Elements of Gothic Queerness

Andy Warhol, Skull, (1976)

My concern with the gothic primarily relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I’m not all that interested in Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale). 

Gothic fiction is a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre whose elements have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies. Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender, and sexual nonconformity, to issues within hauntology and demonology. 

This is aided by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking. Certainly the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality should never be underestimated; for not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity.

If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto (1764) is the first gothic novel, it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked. Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

       

However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché: not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, as the commentator George Haggerty points out, it is similar to pornography. For both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations".

 

Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it’s true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself".

       

And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it’s never boring. For it opens up new worlds of knowledge and understanding and an opportunity to experience the pleasure of socio-erotic transgression: incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and cannibalism. Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though Sade himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books.    

      

So, to conclude these brief reflections on the queer gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for a blossoming of manly love. For more than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human – and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night appreciate. If, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. 

Happy Halloween!
 

See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 9, 10.
  

On Dorian Gray and Models of Illicit Masculinity

 River Hawkins as Dorian Gray

Deleuze writes that one of the pleasures of doing philosophy is buggering the thinkers that one admires in order to produce monstrous offspring. This is an openly perverse and promiscuous love of wisdom in which texts are ravished and authors fucked from behind and below; a non-consensual methodology that suggests violence and Vaseline, rather than fidelity and faithfulness. 

This model of intertextual rape and illicit insemination is one that works particularly well with Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a work wherein elements of camp and gothic queerness helped not only to set the terms for a specifically gay identity founded upon secrecy, narcissism, and fabulousness, but also shaped models of outlaw masculinity open to all men which contested the bourgeois norm of conventional manhood forever oscillating between the poles of an ideal husband and doting father.

Throughout Dorian Gray Lord Henry openly ridicules married life, suggesting that men only enter into it due to fatigue and women from curiosity: both are disappointed. As for the idea of outlaw masculinity, it is worth noting at the outset that Dorian is a violent criminal; not only does he commit murder and blackmail, but he’s complicit in at least three suicides. This notion of the rebellious deviant or ‘anti-hero’ who provides a non-domesticated model of manhood, was popular throughout the twentieth century – not least within the gay community – and continues to this day (thus our eroticised fascination with pirates, gangsters, and psychopaths). 

But arguably, however, there is nothing very queer about what might be regarded as a romantic quest for macho or phallic authenticity. Often it simply endorses the Classical ideal of masculinity as powerful and active and serves to divide men into those who like to love young boys (pederasts), those who like to fuck other men (sodomites), and those who like to play a feminized, passive role and be fucked by men (inverts). It is the latter who, predictably, call forth the greatest level of scorn and vitriol, even from others who share a same-sex attraction. Nothing seems to disturb more than those that William Burroughs denigrates as limp-wristed cock-suckers. For, as Leo Bersani memorably puts it: to be penetrated is to abdicate power. In this way, the invert offers a double refusal – either to dominate or be dominated – and there’s nothing as queer as that!

Anyway, the point is that during the final years of the nineteenth century masculinity was increasingly problematized and strange new models of manhood were springing up as traditional forms of male identity became increasingly unattractive: their power and authority severely eroded and compromised by modernity itself. And when a man to whom phallocratic authority really matters no longer feels king of his own castle, then he looks for something beyond the domestic space and, indeed, beyond Woman. This can result in all kinds of curious thing: from the formation of all-male clubs and secret societies, to criminal gangs and even fascism. All of these homosocial phenomena are, in part at least, a reaction to female emancipation and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere. With the rise of Selfridges and the Suffragettes, London, for example, becomes an increasingly female-friendly urban space in which to shop and do lunch, rather than a masculine metropolis in which to drink, gamble, and whore.         

What I am suggesting, then, is that elements of gothic queerness not only circulate freely within The Picture of Dorian Gray, but are ever-present within modern society. Wilde’s thinking on questions to do with art, ethics, and the nature of the soul exposed not only the radical instability of masculine identity during the period in which he wrote, but also exemplified how that gendered self was increasingly being pathologized.    

Further, Wilde’s use of ‘paradox in the sphere of thought’ and ‘perversity in the sphere of passion’ has significantly served to unsettle any lazy categorization of ideas or people and exposed many of the so-called ‘facts of life’ for the limited and limiting abstractions they are. By encouraging us to think beyond metaphysical dualism, Wilde taught us to resist the urge to identify ourselves as either this or that and accept that deep down there is no deep down. In other words, he has eviscerated and evaginated ideas of sex, substance and soul; not by direct repudiation, but with mockery and masquerade, making depth, as it were, retreat to the surface.

In this way Wilde, like Nietzsche, becomes Greek: superficial out of profundity, transforming questions of being into questions of style and inciting us to abandon our obsession with desiring subjects in favour of the seductiveness of objects.

