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"

  1. Queer Modernism imagines queerness to be utterly pervasive (354)
  1. Queerness has just as much to do with gender and sex as sexuality (355)
  1. Queer Modernism passed hand to hand (356)
  1. 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)