Rethinking queer antisociality through a politics of embodiment

• Main Author: Tan, Sharmane Ying Xing
• Other Authors: W. Michelle Wang
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Language
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/172811
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis seeks to rethink queer negativity and antisociality through a politics of embodiment. Its main intervention to the queer antisocial thesis is a structural and political one. The thesis proposes that a context-specific reading of antisociality might allow us to break with the valorization of a shattered queer subject, and in doing so, rethink the ways in which we can live with negativity. Through the overview of critiques which pit themselves against the antisocial thesis, it appears that at the heart of these critiques is the opposition to queer theory’s masochistic attachment to self-sacrifice and stigma, as if retaliation can only manifest through the queer subject’s flirtation with death. By proposing a subject that rises above the exigencies of place and time, however, the queer antisocial figure is allowed to freely sanction the social with impunity; ironically, in doing so, the entire edifice of the symbolic remains intact, and it is precisely this theoretical inoculation which constitutes queer negativity’s allure as a mode of resistance. To that end, it is thus crucial that we locate the fantasy of queer negativity within the reality of the present. To do so, I examine Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, which portrays the queer subject’s abjection and antagonism as part of their embodiment. The text’s gothic depiction of a formerly enslaved Black lesbian as a monstrous vampire reckons with the history of slavery and its afterlives, and in doing so, formulate new ways of living with negativity. The Gilda Stories critically engages with antebellum history by rendering transparent the gendered monstrosity and negativity of Black lesbian gender/personhood. I contend that Gomez’s depiction of Black lesbians as vampires boldly embraces antebellum Black queer gender as neuter-bound, and in doing so, conceptualizes a politics of Black queer negativity that is attentive to the exigencies of lived historical reality while refuting the seductive and lethal lure of reproductive futurism. The thesis reads Gilda’s decision to become an immortal vampire as indicative of her refusal to lay claim to the normative category of personhood, which is crucial to her pursuit of a future that is not curtailed by the threat of both homophobic and racist violence. While Lee Edelman rightfully rejects the future for its mere repetition of the past, this thesis argues that Gomez’s portrayal of the Black queer future as contingent on the radical dissolution of subjectivity rethinks queer negativity through a racialized necropolitics. In doing so, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories reclaims queer and lesbian negativity for the purposes of offering alternatives to our violent present, hence performing merger between queer negativity and queer utopian thought.