An A-Z of Torpedophilia

Reworked image found on-line at

www.subsim.com

A is for ... Abnormality, Ambiguity, Ambivalence, Anonymity, Anti-humanism, Atheism ...
B is for ... Barthes, Bataille, Baudelaire, Baudrillard ...
C is for ... Care of the Self, Contingency, Cosmetics, Cruelty, Curb Your Enthusiasm ...

D is for ... Dandyism, Decadence, Deconstruction, Deleuze, Derrida, Dorian Gray ...
E is for ... the Eiffel Tower, Elaine Benes, Erotomania ...
F is for ... Fashion, Feminism, Fetishism, Floraphilia, Foucault, Fragments ...
G is for ... Gay Science, George Costanza, Glam, Gothic ...
H is for ... Haywire Mac, Heidegger, Homotextuals ...
I is for ... Incredulity, Indifference, Insincerity, Insouciance, Irony ...
J is for ... Jeff Koons, Judith Butler ...
K is for ... Kindness, Kisses ... 
L is for ... Larry David, Lawrence, Libidinal Materialism, Lolita, Lucifer ...
M is for ... Malcolm McLaren, Masquerade, Michel Houellebecq ...
N is for ... Nellie McKay, Nietzsche, Nihilism, Nunzia Garoffolo ... 
O is for ... Object-Oriented Ontology, Otherness ...
P is for ... Paganism, Perversion, Poetry, Postmodernism, Punk, Pygmalionism  ...
Q is for ... Queer ...
R is for ... Ruins ... 
S is for ... Sade, Seduction, Seinfeld, Serge Gainsbourg, Sodomy, Style, Subversion ...
T is for ... Thanatology, Transaesthetics, Transpolitics, Transsexuality ...
U is for ... Uncanny, Ungodly, Unnatural, Unorthodox ...
V is for ... Venus in Furs, Visions of Excess, Voyeurism ...
W is for ... Warhol, Wilde, Witches, Women in Love, Wuthering Heights ...
X is for ... Xenophilia, X-Ray Spex ...
Y is for ... Young girls ...
Z is for ... Zarathustra, Zena Zena Bamberina, Zombies, Zoophilia ... 

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is

poetry.rapgenius.com

Written in 1888, Ecce Homo - Nietzsche's intellectual autobiography - wasn't published until 1908. It met with a hostile critical response and was dismissed by many as little more than a testament to the author's incipient madness. Throughout most of the twentieth century it continued to occupy a tenuous position in his works, often being held up as a prime example of both his stylistic strengths and weaknesses. It has only been during recent decades that the text has finally gained the readership and attention that it deserves.

       

Although Ecce Homo provides Nietzsche’s own important if somewhat idiosyncratic summary of his earlier writings, what I like most about this late work is that it is the book in which Nietzsche finally becomes what he always wanted to be: a comedian of the ascetic ideal. Via a mixture of mockery, parody, and paradox, Nietzsche teaches us mistrust of morality and all universal truth claims and he revels in his role as a philosophical joker.

But Nietzsche also concedes that he is a décadent – perhaps the first perfect décadent – and it is this mixture of comic persona with corruption which persuades me that whilst there is something Nietzschean in Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, there is also something outrageously Wildean about Nietzsche and his aphorisms.

Although neither man knew of one another, they were, I think, more than mere contemporaries; they shared a common genius and had a similar ethical, intellectual, and erotic project; namely, the queering of modern European culture or what Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. 

       

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche finally throws off all restraint – not from madness, but from the joyful realisation that “life is much too important ever to talk seriously about it”. His final work is an extravagant exercise in style and subversion, combining gay science with elements of camp performance. He not only finally reveals the multifaceted-man that he has become, but, like Wilde, he demonstrates his ability as a writer to sum up “all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram” – even his own. 

And this is why he is so clever and writes such excellent books.

On Voluntary Human Extinction

Rupert Birkin's reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man’s self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human.

Foremost amongst such groups is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), who want people to live long, happy, childless lives and then die out peacefully, proud in the knowledge that their own decision not to breed has helped to secure the diversity of life on earth.

The movement was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, after he came to a very similar conclusion as Birkin; namely, that the world would be better off without us. He neither dreams of a cataclysmic destruction nor calls for genocide; rather, Knight advocates the voluntary adoption of a non-reproductive future, so that we might first reduce population levels and, eventually, disappear altogether as a species.

According to VHEMT literature, this gradual phasing out of humanity via a programme of universal non-breeding, represents a positive alternative to the continued exploitation and wholesale destruction of the bio-sphere. The myriad plant and animal species currently being pushed towards oblivion due to human activity will be given an evolutionary second chance by this benevolent act of selflessness. Further, once man is no more, as Birkin recognised, countless new life forms will be able to evolve from out of the unknown. Man’s non-existence thus promises to secure not only the present, but also the promise of the future. However, as long as there remains a single breeding pair of homo sapiens then this promise is threatened.

