Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma

In Gothic Queer Culture, Laura Westengard proposes that contemporary U.S. queer culture is gothic at its core. Using interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer art, literature, and thought—including ghosts embedded in queer theory, shadowy crypts in lesbian pulp fiction, monstrosity and cannibalism in AIDS poetry, and sadomasochism in queer performance—Westengard argues that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly gothic aesthetic.

Gothic Queer Culture examines the material effects of marginalization, exclusion, and violence and explains why discourse around the complexities of genders and sexualities repeatedly returns to the gothic. Westengard places this queer knowledge production within a larger framework of gothic queer culture, which inherently includes theoretical texts, art, literature, performance, and popular culture.

By analyzing queer knowledge production alongside other forms of queer culture, Gothic Queer Culture enters into the most current conversations on the state of gender and sexuality, especially debates surrounding negativity, anti-relationalism, assimilation, and neoliberalism. It provides a framework for understanding these debates in the context of a distinctly gothic cultural mode that acknowledges violence and insidious trauma, depathologizes the association between trauma and queerness, and offers a rich counterhegemonic cultural aesthetic through the circulation of gothic tropes.
 

ISBN-13: 9781496217028

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nebraska

Publication Date: 10-01-2019

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

Series: Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies

Laura Westengard is an associate professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

HAUNTED EPISTEMOLOGIES

Gothic Queer Theory

Pockets of pain, burning rockets of pain — their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony. Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the spirit — her pain, their pain ... all the misery at Alec's. And the press and the clamour of those countless others — they fought, they trampled, they were getting her under. In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces, getting her under. They were everywhere now, cutting off her retreat; neither bolts nor bars would avail to save her. The walls fell down and crumbled before them; at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled: "We are coming, Stephen — we are still coming on, and our name is legion — you dare not disown us!" She raised her arms, trying to ward them off, but they closed in and in: "You dare not disown us!"

RADCLYFFE HALL, The Well of Loneliness

The final passage in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), with its melodramatic exclamations of pain and suffering and its clamoring ghosts demanding vengeance for wrongs forgotten, would seem quite at home in an eighteenth-century Gothic novel. I include it here not merely to illustrate the gothicism in a text about gender and sexual nonconformity. I include it primarily because this final passage appears in a number of queer theory texts, serving as an illustration of this theory or that but persistently resurfacing, like the legion of suffering queers demanding Stephen's acknowledgement. There is something about the demand of these ghosts of queer pasts that makes them particularly suited to theorizing about contemporary queerness and its futures.

Literary critics have frequently identified the presence of transgressive sexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, usually highlighting its trajectory of temporary titillation followed by a comforting restoration of norms and pointing out that, even in its conservative mode, queerness is embedded in Gothic fiction. Trauma theory often uses gothic metaphors to describe the uncanniness of traumatic experience and its haunting aftereffects, something expressed both implicitly and overtly in theories such as Roger Luckhurst's "trauma Gothic," and queer cultural production (such as The Well of Loneliness) is also often infused with gothicism as an aesthetic and rhetorical mode. In other words, the Gothic is queer, trauma is gothic, and queer cultural production is both queer and gothic because it responds to trauma, specifically insidious trauma or "the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit." As I argue throughout this book, gothic queer cultural production pulls together queerness, trauma, and gothicism as a way of acknowledging and communicating the insidious, structural traumas related to living queerly in the United States.

Traumatically driven cultural production takes myriad forms, but one type of creation usually overlooked as a kind of cultural production is queer theory itself. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins Tendencies by linking the queer teen suicide rate, "the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives," and the precariousness of those who "do" gay and lesbian studies, noting that "the survival of each one is a miracle." Notably, this discussion of unacknowledged insidious trauma, suicide, and academic queer studies begins with a gothicism that reflects the demands of Stephen's legion of suffering queer ghosts: "I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents." The academic production of queer theoretical texts is inextricable from the insidious trauma of professional and social marginalization of queer thought and being — more specifically the institutional silencing of queers in higher education, especially queers of color, who are most likely to receive unfair treatment in academic departments that are structurally and sometimes overtly racist and homophobic. Queer theory is an academic field developed in the 1990s, a time in which the AIDS crisis and culture wars raged and the possibility of federally recognized gay marriage seemed like a pipe dream after President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Traumatic circumstances such as these make the expression of theories around oppression difficult, if not impossible, since trauma tends to disrupt linguistic structures and meanings, but gothic queer theory is not confined to the 1990s. Queer theorists to this day often turn to gothic metaphors, resulting in a product containing gothicisms in form, content, or both.

