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REAL, TRULY LIVE PLACES: NOTES TOWARD THE QUEER UNCANNY By Copyright 2011 Milton W. Wendland Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson: Dr. Ann Schofield ________________________________ Chairperson: Dr. Kathryn Conrad ________________________________ Dr. Doreen Fowler ________________________________ Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati ________________________________ Dr. Adrianne Kunkel Date Defended: July 18, 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Milton W. Wendland certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: REAL, TRULY LIVE PLACES: NOTES TOWARD THE QUEER UNCANNY ________________________________ Chairperson: Dr. Ann Schofield ________________________________ Chairperson: Dr. Kathryn Conrad Date approved: July 18, 2011 ii Abstract This dissertation problematizes contemporary ideas of epistemological dependability and advances queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity by reading the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny in conjunction with the critical concept of the queer to produce the queer uncanny. The first chapter analyzes the The Wizard of Oz (1939) and introduces the disruptive interpretive potential of the queer uncanny in several of its manifestations: the compulsion to repeat, doubling, and dislogic. The second chapter focuses on the novel Mysterious Skin (Scott Heim) and of redemption in light of childhood sexual molestation, demonstrates the ability of the queer uncanny to broaden available interpretative ranges vis-à- vis cultural discourses surrounding traumatic events like child sexual abuse. The final chapter applies the lens of the queer uncanny to a municipal domestic partnership registry ordinance that by its own terms provides no rights to registrants but which upon further analysis turns out to offer evidence of the performative potential of the queer uncanny. iii Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the members of my dissertation committee – Dr. Doreen Fowler, Dr. Adrianne Kunkel, and Dr. Ayu Saraswati – for their support of my work in various ways and at various stages in my graduate career and most especially for their assistance with this manuscript and the defense process. My co-chairs – Dr. Kathryn Conrad and Dr. Ann Schofield – have been helpful both intellectually and professionally, challenging me to think harder and more deeply than I might otherwise have done. Of course, omissions and errors are entirely mine. I owe a very special thank you to Dr. Schofield, who introduced me to the field of American Studies in my first graduate seminar and who has been with me every step of the way. The Department of American Studies has been my home base in graduate school, and one to which I will always be fiercely loyal. Thank you to AMS faculty and fellow graduate students for making my graduate education more than I ever dreamed it could be. (My cohort, especially, was like food for the famished as I left my law practice and took the dive back into the life of a graduate student.) Thanks as well to the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, which I joined as a GTA but which I soon took up as my second intellectual home. iv There is no way I could have made it through graduate school, much less through this dissertation process, without the knowledgeable assistance of three incredible people: Jan Emerson in WGSS and Kay Isbell and Terri Rockhold in AMS. Administrative staff are the heart and backbone of any department; these three are proof of that. Thank you to the Graduate School for funding my final semester, giving me the time and support to focus on completing this project. Thanks to my BFFs Thyra Knapp, Glenn Hudspeth and Temma Balducci for the debates, the complaints, the cheers, and the beers as we’ve all four battled the graduate school dragon. Our friendship is among the best things in my life, personally and intellectually. Thank you to my partner, Michael Rezayazdi, who during the most intense parts of the dissertation process always reminded me that “it’s all right” – and then made it all right. A thank you, as well, to my three parents. I can imagine no better situs for application of the queer uncanny than in the complicated web that exists among us. Though they do not know the nature of the research I conduct, the subjects of the courses I teach, or the contents of the best parts of my life, these three people are the genesis of how I think and how I live. And thanks to all of my Atlantis buddies. v Table of Contents Introduction “Topsy Turvy: Joining the Queer and the Uncanny”…………………..……………………..1 Chapter One “Home is No Place: Moments of the Queer Uncanny in The Wizard of Oz ”………...…..….35 Chapter Two “Alien Brains: The Queer Uncanny, Troubling Texts, and Mysterious Skin”……………….86 Chapter Three “This Ordinance Which is Not One: The Performative Potential of the Queer Uncanny”…127 Conclusion “The Way We Play: Directions for the Queer Uncanny”…………...……………………...152 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………155 vi Introduction “Topsy Turvy: Joining the Queer and the Uncanny” When I went on my first Atlantis week-long all-gay vacation for men at a coastal resort in Mexico, I and the other men I met agreed that this was special, that somehow this vacation was unique. 1 But what exactly did we mean by that? I began to push the other men to articulate exactly why this vacation experience felt so different. Was it just that we were on vacation and for a time liberated from work and domestic concerns? No, many of us vacationed frequently. Was it that we found sexual encounters easy to initiate? Again, no, for the sexual possibilities on this trip seemed no more or less numerous than in regular life. Was it perhaps the week of gay-themed entertainment and programming? Again, no, because most of us frequented gay-themed comedy shows, films, and performances. My own initial reaction came from my training in American Studies and in Women’s Studies: there is power in numbers and we were likely building community with others like us, having a chance to “be ourselves” together. Certainly we could analyze this experience using the rubrics that have fruitfully explored issues of identity and community in gay bars, gay enclaves, gay bathhouses, and the like – that is, as an example of how delimited physical spaces which contain or attract concentrations of gay men can have individual and social implications. It 1 Atlantis Events is a Los Angeles-based company that charters entire cruise ships or land resorts, books gay-themed entertainers and activities, and markets the vacations to gay men aged eighteen and over, although men and women of any orientation are welcome. Because of the timing, cost, and focus of the vacations they are largely populated by gay men between thirty and seventy years of age. See Atlantis Events, Inc. “Atlantis: The Way We Play.” http://atlantisevents.com. Accessed 16 February 2011. 1 would also be tempting to examine the Atlantis situation as a moment of queer consciousness, a twist on Marxist coming to consciousness in which a person finds himself in a particular set of social circumstances and recognizes his place in it for the first time – and more importantly his connection to others similarly situated. This, indeed, is how much work in gay and lesbian studies has progressed, by examining social sites and cultural moments in which gay men and lesbians have recognized themselves and each other and thereby been able to band together to develop friendships, communities, and social movements. While these explanations certainly fit the facts, I remained skeptical because nearly all of the men I vacationed with were, to large degree, like me – not at all socially, politically, or geographically isolated. To a man we were all living relatively open lives in communities, workplaces, organizations, and family circles that were for the most part gay or gay-friendly. There was something uncanny about the Atlantis vacation, and I was reminded of Sigmund Freud’s short essay on the uncanny and the anecdote in which he came up on the red light district of an Italian city and then inadvertently came back upon it several more times in the course of a single sojourn. On the Atlantis vacation one could walk anywhere on the resort and know, without a doubt, that every other man there, excepting perhaps men on the resort staff, was gay. It was a feeling that one need not speculate about or even for a moment guess at the sexual orientation of the other men at the resort. It was not frightening, but it was at once both unfamiliar and familiar, both novel and known. As a friend put it, it was like being in the twilight zone because normal life was turned upside down and the world was topsy-turvy. This resort, this itinerary of activities and shows, this on-going experience was a ‘real, truly live place,” and not simply a break with our every day realities or an escape from the daily grind. What I discovered, in staying in contact with my friends after our returns to 2 our respective homes, is that the experience stayed with them, that there was a period in which the two moments merged and overlapped. Unsatisfied at reading this as community- building, I turned to queer theory for guidance. Scholarship dealing with identity and community in the lesbian and gay context forms an important and essential archive of such times and places and developments. 2 But such work has not been the only thread in the development of gay and lesbian studies; parallel to, or perhaps more aptly, in opposition to, such studies has been the development of queer theory, emerging in the early 1990s from the intersections of literary, critical, and gender theory.

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