Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT-Themed Literature

Mode

Mode is typically understood as a circle or compass, divided into quadrants including irony, comedy, romance, and tragedy, with comedy opposite tragedy and romance opposite irony (Cadden, 2010). Cadden (2000) asserts that most children’s literature is romantic and/or comedic with little movement beyond or between these. The problem with this, he claims, is that these modes do not provide much room for change by either the protagonists or the readers. Alternatively, he argues, irony and tragedy are more likely to produce change as a result of provoking cognitive dissonance and discomfort—unsettled by those feelings, the reader is pushed to engage the dialectic tensions posed by the competing values, ideas, and beliefs. Because Cadden’s interest in dissonance and discomfort aligns with queer theory’s tenet of disrupting norms, we, too attended to ironic and tragic modes, in particular, in our analysis of literature.

Focalization

Focalization is when some part of the story, perhaps a scene, event, or character, is described through the point of view of a character, who has unique beliefs and values which shape his or her interpretation and thus representation of the story. A character might be focalizing, that is, representing the scene, event, or character; or a character might be focalized, that is, represented through the eyes of a different character (McCallum, 1999). McCallum (1999) asserts that characters make their beliefs and values explicit through focalization, constructing themselves as ideologues and providing a range of ideologies from which readers can choose. There may be few or many focalizers in any novel. The more focalizers there are, the more polyphonic, or mulitvoiced, it is. A consequence of such a text is that it invites readers to align themselves with any number of ideologies (Cadden, 2000). Cadden (2000) argues that texts with multiple focalizers are the most ethical because they refrain from arguing for one clearly defined ideology. Building from Cadden’s argument, we assert that such texts are also the most queer because they avoid a single, static ideology and, instead, offer multiple and, at times, conflicting ideologies.

Naïve and unreliable narrators

Of course, some ideologies are meant to be resisted or suspect. Consider focalizations offered by naively unreliable characters or narrators. A naïve narrator (Cadden, 2000) is one who is “believable and challengeable,” often less “sophisticated” or “confident,” and thus, offers the reader, through her or his naïve discourse, a contestable view of the world (pp. 149-150). The contestability of naïve narrators contributes to the multivoicedness of the narration (Cadden, 2000) and, we assert, to the ideological diversity and queerness of a text.

Metonymic configurations

We also looked at metonymic configurations (McCallum & Stephens, 2010; Romören & Stephens, 2002); that is, the way in which patterns of behaviors, which are marked by gender, sexuality, and other normalized constructions, are “built up through the simple fictive practice of developing conflict and/or thematic implication through interactions amongst diverse and contrasting characters (often character stereotypes)” (p. 220). As Romören and Stephens (2002) describe, for example, a character’s behavior may be “marked by attributes which prompt readers to instantiate a schema for hegemonic masculinity” (p. 220), or other generalized practices. In the case of such a male character, he not only fulfills a story function but also is “apt to function as a metonym for hegemonic masculinity” in relation to other characters “performing different kinds of masculinity” as they “enter the novel’s configuration of gendered behaviors” (p. 220). Romören and Stephens note that both masculine and feminine metonymic configurations are possible as are other relational patterns, including father/son, mother/son, school situations, sports, and so on.

Flashbacks and foreshadowing

Finally, we examined flashbacks and foreshadowing, as temporal disruptions (Genette, 1980), particularly when those temporal disruptions mattered in the experiences of a character being or becoming queer. Bae and Young (2008) define a flashback as that which “tells (or shows) what has happened in the past with respect to the present” and foreshadowing as that which “presents what will happen in the future with respect to ‘now’ in the story” (p. 156). Such literary devices have a heterochronous effect; that is, they effectively disrupt time (Lemke, 2008). Heterochrony is when there is a change or distortion in processes aligned with time, or in Lemke’s (2008) words, it is the “intersection of processes and practices which have radically different inherent timescales” (pp. 25-26), with timescales meaning how long any given process takes. The notion of chronotope is foundational to the idea, and chronotope references both time and space, or, in Bakhtin’s (1981) words, chronotope is the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (p. 84). Multiple chronotopes can exist within one novel and are “mutually inclusive” and “dialogical” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 252) with one another. With this in mind, we are conceptualizing heterochrony as a time-space (McCallum, 1999) in literature that is artistically distorted. Such an artistic distortion might carry throughout a novel or be captured in a particular scene. These literary elements that effectively disrupt normative notions of time in ways that inform readers’ understandings of queer characters play a significant role in queer texts.

Essential

Boy Meets Boy is a YA novel about a network of high school students, some linked by friendship, others by romance, and still others by tension. Narrated by Paul, and foregrounding the lives of his friends, Noah, Tony, Joni, Infinite Darlene and Kyle, the YA novel captures a somewhat ordinary series of high school days (e.g., hallway interactions, breakups and makeups, school dance), while also offering a slightly less ordinary setting in that most of Paul’s town is accepting and affirming of the sexual and gender diversity in the school, in contrast to the neighboring town where Tony lives with his homophobic parents. Essential conceptualizations of identities are evident in this book when Paul’s kindergarten teacher asserts, “PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY” (p. 8). Paul did not know he was gay before that, but the understanding is that he was gay, is gay, and always will be gay. Being a gay young man is essential to the identity of the character Paul. This notion of identity development holds true across characters. Take, for example, Noah, Paul’s love interest. Noah’s sexual and gender identities are even more stable than Paul’s, as he is already out as a young gay man when readers (and Paul) meet him, and this identity never waivers.