As VHEMT is neither a political party nor organization, it doesn’t have paid-up members. Rather, it simply has ‘supporters’ and ‘volunteers’. The former do not call for man’s extinction, but they accept that the continued rise in the level of human population is unsustainable and that reproduction is therefore irresponsible and unjustifiable at the present time. The latter, meanwhile, do support the VHEMT goal of total human extinction and have fully committed themselves to the dream of a childless future.

Unfortunately for VHEMT volunteers, whilst in some of the wealthier nations fertility rates have fallen below the level needed to sustain population numbers, in other poorer countries numbers continue to increase rapidly and Knight knows in his heart-of-hearts that his non-violent philosophy stands zero chance of popular adoption or success. Mankind, it seems, prefers to remain on its present path towards environmental catastrophe and the sixth species event. Nevertheless, Knight believes voluntary human extinction remains the morally right thing to advocate.

This moral component to Knight’s philosophy is often overlooked by opponents and commentators. Indeed, much of the media reportage on VHEMT has been sensationalist in nature, unfairly depicting it as a sinister suicide cult, despite Knight’s insistence that he and his supporters are not just misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster befalls humanity. Indeed, it might be argued that Knight is actually a type of pessimistic idealist acting in the name of love – even if zero population is an extreme development from the old idea of zero population growth.

Interestingly, when pressed, Knight admits to feeling a sense of sadness when contemplating the prospect of a posthuman world and the passing of a species of such fantastic potential, but which, in his view, has screwed everything up. This rather mournful confession contrasts sharply with Birkin’s sense of jubilation. However, Knight also writes that returning the Earth to its natural prehuman splendour is a happy thought and primarily he wishes to encourage a practice of joy before death, not sorrow.

In order to foster this cheerful approach to human extinction, Knight avoids the use of aggressive rhetoric and seeks to gain new supporters and volunteers via gentle persuasion, coupled to the hard facts concerning human impact upon the biosphere. He doesn’t want people to kill themselves individually in a state of despair, or move collectively towards a violent and terrible end via war, famine, or disease (as seems likely if we continue along the path we’ve chosen). Thus the VHEMT newsletter, These EXIT Times, calmly calls for an end to reproduction.

In other words, the goal is not to abort the human race, so much as prevent its future conception. And if they would like to establish anti-natal clinics, this doesn’t mean they are rabid baby-haters. On the contrary, VHEMT volunteers love babies – but they value young birds, beasts, and plants as much as human offspring. Their argument, in a nut-shell, is this: if life matters at all, then every life matters equally and human presence or non-presence doesn’t determine the ‘blessedness’ of anything. Again, the religious character of the language used here is conspicuous, as it is in Birkin’s speech in Women in Love.

To some people, of course, to equate human life with that of other species is mistaken and offensive. Even Heidegger suggested that human being is uniquely rich in world and has a privileged relationship to Being. Others would assert that the desire for children is the most natural desire of all. Obviously, VHEMT supporters and volunteers would reject such claims and I have to confess that I would also regard any argument that relies upon anthropocentric conceit and/or the language of nature as being highly suspect and in need of careful but relentless deconstruction. VHEMT supporters and volunteers are right to say, after Darwin, that all life forms are ‘netted together’ and that there is no abyss of essence between us and other living beings. They are also right to claim that even if the desire to fuck is a ‘natural instinct’, the desire to procreate is culturally conditioned and enforced.

For just as there is an underlying moralism so too is there is a fierce logic to Knight’s position; a logic that contrasts tellingly with our frenzied consumption of resources and seemingly insane destruction of the natural environment. Knight’s ‘final solution’ might not be one many people will give serious consideration to, but surely most would concede that something has to be done in the face of climate change, loss of habitat diversity, and melting ice caps. Unfortunately, despite what our supermarket retailers tell us, recycling carrier bags and buying their fair trade coffee isn’t going to halt the Holocene extinction event; nor does environmental friendliness and acting locally slow population growth, or reverse global warming.

Activists and politicians who espouse ‘green technologies’ and increased government intervention as the key to saving the planet, are essentially liars or fantasists dreaming of universal harmony when the lion will at last lie down with the lamb. The fact is, we are not going to develop a cosy symbiotic relationship with all God’s creatures when there are ever-more of us demanding to be fed, housed, and accorded our right to shop and fly-drive round an air-conditioned world.

Like it or not, humanity is a walking environmental disaster: a violent and destructive parasite. Quite simply, Birkin was right: we have to go! And if Les Knight had been around to do so, whilst he might not have torpedoed the ark, he would certainly have encouraged Noah and his three sons to have post-flood vasectomies.