Peter A. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789888083268
- eISBN:
- 9789888313907
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay ...
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First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.Less
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.
Jonathan Fenderson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042430
- eISBN:
- 9780252051272
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences ...
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This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences around Fuller’s sexuality have been (de)constructed across time and space. It identifies exactly who helped manufacture these silences, speculates about factors that led to their production, gestures to the contexts out of which they emerged, and illuminates rare moments when some of these silences were punctured. By mapping the production (and shattering) of silences, the chapter offers insight into the ways movement activists responded to Fuller’s sexuality. His intimate life--as a man who had sex with other men (and women)--troubles conventional wisdom about the movement and Black nationalism, more broadly. The chapter argues that instead of being simplistic, dogmatic, or uniform in their thinking, movement participants thought about sexuality in complex, varied, and inconstant ways.Less
This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences around Fuller’s sexuality have been (de)constructed across time and space. It identifies exactly who helped manufacture these silences, speculates about factors that led to their production, gestures to the contexts out of which they emerged, and illuminates rare moments when some of these silences were punctured. By mapping the production (and shattering) of silences, the chapter offers insight into the ways movement activists responded to Fuller’s sexuality. His intimate life--as a man who had sex with other men (and women)--troubles conventional wisdom about the movement and Black nationalism, more broadly. The chapter argues that instead of being simplistic, dogmatic, or uniform in their thinking, movement participants thought about sexuality in complex, varied, and inconstant ways.
Lucille Cairns
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255351
- eISBN:
- 9780823261079
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255351.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, ...
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This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, the French Republican state, in relation to nation-state rights of sexual and other marginalized groups. She arraigns the resistance of L’Université française to “imported” intellectual paradigms such as cultural studies and queer. She interrogates the role of the openly gay politician Delanoë (dubbed the ‘homo republicanus’). Further, she links contemporary French xenophobia and Republican sexual democracy, and exposes the clash between French feminist politics and queer. Bourcier excoriates Republican universalism, but my own critique of her multiple critiques will explore the dangers of another form of universalism, viz. a conceptual universalism that posits “Queer” as the correct theory of politics.Less
This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, the French Republican state, in relation to nation-state rights of sexual and other marginalized groups. She arraigns the resistance of L’Université française to “imported” intellectual paradigms such as cultural studies and queer. She interrogates the role of the openly gay politician Delanoë (dubbed the ‘homo republicanus’). Further, she links contemporary French xenophobia and Republican sexual democracy, and exposes the clash between French feminist politics and queer. Bourcier excoriates Republican universalism, but my own critique of her multiple critiques will explore the dangers of another form of universalism, viz. a conceptual universalism that posits “Queer” as the correct theory of politics.
Bryce Lease
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992958
- eISBN:
- 9781526115263
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992958.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After ...
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This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.Less
This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.
Anita Mannur
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823278602
- eISBN:
- 9780823280629
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823278602.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and ...
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Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.Less
Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory ...
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This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”Less
This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”
Laure Murat
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255351
- eISBN:
- 9780823261079
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255351.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic ...
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This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of questions to this American reading of “old France” and its stereotypical symbols: is the French kitchen a metaphor of the “melting pot” where immigrants elaborate recipes whose basic principle is precisely to “mix” ingredients? Is the motto “anyone can cook” the culinary equivalent of French universalism, assuming that anyone can become French if they simply adopt French culture as their own?Less
This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of questions to this American reading of “old France” and its stereotypical symbols: is the French kitchen a metaphor of the “melting pot” where immigrants elaborate recipes whose basic principle is precisely to “mix” ingredients? Is the motto “anyone can cook” the culinary equivalent of French universalism, assuming that anyone can become French if they simply adopt French culture as their own?
Laurie R. Lambert
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823280063
- eISBN:
- 9780823281510
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823280063.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the ...
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This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.Less
This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a ...