Perhaps most contestable is Infinite Darlene’s sexual identity. The gender identity of Infinite Darlene, a male-to-female transsexual character, has developed and is now fixed. That is to say, as a transsexual character, Infinite Darlene’s “gender identity is different from [her] assigned sex at birth” (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2009), which was male. It is made very clear that she is a much happier and stronger person since rejecting her identity as a young man in favor of that as a woman when Paul states,

I don’t know when Infinite Darlene and I first became friends. Perhaps it was back when she was still Daryl Heisenberg, but that’s not very likely; few of us can remember what Daryl Heisenberg was like, since Infinite Darlene consumed him so completely. He was a decent football player, but nowhere near as good as when he started wearing false eyelashes. (pp. 15-16)

Still, Infinite Darlene’s sexual identity allows for more interpretation. During most of the book, when desire is revealed related to Infinite Darlene, it is a straight boy who is attracted to her. All we know about her desire is that she rejects him on the grounds that “he wasn’t her type” (p. 16). At the end of the book, there is a suggestion that Infinite Darlene is attracted to girls. Amber, a lesbian in the novel, considers this possibility with Paul, and a hint of confirmation is offered in the final scene when Infinite Darlene and Amber dance together: “I see Infinite Darlene whooping for joy as Amber attempts to dip her to the ground” (p. 185). A superficial read would be that Infinite Darlene’s desires shifted, but a closer read suggests that it is not that her desire shifts but that her peers’ understandings of her desire shifts. In other words, several characters in the book adhere closely to an essentialist model of identity development and thus may convey a monolithic ideology with little room for contestation or complication. The idea is we are who we are, even if we don’t know it yet.

The only possible exception to this appears in Kyle, Paul’s former boyfriend and emerging friend. Kyle explicitly states, “I still like girls. . . . And I also like guys” (p. 85), which may be understood as an essentially bisexual identity, which Paul suggests and then Kyle rejects saying, “Do we really have to find a word for it? . . . Can’t it just be what it is?” (p. 85). Paul says, “Of course” to Kyle, but wonders to himself whether this is true as, “The world loves stupid labels” (p. 85). This is the only character that presents a possible poststructural conception of identity. However, the representation is fleeting and less developed than the characters discussed above, which seems to eliminate it as a real possibility.

This understanding of identities as essential is maintained by Paul’s role as a naïve narrator (Cadden, 2000). Because the novel is told in the first-person and by Paul, everything we know is filtered through him. As an out, gay, young man, Paul knows a great deal about recognizing and negotiating homophobia. As readers, we believe him and trust him, especially in his recounting of his relationship with Noah, another out, gay, young man. He is questionable, however, because his filter is entirely that—gay and male. In focalizing the experiences of other characters, such as Infinite Darlene and Kyle, he fails to allow for their desires that do not resemble his own, that is, for Infinite Darlene’s possible attraction to Amber and Kyle’s fluid sexuality. While we see hints of the complexities of such relationships and desires, because the people in these relationships and experiencing these desires are focalized by Paul, Infinite Darlene, for example, gets inaccurately characterized as a “drag queen” and expected to be a feminine acting “girl”—one who is attracted to boys. The fact that Chuck isn’t Infinite Darlene’s “type” is understood by Paul as a simple “girl” rejecting “boy” dynamic, with no attention to the possibility that Infinite Darlene is a young trans woman who is attracted to girls, not boys. Similarly, Kyle gets described simply as “bisexual” (p. 85). A different narrator, perhaps a less naïve one, might have characterized both of these characters more accurately.

Developmental

The Color Purple and Other Voices, Other Rooms both suggest a developmental notion of identity. Although there is a relationship between essential and developmental conceptions of identity, the latter allows for complication, particularly the complication of ideologies conveyed by characters’ identities.

The Color Purple tells the story of a Black woman, Celie, living in the segregated south in the early part of the 20th century. In the opening of the novel, Celie is promised to Mr. _____, by her father, a substitution for the woman Mr._____ desires, her prettier sister, Nettie. The novel focuses on the unstable, abusive, and dysfunctional life that becomes Celie’s reality with Mr. _____, which heightens the importance of Celie’s relationships with individuals beyond her home (e.g., her correspondence with her sister living abroad, her relationship with God, her admiration for strong women like Sofia). Celie finds refuge in these relationships. Other Voices, Other Rooms is about a 13-year-old boy, Joel Knox, who at the opening of the novel has recently lost his mother and is en route to live with his father, who left his family when Joel was young. Joel’s new life at Skully’s Landing is spent forming relationships with his stepmother, Miss Amy, his cousin Randolph, and nearby twins, Idabel and Florabel, with most of his time spent with Idabel as they explore Noon City and venture into surreal time-spaces, like the local town fair.

Although identity as developmental is present in both novels, it is most explicit in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Over the course of this book, Joel develops a queer identity. It is worth noting that queer is a word that is used repeatedly throughout the book, but it means something different than how we are conceptualizing it in most of this article. In most of this article, we are using queer as it is conceptualized in queer theory; that is, the suspension of classification of gender and sexual identities and disruption of norms related to these identities. Such a conception of queer, though, was articulated first by de Lauretis in the early 1990s (de Lauretis, 1991), and this novel was published in 1948. During the time that the book was written, queer was used to mean odd or different with a decidedly negative connotation. Moreover, it had, by this time, been applied to homosexual men. It is this queer identity that Joel develops over the course of the book.

Early in the novel, Joel is described as “too pretty, too delicate . . . and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes” (p. 4). In other words, he is introduced as effeminate, but he explicitly conveys his repulsion to that which is not straight. Therefore, for example, when he meets the twins Idabel and Florabel, he initially rejects Idabel, who is decidedly masculine in favor of feminine Florabel:

Joel looked from one to the other, and concluded he liked Florabel the best; she was so pretty, at least he imagined her to be, though he could not see her face well enough to judge fairly. Anyway, her sister was a tomboy, and he’d had a special hatred of tomboys. (p. 33)

Therefore, not surprisingly, Joel finds “Holding hands with Randolph,” his gender nonconforming cousin, “obscurely disagreeable” (p. 85).

