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.
Since the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic has included themes of transgressive sexuality. The novel begins with the death of Conrad, a young man who is ...engaged to be married to Isabella. After a giant helmet falls from the sky and crushes him, his father Manfred decides that he will take the place of his dead son and marry the young woman who had been positioned to be his daughter-in-law. Following this declaration, Manfred frantically attempts to control the fracturing of his patriarchal power by chasing Isabella through dark subterranean passages, imprisoning those who interfere with his plans, and dodging ancestral ghosts and giant appendages. Walpole's novel is credited with establishing the hallmarks of what would come to be known as Gothic fiction. These hallmarks include haunting, medieval castles, Catholic monasteries, catacombs, supernatu-ral prophetic occurrences, subterranean passages, ancestral curses, terrorised vulnerable women and eroticised power dynamics. These themes and tropes recurred throughout the centuries that followed and have come to be recognised as ‘Gothic’, but in addition to these more recognisable Gothic tropes, eighteenth-century Gothic fiction also established the enduring and pervasive relationship between the Gothic and non-heteronormative genders and sexualities, often known as ‘queer Gothic’.Though ‘queer’ initially denoted oddness or peculiarity, the term later developed as a derogatory epithet for homosexuals, but by the late twen-tieth century queer had been reclaimed by many in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community as a marker of politicised resistance to the original stigma of the term. Susan Stryker notes that this use of queer first appeared on flyers at the 1990 New York Pride march after being adopted by the political protest group ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and today it often stands for a defiant, anti-normative positionality. However, queer also functions as an umbrella term that broadly represents a ‘range of nonnormative sexual practices and gender identifications’ both including and exceeding the meanings of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. The broad understanding of queer as both odd and as indicating non-normative genders and sexualities helps us understand the way the term is conceptualised in relation to the Gothic.
The protesters expressed their concern that the archival exhibit entombed the HIV/AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) crisis in the historic past, a serious ...concern for those still engaged in battling a virus with no known cure and decreasing public awareness. Once queers embrace their role outside of the realm of political possibility, they become the threatening representation of the death drive, associated with indulgent jouissance and exposing the all-encompassing ideology of futurity as mere fantasy.\n It uses melancholia to resist limiting narratives of race, sexuality, and even temporality, embracing desire to move beyond solidified and limiting no- tions of the human as merely an assimilated consumer, a pawn in neoliberal ideology.
SADOMASOCHISM LAURA WESTENGARD
Gothic Queer Culture,
10/2019
Book Chapter
In Life magazine’s June 26, 1964, article “Homosexuality in America,” journalist Paul Welch characterizes San Francisco’s “s&m” scene as “another far-out fringe of the ‘gay’ world” and describes the ...Tool Box, San Francisco’s first successful leather bar: “Inside the bar, the accent is on leather and sadistic symbolism. The walls are covered with masculine-looking men in black leather jackets.”¹ The opening spread features an image of the bar, dense and crowded with men, their leather jackets and caps haloed by an overexposed doorway leading into the vibrant, but shadowy, cruising ground. As the ethnographic Life magazine study intuits from its
LIVE BURIAL LAURA WESTENGARD
Gothic Queer Culture,
10/2019
Book Chapter
Beneath the dark and rocky peaks of an imposing mountain landscape, a break in the gathering storm clouds illuminates a man with an agonized face, reaching out toward something he seems driven to ...possess. The man casts a shadow that draws the eye toward the object of his desire; a young woman with loose blond waves, lavender blouse, and dove gray skirt is resting on a couch framed by the craggy precipice, ominous clouds, and masculine pursuer—all threaten to engulf her. She faces away from him but casts her eyes back toward the approaching threat. Shielding her from these
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.¹ There is something about the demand of
MONSTROSITY LAURA WESTENGARD
Gothic Queer Culture,
10/2019
Book Chapter
A monstrous form with excessive meaning haunted the United States in the 1980s and 1990s: the queer body and the hiv-positive body (often imagined as one and the same). The iconic 1990 Life magazine ...image of gay activist David Kirby on his deathbed introduced a powerful new public image of the abject, aids-ravaged body.¹ As knowledge about the virus slowly unfurled, media portrayal of the bodies decaying from an unfamiliar and uncontrolled disease became a kind of spectacle of horror. Even when presented in the guise of sympathy, as in the case of Kirby’s photo, the excesses of the wasted
Steinbeck's first months in Brooklyn in 1925 expose him to a forlorn world that leaves a lasting impression. In his letters Steinbeck reveals his struggle to deal with the city and his own writer's ...block even as he looks for source material in “the subway face and the blundering revelers in the street.” The use of contemporary periodicals and new approaches to Steinbeck's fiction reveal how the tragedies that befell Steinbeck in Brooklyn intimately shape “The Murder” (1934).
Learning community participation is often linked with effective student communication, belonging, persistence, increased retention rates, and higher GPA. However, learning communities can also foster ...less desirable social and behavioral dynamics. This study explored differences in student and faculty perception and how differences might impact classroom dynamics. Using survey data and qualitative responses, we compared student and faculty perception about the effects of learning community participation in relation to student academic performance, classroom behavior, and social interactions. Students and faculty exhibited statistically significant differences in perception around questions of academic performance and classroom behavior but showed no statistical difference around questions of social interaction. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to learning community faculty training and retention and pedagogical development.
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