In this chapter I read queer epistemological texts to locate gothic themes and forms, focusing specifically on paranoia, accretion, monsters, sadomasochism, and haunting. The gothic thread I trace through these texts points to the effectiveness of gothic metaphor as a means of elucidating insidious trauma, specifically around the institutional and structural microaggressions that impact queer folks. Paranoia and accretion are particularly suited to reflecting microaggression, since microaggressions often leave recipients feeling as if their responses are paranoid or overreactive (if you have ever been offended by someone's comment and then told, "It was just a joke!" then you may know this feeling). Accretion, the growth of a substance by an accumulation of layers, mirrors the way repeated microaggressions accumulate to create insidious trauma, an experience that can have significant negative impacts on mental health despite the "micro" nature of the offences. Monstrosity can itself be a form of accretion, as monsters are often cobbled together from various cultural anxieties and desires, allowing "for a whole range of specific monstrosities to coalesce in the same form." The excesses of monstrosity and the hybridity of the living dead help visualize naturalized oppressive structures, making those structures uncanny and therefore intervening in the architecture of oppression. Both haunting and sadomasochism appear in queer thought as expressions of queer temporality that expose a particular type of traumatic temporality. Haunting manifests the swirling, fractured, intersecting temporality of ongoing low-level trauma, not just a singular traumatic event popping through into the present but a disorienting and overwhelming storm of traumatic intrusion.

The traumatic gothic shadow cast on queer theory is not always made explicit, however. Gothicism often subtly permeates contemporary queer theory — Gothic fiction does not necessarily serve as a source of primary examples, and theories sometimes explicitly engage gothicism but often do not. Rather, gothicism usually lurks under the surface, popping through texts in moments when its metaphoric power is needed to describe or theorize a concept or offering a structure that allows theorists to better communicate their ideas or to propose productive modes of resistance. In other words, queer epistemology is haunted by trauma, and the specter of "trauma Gothic" appears in the following texts in ways that exhibit preoccupation with gothic concepts. In this chapter I tell a story about queer thought's almost obsessive return to gothicism and how the insidious trauma associated with queerness and its intersections lends itself to gothic representation on multiple levels, often in a turn toward the grotesque, the uncanny, the monstrous, and the spectral.

Paranoia and Accretion

There is a deeply rooted relationship between gothicism, psychoanalysis, and theories of nonnormative gender and sexuality. Sigmund Freud's "Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" is a foundational text that depends on gothic tropes and structures to theorize sexuality and its effects, specifically paranoia. In this text Freud analyzes Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber's written autobiographical account of his struggles with paranoia and hypochondria (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken) to illustrate his emerging theory that "a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease [paranoia]." In this analysis Freud fundamentally links paranoia with homosexuality, but because of its gothicism Schreber's autobiography is particularly suited to Freud's task of describing the psychological trauma of having a "homosexual wish" in a homophobic culture.

Schreber's account contains the gothic elements of demonic manipulation, necrophilia, and fetishized decay that can be found in eighteenth-century Gothic novels. In Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor, for example, Victoria experiences uncontrollable sexual desires that drive her to become increasingly attracted to a forbidden object, her black servant Zofloya. Overtly, Victoria's sexual desires are directed at her husband's brother, Henriquez, but throughout the novel it becomes increasingly clear that she is, in fact, drawn to the majestic Zofloya as an object of sexual desire until they become (unconsummated) lovers by the end of the novel. At this point Zofloya reveals that he is actually Satan, and Victoria devotes herself to him for eternity just before he hurls her off a precipice. Similarly, Matthew Lewis's The Monk: A Romance includes demonic manipulation, when Ambrosio is seduced by Matilda, a woman who entered the monastery disguised as a young man and who turns out to be a servant of Lucifer, sent to encourage and support Ambrosio's sinful desires. When he grows tired of Matilda, Ambrosio then shifts his desire to the innocent Antonia, eventually giving her a potion to mimic death so he can rape her interred body, in a kind of simulated necrophilia. Ambrosio's necrophilia is paired with fetishized decay in the story line of Agnes, a young woman who, after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is locked away in the catacombs underneath a convent, only to be later discovered in her burial chamber barely clinging to life, emaciated, and clutching the rotting corpse of her infant to her breast. Each of these iconic Gothic characters pursue forbidden sexual desires, leaving them vulnerable to decay and devilish manipulation. Schreber's autobiography is similarly concerned with his increasing drive toward sexual taboo paired with the sense that he was in communication with God and the "plaything of devils." Further, it contains descriptions of Schreber's "dead and decomposing" body and an allusion to necrophilia, in which Schreber imagined his "soul was to be murdered" and his "body used like a strumpet" by God, who "was only accustomed to intercourse with corpses."

