Dissolution and apotheosis of the queer body in The Lazarus Heart, by the trans author Poppy Z. Brite

ABSTRACT In The Lazarus Heart, the trans author Poppy Z. Brite sets a brutal anatomy of gender and sexuality, and examines the violence and abjection frequently imposed on queer subjects, especially on trans people. Body, gender, and sexuality occupy a central role in the novel, which allows Brite’s work to be read as queer Gothic, a type of fiction understood as an interstice between Gothic studies and queer studies. Berenice Bento states that transsexual bodies are fabrications engendered by particular technologies, and Butler defines gender as performance; these are the central issues to the analysis I propose here. My main goal is to discuss the thematic development towards the body. I pay particular attention to the violence inflicted upon, as well as the restoration of the body, also observing the character development of Lucrece.

The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>

The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>

The Experimental Gothic

This essay proposes that the crucial movements of the historical avant-garde looked to the first wave of Gothic literature (1760s–1820s) in developing their respective variants of experimental prose. To date, the linguistic and textual characteristics (non-mimesis, ineffability) of the literary mode here called Experimental Gothic have not been comprehensively investigated, neither in Avant-Garde nor Gothic Studies. The proposed poetics of the Experimental Gothic indicates that the early avant-gardes did not straightforwardly recycle Gothic material but rather wove the praxis of contemporary theories of representation into their prosaic exploits, which were immersed in the imaginary, supernatural and irrational. The linguistic features of recognised works of avant-garde prose by luminaries such as Carl Einstein, Hugo Ball and Julien Gracq reveal the Experimental Gothic to be a language project spawned from anarchist backgrounds, which leads readers to reject their naïve belief in conventional representation in order to gain a renewed sense of reality.

“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.

Snaking into the Gothic: Serpentine Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

Gothic Modernisms: Modernity and the Postcolonial Gothic in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

This article discusses the intersection between modernism and the Gothic, interrogating the conventional periodisation of modernism and extending the scope of both modernist and gothic studies. I propose that Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North is a response to Sudanese postcolonial modernity through the mode of Gothic modernism. The modern Gothic is symptomatic of the contradictions fundamental to modernity as the ‘regressive’ past continues to haunt the ‘progressive’ present. I extend my discussion of modernism, modernity and the Gothic to debates around the postcolonial Gothic, considering the various ways in which the uncanny and gothic doubling are paradigmatic of the postcolonial experience. Tayeb Salih's novel is a departure from hegemonic conceptualisations of modernity and modernism, using the Gothic to critique Western metanarratives of historical linearity, progress and modernisation.

Gothic Access

The article charts gothic fiction’s spatialization of disability by examining two representative entries: Horace Walpole’s foundational novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Peter Medak’s film The Changeling (1980). Their different media and historical backgrounds notwithstanding, both texts feature haunted houses where ghosts and nonghosts collaborate in tearing walls, clearing passageways, tracking voices, and lighting up cellars. These accommodations, along with the antiestablishment critiques they advance, remain unanalyzed because gothic studies and disability studies have intersected mainly around paradigms of monstrosity, abjection, and repression. What do we gain, then, by de-psychologizing the gothic, assaying ghosts’ material entanglements instead? This critical gesture reveals crip ghosts Joseph (Changeling) and Alfonso (Otranto) engaged in what the article conceptualizes as “gothic access”: a series of hauntings that help us collapse and reimagine everyday life’s unhaunted—yet inaccessible—built environments.

Dis/Possessing the Polish Past in Marcin Wrona’s Demon

The article examines how Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) reworks the Jewish myth of a dybbuk in order to discuss how and to what extent a spectral haunting may disrupt acts of collective forgetting, which are in turn fueled by repression, repudiation, and ritualized violence. A part of a revisionist trend in Polish cinema, Demon upsets the contours of national affiliations, and in doing so comments on the problematic nature of memory work concerning pre- and postwar Polish–Jewish relations. Because the body possessed by a female dybbuk is foreign and male, the film also underlines gendered aspects of possession, silencing, and story-telling. The article draws on Gothic Studies and horror cinema studies as well as Polish–Jewish studies in order to show how by deploying typical possession horror tropes Wrona is able to reveal the true horror—an effective erasure of the Jewish community, an act that needs to be repeated in order for the state of historical oblivion to be maintained.