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Notes - The Queer Uncanny

CHAPTER 1.

The uncanny is queer. And the Queer is uncanny. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, 2003 p43asidePotentialReading

Uncanny:

  • Eerry and uncanny sensations as a reflection of repressed desires and fears (p2)

  • Doubling

  • Taboo (see Freud on the uncanny)

  • drives which have been repressed for the sake of cultural continuity pg6

  • The fringe of something else (Helene Cixous fiction and its phantoms reading freuds the uncanny)PotentialReading

  • Excess, both decadence and lack pg7

  • Mimicry and doubling (gay and lesbian roles commenting on hetero roles, revealing the constructedness ‘a kind of neutralised gener mime’(Butler)

  • Ambiguity, living in ambiguity pg 8

  • Doubling dividing and interchanging of the self pg 10

  • Unhomely home 15

  • Gothic monster

aside re-read the intro to the new uncanny because that included some good definitions

PotentialReading Sarah Ahmed, slant wise & queer phenomenology

The texts in the latter two categories illustrate the tendancy of motifs and imagery relating to the uncanny and Gothic to infiltrate different forms of fiction, demonstrating their versitility and the attraction they continue to hold for writers and readers. pg 4

The usage of the term Queer itself is ambiguous. While emplyed in academia in relation to queer theory to challenge the concept of a stable sexual identification and problematise the binary division homosexual/heterosexual, it is alternatively used as a form of shorthand to encompass the categories of lesbian, gay and on occasion transgender. pg 4

aside I think it will be important to make sure that I am aware that what is understood as taboo, or fringe will change depending on the specific context and struggles in which the work/author exists. i.e. narrowly American connotations and limited metropolitan associations, maleness v contributions of lesbian culture and contribution, and move from grass roots movements to the academy

Motifs with uncanny connotations (spectre/vampire the latter representing capitalism by Marx). Ghosts of revolutionary traditions dead but remain unburied. pg 6.

Gothic is a highly mobile and fluid literary form. pg 11

As Julian Wolfreys observes, ‘traces, remnants, ruins of the Gothic are found everywhere in fiction and non-fiction alike, in realist and fantasty literature’. Transgression, identity, space, time 2008 p97PotentialReading

Gothic fantasy articulating the individual and societies repressed fears and desires. p11

The Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’ (William Hughes Andrew Smith “Queering the Gothic”) pg 11

“paranoid Gothic” term by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

unheimlich the name for everything that ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light pg 14

Derrida and the phantom text (no text is an independant entity since all are intertextually haunted by the others) memoire for paul de manPotentialReading

Royle, paraphrasing schelling’s words, describes how ‘uncanny feelings are very often generates by strange sights, unveilings, revelations, by what should have remained out of sight. (the simultaneous invisibilty and the otherness of queer people - anyone can be gay how terrifying) (the reveal inciting violence showing the precariousness of queer existence and queerness as alien and threatening) pg 16

What is the Female Gothic? pg 20aside

Mad woman in the attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) p21PotentialReading

Summary

The chapter outlines the content of the rest of the book. It introduces how the uncanny can reflect society and its fears and desires, and in particular those of marginalised groups and queer individuals, and in turn how queer phenomenology is used as a way to theoretically approach works which engage with the gothic. It notes the limitations of queer theory, and its ambiguity as a term. She then also touches on how these themes are approached in works centering lesbian and homosexual relationships, particuarly relating to sex, and how it might range in explicitness and obscurity, excess, objectification