There is a shift, though, or a development in Joel’s desire. Later in the novel, Joel finds Idabel and her masculinity attractive. They are getting ready to swim and Joel conveys his reluctance to take his clothes off in front of Idabel because, in his words, “you’re a girl” (p. 131), to which Idabel responds,

Son . . . what you’ve got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can never be friends. (p. 132)

With that, Joel undresses, and they swim. Afterwards, they are sitting out to dry when Joel “wanted to touch [Idabel], to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek” (p. 134). Here, Joel experiences and acts on his desire for Idabel. Perhaps he is attracted to Idabel because of her masculinity but acts on this attraction because he understands her to be a girl, thus making the attraction allowable, at least in his mind. It is not in hers as evident by her reaction: “She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull,” which provoked a fight that ended in Idabel “astride” Joel, “her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: ‘Give up?’” (p. 135). Toward the end of the novel, Joel gives up his attraction to Idabel and connects with Randolph. He shouts to him, “I am Joel, we are the same people” (p. 227). Then Joel “took hold of [Randolph’s] coat-tail and steered him” down a path described as “Long, like a cathedral aisle” (p. 228), suggesting a sort of wedding between the two. Thus, readers get the impression that Joel was essentially queer but had to go through a process of development to come to terms with and claim that identity. The developmental model of characters’ identity development, then, does not allow for contestation regarding the identity, but it does allow for some complications along the way.

Poststructural

The other two books, Fun Home and Written on the Body, suggest a poststructural notion of character identity. Written on the Body details the love affairs of the narrator, who remains nameless and elusive of categorization in terms of gender throughout the novel. The narrator’s concealed gender is juxtaposed with intimate details of lovers—Jacqueline, Frank, Catherine, Inge, Bathsheba, Carlo, Judith, Estelle—all who came and went—all except, Louise. A beautiful love story between the narrator and the married Louise, unfolds and reveals the sometimes-turbulent nature of desire and the difficulties of loving someone who is terminally ill. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, captures the author’s life over time, particularly her childhood and college years, as well as the early years of her parents’ marriage. Alison’s sexuality, gender and gratifying sexual experiences are juxtaposed with her father’s, who to the best of Alison’s knowledge, refrained from any public display of his sexuality and instead lived outwardly as a heterosexual husband. Situated in the “fun home,” or the family-owned funeral home, Bechdel’s memoir offers her reflections on, and analyses of, the marriage of her parents, her mother and father’s yearnings to have known love, desire, and companionship differently, and her own exciting journey to explore, experience and understand her sex, gender and sexuality.

Again, while the poststructural understanding of identity is evident in both novels, it is most clearly embodied in the narrator of Written on the Body, the primary focalizer in the novel. Through focalization, narrators invite readers to take up particular positions or roles to make the most sense of the text (Reimer, 2010). In this book, the narrator’s gender is unclear, it is not that the narrator is genderless. The author constructs the narrator in ways that suggest gender throughout the novel, just inconsistently, or perhaps, intentionally, consistently oppositional. The author constructed the narrator as a man by having the narrator engage in behaviors associated with men, like “pee[ing] behind a bush” (p. 186) and reading women’s magazines from an outsider’s point of view (p. 74). Other characters in the novel reference the narrator in masculine terms, like having Louise gaze at the narrator, “the way God gazed at Adam” (p. 18), not Eve, and having a friend advise the narrator to “play the sailor and run a wife in every port” (p. 40). Even the narrator compares himself or herself to famous males, such as Mercutio (p. 81) and Sir Launcelot (p. 159). Though none of these behaviors, references, or comparisons are limited to men, they conjure images of men in relation to the narrator. However, the author constructed the narrator as a woman as well. For example, the narrator describes himself or herself as “quiver[ing] like a school girl” (p. 82) and feeling like a “convent virgin” (p. 94). She or he also describes staring at a phone after Louise has hung up “the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart” (p. 41), thus aligning the narrator with Lauren rather than Humphrey. Moreover, the implicit ambiguity of the narrator’s gender is made explicit when Louise says to the narrator, “When I saw you two years ago I thought you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen” (p. 84).

Moreover, there is the ambiguity of sexuality. Although the narrator is in a relationship with Louise, a married woman, for most of the novel, he or she references relationships with women, such as Jacqueline and Catherine, and men, like Crazy Frank and Brutus. Therefore, we cannot identify the narrator as either male- or female-attracted. There is even a time when the narrator describes dancing with Louise in this way: “We are dancing together tightly sealed like a pair of 50s homosexuals” (p. 73). The use of the word homosexuals suggests they are not gay, as this is a term that gay people generally reject on the grounds of its diagnostic history. And being “like” gay people rather than being gay people also suggests they are not gay. But this is not clear. Perhaps they are like gay people in the 50s but actually gay people in the contemporary setting of the novel.

The ambiguity of the narrator’s gender and sexual identities continually asks readers to shift their understanding of the focalizer to make the most sense of the novel, which contributes to the multiple ideologies and queerness of the book. In other words, Winterson, the author, crafted the narrator in ways that do not allow a single, stable understanding of him or her in terms of gender and sexual desire and behaviors. As such, there is no essential sexual or gender identity, but neither is there any development toward some true identity. Rather, there is a poststructural conception of sexual and gender identities. This conception offers the most interpretive space for multiple, variable, and conflicting ideologies.

