Women In the Cut of Danger: Female Subjectivity,Unregimented Masculinity and the Pleasure/Danger Symbiosis from the Gothic Romance to the Erotic Thriller

Abstract: Through a comparison between Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca and Susanna Moore's 1995 novel In the Cut, this article considers the extent to which Franco Moretti's theory of the inevitable dissolution of literary genres is true, with specific regard to the genre of the gothic romance. In evaluating both novels' treatment of female subjectivity, unregimented masculinity and the symbiotic relationship between sexual pleasure and mortal danger, this article investigates the degree to which a contemporary novel such as In the Cut, which is generally acknowledged to be an ‘erotic thriller’, is heavily indebted to the gothic romance and may therefore be interpreted as a continuation of this more traditional genre, and, conversely, the means through which Moore's novel exhibits an overt and defiant resistance to the gothic romance, thereby signifying the dissolution of this particular genre within twentieth-century women's writing.     

feminism and futurity: revisiting Marge Piercy’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Woman on the Edge of Time</Emphasis>

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the past, I argue that readings of Piercy’s novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel’s critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy’s novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past.     

Speaking volumes: Amélie nothomb's hygiène de l'assassin

This article discusses the first novel of the Belgian writer, Amélie Nothomb, whose irreverent mixing of classical and contemporary models of writing has delighted literary critics in 1990s France. The main argument of this article will be that Hygiène de l'assassin playfully appropriates aspects of both Plato's Socratic dialogues and the classic detective story to question the ways we approach texts and the reading strategies we adopt. Central to Nothomb's concerns is the subversive effect of the woman reader as a figure who contests (male) authorial intentionality. Bakhtin's formulation of the “novelistic” also operates as an important critical reference point for my discussion. It offers a model for understanding the literary experimentation of Nothomb's text as a means of creating “speaking volumes,” dialogised encounters, which unsettle our expectations of genre, literature and culture.     

Reflective Interplay Between Self and Other: Textual/Sexual Space and the Cultural Meanings of AIDS in Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

The article considers how the temporal distance has affected the cultural meanings of AIDS from the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty‐first century. It investigates the literary forms of the AIDS novel/autobiography, focusing on Hervé Guibert's novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (orig. A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie). Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was France's leading AIDS novelist and photographer; he wrote a series of autobiographical novels following his own diagnosis in the late 1980s. Through a reading of the novel, the article shows how the connection between time and space (reflected through the concept of queer space) undermines the conventional narrator‐author relationship and extends the limits of normative autobiographical/fictional writing. The analysis also focuses thematically on the mental and physical social spaces available for sexually non‐normative victims of the AIDS epidemic. The article explores the role played by representations of queer spaces in the process of resisting the norms of both sexuality and textuality. In so doing, I argue that new reparative meanings and interpretations of this once highly “stigmatized sexual past” can be found, in relation both to the discussion of queer theories and to public reconsiderations of the cultural memories of the AIDS era.     

Sex Positive: Feminism,Queer Theory,and the Politics of Transgression

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material effects of pro-sexuality.     

In Fredrika Bremer's Footsteps: Early Women Authors and the Rise of the Novel Genre in Finland

For some years scholars have been searching actively for new ways to look at literature, to replace the earlier nationalistic view in which literature played an important role in transmitting the idea of an authentic and unspoilt nation. This article deals with the earliest Finnish women authors and their role in developing the novel genre in Finland. I focus in particular on the importance of Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), a Swedish author born in Finland, and her “sketches of everyday life”, for early Finnish women authors and the novel genre. While I am not the first to take note of Bremer's influence on literature in Finland, the topic has not received close attention. By focusing on literary criticism as well as on thematic and structural parallels in the novels, I draw attention to the intercultural bonds between Finnish and Swedish literary institutions in the mid‐nineteenth century and show the vital importance of these bonds not only for the rise of the novel in Finland, but also in giving Finnish women authors the possibility of having their novels published and gaining a legitimate place in the literary institution.     

MEMORIAL ACCOUNTS

Under the conditions of narrative construction, young queer men's coming out stories present memorial accounts of ‘always-having-been’ queer; a queer childhood. The ways in which coming out stories operate have developed significantly over the past decade, particularly resulting from the use of online, digital technologies where such narratives proliferate. This article presents some initial theorisation of the role of young men's coming out narrative in the constitution of performative queer identity with a focus on the construction of memory. The article presents an overview of the history of coming out and the ways in which this history has influenced the conventions and genre of the coming out narrative online. It addresses some of the ways in which such memorial accounts are performative acts themselves, seeking to stabilise queer masculine identity, and ends with a discussion as to whether or not online sites such as YouTube continue or disrupt such stabilising narratives.     

A heroic male and a beautiful woman. Teemu Mäki,Orlan and the ambivalence of the grotesque body

In this article two performances are analysed, Finnish artist Teemu Mäki's video performance The Good Friday (1989) and French artist Orlan's performance of metamorphosis The Re-incarnation of Saint Orlan or Image(s)/New Image(s) . The concept of heroic masculinity is problematized through Mäki's masochistic performance. Orlan undergoes cosmetic surgery in the name of art. Her performances are treated as a cultural statement about gender and as a visualization of the contemporary, commercial ideals of female beauty. This interpretation is framed by the art theoretical concept of the grotesque. In the article the grotesque is approached through the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser and feminist appropriations of them by Mary Russo and Rosemarie Garland Thomson. Through these works the grotesque is defined as a concept by which phenomena are described in a state of transformation, a state in which they no longer fit into any fixed category. The ambivalence of the performances is stressed in this analysis. The grotesque is defined as a thoroughly political term. The politics of the grotesque is such that the term can be used to indicate that phenomena - bodies, genders and sexualities - are not as natural and self-evident as we would often like to think.     

The Cross-Dresser,the Thief,His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926). Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage. The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.     

exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th-century Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.     

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice.     

Kiss and Tell: ‘The Writing Cure’ in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997)

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.     

Queer Individualization: The Transformation of Personal Life in the Early 21st Century

This article explores what happens to understandings of social change in the realm of personal life when an empirical investigation is carried out that begins from rather different ontological and epistemological premises from those that have underpinned recent debates. It draws on UK‐based research that was framed by an engagement with sociological theories of individualization, psychoanalytically informed psycho‐social studies and queer theory, and that was designed to explore the psychic and affective dimensions, and the unconventional, counter‐heteronormative practices, of contemporary personal life. The study used the free association narrative interview method to examine the practices and ethics of personal life of people living outside conventional couples. It found considerable levels of psychic conflict and emotional distress, and some mental illness, amongst the people interviewed. Many interviewees told stories of experiencing a fracturing of self as they faced lives in which they felt alone and in which they were expected to be self‐responsible. These experiences, it is suggested, can be understood as tied up with losses contingent upon processes of individualization. However, the research also found evidence of a set of interrelated, counter‐heteronormative relationship practices that served reparatively to suture the selves undone by these processes of individualization: the prioritizing of friendship, the decentring of sexual/love relationships, and the forming of non‐conventional partnerships. The article proposes the notion of queer individualization to capture this set of transformations in the organization and experience of personal life, and suggests the necessity of understanding contemporary personal life as involving both the pain of loss, and new, reparative non‐conventional connections.     

‘she found a way,left the child’: ‘child-shifting’ as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">River Woman</Emphasis>

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.     

Abnormal fears: the queer Arctic in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.     

Cross way cross civil war chronicles,part iii

What possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.