Description
Book SynopsisIn 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, perform
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"The real reason why Gothic Queer Culture is impossible to put down is that in addition to being meticulously argued, it is celebratory. In the spirit of Lady Gaga’s gleefully bloody and irreverent meat dress, with which Westengard opens the book, Gothic Queer Culture gracefully sidesteps moralizing judgements of the artists and writers whose challenging work it examines, choosing instead to emphasize the affirmative power of reveling in the lurid grey areas that queer artists and their work so often occupy."—Elizabeth Simins, Art Discourse
“This tour-de-force of literary and cultural analysis connects eighteenth-century Gothic obsessions with traumatic realities of the twenty-first century. Queer theory, lesbian pulp fiction, the melancholy of AIDS, and sadomasochism—Laura Westengard helps us to understand these phenomena as never before.”—George E. Haggerty, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside
“Westengard takes a common idea—that gothic is queer—and inverts it to show the effects of unacknowledged trauma on marginalized communities. Gothic Queer Culture establishes Westengard as an exciting new voice in critical trauma studies, gothic studies, and queer theory.”—Nowell Marshall, author of Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini
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