Sexuality and gender

We understand the social norms related to sexuality to be heterosexuality and the norms related to gender to be cisgender, or the experience of one’s assigned sex at birth being the same as one’s lived gender identity. This understanding is aligned with our own life experiences and, generally speaking, the settings of the focal novels. In these books, the disruption of the sexual binary, that is, heterosexual versus homosexual, is often achieved through the disruption of the gender binary, that is, man versus woman. This is certainly the case in Written on the Body, as our above discussion of the narrator’s poststructural identities reveals. Because the author prevents readers from identifying the narrator as consistently man or woman, we, as readers, cannot label the narrator in sexual identity terms either. In other words, the disruption of the narrator’s gender is explicit while the disruption of the narrator’s sexuality is implicit.

Sexual norms are disrupted more explicitly in the other four books, although in different ways, depending on when and where they were set. The two novels that are set in the early 20th century in the U.S. south, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and The Color Purple, disrupt sexual norms through characters’ desires and/or actions rather than identifications. This is not surprising because identifications such as gay and lesbian are 20th-century constructs that increased in usage throughout the century and therefore were not very commonly used in the time periods during which these novels were set. Still, it is worth exploring the different ways we see sexual norms getting disrupted in queer literature.

In Other Voices, Other Rooms, sexual norms are disrupted almost exclusively through characters’ desire. Joel, for example, early in the novel, desires masculinity, in Idabel, who explains to Joel, “I never think like a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can never be friends” (p. 132). Then, later in the novel, Joel desires being with a man, as distinct from masculinity, in Randolph, when he imagines the wedding-like scenes that we described earlier. Similarly, Randolph disrupts sexual norms through desire rather than behavior when his lover Dolores and he meet Pepe Alvarez, the prizefighter, and both fall in love with him. Dolores and Pepe become lovers, ultimately, leave Randolph altogether, and Randolph’s love for Pepe is never embodied. Still, Randolph said, “It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier” (p. 147). Therefore, he is not jealous of Pepe for being a lover of Dolores, but neither is he jealous of Dolores for being a lover of Pepe. Instead, Randolph is jealous of Pepe because he is able to be attracted to Dolores with an intensity Randolph could never muster for her or any other woman.

Like Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Color Purple disrupts sexual norms through desire, but it also disrupts these norms through action. For example, although Celie is married to a man, she only seems to desire and share a relationship that is both sexual and romantic with women, really one woman: Shug Avery. Shug is not only Celie’s lover, but also the lover of Celie’s husband, Mr._____, who Shug calls Albert Johnson. ² Shug, as distinct from Celie, desires and has sexual relationships with both men, including a much younger man, and women, or at least Celie if not other women. Thus, both Celie and Shug effectively and explicitly disrupt norms associated with sexuality, that is, that they would, as women, each desire and share a sexual relationship with a man, more specifically, a husband.

Boy Meets Boy and Fun Home, both of which are set in closer to contemporary times, explicitly disrupt sexual norms through desire and action, but they also disrupt these norms through explicit identifications. Therefore, for example, Paul is the narrator and primary focalizer in Boy Meets Boy. He identifies as gay, and his desire for Noah and their behaviors align with this identification. The complicated part about recognizing the work this couple does with respect to disrupting sexual norms is that the norms of the book are quite different than the norms of even the norms of today. That is, there is no Boy Scouts of America surveying their membership to determine whether gay adults should be permitted to work alongside young people. Instead, in this novel, the Boy Scouts are disbanded in favor of the Joy Scouts, which welcome everyone. Still, when read in our current society, Paul and others in Boy Meets Boy disrupt the heteronormative expectation of young men identifying as straight, and being desirous of and sexually active with young women.

Similarly, Alison, in Fun Home, both claims and embodies a lesbian identity. In the memoir, Bechdel recognizes and articulates her desires for women, particularly Joan, her girlfriend in college. Interestingly, in this graphic novel, Alison’s father, Bruce, disrupts sexual norms more like Celie does in The Color Purple: that is, through desire and action, rather than through explicit identification as gay, even though he experienced desires for and engaged in sexual behaviors with men much later in the century, in the 1970s. Of course, there was still rampant homophobia during this time, but the significant distinction between the era of Bruce’s relationships with young men and that of Celie and Shug’s relationship is the possibility, even, of claiming a gay or lesbian identity. For Bruce, such a claiming was possible but he rejected that possibility. For Celie, such a claiming was not even an option.

Just as sexual norms were disrupted in all of these five books, so too were gender norms. In fact, the disruption of sexual norms was often underscored by the disruption of gender norms. And, in the case of The Color Purple, this disruption is underscored by layered focalization, that is, by the fact that characters, in this case Shug and Sofia, are focalized by Celie and Mr. _______, who have quite distinct understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman. Celie, as the writer of most of the letters in this epistolary novel, might be expected to be the only focalizer. But as evidenced below, Celie writes in her letter about what Mr. __________ said. In this way, he serves as another focalizer of Shug and Sofia:

 Mr.  ast me the other day what it is I love so much about Shug. He say he love her style. He say to tell the truth, Shug act more manly than most men. I mean she upright, honest, speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost, he say. You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself not matter what.

 Mr. think all this stuff is stuff men do. But Harpo not like this. What Shug got is womanly it seem like to me. Specially since she and Sofia the ones got it.

 Sofia and Shug not like men, he say, but they not like women either.

 You mean they not like you or me.

 They hold they own, he say. And it’s different. (p. 269)

Here, what it means to be masculine or feminine is disrupted by Mr._____ and Celie’s focalization of the characters Shug and Sofia. The defining features or behaviors are about character, such as honesty and forthrightness, as well as physicality, such as the willingness to engage in sexual relationships and physical fights.

