Gender Theory/Gay & Lesbian Culture Studies

with Thomas L. Long

In preparation for doctoral comprehensive examinations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I worked with Dr. Cecilia Rodriguez-Milanes on a reading list devoted to gender theory with a specialization in gay and lesbian culture studies. This list included both traditional literary texts and essays in critical theory. Among the first were Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Adolfo Caminha's Bom-Crioulo, William Beckford's Vathek, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Among the critical theorists I studied were Gloria Anzaldua, Roland Barthes, John Boswell, Judith Butler, Teresa De Lauretis, Jonathan Dollimore, Michel Foucault, Marjorie Garber, Annette Kolodny, Thomas Laqueur, Gerda Lerner, Audre Lorde, Richard Mohr, Charles I. Nero, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Monique Wittig.

Much of this study in critical theory has been invaluable in my dissertation research on "AIDS and American Apocalypticism: Discourse, Performance, and the Cultural Production of Meaning in New York City, 1981-1996" which examines representations produced by some of those affected by HIV/AIDS. In addition, I've found Daphne Spain's analysis of gender and physical space, Gendered Spaces, useful in several places, including my conference paper on the nineteenth-century Virginia writer, Molly Elliot Seawell.

The essentialist/constructionist debate, reconfigured as the gay/queer debate, needs strategic mediation that would move the conversation beyond the current binary opposition. I position myself as a "construalist" in that I acknowledge that both biological and social forces combine in the formation of subjectivity. Moreover, my reading of performance theory suggests that subjectivity itself is never a completed project or even momentarily stable. Culture productions, like literature, are the traces or residuum of subjectivity.

As the nephew of a lesbian aunt and gay uncle (both now deceased) I am interested in queer culture before Stonewall. Between 1869, the year the term "homosexual" was first published by Karoly Benkert, and 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, gay and lesbian people constructed complex subcultures in the West. The study of gay culture is of interest not only as a project in collective queer memory, but also for the light it sheds on sexuality generally during the period.