Freud heightens the gothicism of the account by focusing on the supernatural and divine manifestations of Schreber's delusions (in the "Case History" section of the text) and then explaining them away through psychoanalytic interpretation (in the "Attempts at Interpretation" section), a move that reflects the explained supernatural that often occurs at the conclusion of some Gothic fiction in which "all the incidents appearing to partake of the mystic and the marvelous are resolved by very simple and natural causes." For example, Dr. Schreber hallucinates supernatural phenomena and develops delusions about the divine intention behind his emotional and physical sensations, each instance of which Freud describes (using direct quotes from the autobiography) and then systematically demystifies through interpretation. Schreber believes that "miracled birds" talk to him in "meaningless phrases they have learnt by heart" and then discharge a "load of ptomaine poison on to him" (a footnote clarifies that the literal translation would be "corpse poison"). Freud explains that what this ominous supernatural hallucination "really refers to must be young girls," whom "people often compare" to geese or "ungallantly accuse them of having 'the brains of a bird.'" Further, Schreber's sense that he is gradually transforming into a woman to be used by his doctor for "sexual abuse" and later to be used as a corpse "strumpet" by God is explained as a "feminine (that is, a passive homosexual) wish-phantasy, which took as its object the figure of his physician." Schreber even identifies the "call to sh —" and its attendant "voluptuousness" as supernatural, explaining that it is "evoked miraculously." Freud, of course explains that the persecuting God who manipulates Schreber's "evacuation," among other things, is merely the transfiguration of his father and an expression of a "father-complex." In all these instances Schreber presents himself as passive, a vessel on which supernatural forces act, and Freud first presents them through this lens, allowing the supernatural to enter into the text as an imaginative possibility, only to explain each instance as a logical phenomenon stemming from Schreber's childhood experiences and repressed desires. This is what Freud does best — interpret apparent incoherencies within the rational frame of unconscious desires — but its resonance with the tradition of the explained supernatural provides a gothic cast to the work of analysis in this text.

Additionally, Freud's choice to analyze a published text rather than actual patient interaction creates a case study embedded with multiple voices and narratives, making "Psychoanalytic Notes" uncannily similar in form to Gothic literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Freud inserts Schreber's narrative within his own by beginning the piece with an introduction justifying his use of the autobiography, moving into a "Case History" section, in which he narrates Schreber's story using extended quotes from the autobiography (creating a kind of dual narration), then providing a second narrative of the events in the "Attempts at Interpretation" section, and finally ending with a generalization developed from this case in the section titled "On the Mechanism of Paranoia." Within this convoluted narrative, the lines between Freud's voice and Schreber's become blurred, since Freud moves between voicing his own position as narrator and voicing the reasoning behind Schreber's neurosis as if the paranoid logic were his own: "The behavior of God in the matter of the 'call to sh —' (the need for evacuating the bowels) rouses him to a specially high pitch of indignation. The passage is so characteristic that I will quote it in full. But to make it clear, I must first explain that both the miracles and the voices proceeded from God, that is, from the divine rays." At the beginning of this passage, it is clear through the use of third person that Freud is summarizing Schreber's beliefs and feelings, and his position as a kind of omniscient narrator is quite overt when he explains that he will "quote" a passage from the autobiography "in full." The following sentence, however, does not maintain this authorial distance when it lapses into clarifying Schreber's logic as if it were a matter of fact ("both the miracles and the voices proceeded from God") and without qualifying the statement with any language such as "Schreber believes." While the first two sentences in this passage are clearly from Freud's perspective as narrator and analyst, the final sentence could just as easily have been written by Schreber himself.

This slippage of narrative voice occurs throughout the text — Freud inserts bits of poetry, lyrics, and plot summary in footnotes throughout and, at one point, interrupts Schreber's narrative with a story of another patient to illustrate the "father-complex," calling to mind those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novels — Melmoth the Wanderer, The Monk, and Frankenstein, for example — in which lengthy embedded stories are narrated within embedded stories, often stalling the main narrative. Frankenstein, for example, is famously structured with a multilevel frame narrative: the creature's narrative at the center, Victor's narrative framing the creature's, and Walton's epistolary narrative framing Victor's. Eighteenth-century Gothic novels tend to have even more circuitous narrative structures, offering texts-within-texts whose "structural correlate ... is to be found in the structure of Gothic houses involving a succession of ruins, in the labyrinthine spatial enclosures of underground tunnels and secret chambers, and in the crossed lines of withering family trees." One function of embedded narratives, especially those that incorporate found objects such as letters, prefaces, and first-person accounts, position the text as an authentic object of interpretation. Freud's adoption of embeddedness attempts to privilege the authenticity of his interpreted object while creating fragmented narrative, reflecting the "proliferation of fragments in Gothic fiction — abandoned houses, rusty locks, ill-fitting bolts, crumbling graves, incompleted manuscripts, half-formed sensibilities." The fragmentation of the interrupted narrative mirrors both Gothic form and traumatogenic fragmentation, as Schreber desperately works to reconcile his taboo desires with the insidiously traumatizing strictures of his social context.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Queer Cultures and Insidious Trauma
1. Haunted Epistemologies: Gothic Queer Theory
2. Live Burial: Lesbian Pulp and the “Containment Crypt”
3. Monstrosity: Melancholia, Cannibalism, and HIV/AIDS
4. Sadomasochism: Strategic Discomfort in Trans* and Queer of Color Performance Art
Conclusion: The Challenges of Neoliberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index Show More