Mr. _____ associates such character and physicality with men, an association that Celie troubles. Mr. ______ says that he loves these qualities that he considers masculine, raising an implicit question about Mr. ______’s adherence to sexual norms. This question is raised, too, when Shug focalizes him. Shug is talking to Celie, encouraging her to wear pants instead of a dress:

She [Shug] say, Times like this, lulls, us ought do something different.

Like what? I ast.

Wells, she says, looking me up and down, let’s make you some pants.

What I need pants for? I say. I ain’t no man. (p. 146)

Here, Celie conveys that she thinks only men can wear pants, and then she goes on to suggest that even if she wanted to wear pants, her husband would not allow it: “Mr. _____ not going to let his wife wear pants” (p. 146). In response, Shug tells Celie, “I used to put on Albert’s pants when he was courting. And he one time put on my dress . . . But he loved to see me in pants. It was like a red flag to a bull” (p. 147). In this account, Albert not only disrupts sexual norms by being impassioned by that which he understands as masculine, but he also disrupts gender norms by wearing a dress.

Perhaps more interestingly, the use of a metonymic configuration underscores the disruption of sexuality and gender. Early in the novel, both Celie and Mr. _____ are metonyms with Celie representing the expected patterns of behavior of women and Mr. performing hegemonic masculinity. She is modest, discreet, timid, compliant, and obedient; he is physically and verbally bullying and abusive, misogynistic, neglectful in relation to his wife and children, and so forth. As she comes to know Shug and Sofia, though, both of whom perform different ways of being a woman, Celie’s understandings of women and the associated behaviors gets disrupted, as do Mr. _____’s conceptions of masculinity through his interactions with Shug. In this way, gender norms are disrupted through metonymic configurations.

Fun Home; Other Voices, Other Rooms; and Boy Meets Boy disrupt gender norms in more decisive ways than the Color Purple and in more explicit ways than Written on the Body. That is, rather than women assuming some of the positive traits associated with men, or completely evading gender identification, some of the people in these books are men who actively perform womanhood, and vice versa, and other people in these books have been assigned the gender of man, for example, and reject this assignment to assume the gender of woman. It is not that there are not women who assume traits typically associated with men, and vice versa. There are. But there are also these more decisive gender disruptions. Therefore, for example, in Fun Home, there is a six-panel sequence in which Alison recounts her first time seeing a woman performing masculinity, if not manhood (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Six sequential panels across three pages of Fun Home (pp. 117-119).

In the first two panels, we see Alison and her father, in profile, in a booth at a diner in Philadelphia, a city bigger than the town in which they live. Alison stares intensely into the distance, and her father studies the menu. The next panel offers Alison’s view: the doorway to the diner as a delivery is made. Bechdel recalls, “In the city, in a luncheonette . . . we saw a most unsettling sight.” The “unsettling sight” is the delivery person, a woman, dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, short hair, key ring on her belt loop—that is, a woman performing masculinity and thus disrupting normalized constructions of gender. In the third panel, Alison continues to study the delivery woman as, again, Bechdel recalls,

I didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.

In other words, seeing this woman disrupting gender norms invites Alison, too, to disrupt gender norms, an invitation which she receives enthusiastically. Her enthusiasm, though, is met with disdain in the next panel where she and her father are shown up close, in profile, looking across the table at one another, as Bechdel recalls, “Dad recognized her too,” and her father leans in, asking Alison, “Is that what you want to look like?” The next panel focuses tightly on the face of the delivery woman, as Alison peers, wide-eyed, over the back of the booth. Bechdel reflects, “What else could I say?” as the young Alison says to her father, “No.” The final panel shows Alison and her Father, hand in hand, leaving the diner, her Father looking ahead, but Alison looking back. And, although Alison does not explicitly claim masculinity in that moment, the impact of witnessing gender disruption on her younger self is clear, as Bechdel notes, “But the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years . . . ” Similarly, there is a sequence of panels later in the book when Alison cross dresses in her father’s clothes and describes it as feeling “too good to actually be good” (p. 182). Therefore, while there is no reason to believe that Alison identifies as a man, it is clear that she is drawn to performing masculinity if not manhood.

These five queer novels, then, disrupt sexuality and gender norms in a variety of ways. One does this work by evading gender identification and thus calling into question sexual identification. Others disrupt norms associated with sexuality by representing same-sex desire and behavior and by having characters who explicitly claim nonheterosexual identities. These others also disrupt norms associated with gender with characters who assume some traits typically associated with the gender “opposite” theirs, characters who perform as the gender “opposite” theirs, and characters who reject their assigned gender in favor of their actual gender. Although they accomplish these disruptions in a variety of ways, all of them do this work, and it is imperative in literature if it is to be understood as queer.

Families and homes

We understand the social norms related to families and homes to be grounded in the fictional notion that all families comprise a father, mother, and their biological children and that such fictional families live together, but without anyone else, in a home, usually a house that they are working to own. All of the focal books disrupt such normative notions of families and homes, although in several different ways. Two of the books explicitly reject traditional notions of family, three of them celebrate alternative configurations of family, and two of them embrace a reconciliation of traditional and alternative families. (This totals seven rather than five books because we included two of the books in two categories.) Among these, there is much overlap between the disruption of families and the disruption of homes. Indeed, they are often intricately intertwined, as we present them here.

