narrative trajectories for queerness. Character-details thus highlight the promiscuously queer relationality of character as an aesthetic form. The essay then turns to A. K. Summers's graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014), which takes up the character-details of Tintin to expand the narration of gender nonconformity. Finally, the essay traces how character-details focalize bisexual queer eroticism in Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Inventory" from Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Taken together, these texts exemplify the centrality of queer characters to-and character as an aesthetic form in-contemporary queer literature.
Journal of Sociology
Queer Theory Now is a very well-written and refreshingly clear intersectional account of what 'queer theory' is (a daunting task!), the historical processes that brought it into being, and how it has evolved over time. It is an excellent teaching resource for lecture preparation and inclusion on student reading lists, but it is equally useful as an introduction to queer studies for newcomers or as a reference work for scholars already working in the field. The key contribution of this excellent book is alluded to in the title, where the 'now' presupposes a historical trajectory of 'queer theory', which, the authors contend, has very much endured as a relevant theoretical framework, despite elegiac claims to the contrary. Queer Theory Now thus serves as a welcome corrective to the problems of ahistoricism that can abstract 'theory' from the concrete genealogies within which it is shaped. The structure of the book is well thought out and executed, which is no small achievement for a subject as unwieldy and deliberately ephemeral as queer theory. The chapter themes are logically ordered, with the first two chapters offering a definition and then an exposition of the modern 'invention' of sexuality in sexology and the activism it spawned via Foucault. There are probably a thousand different ways one could structure a book like this, but the decision to begin with Foucault is sound, given the importance of his argument that the category of identity that produced homosexuality as a pathology was also the very same identity through which gay activists could join together first to demand equal rights and, later, to reject the institution of heterosexuality itself. After all, the basic impetus of 'queer theory' is to problematise sexual identity. From Foucault, we are then taken on a journey through feminism and the sex wars; the AIDS crisis and the emergence of Queer Nation; the work of prominent field-defining thinkers Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick; the debates around identity politics; the rise of intersectionality; and the concepts of queer time and affect. Break-out boxes offer helpful explanations of key terms (like 'normativity', 'discourse', or the 'sex/gender distinction') and provide overviews of related theories not covered in the main text. They also offer suggestions for further reading and films to watch and sometimes feature diagrams and tables that break down different political strands of thought. A particular favourite is the figure near the 952615J OS0010.