Sources for Queer Theory
- Feb 24, 2016
- 6 min read
Queer Theory is relatively new as a discipline and so scholars of literature have barely begun to realize its potential. Some theorists have begun locating its applicability as interpreter of the silences, spaces, and coded descriptive moments in novels, poetry, and other records. In particular, when applied to the vague moments and descriptions within 18th and 19th century Gothic novels, queer theory illuminates and interprets sexual and gender tensions that may be otherwise obscured. One of our members has put together this useful list of seminal works on queer theory and its intersections with the gothic, along with important quotes and definitions:
Queer(ing) Gothic
Queer: “Queerness … is a quality which may be said to inflect a sense of difference not confined simply to sexual behavior but which may equally inform a systematic stylistic deviance from perceived norms in personal style or artistic preference” (Hughes and Smith 3, emphasis added)
Gothic: “In these textual worlds of excess and danger we find the institutions of family and marriage shaken, the representation of extreme states of being, encounters with outcast monsters, not to mention conventional preoccupations with forbidden knowledge, paranoia, madness, secrecy, and guilt” (Rigby 47)
The Relationship Between Gothic and Queer
“‘Gothic’ and ‘queer’ are aligned in that they both transgress boundaries and occupy liminal spaces, and in doing so, they each consistently interrogate ideas of what is ‘respectable’ and what is ‘normal’” (Thomas 43)
“The terms ‘genderqueer’ and ‘queer’ are undeniably useful when looking at Victorian Gothic because they connote a sense of flexibility; they hold the multiple gender identities and sexual behaviors of a Victorian culture that was beginning to rigidly define the connection between identity and behavior” (Thomas 151, emphasis in original)
“‘Gothic’ and ‘queer’ share a common emphasis on transgressive acts and subjectivities. In addition, both acknowledge the importance of fantasy, sexual as well as cultural, and represent subjectivity as fractured and fluid. Whereas Gothic narrative explores the disintegration of the self into double or multiple facets, queer theory foregrounds the multiple sexualities and roles that the subject produces and enacts” (Palmer 8)
Two types of “queer” in Gothic: literally queer and stylistically queer
Literally queer: tied to sexuality and sexual practices; homosexuality or non-normative sexuality of both characters and the authors themselves
Stylistically queer: non-normative behavior, locations, performances; non-normative narrative and narrative structure[1]
Stylistically Queer:
Formal Structure: “The formal characteristics of Gothic writing, such as its Chinese-box narrative structures, its multiple narrators and interrupted stories, invite a circuitous reading attitude” (Fincher 4)
Themes and Tropes:
Gender: “the queerness of Gothic writing also emerges through an idea of gender performativity that is more self-conscious. Superficially, Gothic writing is replete with situations where changes in identity (usually class or gender) are mobilized for particular ends. Identities are mistaken, and Gothic often presents us with characters whose gender is exaggerated, theatricalized, and almost stereotyped” (Fincher 15-16)
Sexual Behavior: “Transgressive social-sexual relations are the most basic common denominator of gothic writing…terror is almost always sexual terror, and fear, and flight, and incarceration, and escape are almost always colored by the exoticism of transgressive sexual aggression” (Haggerty 2)
The Other: “The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny” (Case 69)
“Some authors employed Gothic frameworks to defend queer and other marginalized characters in ways that were quite subversive. For other authors, Gothic as a genre allows them to express their ambivalence regarding ‘others’ in society” (Thomas Others 2)
The Closet: “The desire to escape from locked rooms and prisons, as well as to investigate the half-open doors or distant archways with shadowy figures on the threshold: all of these motifs are metaphors for a desire to both escape from a closeting (or closing in) of identity and to open identity up, to release and simultaneously reinforce doubt. Imprisoning is a way of silencing, of preventing certain knowledges from being publicized, which would destabilize sexual, class and power hierarchies” (Fincher 22)
Writing Style: Gothic and Camp: “The queerness of Gothic writing is partially made up by how the Gothic is camp” (Fincher 16)
Camp is a style of writing based on excessiveness, artifice, performativity, and the inability to be defined (all arguably elements of the Gothic and queer theory). Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” not only articulates one of the first definitions of Camp, but also identifies Camp’s Gothic heritage. According to Sontag, Camp “is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” (56) and it “offer[s] for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards” (61)
Sontag sees Camp origins in the “late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry… But in the nineteenth century, what had been distributed throughout of all high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse” (57)
Important Scholarship:
Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 66-85. Print.
Memorable quote: “The queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast”; “queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural” and “the queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny” (68-69)
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Print.
Memorable quote: “Gothic novels are technologies that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body. The monster’s body, indeed, is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative” (21); “Monsters have to be everything that the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (22)
Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Print.
Memorable quote: “It is no mere coincidence that the cult of gothic fiction reached its apex at the very moment when gender and sexuality were beginning to be codified for modern culture”; “gothic fiction offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities” and “it offers a historical model of queer theory and politics: transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to dominant ideology” (2)
Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. Queering the Gothic. Eds. Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Print.
Memorable quote: “Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’” and “it is poised astride the uneasy cultural boundary that separates the acceptable and familiar from the troubling and different” (1); “The queer in Gothic is thus…fundamental to the whole cultural project that is Gothic” (4, emphasis in original)
Rigby, Mair. “Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic.” Gothic Studies 11.1 (2009): 46-57. Print.
Memorable quote: “Instead of viewing queer theory as liberating repressed sexual meaning in the Gothic, it is interesting to view the Gothic as enabling queer scholarship, helping theorists to articulate queer reading practices and discuss the construction of sexual nonconformity. Gothic horror fiction has given queer theorists a language … which they have drawn upon to speak about queer experience and produce critical narratives. What queer theory can help us to understand and articulate is our own uncanny attraction to the Gothic” (54)
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print.
Memorable quote: The Gothic was the first novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to male homosexuality, at a time when styles of homosexuality, and even its visibility and distinctness, were markers of division and tension between classes as much as between genders” (91)
Bibliography
Briefel, Aviva. “The Victorian Literature of Fear.” Literature Compass vol. 4., no. 2, 2007, pp. 508-523.
Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 66-85.
Fincher, Max. Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.
Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. Queering the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester University Press, 2009.
Palmer, Paulina. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. Cassell, 1999.
Rigby, Mair. “Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic.” Gothic Studies vol 11., no. 1., 2009, pp. 46-57.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 1985.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: a Reader. Edited by Cleto, Fabio. University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 53-65.
Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. University of Wales Press, 2012.
---. “Queer Victorian Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 142-155.
[1] Numerous critics have discussed the Gothic’s role in supporting heteronormativity. According to George Haggerty, “Gothic resolutions repeatedly insist on order restored and (often) on reassertion of heteronormative prerogative. […] Gothic fiction is about reaching into some undefinable world beyond fictional reality, and that ‘beyond’ can never be pulled back into narrative control. That is why gothic remains to challenge the status quo and at the same time to expand its purview” (10). As we can see in Wuthering Heights, for all of the “queer” aspects (sexualities, behaviors, narrative structures), the characters simultaneously follow heteronormative standards: marriage, normative family structure (one man, one woman), ensuring future generations, patriarchy.
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