Queer Matters
An Analysis of Nella Larsen's Novella, Passing : Transferring Despair and Translating Hope
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Linda Nicole Blair
Published in April of 1929, Nella Larsen’s novella, Passing, brought to readers’ attention a concept that had long been known but seldom publicly acknowledged by those who’s ability to “fit in” determined the very nature of their lives, or if they would continue to live at all. My primary objective, while primarily focused on Larsen’s novel and its continuing significance, is to frame the history of the concept of “passing,” how it came to be common practice in certain populations, and what this means for our world today. Larsen’s brief novel is as relevant and socially significant today as it was the day it was published, perhaps even more. In the United States, 2024 feels in some ways no different than 1924—people of different races, ethnicities, and sexualities continue to face discrimination and prejudice in alarming ways. My work with this text includes both literary and political frameworks. The methods I use in my research begin with a review of the detrimental effects of the imposition of “passing” on people of color and LGBTQ+, and a critical reappraisal of Larsen’s novella in light of today’s sociopolitical atmosphere. I hope that one conclusive outcome of this work may a deepening of conversations around how such ideas are conceived and circulated to the detriment of society and how to turn our attention to building more inclusive societies around the world.
The Future’s Marriage, The Future’s Theory: Reparative Reading in ULYSSES
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bridget O'Reilly
In James Joyce’s ULYSSES, published in 1922 but set on16th of June 1904, instead of sex outside of marriage signaling divorce, we have its opposite: equanimity. As character-narrator, Bloom resists the trappings of the cuckold narrative and performs what Eve Sedgwick might call a reparative reading on the über text that is the marriage plot: he vanquishes Molly’s suitor through a non-action action. This reading of ULYSSES removes, at last, the paranoid from the marriage contract. Sedgwick, writing about Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, argues that ideological thinking has become “mandated for inclusion” in our critical studies; then asks: what if we removed “the paranoid” from our own critical readings of texts? My dissertation focus on ULYSSES has been on how Bloom (aka Odysseus) performs a queering of the historical duel by using narrative prowess, rather than violence, to exile Blazes Boylan from the novel. This counter-mapping requires its own critical latency; one that draws the unseen but seen elements of narrative practice to the forefront of our thinking without placing them in a space of proving. Critical latency as an approach to the analysis of texts fixes determinations in the mind without them being fixed. As Beckett taught us when he said, “Je ne sais pas qui est Godot,” interpretations of the new modernist works might most effectively not aim to solve a text. After a hundred years of machinations of critical theory—an endless series of constructs for how to read—we are, in some ways, still waiting.
Representations of Homosexuality in the Contemporary North African Novel
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Max Karama
Sexual object-choice is one of the principal self-confirming parameters defining social identity in Western societies and puts the focus away from practising homosexuality to being homosexual or gay. Many Western countries have decriminalised same-sex sexuality and some have granted it full equal legal status. In the last two decades, aided by gay tourism, satellite television, and global media, the dominant Western-style gay way of life, which makes being exclusively gay one’s social identity, has also disrupted prevailing notions of gender and sexuality in the Maghreb. Young male Maghrebis often can conceive of themselves as gay only by being Westernised and by renouncing their cultural heritage. At the same time, LGBT+ rights organisations have increasingly agitated for an emancipation of sexual outcasts outside the West. This paper explores how Maghrebi writers of fiction, sandwiched between the use of the French language—providing access to a Western audience—and the reality of Muslim-majority locales, have reacted to this import of a different cultural discourse on sexuality. Various contemporary representatives of Maghrebi literature in French have mediated a homosexual reality in their fiction and the Muslim closet in which it is set while crucially picturing it from the first-person perspective. Indeed, the frequently unstable Maghrebi subjectivities staged in many of these narratives deconstruct the post-independence homophobic official discourses of the North African nation-states and the traditional segregation of the sexes but also the polarised hetero- and homonormative identitary discourses which hail from the West and segregate not sexes but sexual orientations.
