Bouncing Back: Queer Resilience in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century English Literature and Culture

Description

LGBTQ people have strategies of resilience at their disposal to help them deal with the challenge that heteronormativity as a power structure poses to their affective lives. This book makes the concept of resilience available to queer literary and cultural studies, analysing these strategies in terms of narration, performance, bodies, and space. Resilience turns out to be a highly interactive mode of being in the world, which can set free creative energy as well as draw inspiration and energy from artistic work. Authors and artists discussed include Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Cunningham, and Ian McKellen. Cover Contents Acknowledgments IntroductionTowards a Theory of Queer Resilience The Turn to Resilience The Art of Bouncing Back Narrative Strategies Narrating the Self in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Narrating the Past: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Queer History Writing Resilient Readings: Queer Visions of Sexuality and Kinship in Amy Fox’ Heights When Readers Become Writers: The Case of Queer Fan Fiction The Art of Queer Emptiness Why Queer Emptiness? Queer Emptiness in the Poetry of Mary Oliver Queer Emptiness in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Summer Will Show A Postscript: Michel Foucault’s Technologies of the Self Performative Strategies Queer Cultural Icons and the Performance of Sexuality: Patterns of Disclosure and Non-Disclosure, Acts of Creative Sexual Citizenship and the Periperformative Navigating the Closet in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man Theatrical Performance, Camp Performativity and Ritual in DeObia Oparei’s Crazyblackmuthafuckin’self Spatial Strategies The Garden as Queer Heterotopia in Katherine Mansfield’s “Leves Amores”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Jungle” and Maureen Duffy’s “Mulberries” Interior Landscapes as Safe Space: Robert Duncan’s “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” Creating Queer Spaces and a Space to Belong: San Francisco, the Emergence of the Castro as a Queer Space and Harvey Milk’s Legacy of Hope Bodily Strategies The Art of Postpornography: John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus and Mark Wunderlich’s “The Trick” The Body as Resource: An Epistemology of Sensing/Feeling in the Poetry of May Swenson, Thom Gunn, Pat Parker and Carol Ann Duffy Conclusion Credits Works Cited