Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age.

Queer Temporalities;Queer Diasporas;Transition;Maturity;Modernity;Temporal Norms;Boyish Narratives;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Ku, Chung-HaoHayes, Jarrod L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Queer Temporalities;    Queer Diasporas;    Transition;    Maturity;    Modernity;    Temporal Norms;    Boyish Narratives;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/97832/chku_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

;;Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age;; challenges identitarian views of sexuality, narrative, and time. Although recent studies of queer temporalities and queer diasporas argue that queers may resist the straight timeline of marriage and reproduction, such queer-inflected views often produce new timelines of transition, maturation, and growth. As a result, queers who once were pathologized as cases of arrested development are now normalized by reference to regulatory notions of coming out, getting married, and having children. In literary studies, developmental expectations obscure non-normative uses of time by characters who defy hetero/homo models of progress without necessarily identifying themselves as sexual nonconformists. Developmental assumptions also miss the way some authors use temporal suspension, deferral, or repetition to counter various progress narratives.In order to critique identity-based temporal norms, I take a transnational, backward-glancing approach to several works of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, and highlight two types of narratives that can be described as ;;boyish.;; First, I study male characters who are deliberately constructed as not yet (re)productive or sexually definite, and who do not mature by the end of the narrative. How do texts like Willa Cather;;s ;;Paul;;s Case;; (1905), Henry Blake Fuller;;s Bertram Cope;;s Year (1919), and Tennessee Williams;;s ;;The Mysteries of the Joy Rio;; (1941) use, respectively, an adolescent;;s suicide, a youth;;s insistence on friendship, and a pupil;;s intergenerational relationship with his master-lover to reconfigure normative modes of growth? Second, I study characters whose transnational connections, postmemories, or ;;outdated;; practices undo the inevitability of Western modernity and maturity. How do texts like Toni Morrison;;s Song of Solomon (1977) and David Wong Louie;;s ;;Pangs of Love;; (1991) shatter the teleologies of liberation, white assimilation, and gay visibility, when their main characters become susceptible to the past in the context of the black Atlantic, the Asian Pacific, or camp aesthetics? Together, these two types of boyish narratives complicate issues of queer temporality and subjectivity. Although the discourse of belated maturity can represent boyish characters as immature for now and yet tending to eventual maturity, boyish narratives challenge various temporal norms, thereby highlighting the stakes in progressivism and American exceptionalism.