Counterpublic Histories, Radical Queer Negativity, and Creaturely Life
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by YorkSpace Counterpublic Histories, Radical Queer Negativity, and Creaturely Life: Exploring a Literary Archive of Queer Spaces in New York City Faye Chisholm Guenther A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English York University Toronto, Ontario October 2015 ©Faye Guenther, 2015 Abstract My dissertation is a comparative study of David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991), Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), and Eileen Myles’s Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (2010). I conceive of the memoirs as a literary archive of queer spaces situated in New York City in the last quarter of the 20th century. Crucially, the memoirs recall queer spaces as sites of counterpublic experience. The guiding questions for my dissertation are: how does this literary archive function, how are the different queer spaces represented, and why is this archive significant. The queer spaces described in the memoirs include physical environments, relational practices, and queer imaginaries. The memoirs bear witness to the ways that the AIDS epidemic dismantled queer spaces. They also document the destructive impact of gentrification as a material and social process. In doing so they address how contemporary queer culture in North America is shaped by the losses of queer spaces. Wojnarowicz, Delany, and Myles use personal narratives to convey the ways struggles over visibility and freedom register on their bodies and resonate in their emotional and intellectual experiences. They explore the meaning of queer spaces in terms of the material nature of history—how history moves within the body and through spatial relations. I theorize the materialization of history in the memoirs as expressions of creaturely life and radical queer negativity. These modes of expression primarily emerge from the memoirs’ central thematic concerns of freedom and visibility in relation to queer spaces. In conveying the materialization of queer history within the body and through spatial relations, the three authors become pivoting subjects. They bear witness to their own counterpublic experiences in queer spaces in order to consider the possibilities of liberated queer futures. ii Acknowledgments Thank you to my dissertation supervisor, Marcus Boon, and to my dissertation committee members, Terry Goldie and Art Redding, for their insights and advice. I am grateful to my friends and family for their encouragement and support as I was writing the dissertation. I also want to thank Eileen Myles for the two interviews, a year apart, at Café Morgador. Our conversations fueled my work on this project. iii Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents............................................................................................................................iv Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Defining My Project.............................................................................................................1 Defining My Focus...............................................................................................................4 Defining My Method..........................................................................................................12 Chapter Two: Exploring the Archive: Key Concepts and Contexts................................................16 Entering the Archive..........................................................................................................16 The Concept of Queer.........................................................................................................17 The Concept of Queer Space..............................................................................................22 Literary Devices of the Archive.........................................................................................25 Queer Space in New York City 1975-2000: An Overview................................................31 The Downtown Scene and Queer Spatial Constructs.........................................................31 Queer Space and the AIDS Crisis.......................................................................................34 Queer Space and Queer Nation...........................................................................................37 The Impact of Gentrification..............................................................................................39 Queer Freedom and Queer Visibility……………………….............................................48 Walking and Memory: Exploring Queer Spaces of the City and the Self..........................53 Representations of Queer Spaces in the Archive................................................................55 The Significance of the Archive.........................................................................................60 Radical Queer Negativity...................................................................................................61 Creaturely Life……...........................................................................................................64 Chapter Three: Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz.............69 A Record of Survival..........................................................................................................69 Living and Writing in “Picturesque Ruins”........................................................................71 Unflinching Glances: The Private as Public………………...............................................76 “Like a heart against a rib cage”: What to Do with Queer Freedom..……………………..79 “In order not to disappear”: The Necessity of Queer Visibility..………………………….83 “Creating my Own Order”: Queer Spaces of the Streets..………...………………………87 I’m losing myself in the language of his movements”: Queer Spaces of the Piers….......99 “Set us free from our past histories”: Grappling with Destruction………………….…..115 “I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg”: Liberation through Anger….…………118 “I lean towards him”: Creaturely Life as a State of Exception....……....……...………...120 Chapter Four: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany.……...……………127 Measuring the Loss of Queer Spaces................................................................................127 Writing Queer Spaces of Intersectional Identity and Minoritarian Experience................130 iv Presence and Absence, Juxtaposition and Contact: Writing a Return..…………...……..133 “They’ve set gay liberation back”: What Queer Freedom Means……..……………….140 “Let’s go around the corner”: Remapping to Make Counterpublic Histories Visible.....144 “Interlocking systems and subsystems”: Queer Spaces of the Porn Cinemas………….150 “Social problems to be socially solved”: Violence in Queer Spaces.................................161 “Irrevocably anchored within the social”: Defying Erasure and Nostalgia..………….....167 “Pretty much like you, pretty much like me”: Creaturely Relations……........................172 Chapter Five: Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles.……………………...……………….177 A Poetic Inventory of Queer Spaces.................................................................................177 Setting the Record Queer..................................................................................................179 Asserting a Queer Gaze and Claiming a Female Public..…..............................................184 “I made this. I am free. I had a room.”: How to Sustain Queer Freedom..………………194 “This ridiculous painting without limits was at my disposal”: Becoming Visible..….….195 “A room…that contained the world”: Queer Spaces of the Poet’s Apartment..….……..197 “We were a neighborhood and we would play”: Queer Spaces of Performance..….…...201 “I just needed someplace to go”: Queer Spaces of the Streets..……..…………………..204 “I’m female, plus I’m me”: Resisting Genders in Queer Spaces..…………………..…..207 “It was still much better to destroy things”: Performing Queer Failure..………………..211 “The only refuge…is the impossible moment of being alive”: A Creaturely Self..……..220 Chapter Six: Conclusion.………………………………………………………….……..…...…227 Queer Spatial Temporalities and the Reparative Impulse.………………...……………227 Remembering Counterpublic Histories to Understand the Queer Present...……………236 Bibliography..…………….………………………………………………………….……….... 242 v Introduction Defining My Project My dissertation is a comparative study of David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1992), Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), and Eileen Myles’s Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (2010). I conceive of the memoirs as a literary archive of queer spaces situated in New York City in the last quarter of the 20th century. Crucially, the memoirs recall queer spaces as sites of counterpublic experience. The guiding questions for my dissertation are: how does this literary archive function, how are the different queer spaces represented,