Abstract
After referring to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012) to illustrate some of the distinctive feature of queer Gothic fiction, the chapter summarises the development of queer Gothic from the eighteenth-century to the present-day. Critics such as George E. Haggerty and William Hughes, who have recognised the importance of the form, receive reference. The influence of Female Gothic, significant for its utilisation of feminist theory to explore female-authored texts, is discussed, as also are the roles that the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements and the growth of queer theory in the 1990s played in furnishing a context for the production of queer Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes with a section illustrating the way in which Gothic motifs, such as spectrality, secrets, the monster, the double, death and excess, furnish vehicles for representing aspects of queer sexuality and gender in the writing of Judith Butler, Jay Prosser and other theorists. This furnishes a context for the analysis of the fiction in the following chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
See Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 69. (Jagose 1996).
- 2.
Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate, p. 49. (Winterson 2012) subsequent references are to this edition and in the text.
- 3.
Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, ‘General Introduction’, in Botting and Townshend (eds), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, p. 12. (Botting and Townshend 2004).
- 4.
Steven Bruhm, ‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, p. 271. (Bruhm 2002).
- 5.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, pp. 67–72. (Jackson 1981).
- 6.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Angela Richards and James Strachey (eds), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, p. 345. (Freud 1985).
- 7.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, p. 32. (Love 2007).
- 8.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern, p. 1. (Dinshaw 1999).
- 9.
Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, pp. 371–2.
- 10.
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, pp. 34–42. (Halberstam 2005).
- 11.
Michael Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, xxviii. (Warner 1993).
- 12.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, p. 229. (Butler 1993).
- 13.
Donald Morton refers to three other meanings associated with ‘queer’: ‘an oppressed minority’s positive re-understanding of a once negative word, the adoption of an umbrella term to encompass the concerns of both female and male homosexuals and bisexuals, and the embracing of the latest fashion over an older, square style by the hip youth generation’, ‘Birth of the Cyberqueer’, PMML, 110/3 (1997), 369 (Morton 1997). For reference to the historical context of the emergence of ‘queer’ and the contestation of the term, see Jagose, Queer Theory, pp. 72–126.
- 14.
William Hughes and Andrew Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Hughes and Smith (eds), Queering the Gothic, p. 3. (Hughes and Smith 2009).
- 15.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire, p. 91. (Sedgwick 1985).
- 16.
Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 92.
- 17.
George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, pp. 123–77. (Haggerty 2006). See also William Veeder, ‘Carmilla: The Arts of Repression’, in Botting and Townshend (eds), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 3, pp. 117–41. (Veeder 2004); and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, pp. 105–26. (Showalter 1992).
- 18.
Haggerty, Queer Gothic, p. 2.
- 19.
Haggerty, ‘The History of Homosexuality Reconsidered’, in Chris Mounsey (ed.), Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal 1600–1800, p. 5. (Haggerty 2013).
- 20.
- 21.
Kelly Hurley, ‘“The Inner Chamber of all Nameless Sin”: The Beetle: Gothic Female Sexuality and Oriental Barbarism’, in Botting and Townshend (eds.), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Concepts, pp. 241–55. (Hurley 2004).
- 22.
- 23.
Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic’, in Moers (ed.), Literary Women, pp. 90–110. (Moers 1978).
- 24.
Claire Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror’, in Shirley Nelson Gardner, Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (eds), The [M]other Tongue, p. 336. (Kahane 1985).
- 25.
Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in Barry Keith Grant, (ed.), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, pp. 153–63. (Zimmerman 1984).
- 26.
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality in Modern Culture, pp. 28–65. (Castle 1993).
- 27.
Section 28 of the Local Government Act was sponsored by a group of Tory backbenchers and, despite major opposition, came into force in the UK on 24 May 1998. It prohibits local authorities from (a) promoting homosexuality or publishing material that promotes it; (b) promoting the teaching in state maintained schools of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship; or (c) giving financial assistance to any person for approval of either of these purposes. As Duncan Fallowell points out it gives ‘official approval to homophobia in the country at large’, ‘Section 28 and its Effects’, The Guardian, 1 December 1989, p. 36. (Duncan 1989).