Both Fun Home and Written on the Body reject traditional notions of family. Here, we focus on Written on the Body because we discuss family in Fun Home in the reconciliation piece of this section. In Written on the Body, the narrator repeatedly rejects traditional families by rejecting the institution of marriage in both words and actions. The narrator asserts that marriage is the “flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python” (p. 78). And, he or she confesses that he or she “used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a brick” (p. 13), a brick she or he threw with some frequency: “I’ve been through a lot of marriages. Not down the aisle but always up the stairs” (p. 13). In fact, the entire book is focused on an intensely passionate relationship between the narrator and Louise, a married woman, who leaves the home she shares with her husband Elgin to be with the narrator. The narrator’s apparent disregard for families calls her trustworthiness into question. This is evident when he or she is focalized by a friend who says, in response to learning of the narrator’s relationship with Louise, “You bloody idiot . . . Another married woman” (p. 32). Here, families are constructed by marriage, but not at the exclusion of other constructions of family. Likewise, in this novel, normalized conceptions of family are disrupted through the use of metonymic configurations of heterosexual marriage, as represented through Louise’s husband, Elgin, in contrast to the relationship between Louise and the narrator. While their marriage is marked by all of the “normal” conventions, including “a wedding held in the Registry Office in Cambridge” (p. 34) and wedding rings, it is both sexless and loveless, leading Louise to reject Elgin for her lover, the narrator. And, while the narrator dismisses the institution of marriage, as we describe above, it is just this institution that forces Louise and the narrator apart due to Louise’s cancer and the fact that she can only gain access to the specialized medical treatment she needs if she stays with Elgin, who is a cancer researcher: “She would go with him to Switzerland and have access to the very latest medico-technology. As a patient, no matter how rich, she would not be able to do that. As Elgin’s wife she would” (p. 102). The narrator chooses to acquiesce to Elgin’s demands to leave to save Louise’s life. And, while marriage is the trump card that is used by Elgin, the narrator leaves, not out of respect for the institution of marriage or recognition of Elgin as Louise’s family, but out of love for Louise, reflecting a contrastive construction of family. These representations of family in combination with the shifting sexual and gender identities of the focalizing character challenge readers to grapple with which ideologies are meant to be resisted or suspect and which are to be embraced (Cadden, 2000), thus supporting the ideological openness and overall queerness of the novel.

Boy Meets Boy, The Color Purple, and Other Voices, Other Rooms all celebrate alternative configurations of family to various degrees. This is most developed and explicit in Other Voices, Other Rooms, as it is a prominent theme in the novel. As noted above, the book begins with the premise that Joel’s mother has died, and because just the two of them had lived together, and he is a minor (12 years old), he is now living with his aunt in New Orleans. So, from the beginning, Joel’s family is not a traditional one, but his aunt is his mother’s sister, and her children are his cousins. They are, in short, family, even if an extended one. Almost immediately, Joel’s aunt receives a letter from Joel’s estranged father asking Joel to come live with him. Still, this is family, even if farther from traditional.

But when he arrives at the place named in the letter, Skully’s Landing, Joel sees no evidence of his father in the decrepit mansion in an isolated Alabama community. He is greeted by Amy, who introduces herself as Joel’s father’s wife and therefore Joel’s stepmother, and Randolph, Amy’s first cousin and owner of Skully’s Landing. In other words, he is greeted by and comes to share a home with people who are only family by marriage to someone who Joel has never met before and meets only fleetingly in the novel. This feeling of being in the absence of family at Skully’s Landing is initially underscored by Randolph’s flamboyance, which Joel finds quite off-putting. Eventually, though, this flamboyance, an evolving understanding of Randolph’s homosexuality and cross-dressing, and Randolph’s declaration that

any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell [are the things that allow Joel to accept his own homosexuality and accept Randolph as his alternative, queer family]. (p. 147)

His acceptance of a queer family is suggested in several scenes. For example, after Joel attempts to flee Skully’s Landing, he becomes ill and is returned to Skully’s Landing, where Randolph nurses him back to health. As he is recovering, he notices Randolph “blessedly near” (p. 206) and asks him whether he hates him for running away. In response, Randolph calls Joel, “baby” (p. 207), takes him in his arms and kisses his forehead, just as a parent might do. Once Joel recovers, he studies his maturing face in the mirror, and “All that displeased him was the brown straightness of his hair. He wished it were curly gold like Randolph’s” (p. 207). This might be understood as Joel wishing for a physical similarity that would suggest a biological or familial relation.

By the end of the novel, Joel rejects his dreams of straightness, as indicated by his refusal to reconnect with Idabel, the one person with whom he could imagine sharing a heterosexual relationship, but he never rejects his family of origin; rather, he is rejected by them. This is suggested when he is remembering his deaf cousin and how he used to taunt her,

But when he saw her again, why, he’d be so kind; he’d talk real loud so that she could hear every word, and he’d play those card games with her . . . But Ellen [his aunt] had never answered his letters. His own bloodkin. And she’d made so many promises. And she’d said she loved him. But she forgot. (p. 230)

In other words, Joel neither has an opportunity to reject his traditional family nor reconcile with it.

He does, however, have an opportunity to celebrate his alternative family, which he does when he reflects on what it is that makes a home a home. He learns what a home is from Little Sunshine, a local hermit and charm-maker, and Randolph, Joel’s uncle. Little Sunshine lives in a place Joel describes as old, slimy, evil-colored, wild, decaying, terrible, and strange, but, “it was his rightful home, [Little Sunshine] said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams” (p. 100). Here, Little Sunshine teaches Joel that home, no matter how unappealing the house, is where one feels at peace. Later, Randolph teaches Joel that home is where people love you consistently as you are. It is after these lessons from Little Sunshine and Randolph that Joel comes to accept Skully’s Landing as his home, a place where he is at peace and surrounded by people who love him for who he is rather than a place provided for by his “bloodkin” (p. 230). Thus, Other Voices, Other Rooms disrupts typical notions of what counts as home.

