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8 - Queer Horror
- from Part II - Genres
- Edited by Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, Mark Storey, University of Warwick
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
- Published online:
- 21 July 2022
- Print publication:
- 04 August 2022, pp 120-138
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Summary
This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer creators have intentionally deployed such Gothicisms for the sake of representing queerness. This chapter explores the conflicting purposes of horror’s depiction of queerness by reviewing several Gothic tropes as they appear in American horror texts, focusing specifically on monstrosity, vampirism, the asylum, medical body horror, and haunting.
16 - Queer Gothic Literature and Culture
- Edited by Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bernice M. Murphy
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- Book:
- Twentieth-Century Gothic
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2022, pp 259-272
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Summary
Since the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic has included themes of transgressive sexuality. The novel begins with the death of Conrad, a young man who is engaged to be married to Isabella. After a giant helmet falls from the sky and crushes him, his father Manfred decides that he will take the place of his dead son and marry the young woman who had been positioned to be his daughter-in-law. Following this declaration, Manfred frantically attempts to control the fracturing of his patriarchal power by chasing Isabella through dark subterranean passages, imprisoning those who interfere with his plans, and dodging ancestral ghosts and giant appendages. Walpole's novel is credited with establishing the hallmarks of what would come to be known as Gothic fiction. These hallmarks include haunting, medieval castles, Catholic monasteries, catacombs, supernatu-ral prophetic occurrences, subterranean passages, ancestral curses, terrorised vulnerable women and eroticised power dynamics. These themes and tropes recurred throughout the centuries that followed and have come to be recognised as ‘Gothic’, but in addition to these more recognisable Gothic tropes, eighteenth-century Gothic fiction also established the enduring and pervasive relationship between the Gothic and non-heteronormative genders and sexualities, often known as ‘queer Gothic’.
Though ‘queer’ initially denoted oddness or peculiarity, the term later developed as a derogatory epithet for homosexuals, but by the late twen-tieth century queer had been reclaimed by many in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community as a marker of politicised resistance to the original stigma of the term. Susan Stryker notes that this use of queer first appeared on flyers at the 1990 New York Pride march after being adopted by the political protest group ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and today it often stands for a defiant, anti-normative positionality. However, queer also functions as an umbrella term that broadly represents a ‘range of nonnormative sexual practices and gender identifications’ both including and exceeding the meanings of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. The broad understanding of queer as both odd and as indicating non-normative genders and sexualities helps us understand the way the term is conceptualised in relation to the Gothic.