Queer Modernisms
Modernism
Looking Backwards
Foundling
Queer
Defined and Undefined Identity/Identities
Critical and Theoretical Framework
Sedgwick
Period: 1900-1945, shaped by two world wars and industrialization
Transformation of Victorian era thinking
Verb: To Queer
Kahan
Professor at LSU, works with topics on modernism, gender, and sexuality
"Queer Modernism"
- Queer Modernism imagines queerness to be utterly pervasive (354)
- Queerness has just as much to do with gender and sex as sexuality (355)
- Queer Modernism passed hand to hand (356)
- Queer Modernism is in perpetual motion (357)
an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer and critical theory
"Queer and Now"
Queer as: elements of gender or sexuality that are not made or can not be made to conform monolithically (p.8)
Queer as: Loose ends where representation, identity, gender, sexuality, and the body do not line up neatly (p.11)
"Queer" as a theoretical framework, moving beyond just sexual identity
Halperin
“How to do the History of Male Homosexuality"
Effeminacy
Pederasty or "Active Sodomy"
Friendship or Male Love
Passivity or Inversion
Virginia Woolf
Orlando
In Orlando: excess, being controlled by emotions, womanizer
Gender as Performance
Gender Roles
Orlando's Transformation: Chastity, Purity, Modesty & rejection of this (pg 138-139)
Gender as a performance or as something perceived and decided upon by others
in Orlando: a queer marriage pg 164-165
"The change of sex, although it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity" pg 138
woman's duty to get married: "I am a woman....a real woman at last" pg 253
Queer: not fitting in or defying what is "natural" : Shel, Orlando, Nick Greene
Orlando follows the story of Orlando, a person who transitions from a man into a woman. The story ends when she is 36, although living from the mid 1500's - 1928 (the present moment)
An English writer, now considered "Queer", 1882 - 1941
Nealon
“Introduction"
Queer disaffiliation from normative societal expectations and desires -- due to exile from sanctioned experineces
Reaching out toward a "community that outpaces the hostile language of inversion," (pg 9) toward a different future
"Foundling" as a useful analytic tool for queer reading and understanding
Teaches American history and intellectual histories
Love
"Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History"
Rejecting history as linear
The Backward Turn
destruction of the past
Allegations of Backwardness
Choosing isolation -- to disconnect from a larger historical continuum
Embrace association with the abnormal
Sedgwick understanding of Queer
Looking Forward while feeling backward
Cather
"Paul's Case"
As a "Foundling" text
As a "Feeling Backwards" Text
Larsen
Passing
"Passing" (as a term)
1891-1964, Mixed woman, active during Harlem Renaissance
Glick
Harlem Queer "Dandy"
Inversion
Proust
1871- 1922, French writer who wrote one of the longest novels of all time, appreciated by modernist critics and writers
"Sodom and Gomorrah"
early understandings of the homosexual; labeled as morally wrong or deviant
Apollinaire
"The Breast of Tiresias
Queer gender roles
Queer Family
Gender Transformation
Barnes
Nightwood
considered one of the "first" (even if not accurate) lesbian novels
Queerness
American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer. Produced the cult classic of lesbian fiction Nightwood, considered an important work of modernist literature
(1880-1918) Emigrated to France, a poet, critic, and writer associated with the creation of 'surrealism' is a term
"I want to make war (Thunder.) and not make children. No Mister husband you won't give me orders" (207)
"But I think I'm growing a beard….My bosom is falling off" (208)
More Literal when compared to Orlando
"Since my wife is a man…It's right for me to be a woman" (210)
Sexology
"the academic discipline which aimed to classify sexual deviance" (348)
Decadence
Representations of "lesbianism as the sexual dissidence par excellence rather than adultry, incest, or other transgression" (350)
an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture and visual culture
"effeminacy deserves to be treated independently because it was for a long time defined as a symptom of an excess of what we would call heterosexual as well as homosexual desire" (92)
"If the man who played an “active” sexual role in sexual intercourse with other males was conventionally masculine in both his appearance and his manner of feeling and acting, if he did not seek to be penetrated by other men, and/or if he also had sexual relations with women, he might not be sick but immoral, not perverted but merely perverse" (95)
"passivity or inversion stamps itself all over a man’s social presentation and identifies him as a spectacularly deviant social type" (89)
there is a "tradition that emphasizes equality, mutuality, and reciprocity in love between men" (99) that would not be considered homosexual in any capacity
Self Conscious and Emotional, feeling abnormal or backward
Story rejects a specific future or points to a future that is inaccessible to someone like Paul
"he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something" (II)
"Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up" (II)
an American writer, born a woman who often went by a masculine name and dressed in masculine clothing
"Not only sexual and gender deviants but also women, colonized people, the nonwhite, the disabled, the poor, and criminals were marked as inferior by means of the allegation of backwardness" (6)
"to overcome the past, to escape its legacy" (1)
"They choose isolation, turn toward the past, or choose to live in a present disconnected from any larger historical continuum" (8)
"the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialize them" (1)
Professor at Penn, interests in gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, sociology and literature, and critical theory
Being taken as, or able to be taken as, an identity that is not your own. Often based on racial, sexual, and gendered Identities
Ability to pass changes based on various parameters of agency
Butler in Bodies That Matter: “Irene engages many of the same social conventions as Clare….according to Irene, Clare goes too far, passes as white not merely on occasion, but in her, life, and in her marriage.” (124)
Professor at U. MO, teaches GSS, Queer Studies, and topics on modernism
Dandy: disrupts commodification of black life and experiences, rejects ideas of black primitivism by being "fancy," intersection of racial and sexual minorities
"the complexities and contradictions of dandyism as symbol and oppositional act make legible not simply the bifurcation of race and sexuality but rather their interrelation" (415)
ideas on the pervasiveness of homosexuality (Kahan-like), inversion, and inner conflict between homosexual desires and rejection of homosexuality
"This scene was not, however, positively comic; it was stamped with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased" (5)
Queerness
Passing as a means to gain agency under conditions of racial (and sexual) oppression
Brian - Queer in a more conventional sense
Claire - Queer as articulated by Sedgwick
Doesn't truly belong in any racial group due to her every-day passing
"...old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again with him, that craving for some place strange and different..." (48)
"I wanted things. I knew I wasn't;t bad-looking and that I could 'pass.' (27)
"Irene Redfield found it hard to sympathize with this new tenderness, this avowed wearing of Clare's for "my own people." (52)
Sedgwick
Conventional: The Doctor as Trans
in margins of society, not fitting fit in: Jenny, Nora, Felix, Guido
Gendered expectations and breaking them: Robin
"With Guido, you are in the presence of the 'maladjusted'" (124)
"Standing before them in her boy's trousers was Robin. Her pose, startled and broken...she began to bark also, crawling" (179)
"I spoke to Tiny O'Toole....I whispered 'What is this thing, Lord?' And I had begun to cry" (141)
Lies, Lying to self and others
"The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of the degradation and the night" (171)