Unlike Joel, Alison in Fun Home and Paul in Boy Meets Boy do not have to choose between their families of origin and families of choice. Here we focus on Fun Home because the focus on reconciliation with families of origin is much more pronounced than in Boy Meets Boy. As in Written on the Body, traditional families are rejected in Fun Home in that it centers on the ways that Alison’s traditional family causes the death of her Dad, Bruce. Bruce cannot be satisfied without “sex with teenage boys” (p. 17), which defies their traditional family, but neither can he escape his traditional family to create an alternative one. That he wishes for such an alternative family is evident in the several panels where Alison is “rooting through a box of family photos” (p. 100). In the box was an envelope “labeled ‘family’ in Dad’s handwriting” (p. 101). The photo was of the “yardwork assistant/babysitter, Roy” (p. 100) on vacation with the family, minus Alison’s mom, when Alison was 8, and Alison recalls that the children slept in one room while her Dad and Roy slept in an adjoining one. The image shows Roy stretched out on a bed, bathed in sunlight, dressed in only his underwear. The year, indicating Roy’s age of 17, has been ineffectively blotted out.

In this scene, the significance of a naïve narrator, as a literary element, stands out. We experience the narrator, drawn in her younger form, as Alison, to be more naïve than the narrator, in her older form (Bechdel), and thus, less reliable. Leading up to the aforementioned scene, on pages 94 to 95, for example, the older Bechdel, in narration around the panels, recounts Alison’s experience of meeting Roy, the young man who was a babysitter and household helper to the family. The younger Alison is represented, in the panels, gazing at Roy and being drawn to his masculine gender and wanting to present herself in a similarly masculine way. At the same time, her father is also shown gazing at Roy, but his interest is focused on Roy’s male sexuality and his interest in Roy as a possible lover, something to which the younger Alison seems fully unaware. Then, in the scene described above, we see the younger Alison, after her father’s death, finding and examining the photo of Roy. Here, the older Bechdel analyzes this series of panels, narrating how she, as an adult, now understands her father in terms of his sexual identity, as well as her younger self, in terms of her own sexual identity as a lesbian, and her “family,” as her father experienced these relationships. Because of the layered focalization coupled with the intersections of the naïve Alison and the mature Bechdel, we experience not a singular narrative point of view, but multiple and shifting perspectives and, hence, multiple ideologies.

That Roy was included on a family vacation, and that his photo appears in the box of family photos in an envelope that the Dad has labeled “family,” reveals Bruce’s desire to create an alternative family. Nothing actually comes of this desire, though, and the resulting tension only breaks when Alison’s Dad walks in front of a truck, killing himself. Although alternative families are not constructed within the book, that Alison might one day create her own alternative family is suggested when her girlfriend Joan “came home with [her] for a visit” (p. 225). In other words, there is promise that alternative families are possibilities, even though they were not possible for Bruce.

It is the reconciliation of family, though, that holds the most promise in Fun Home. Whether Alison creates an alternative family or not, the book suggests that she, as a lesbian, remains connected to her family of origin. To her, even if not to Bruce, her family “really [was] a family” (p. 17). And even her father, who caused the “chink in [her] family’s armor” (p. 95), she experienced as having provided “spiritual . . . paternity” when she “leapt . . . into the sea” of queerness (p. 232). That is to say, Alison’s relationship with her father, particularly in their shared queerness, facilitated the reconciliation of Alison, as a lesbian, to her family of origin. Even though once she comes out to her family and then returns to their home, she realizes, “Home, as I had known it, was gone” (p. 215), it is also clear that a different kind of home with her family of origin still exists.

Time

Just as normative notions of sexuality and gender and families and homes are disrupted, so too are normative notions of time. This is not a quality unique to queer texts, but it does seem to enhance the queer nature of already queer texts. We were particularly interested in scenes in which the chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) or the time-space (McCallum, 1999) of the text is artistically distorted. Through these distortions, “normal” conceptions of time-space are suspended offering nonnormative renderings of time and space, which make these texts queer, as distinct from LGBT-inclusive texts. These queer conceptions of time are often rendered through literary elements, such as flashback and foreshadowing, as well as mode. As Cadden notes, “the romance or hero novel . . . is much more likely to offer the reader a multistranded narrative, or any sort of rearrangement of narrative time,” in contrast to the comedic mode (p. 305). Moreover, he asserts that “comedy and romance are at the heart of a conservative world view of returning to a previous order—things ‘go back to normal,’” whereas, “irony and tragedy are more upsetting” in that they are “modes of change—either random and absurd in the ironic or as the rebirth of a new order as in tragedy” (p. 306). The coupling of distortions of “normal” conceptions of time with the tragic or ironic mode reflects a confluence of queer and literary elements that mark the ideologies of these novels as queer.

