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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Queer Monsters Within: Trauma and the Emergence of Gothic Queer Discourse in U.S. Cultural Production, 1945-2011 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h6856t2 Author Westengard, Laura Elizabeth Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Queer Monsters Within: Trauma and the Emergence of Gothic Queer Discourse in U.S. Cultural Production, 1945-2011 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Laura Elizabeth Westengard September 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. George E. Haggerty, Chairperson Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Dr. Tiffany Ana López Copyright by Laura Elizabeth Westengard 2012 The Dissertation of Laura Elizabeth Westengard is approved: ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS I would like to thank my dissertation committee members, George Haggerty, Steven Axelrod, and Tiffany López, for their sustained and dedicated support throughout my graduate career. I would also like to thank the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside for their generous support of my project through the Dissertation Year Program Fellowship. I extend my gratitude to Elaine Rader for granting permission to use the cover image from Strange Breed and The Third Street (art by Paul Rader) and to Bob Speray for granting permission to use the cover image from The 3rd Theme (art by Robert Bonfils). All figures appear courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. I have made every effort to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material and to give credit to any artists that could be positively identified. No artist credit is given only in cases where I could not identify the artist through any source. Any errors or omissions in credit and/or copyright matters are inadvertent. iv For my dad, James Westengard, who read every word I wrote until he couldn’t v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Queer Monsters Within: Trauma and the Emergence of Gothic Queer Discourse in U.S. Cultural Production, 1945-2011 by Laura Elizabeth Westengard Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, September 2012 Dr. George E. Haggerty, Chairperson This project explores how gothic metaphors appear in American cultural productions concerned with non-normative gender and sexuality and why this gothicism spikes when American experience becomes traumatic. I claim that there are particularly gothic periods in the cultural production that follows collective trauma, and I focus on a single gothic trope for analysis in each of these historical moments—sadomasochism in performances responding to insidious trauma, haunting in historical fiction following the Watts riots of 1965, live burial in AIDS literature, containment in cold war lesbian pulp fiction, and vampirism in post-9/11 popular culture. Trauma shatters established notions of normalcy, disrupting the status quo and creating an anxious flurry of discourse—steeped in gothic tropes and metaphors—that often renegotiates gender vi and sexual norms. I identify the repressive uses of gothicism in these contexts and then examine activist redeployments in texts by LGBTIQ writers, artists, and theorists, such as Lee Edelman, Ron Athey, Ann Bannon, Migdalia Cruz, and Jack Halberstam. This analysis is concerned with questions such as: What are the temporal and causal links between the traumatic historical moment and the gothic-themed productions that follow? In what ways are gothic symbols used to negotiate concepts of gender and sexuality? Are they used to contain and regulate non-normative sexual or gender expressions, subvert popular understanding of “normal” gender and/or sexuality, or both? What other factors intersect with gender and sexuality to create this discourse (such as race, class, and ability), and how can an intersectional analysis deepen our understanding of the phenomenon? Finally, how has the subversive redeployment of gothic metaphors been used to speak to issues of social justice in response to oppression? In spite of the presence of this phenomenon in American literature and culture, the implications of gothicism in relation to American LGBTIQ experience have not been explicitly addressed within queer theory nor within American literary studies. My project builds on scholarship in queer Gothic literature by identifying gothic queer theory as a mode of literary and critical discourse and by constructing a crisis-based historical trajectory for repressive and redeployed gothicisms in U.S. cultural production. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 15 From Queer Gothic to Gothic Queer CHAPTER TWO 44 Body Text: Sadism, Masochism, and Traumatic Narrative Assault CHAPTER THREE 92 Live Burial/Queer History CHAPTER FOUR 143 Containing the Beast: Containment Culture and the Golden Age of Lesbian Pulp CHAPTER FIVE 197 Vampire Fantasy: Neoliberalism and the Undead in Post-9/11 Popular Culture CONCLUSION 250 viii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 155 Valerie Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, 1960). FIGURE 2: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 157 Aldo Lucchesi, Strange Breed (New York: Tower Publication, 1960). Cover art, Paul Rader. FIGURE 3: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 161 Arthur Adlon, The One Between (New York: Beacon Signal, 1962). J.C. Priest, Forbidden (New York: Beacon, 1952). Jay Carr, Unnatural Wife (New York: Beacon Signal, 1962). FIGURE 4: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 167 Artemis Smith, The Third Sex (New York: Beacon, 1959). FIGURE 5: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 169 March Hastings, The 3rd Theme (Chicago: Newsstand Library Books, 1961). Cover art, Robert Bonfils. FIGURE 6: (Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) 171 Joan Ellis, The Third Street (New York: Tower Publications, 1964). Cover art, Paul Rader. ix INTRODUCTION The 2010 Darren Aronofsky film, Black Swan, portrays a professional ballet dancer (Natalie Portman) who, under extreme pressure as the Swan Queen in a production of Swan Lake, slips increasingly into a state of paranoia, doubling, self- mutilation, and lesbianism. In Hollywood, the correlation between paranoia, sexy self- mutilation as a kind of sadomasochistic practice, and queer identity is not a new phenomenon. As Vito Russo outlines in The Celluloid Closet, Hollywood has a long and complicated history with queerness, and the portrayal of gay and lesbian characters as monstrous, pathological creatures that are inevitably punished in the end of the film is a familiar occurrence. While the most obvious explanation for this phenomenon posited by Russo is that the addition of queerness as a character trait simply plays upon the public understanding of gays and lesbians as creepy, sick, and villainous, he also acknowledges that these characters were sites of clandestine representation for queer writers and directors as well as for queer viewers.1 Although at times the portrayal of the LGBT community in popular culture seems to have come a long way from Rebecca’s obsessive Mrs. Danvers with her crazed look and black high-necked gown, Natalie Portman’s character in Black Swan fits right in to Russo’s “Necrology” of queer characters who are miserable, homicidal, insane, and who inevitably end up dead (usually by suicide or murder). The return of the paranoid, insane, homicidal/suicidal queer character not only fits into an identifiable genealogy, or necrology perhaps, but it also finds itself in the center of a flurry of gothicism within contemporary popular culture. From the immense 1 popularity of the Twilight saga and the subsequent vampire narratives to emerge in its wake to the obsession with reality programs that serve as a modern day freakshows and haunted houses, one cannot ignore the cultural trend toward the unsettlingly odd, the ominously supernatural, and the titillatingly unusual. The common thread that runs through these productions, in many cases, lies both in the gothic nature of this cultural phenomenon and in the underlying link between a gothic presence and the negotiation of gender and sexuality. It is the tie between these two elements that is the main concern of this project— why have the arts (both high and low) returned again and again to the gothic as a means of communicating queerness?2 Why are there spikes in this type of sexualized gothicism within twentieth and twenty-first century American cultural productions, and how are these trends linked to specific historical moments? It is not only within literature, art, and film that this phenomenon occurs. Theorists who examine the intricacies of genders and sexualities—critics who write about the history and the future of queerness, such as Lee Edelman, Kate Bornstein, Carla Freccero, and Leo Bersani— also turn again and again to the gothic as an apt and resonant cache of metaphors for communicating the complexities of queerness. This project explores why these gothic metaphors are resonant for theorists of gender and sexuality, how they appear in other American
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