Never Grow Up: The Queerness Of Immaturity In American Film

This dissertation examines the contradictory status of immaturity in our culture. While immaturity’s otherness to heteronormative adulthood is a source of fear and anxiety, this otherness is also what makes it desirable–that is, immaturity represents an escape from the pressures and standards of adulthood, signifying an oppositional subjectivity reminiscent of youthful rebellion. Indeed, the oppositional nature of immaturity is ultimately what gives it power as a source of political agency. Rather than seeing immaturity as something to be ashamed of, or as something to be avoided or defeated, this dissertation, following Judith/Jack Halberstam, views immaturity as a powerful form of resistance as well as a queer “way of being.” In fact, these two latter elements–resistance and queerness–go hand-in-hand; queerness within this project is primarily understood as an uncompromising “resistance to regimes of the normal,” specifically those pertaining to maturity and success. Beginning with a focus on male immaturity, I establish the fear/desire dynamic characterizing the immature male through close readings of the 1950s male-centered melodrama, combined with an historically-oriented analysis of postwar American culture. Next, I examine how comedy and dramedy films about childish men from the 1980s to the present day are also structured by this contradictory dynamic, as they both resist and reinforce heteronormative adulthood. My textual analysis of these films are grounded in theories of queer temporality. Finally, I focus on the female counterpart to the immature male, examining various constructions of female immaturity in recent cinema. Here, I utilize a broader range of queer temporal theories to demonstrate the political potential of immature womanhood, where “immature” gains agency through its queer and feminist resistance to the tyranny of heteronormative adulthood. While this dissertation ultimately seeks to demonstrate how immaturity functions as a site of resistance to (hetero)normativity, it also acknowledges how it can (specifically in the context of male homosociality), reinforce and reproduce oppressive structures, further underlining immaturity’s incongruous status.

Never Grow Up: The Queerness Of Immaturity In American Film

This dissertation examines the contradictory status of immaturity in our culture. While immaturity’s otherness to heteronormative adulthood is a source of fear and anxiety, this otherness is also what makes it desirable–that is, immaturity represents an escape from the pressures and standards of adulthood, signifying an oppositional subjectivity reminiscent of youthful rebellion. Indeed, the oppositional nature of immaturity is ultimately what gives it power as a source of political agency. Rather than seeing immaturity as something to be ashamed of, or as something to be avoided or defeated, this dissertation, following Judith/Jack Halberstam, views immaturity as a powerful form of resistance as well as a queer “way of being.” In fact, these two latter elements–resistance and queerness–go hand-in-hand; queerness within this project is primarily understood as an uncompromising “resistance to regimes of the normal,” specifically those pertaining to maturity and success. Beginning with a focus on male immaturity, I establish the fear/desire dynamic characterizing the immature male through close readings of the 1950s male-centered melodrama, combined with an historically-oriented analysis of postwar American culture. Next, I examine how comedy and dramedy films about childish men from the 1980s to the present day are also structured by this contradictory dynamic, as they both resist and reinforce heteronormative adulthood. My textual analysis of these films are grounded in theories of queer temporality. Finally, I focus on the female counterpart to the immature male, examining various constructions of female immaturity in recent cinema. Here, I utilize a broader range of queer temporal theories to demonstrate the political potential of immature womanhood, where “immature” gains agency through its queer and feminist resistance to the tyranny of heteronormative adulthood. While this dissertation ultimately seeks to demonstrate how immaturity functions as a site of resistance to (hetero)normativity, it also acknowledges how it can (specifically in the context of male homosociality), reinforce and reproduce oppressive structures, further underlining immaturity’s incongruous status.

“Peculiar ‘Til I D.I.E.”

Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.

The Voice of an Incestuous Sister

This chapter investigates the voice of the sister, Satoko, who has an incestuous relationship with Akiyuki. There is considerable discussion in both Japanese and English scholarship of Akiyuki's breaking the incest taboo with his half-sister as a substitute for patricide. Although a number of these commentaries reference Satoko, little attention has been given to her vulnerability or her response to the incest. Thus, this chapter profiles Satoko's subjectivity by considering her as a sister whose sexuality is exploited as a strategic weapon in Akiyuki's bitter conflict with his father. This conflict is shown as the son's attempt to bond with the father. Drawing on a study of male “homosociality,” this chapter discusses Satoko's subalternity as an object of dispute in her father and half-brother's homosocial bond. A key element of the chapter is the analysis of Nakagami's interpretation and, in turn, a reinterpretation of “Kyōdai shinjū” (“A brother–sister double suicide”), a folk song featured in the Akiyuki trilogy that implies the playing out of a mythic family tragedy in Kasuga.

Comrades-in-[Each Other’s]-Arms: Homosociality, Masculinity and Effeminacy in the Turkish Army

In Turkey, the military regulation Article 17 prohibits men who suffer “visible sexual identity and/or behavioral defects” from serving in the armed forces. The final decision of exemption, however, is made by doctors depending on the cogency of the femininity/effeminacy draftees perform. Based on seven oral histories of gay men and a trans woman who served in the army, and five oral histories of gay men, including myself, who obtained the certificate of discharge, this article discusses the constitutive role of homosociality in the production of military masculinity and the abjection of effeminacy by raising three interrelated points: (a) (Turkish) military masculinity is essentially fragile and shattered due to the lack of distinct boundaries between male homosociality and homosexuality. Therefore the medico-military gaze, as well as the proper soldiers, must protect, albeit unskillfully, the boundaries separating the two. (b) For the medico-military gaze and the military culture, the real peril to homosocial bonding and military masculinity is not homoerotic intimacy or gay sex per se, but effeminacy. And (c) in the Turkish Armed Forces, effeminophobia is an instrument employed in defense of the homosocial safe zone.