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First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a convincing case that Mexico, as escape route, inspiration and alternative universe, was essential to Burroughs’ development as a writer, as well as the scene of the definitive incident in the writer’s life, his accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Beginning with a description of the circumstances that led Burroughs to move to Mexico, the book covers the author’s initial elation at settling into this foreign land, followed by his growing disillusionment and descent into various addictions as he discovered his literary vocation. Reconstructing the environment of 1950s Mexico through Burroughs’ correspondence and writings, reports from the Mexican press, descriptions of the cultural and political panorama of the era and interviews with Burroughs’ Mexico acquaintances, García-Robles paints a vivid picture of the world that spawned the Beat novelist’s career. Although this period of Burroughs’ life has been written on by others, García-Robles’ version provides a uniquely Mexican perspective. García-Robles, who has translated the Burroughs-Ginsberg collaboration The Yagé Letters into Spanish, has a talent for recreating the Mexico of the 1950s. Burroughs cooperated with the author while La bala perdida was being written and in fact contributed an essay about the Mexican lawyer who arranged his quick release from prison after the shooting incident. The book also includes previously unpublished letters written by Burroughs from Mexico.Less
First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a convincing case that Mexico, as escape route, inspiration and alternative universe, was essential to Burroughs’ development as a writer, as well as the scene of the definitive incident in the writer’s life, his accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Beginning with a description of the circumstances that led Burroughs to move to Mexico, the book covers the author’s initial elation at settling into this foreign land, followed by his growing disillusionment and descent into various addictions as he discovered his literary vocation. Reconstructing the environment of 1950s Mexico through Burroughs’ correspondence and writings, reports from the Mexican press, descriptions of the cultural and political panorama of the era and interviews with Burroughs’ Mexico acquaintances, García-Robles paints a vivid picture of the world that spawned the Beat novelist’s career. Although this period of Burroughs’ life has been written on by others, García-Robles’ version provides a uniquely Mexican perspective. García-Robles, who has translated the Burroughs-Ginsberg collaboration The Yagé Letters into Spanish, has a talent for recreating the Mexico of the 1950s. Burroughs cooperated with the author while La bala perdida was being written and in fact contributed an essay about the Mexican lawyer who arranged his quick release from prison after the shooting incident. The book also includes previously unpublished letters written by Burroughs from Mexico.
Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621808
- eISBN:
- 9781800341265
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621808.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only ...
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The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only influenced the direction of Forster studies but also exemplified wider disciplinary trends. It illustrates how, by addressing previously overlooked themes and contexts such as feminism, Aestheticism, allegory and body-soul relations, the present volume offers a ground-breaking examination of Maurice and its legacies, sharpening critical appreciation of this under-discussed work and expanding recent revisionist attention to the novel in new modernist scholarship. The fact that the novel can be read divergently, from various approaches including but not limited to those informed by the author’s own sexuality and the representation of same-sex desires in the text, and in different contexts and afterlives, not only signals its protean texture but also prompts us to reconsider our assessments of Forster the writer. What emerges from the volume, the Introduction suggests, is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon. Providing an overview of the volume’s three sections – interpersonal relationships, contemporary contexts and afterlives – the Introduction summarizes the contours of a new multifaceted understanding of Maurice set out in the volume.Less
The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only influenced the direction of Forster studies but also exemplified wider disciplinary trends. It illustrates how, by addressing previously overlooked themes and contexts such as feminism, Aestheticism, allegory and body-soul relations, the present volume offers a ground-breaking examination of Maurice and its legacies, sharpening critical appreciation of this under-discussed work and expanding recent revisionist attention to the novel in new modernist scholarship. The fact that the novel can be read divergently, from various approaches including but not limited to those informed by the author’s own sexuality and the representation of same-sex desires in the text, and in different contexts and afterlives, not only signals its protean texture but also prompts us to reconsider our assessments of Forster the writer. What emerges from the volume, the Introduction suggests, is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon. Providing an overview of the volume’s three sections – interpersonal relationships, contemporary contexts and afterlives – the Introduction summarizes the contours of a new multifaceted understanding of Maurice set out in the volume.
Carrie Noland
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226541105
- eISBN:
- 9780226541389
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226541389.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing ...
