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http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01pr76f6787
Title: | Always Been Queer: Retracing Masculinity |
Authors: | Harrington, Michael James |
Advisors: | Best, Wallace |
Contributors: | English Department |
Keywords: | African American Studies Gender Archetypes Literature and Media Long 20th-Century US History and Culture Masculinity Queer Temporality |
Subjects: | Gender studies LGBTQ studies American studies |
Issue Date: | 2024 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | Always Been Queer: Retracing Masculinity excavates queer influence upon cisnormative masculinity. I begin by demonstrating the illegibility of the Village People’s gay innuendo at recent political rallies. Theorizing such myopia as instances of what José Esteban Muñoz calls the autonaturalizing temporality of heterosexual culture, I characterize heterosexuality as a practice of forgetting and misremembering—inconsistencies rendered natural. Heterosexual culture reproduces itself by negating what is always there, be it queer attraction, social influence, or life itself. I posit such negation extends to hegemonic gender models by conducting cultural genealogies of three popular masculine archetypes: the cowboy, gangster, and preacher. Chapter one, “Wild West Fringe,” contends Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” amplifies queer and Black histories embedded in the American cowboy. Recounting the frontier’s racial, gender, and sexual diversity and reading Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Shannon Pufahl’s On Swift Horses, and twentieth-century Western cinema, I chart the cowboy’s transformation from laborer to icon of straight, White, male being. Lil Nas X combats the cowboy’s cultural falsities through a fabulated frontier where queer and Black life did and does abound. Chapter two, “Wish Death ‘Pon Me,” considers how 50 Cent’s homophobic gangsta rap appeals to the queer lovers in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Uncovering Halberstamian queer temporality and Lee Edelman’s queer death drive in gangster media such as The Sopranos and The Wire, I trace queer influence upon gang-inspired masculine aesthetics. Chapter three, “Crying Holy,” recounts the Black church as a historical space for asserting masculine claims, then unpacks how James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain reimagines the trope of a gay soloist performing after a homophobic sermon. The work of Prince and Frank Ocean subsequently presents an antinomic reversal: queer sensuality as holy transcendence nonpareil. To conclude, “Boy Toy” examines drag criminalization and masculine muscularity to articulate a hermeneutics for recovering—to evoke Lisa Duggan—how the “homo” has shaped the “normative” despite queer disavowal. Revealing queer cultures as the beating heart of spaces that present as queer inhospitable, including those integral to conservative Americana, this project exhibits how masculine archetypes have always been queer. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01pr76f6787 |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | English |
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