QUEER INDIFFERENCE QUEER INDIFFERENCE: SOLITUDE, FILM, DREAMS By ROSHAYA RODNESS, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright Roshaya Rodness, August 2019 McMaster PhD. (2019), Hamilton, Ontario (English & Cultural Studies) TITLE: Queer Indifference: Solitude, Film, Dreams AUTHOR: Roshaya Rodness, B.A. (McGill University), M.A. (McGill University) SUPERVISOR: Dr. David L. Clark NUMBER OF PAGES: ix, 313 ii Lay Abstract This dissertation explores a series of limited and obscure relations marshalled under the concept of “indifference” to develop what I call a theory of queer indifference. By bringing concerns from queer theory about socially compulsive forms of inclusion and connection in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, this dissertation expands the political, ethical, and aesthetic potential of such ways of being to challenge existing relations of power. It argues that the dissident force of indifferent relations generates the queerly critical, imaginative, susceptible, and hospitable capacities inherent to doing justice. Experiences of solitude, film-viewing, and dreaming illustrate the social lure of indifferent relations as practices or embodiments that can be understood otherwise than as a source of deprivation. From the un-belonging spaces of solitude, to the film camera’s technological gaze, to the unwitting intelligence of dreamlife, this dissertation examines the “space of shared-separation” between self and other, viewer and camera, and waking and sleeping selves as a type of existence that produces queer relations to social order and that nurtures creative orientations to indeterminate futures. The films Brokeback Mountain and Last Address, and the dream diaries of American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, are the aesthetic core of this dissertation’s investigation of and experimentation with ways of being that are queerly at odds with the way things are. iii Abstract This dissertation develops an existential-aesthetic theory of the subversive power and lure of limited and recessive forms of social intimacy that it calls queer indifference. By putting queer concerns with the normative politics of identity, visibility, and inter-relationality in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, it responds to expectations of the self-evident value of active bodies, personal recognition, and mutual experience for meaningful social political agency, and argues that recessive relations experienced and cultivated in the fortuitous spaces of “shared-separation” constitute a queerly-imagined rapport with alterity rather than being the source of social deprivation. Queer indifferences, I argue, effect their own ethical engagements beyond the self that are not reducible to readily legible connections to the social, while they may be continuous with such modes of connection. Drawing on a number of critical resources from queer theory, poststructuralist philosophy, film criticism, dream science, and the history of AIDS activism, this dissertation seeks to discover the generative impasses in perception, consciousness, and connection articulated by queer aesthetic media that make themselves seen and heard through the involutions of social legibility and recognition. In social postures such as solitude, techno-mediated encounters with cinematic worlds, and the creative automation of dreamlife, this dissertation locates aesthetic-ethical expressions of justice oriented towards the defiant persistence of queer life. Films such as Brokeback Mountain and Last Address, and the dream diaries of American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, access and communicate a certain inaccessible and incommunicable core of self and intimate expression that elicits relations with the other in appearances of isolation or remoteness, and that generates creative and imaginative possibilities for justice ahead of indeterminate futures. iv Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, McMaster University, and McMaster’s Department of English & Cultural Studies. A version of Chapter Two originally appeared in New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-202, and I thank Co-Editor-In-Chief Scott Michaelsen and Managing Editor Natalie Eidenier for their permission to reprint this material. There are many people whose unique gifts and talents I had the distinct honour of benefitting from to complete this work. My supervisor, David L. Clark, whose uncompromising insight, rigour, and generosity, and unqualified commitment to the work deepened and strengthened it at every stage. The discussions and guidance from which the work grew modelled for me what it means to cultivate truly radical thought that makes a difference. My doctoral committee, Sarah Brophy and Susan Searls Giroux, whose precise questions, suggestions, and support throughout enriched the project and expanded its horizons. Among my community in the English & Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University, Professors Eugenia Zuroski, Anne Savage, Lorraine York, and Managing Editor of Eighteenth- Century Fiction Jacqueline Langille often gave their time, resources, and keen intelligences to my questions and concerns. Conversations we had over several years influenced my dissertation in known and unknown ways and sustained me through the writing process. The friendship and brainpower of my colleagues: Andrew Reszitnyk, Jocelyn Sakal Froese, Danielle Martak, Simon Orpana, Tyler Pollard, Jenny Blaney, Emily West, and Jessie Travis, to name only a few, uplifted me and the writing across its challenges and twists and leaps. v My little Beit Midrash at Beth Jacob Synagogue, which in the final year of writing expanded my community and suffused my work with knowledge and friendship through Talmud study. I would also like to thank Ira Sachs, who graciously allowed me to interview him for this project, and Jacques Khalip for his valuable feedback. My mother, Naomi Kates, and my brother, Benjamin Rodness, saw me through the work and steadfastly supported the project as it developed. River and Jet, canine comrades of the highest order, watched over this project and saturated every page with non-human love and insight. And my partner, Clair Macaulay-Newcombe, whose incalculable love and influence is the motor and the fuel for it all. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Queer Indifference . 1 - Indifference as Queer Theory . 4 - Theory and Practice . 15 - Stony . 27 - Three Meditations on Indifference . 44 Chapter One: Queer Solitude . 48 - Alone with the Marlboro Man . 87 - Coda: “I am writing” . 115 Chapter Two: Cinematic Indifference . 119 - Automatisms . 127 - Last Address . 152 - Cinema Animal . 179 - Conclusion: Seeing After the World . 195 Chapter Three: Dreams After All . 198 - “First Violence:” Queer Dreaming . 203 - Dreaming in Disaster: David Wojnarowicz’s Dreams . 220 - Coda: Dreaming in Facsimile . 268 Conclusion: Queer Indifference-to-Come . 275 Appendix: Interview with Ira Sachs . 280 Bibliography . 296 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian (1982) . 223 Figure 2: Untitled (Peter Hujar) (1989) . 223 Figure 3: Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Day’s End” building cuts with two men) (1978) . 250 Figure 4: Page 36 of 7 Miles a Second (2012) . 268 Figure 5: Page 37 of 7 Miles a Second (2012) . 268 Figure 6: Detail from Facsimile, Part II (Peter F. Tanguay) (1991) . 271 viii Declaration of Academic Achievement The author of this thesis is the sole contributor. ix Introduction: Queer Indifference Relations are apertures. Widening and contracting, they adjust the clarity and blur of alterity. If things reside at a great distance, they may only come into view through the smallest of openings. Eyes narrow, gazing past what lies before them, to glimpse life lived in the space beyond. At the limitations of our vision we contract almost to the point of closure to relate to what lives on the margins of our faculties. What this study calls queer indifference names the limits of knowledge, attachment, visibility, and personality, not to highlight the negative facets of coexistence but to explore the dissident agency of recessive, suspended, inoperative, and opaque states and postures that become queer forms of agency. I imagine a queer entelechy of indifference as a radical potential in limited forms of relation to unmake normative social organization and produce new courses of action. Imagining indifference as otherwise than a privation permits serious considerations of the recursive intervals in the midst of identity and difference, positivity and negativity, that are more than contingent states of being and that provide a heterogeneous vocabulary for queer modes of dissidence that appear to the side of stark recalcitrance and direct action. While concepts of difference are more readily associated with queer politics and theory that describe diversity and alterity, I argue that indifference releases new possibilities for queer critique and offers a source of alternative relations towards alterity that preserve and generate deviant forms of non-recognition and non-spectatorship. Queer Indifference brings together an assemblage of American queer film and diaries that countermand expectations of transparency, revelation, and intimacy typically associated with cinema and life writing. Ang Lee's