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In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing solely on “the movement itself,” Cunningham in fact explored the way movements evoke intimate relationships and dramatic plots. By privileging this side of Cunningham—which has never been systematically examined—I go against the grain of the critical literature on his dances, a critical literature that has repeatedly compared his aesthetics to those of John Cage. While others have championed (or lamented) his posthumanism, his aesthetics of "indifference," his abstraction of the corporeal, and his refusal of meaning, I argue that his dances contain a plethora of moments in which archetypal human dramas are staged, desire and interest are multiplied, the human body is highly particularized, and gestures are saturated with meaning and affect. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary will change the way we look at Cunningham's dances as well as the nature of his collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and other members of his company.Less
In this book, I treat what I believe to be Cunningham’s greatest preoccupation: not chance but rather inevitability, not chilling neutrality but rather the heat of human bonds. Instead of focusing solely on “the movement itself,” Cunningham in fact explored the way movements evoke intimate relationships and dramatic plots. By privileging this side of Cunningham—which has never been systematically examined—I go against the grain of the critical literature on his dances, a critical literature that has repeatedly compared his aesthetics to those of John Cage. While others have championed (or lamented) his posthumanism, his aesthetics of "indifference," his abstraction of the corporeal, and his refusal of meaning, I argue that his dances contain a plethora of moments in which archetypal human dramas are staged, desire and interest are multiplied, the human body is highly particularized, and gestures are saturated with meaning and affect. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary will change the way we look at Cunningham's dances as well as the nature of his collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and other members of his company.
Angus Brown
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719097171
- eISBN:
- 9781526115201
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097171.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked ...
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Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked throughout by careful reading and a preoccupation with bibliography. This preoccupation grew into an obsession that characterizes the rather readerly eroticism of Hollinghurst’s first novel. Hollinghurst’s formative attention to the book as a student and a novelist offers a rare invitation to revisit both the hermeneutics and materiality of reading through the possibility of touch. Building on recent work in queer studies concerning touch and reading, this chapter presents a speculative blueprint for the queer mechanisms that underpin the structure of The Swimming-Pool Library and the intimacy of reading in Hollinghurst’s early work.Less
Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked throughout by careful reading and a preoccupation with bibliography. This preoccupation grew into an obsession that characterizes the rather readerly eroticism of Hollinghurst’s first novel. Hollinghurst’s formative attention to the book as a student and a novelist offers a rare invitation to revisit both the hermeneutics and materiality of reading through the possibility of touch. Building on recent work in queer studies concerning touch and reading, this chapter presents a speculative blueprint for the queer mechanisms that underpin the structure of The Swimming-Pool Library and the intimacy of reading in Hollinghurst’s early work.
Alison Garden
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621815
- eISBN:
- 9781800341678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621815.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and ...
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The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.Less
The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and ...
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The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.Less
The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.
Nina Bagdasarova
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781529211955
- eISBN:
- 9781529211986
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781529211955.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
From the perspective of large parts of Kyrgyz society, 'non-traditional' relations do not only pertain to ethnically mixed couples but equally to same-sex partnerships. This chapter takes a look at ...
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From the perspective of large parts of Kyrgyz society, 'non-traditional' relations do not only pertain to ethnically mixed couples but equally to same-sex partnerships. This chapter takes a look at the securityscapes of individuals from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Bishkek, who face similarly dire consequences if their sexual orientation or gender preference is found out. Their everyday life in public thus often resembles a continual masquerade. The chapter focusses, in particular, on an LGBT nightclub in the capital city. It argues that the stress of having to keep disguising oneself may occasionally excite moments of excess and frenzy, of experiencing one's 'true' self only in a temporary act of transgressing the norms of profane life.Less
From the perspective of large parts of Kyrgyz society, 'non-traditional' relations do not only pertain to ethnically mixed couples but equally to same-sex partnerships. This chapter takes a look at the securityscapes of individuals from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Bishkek, who face similarly dire consequences if their sexual orientation or gender preference is found out. Their everyday life in public thus often resembles a continual masquerade. The chapter focusses, in particular, on an LGBT nightclub in the capital city. It argues that the stress of having to keep disguising oneself may occasionally excite moments of excess and frenzy, of experiencing one's 'true' self only in a temporary act of transgressing the norms of profane life.