Abstract
What form can a queer life story take? It is easier for the historian of sexuality to approach this distinctively contemporary question by thinking more precisely about what it rejects. Most obviously, it challenges a story of heterosexual and gender conformity. Teresa de Lauretis, Marilyn Farwell, Judith Roof and others have argued that many narratives are ‘organised around the patriarchal goals of marriage and reproduction […] enforcing what has become known as “compulsory heterosexuality”’.1 Queer lives are not organized around these goals and we might surmise that in narrating them, one would seek a form that expresses this disaffection. But equally, queer rejects the conventions of the sexual dissident’s coming out story, whether it be the conversion model of autobiography or its biographical equivalent, the detective’s quest for the truth.
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Notes
William Stephenson (2000) ‘William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy and Queer Autobiography’, Auto/Biography 15:1, 5–21, p. 6.
Biddy Martin (1998) ‘Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s)’ in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds) Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 380–92, p. 281.
Diana Fuss (ed.) (1991) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: New York University Press), pp. 252–3.
Robert Richmond Ellis (1997) The Hispanic Homograph: Gay Self-Representation in Contemporary Spanish Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Margaretta Jolly (2001) ‘Coming out of the Coming out Story: Queer and Life Writing’, Sexualities 4:4, 475–97.
Thomas C. Spear (2000) ‘Introduction: Auto/Biographical Que(E)Ries’, Auto/Biography 15:1, pp. 1–4 (unpaginated introduction).
Leigh Gilmore (1997) ‘An Anatomy of Absence: Written on the Body, the Lesbian Body, and Autobiography without Names’ in Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen Berry (eds) The Gay ’90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies (New York and London: New York University Press), pp. 224–52.
Marjorie Garber (1996 [1995]) Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (London: Hamish Hamilton), pp. 142–3; emphasis in original.
Jan Clausen (1999) Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 248.
David Wojnarowicz (1992 [1991]) Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (London: Serpent’s Tail).
Catherine Millet (2002) The Sexual Life of Catherine M (New York: Grove Press).
Paul John Eakin (1999) How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press);
Nancy K. Miller (2002) But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (New York: Columbia University Press).
Mark Norris Lance and Alessandra Tanesini (2005) ‘Identity Politics, Queer Judgements’ in Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox (eds) Queer Theory (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 171–96, p. 171.
Ken Plummer (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge), p. 143.
Grayson Perry (2003) ‘Ask This Year’s Turner Prize Winner: An Interview with Razia Iqbal’ (BBC, 9 February 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/3291691.htm) (no longer available).
Judith Butler (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge);
Del LaGrace Volcano and Judith Halberstam (1999) The Drag King Book (New York: Serpent’s Tail).
Wendy Jones (2006) Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 115.
Trace Newton-Ingham (2006) ‘Top of the Pots: An Interview with Grayson Perry’ (The Ideas Factory, http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/grayson_htm, accessed 9 February 2008).
Paul Mathieu (2003) Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics (London: A&C Black).
Moira Vincentelli (1999) Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Studies in Design and Material Culture, New York: Manchester University Press).
Mandy Merck (2005) ‘Afterword’ in Morland and Willox (eds) Queer Theory, p. 187.
Lisa Jardine (2004) Grayson Perry: Very Much His Own Man (London: Victoria Miro Gallery).
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© 2011 Margaretta Jolly
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Jolly, M. (2011). ‘Perversity to match the curtains’: Queering the Life Story with Grayson Perry. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_7
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