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

✍ Scribed by Susanne Jung

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 245
• Series: Queer Studies, volume 24
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

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