Gothic Sexualities

Abstract

After fifteen years of teaching Gothic literature and queer theory, I have come to regard the phrase “Gothic sexualities” as self-evident, even somewhat redundant. All Gothic appears in some way to register sexual anxieties and tensions, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s important Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire made clear.¹ Sexuality, as it comes to us through a history of Freudian, post-Freudian and queer thought, is nothing short of Gothic in its ability to rupture, fragment, and destroy both the coherence of the individual subject and of the culture in which that subject appears. As an analytical tool for both scholarship and classroom teaching, the kind of work Sedgwick inaugurated has allowed us to ask new questions of the Gothic in its representation of sexuality, power, and pleasure. In much criticism on the Gothic, sexuality has been the purview of a feminist criticism that reads—correctly—issues of gender in the Gothic as explorations of power inequities. A critic like Michelle Massé, for example, sees the Gothic’s preoccupation with masochism as a schooling of its women readers into submission, an acceptance of compulsory femininity; while Anne Williams locates the Gothic within the fall of the patriarchal family and considers the ways in which women might fashion their own poetics within that fall.²