The uses of identification: Re-conceiving lesbian and gay history in American literature at the end of the twentieth century (Mark Merlis, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Tom Spanbauer, Cheryl Dunye, William Faulkner).

摘要

This dissertation project began with the following question: what does American lesbian and gay literature produced after the advent of Foucauldian-influenced historiography have to offer to the ongoing debates over how to conceptualize lesbian and gay history? What kinds of reading practices does this literature recommend to literary critics—do the stories undertake merely naïve identification with historical figures? The answer, in short, is no: identification, yes, but far from naïve. This dissertation presents extended readings of four works that directly address the current academic historiography debates, by Mark Merlis, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Tom Spanbauer, and Cheryl Dunye, respectively. The first four chapters offer these stories not as objects of critical theory but as creative articulations of theory in their own right. They hold as their most common position that identification is a valid and valuable method for exploring lesbian and gay history—provided that one defines identification in terms of familial resemblance rather than mimetic sameness. The multiethnic voices represented in these fictions push the conceptual boundaries of sexuality, gender, race, and class into “new territory” (to invoke one of the American myths they critique)—territory defined by temporal and cultural crossings that have been considered taboo by dominant historiographical epistemologies. In different ways, each of the four stories re-imagines putatively regressive acts as transformatively pioneering, locating for instance in solo-sexual and/or anal eroticism symbolisms uniquely capable of addressing the loud silences and lack of traditionally authoritative lineage that characterize the lesbian and gay past (as well as present, to a significant degree). All four works share three primary conceptual catalysts: they valorize the roles of ignorance, pleasure, and non-biological conceptions of kinship in lesbian and gay historiography. The fifth and final chapter of the dissertation turns to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as a representative case study of how the reading practices forwarded by the four contemporary works suggest that a far broader segment of literary history than has often been supposed may be included under the rubric of lesbian and gay literature.