Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

2019

the comparatist 42 : 2018 tual stock of modern novels (including ones by Robert Penn Warren, Luis MartínSantos, Almudena Grandes, and Juan Goytisolo) from these societies that sought to be “exceptions” to modernity, and the insightful dialogue between texts that Kennedy’s provocative juxtaposition instigates. Our world is, quite literally, unthinkable without the citycountry symbiosis that traditional civilization presumes. Yet in this century the literature and thought of the developed world have forgotten it. Even if it is possible to advance beyond that interdependence, if we are to be able to think ourselves once again and to know where we are in any sense, we must come to know the struggle between tradition and modernity from within. Kennedy has done a service in rendering two worlds in the midst of that struggle, examining them critically in terms of motives and cost, and unveiling the portrait of the human heart to which that struggle gives rise.

"Although widely recognized as pivotal texts in the history of homosexual literature, Genet’s novels occupied a largely negative position within gay criticism of the 1990s, by which they were seen to reproduce heterocentric, even homophobic assumptions about same-sex desire. This article argues that Genet’s contentious decision to articulate homoerotic desire within the space of a heteronormative language is one necessitated by the structural constraints of language itself. Metafictively drawing attention to the absence of a language in which to communicate homoerotic desire, Genet represents his narrators and characters as locked in a closet of heteronormative language. His strategic response to this silencing is to appropriate and recontextualize heterocentric and homophobic discourses in ways that problematize their assumed heteronormativity. In contrast to the gay critical focus on whether Genet himself has internalized heteronormative assumptions about his sexuality and subjectivity, Genet’s texts remind us that the question is not simply an individualized one of what the author him/herself thinks, but rather how s/he might articulate expressions of desire within a language that seems designed to erase such expressions of difference. "

To articulate Jean Genet's concept of self is to inevitably address the ontology of representation. Genet's manipulation of the ontology of representation simultaneously employs and subverts the traditional mimetic system of reference and challenges the notions of written and performance text. As reality/representation and fodcontent binaries no longer hold identity is rendered a concept at once "produced and "performed." Such ambivalence becomes the catalytic intersection point for theoretical, socio-political, and practical articulations of Genet's concept of selc potentially disruptive, this arnbivaience challenges traditionally fixed, logocentnc concepts of self as it reveals their articulation as embedded in a politics of power. As Genet's characters experience the performative nature of their existence and struggle to escape representation, the self thus moves beyond a logocentnc concept associated with the static notion of "being." In context of The BIackr and n e Screens, and in parallel to the Funambulist, or Genet's metaphoric actor, this thesis is an atternpt to articulate Genet's concept of self as a dynarnic process (of becoming), constitutive and performative in nature.

Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory is a good contribution to the theoretical, political and cultural investigations at the intersection of queer-and postcolonial theory, as editor Murat Aydemir has managed to bring together a group of excellent authors in the field of cultural analysis who aim to put the postcolonial and the queer in a productive dialogues with one another. As he explains in the introduction to the volume, Aydemir's inspiration came from Roderick A. Ferguson's notion of the "ideology of discreteness". Ferguson argues that ideologies such as Marxism and revolutionary nationalism tend to base their analyses of inequality by privileging one axis of oppression over all other, and fail to acknowledge how race, gender and sexuality are mutually productive. This volume is to be read as an attempt to correct this blind spot. Through the lens of cultural analysis, the authors make visible the intricate intersections of the seemingly separated, "discrete", realms of postcolonial and queer theory.

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.

2018

This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th-and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge. the support, encouragement, expertise, and inspiration of a number of people. First and foremost, my utmost thanks go out to my advisor, Christy Wampole, for her attentive supervision, contagious commitment to feminist scholarship, and unwavering generosity with her time, kindness and insight. It would be difficult to overstate my gratitude to Nick Nesbitt for his mentorship from my very first days on campus. During my time at Princeton, I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and critical acumen of Gayle Salamon, Wendy Belcher, Katie Chenoweth, Göran Blix, and Heather Love, whose seminar on queer and feminist method forever changed the way I approach scholarly research. I would also like to thank Lucien Nouis and Emily Apter, who fostered my appreciation for French literature and feminist theory during my undergraduate years at New York University and encouraged me to pursue graduate study.

After Lacan — about to be published, Cambridge UP, 2018

“Repression” names just one of the defense mechanisms that characterize queer theory’s quarter-century evasion of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The act of repressing the unconscious might seem entirely different than the decision to reject the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. Yet, as Freud writes in the 1925 “Negation,” “[a] negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its ‘no’ is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin.” One of the key concepts of Lacanian theory that queer theory finds inadmissible is repression. Indeed, repression has been somewhat of a bugaboo since its inception. Tracing queer theory from the foundational texts of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to the contemporary writings of Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Paul B. Preciado, while building on Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality, this chapter argues that queer theory has repressed repression, thereby forestalling the thinking of radical social change that Lacan makes possible.

Paragraph, 2012

The issue of queer theory's return to France evokes a complex problematic of translation, including yet-to-be mourned losses that have been sustained througb tbe wear-and-tear of multiple journeys, over the years, from French to English and now back again. As tbe essays in tbe special issue of Paragraph demonstrate, so much gets lost in translation that we are justified in speaking of psychic-as well as intellectual and linguistic-tolls exacted by tbe intercultural traffic in ideas. A work of mourning, or of active forgetting, therefore remains. What struck me most in reading these rich essays is how the geopolitical, linguistic problematic of transmission across national borders is complicated by tbe temporal factor of intergenerational transmission. It is not just a question of what may be lost (or, indeed, gained) in translation but of what has been lost and gained between generations. Two generational shifts are involved, since tbe transformation of the post-'68 ferment in France into tbe queer theory moment of the early nineties is redoubled by tbe transformation, twenty years later, of that predominantly North-American queer efflorescence into our fractured present moment. Tbis dual generational shift, together with tbe double linguistic crossing, accounts for what Adrian Pdfkin, in bis contribution, calls 'the impossibility of a unifying optic'-an impossibility that I happily adopt as my alibi here. The contributors manifest disparate ways of dealing with those intercultural and intergenerational transmissions, not least because they bail from different cultural vantage points and possess different generational perspectives. From a US-based perspective, I am interested in how queer theory looks from across the Atlantic and how, despite the ease of communication in our electronic, globalized