- 28.
See Lucie Armitt, Twentieth Century Gothic (Armitt 2009); Monica Germana, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (Germana 2010); Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Hogle 2014); Catherine Spooner and Roger McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Spooner and McEvoy 2007).
- 29.
Calvin Thomas (ed.), Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality, p. 19. (Thomas 2000). See also Olivia Laing’s powerful feature ‘On the Orlando Shooting and a Sense of Erasure’ in which she protests at the attempted erasure of the significance of LGBTQ people from the massacre in the gay club in Orlando, USA, by being told that it had nothing to do with the ‘everyday viciousness of homophobia’ but was just an attack on Western freedoms in general. (Guardian Review, 16 June 2016, p. 19).
- 30.
McCallum, ‘The “queer limits” in the Modern Gothic’, pp. 71–86. For reference to comments on and critiques of ‘queer’, see Palmer, The Queer Uncanny, p. 9. (McCallum 2014).
- 31.
Iain Morland and Annabelle Wilcox (eds), Queer Theory, p. 187. (Morland and Wilcox 2005).
- 32.
Critics who refer to historical events to illuminate the context of earlier queer Gothic fiction include John Fletcher, ‘The Haunted Closet: Henry James’s Queer Spectrality’, Textual Practice, 14/1 (2000) 53–60. (Fletcher 2000); and Mair Rigby, ‘“Do You Share My Madness?” Frankenstein’s queer Gothic’, in Hughes and Smith (eds), Queering the Gothic, pp. 42–4. (Rigby 2009).
- 33.
Important examples include Matthew Taylor, ‘Schools Accused of Abandoning Thousands of Children to Classroom Bullies’, The Guardian, 9 May 2005, p. 20 (Taylor 2005); Bella Quist, ‘Challenges for LGBT People in the Workplace and How To Overcome Them’, The Guardian, 28 July 2014. (Quist 2014); and John Browne, The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good in Business. (Browne 2014). Jeffrey Weeks’s publications Making Sexual History (Weeks 1999) and The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (Weeks 2007) also chart the different forms of prejudice and oppression that queer people continue to encounter in Western society.
- 34.
Jerold Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in Hogle (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, p. 12. (Hogle 2002).
- 35.
Bruhm, ‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It’ (Cambridge University Press 2002). p. 12.
- 36.
David Punter, ‘The Passions of Gothic’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothic Origins and Innovations, p. 233. (Punter 1994).
- 37.
- 38.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, p. 107. (Ahmed 2006).
- 39.
Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story: 1840–1920: A Cultural History, pp. 4–5. (Smith 2010).
- 40.
Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. (Buse and Stott 1999).
- 41.
Mandy Merck, ‘The Medium of Exchange’, in Buse and Stott (eds), Ghosts, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London: Macmillan 1999). pp. 162–74.
- 42.
Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 8.
- 43.
See note 27, this chapter.
- 44.
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, p. 85. (Prosser 1998).
- 45.
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, p. 80. (Freccero 2006).
- 46.
Haggerty, ‘The History of Homosexuality Reconsidered’, in Chris Mounsey (ed.), Developments in the Histories of Sexualities, p. 5. (Haggerty 2013).
- 47.
Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 94–5.
- 48.
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 73.
- 49.
Judith C. Brown, ‘Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, p. 75. (Brown 1989).
- 50.
Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ in Diana Fuss, Inside/Out, p. 325. (Hanson 1991).
- 51.
- 52.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood, pp. 16–17 (Bataille 1986). An informative analysis of Bataille’s writing and its relation to homoeroticism is to be found in Les Brookes, Gay Male Fiction since Stonewall: Ideology, Conflict and Aesthetics, pp. 150–54. (Brookes 2009).
- 53.
- 54.
Max Fincher, Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye, p. 71. (Fincher 2007).
- 55.
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, pp. 6–7.
- 56.
Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Still After’, in Janet Hallam and Andrew Parker (eds), After Sex, p. 32. (Freeman 2011).
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Palmer, P. (2016). Introduction: Queering Contemporary Gothic. In: Queering Contemporary Gothic Narrative 1970-2012. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30355-4_1
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