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Narratives of Queer Desire: Deserts of the Heart is an interdisciplinary project that uses literary analysis, especially close reading, along with personal testimony and the applications of gender theory, as a means for identifying, looking at, and exploring LGBTQ stories. Taking its subtitle from Jane Rule's novel Desert of the Heart, Narratives of Queer Desire considers queer yearnings for stories other than those conventionally available, stories that, often located at the social margins ('deserts') and subject to violent regulation, engage and resist norms in literature as well as culture and politics. Narratives of Queer Desire offers a story about the power of storytelling: within our personal, professional, and political lives and at the sites of our desire, including the classroom. This is a story about how literature encounters loss, staves off aggression, and answers erasure by offering itself as a site of care and empowerment and activism for LGBTQ people.
Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance. Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed. This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.
This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this volume foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media. This book traces the intellectual and political emergence of queer studies, addresses relevant critical debates in the field, provides an overview of queer approaches to genres, and explains how queer approaches have transformed understandings of key concepts in multiple fields.
Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women’s, and non-binary people’s experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways. Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people’s experiences. Through 25 newly commissioned chapters, a diverse range of authors, from early career researchers to established scholars, stage conversations at the cutting edge of sexuality studies. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities. This innovative interdisciplinary collection is an excellent resource for scholars, undergraduate, and postgraduate students interested in gender, sexuality, and identity across a range of fields, such as queer studies, feminist theory, anthropology, media studies, sociology, psychology, history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention.
On Making Sense juxtaposes texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to understand how knowledge is acquired and produced in contexts of racial and gender oppression. From James Baldwin's 1960s novel Another Country to Margaret Cho's turn-of-the-century stand-up comedy, these works all exhibit a preoccupation with intelligibility, or the labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others. In their efforts to "make sense," these writers and artists argue against merely being accepted by society on society's terms, but articulate a desire to confront epistemic injustice—an injustice that affects people in their capacity as knowers and as communities worthy of being known. The book speaks directly to critical developments in feminist and queer studies, including the growing ambivalence to antirealist theories of identity and knowledge. In so doing, it draws on decolonial and realist theory to offer a new framework to understand queer writers and artists of color as dynamic social theorists.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Recasts queerness in medieval French romances by juxtaposing key genres for the first time, revealing how their literary sophistication overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness.
This book argues for the importance of narrative theories which consider gender and sexuality through the analysis of a diverse range of texts and media. Classical Narratology, an allegedly neutral descriptive system for features of narrative, has been replaced by a diverse set of theories which are attentive to the contexts in which narratives are composed and received. Issues of gender and sexuality have, nevertheless, been sidelined by new strands which consider, for example, cognitive, transmedial, national or historical inflections instead. Through consideration of texts including the MTV series Faking It and the papers of a nineteenth-century activist, Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative heeds the original call of feminist narratologists for the consideration of a broader and larger corpus of material. Through analysis of issues including the popular representation of lesbian desire, the queer narrative voice, invisibility and power in the digital age, embodiment and cognitive narratology, reading and racial codes, this book argues that a named strand of narrative theory which employs feminist and queer theories as intersectional vectors is contemporary and urgent. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.
Drawing on queer theory, this study locates unorthodox desire in Henry James with a special focus on his two most deliberately queer novels, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. Jacob Jacobson shows how queer desire in these texts is exploited beyond the personal to solicit pawns for subversive causes. More than banal prattle, anarchism and feminism are viable threats to the status quo. By subtly depicting the potency of the politics of same-sex erotics, James legitimates queer desire. If fictional deaths are possible metaphors for sex, Jacobson argues that Hyacinth's unlawful suicide can be concurrently read as a veiled act of licentious masturbation. Hyacinth recovers through death both his body politic and his body erotic in what is James's biggest challenge to patriarchy.
Employing rootedness as a way of understanding identity has increasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity—excluding anyone who doesn’t share the same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led to a suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their political implications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spite of these debates, ultimately the desire for roots contains the “roots” of its own deconstruction. The book considers alternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returning to origins with any certainty; welcome sexual diversity; acknowledge their own fictionality; reveal that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways; and create family trees haunted by the queer others patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives explored in this book simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas—African, Jewish, and Armenian. By looking at these together, one can discern between the local specificities of any single diaspora and the commonalities inherent in diaspora as a global phenomenon. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study will interest scholars in a diversity of fields, including diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, French and Francophone studies, American studies, comparative literature, and literary theory.