This is most apparent in Other Voices, Other Rooms and Written on the Body and less so in The Color Purple. These books have generally linear storylines interrupted with surreal scenes that markedly disrupt the otherwise normative flow of time. Written on the Body, for example, follows a generally linear timeline, beginning in the spring of 1 year into the autumn of the following year. During these approximately 18 months, the narrator and Louise fall in love, which results in the narrator’s girlfriend leaving the narrator, and Louise leaving her husband, who is an oncologist. After the narrator and Louise enjoy some time together, the narrator learns, from Louise’s husband, that Louise has chronic lymphocytic leukemia. As described earlier, the narrator comes to believe that Louise’s chances of fighting the cancer will be improved if she goes back to her oncologist husband. Consequently, the narrator leaves Louise so she will go back to her husband. This is where the dramatic disruption in time occurs. Up until this point, there have been typical text breaks of a line throughout, but not anything more substantial. At this point, though, there is a blank page, followed by a chapter titled, “The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body.” Even this chapter is broken into three sections. Then there is another chapter, “The Skin,” and then another, “The Skeleton,” which has two sections, and a fourth: “The Special Senses,” which has four sections. In this portion of the novel, the narrator explores Louise’s body both as a host of cancer, like when he or she says, “In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit” (p. 115), but also as her lover, so when he or she says, “Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you?” (p. 115). This portion of the novel invites readers fully into the narrator’s struggle to come to terms with understanding his or her lover in mortal, if not fatal, terms. In doing so, though, it propels us from the storyline. It is as if time and space are suspended. Then, though, after these chapters of suspension, readers are pushed back into the linear storyline, with the first word of the next page: “March” (p. 141). This word references the month and thus brings the reader right back into the timeline that composes most of the book. In this way, time is artistically distorted and then reinstated in Written on the Body.

Although all of the books use the ironic mode to disrupt expectations, to various degrees, Boy Meets Boy provides a clear illustration of this in relation to time and space. The book is romantic, no doubt. It is set in an almost hyperbolically gay-friendly town, and the storyline centers on Paul and Noah falling in love with each other. It is comedic as well, although less overtly so. But so too is it ironic in that there is incongruity between what is expected and what actually happens. Therefore, for example, the town is quite different than one might expect. Early on, it is described in this way:

There isn’t really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best. Back when I was in second grade, the older gay kids who didn’t flee to the city for entertainment would have to make their own fun. Now it’s all good. Most of the straight guys try to sneak into the Queer Beer bar. Boys who love boys flirt with girls who love girls. And whether your heart is strictly ballroom or bluegrass punk, the dance floors are open to whatever you have to offer. (pp. 1-2)

Moreover, in this town, “P-FLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) is as big a draw as the PTA” (p. 115). This gay-friendliness plays out in Paul’s school life as well. For example, early in the book, we learn that Paul has “always known [he] was gay, but it wasn’t confirmed until [he] was in kindergarten” (p. 8), when, according to Paul, “It was my teacher who said so,” as we mention above. When Paul asked his teacher about her comment on his report card, she explained, finally saying, “What you feel is absolutely right for you. Always remember that” (p. 9). Then, later, when Paul is in sixth grade, he collaborates with several students to form their elementary school’s first GSA. They do so not as a way to help gay students unify with straight allies in the face of the school’s homophobia, as one might expect, but to help the straight kids. In Paul’s words, “Quite honestly, we took one look around and figured the straight kids needed our help. For one thing, they were all wearing the same clothes. Also (and this was critical), they couldn’t dance to save their lives” (p. 12). Given such characterizations, one might conclude that we are, in reading this book, in some post-homophobic future, or in a sort of magical realism space where homophobia is absent.

If it were such a time-space, there would be nothing ironic about this book. But, it turns out that we, as readers, cannot ignore the expectations of homophobia. There are small things that signal this, like the mentioning of how it was worse back when Paul was in second grade and then remembering that the teacher’s comment was made before that and the GSA a couple of years after that. But there are also larger things. There is a time when Paul is tackled and called, “queer, faggot, the usual” when leaving a screening of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (p. 13). It is important to note that such homophobic language is named as usual, not exceptional, thus debunking any notion that this is a world of magical realism in which there is no homophobia. Such a debunking is underscored by Tony, who says to Paul: “The first time I met you . . . I honestly couldn’t believe that someone like you could exist, or even a town like yours could entirely exist” (p. 150). His disbelief is grounded in the expected homophobia embodied most prominently by his parents who before they “discovered he was gay, they wouldn’t let him shake hands with a girl” (p. 95), but now that they know he is gay, “they practically pimp him out the door . . . if he mentions he’s doing something with a girl—any girl” (p. 95). In other words, his parents would rather him be promiscuous, something they used to consider shameful, than homosexual. But such homophobia is not limited to people or places just beyond the town, where Tony’s parents live. Therefore, for example, Paul’s ex-boyfriend Kyle publically accuses Paul of making him gay. This would have no impact in a post-homophobia time-space or a magical one devoid of homophobia.

It is the mostly but not entirely not-homophobic nature of the town that puts this novel in the ironic mode. We, as readers, come into the book expecting homophobia, and we encounter something different than we expected, thanks to Paul’s description of the town, Paul’s kindergarten teacher, and Paul’s motivation for starting a GSA. Then, we come to expect an absence of homophobia in this time-space, but our expectations are disrupted, by verbal assaults outside a movie theater, Tony’s parents, and Kyle’s fear, as examples. In this way, Boy Meets Boy’s use of the ironic mode creates a jarring sense of time and space and thus offers multiple and conflicting ideologies around the conceptualization, embodiment, and enaction of homophobia.

Fun Home and Other Voices, Other Rooms disrupt normative flows of time with foreshadowing and flashback. Fun Home is a memoir, and, as such, the narrator/author, Alison/Bechdel, is often remembering and re-rendering events from her childhood as experienced, and focalized, by her younger self, but narrating these through her adult perspective. In addition, because of the multiple semiotic systems, images from the far past and the more recent past can be layered and then juxtaposed with narration in the present. This is vividly displayed in two panels on page 120 of the graphic novel, where Alison’s hands are shown holding more of the photos from the box marked “Family,” described earlier. In the first panel, Alison’s hand holds a single photo of her father when he was about the same age as Roy had been when he was both Bruce’s lover and Alison’s babysitter. In the photo, Bruce is seen posing in a women’s swimsuit, a towel wrapping his head and covering his hair. Bechdel, as narrator in the present, writes, “He’s wearing a women’s bathing suit. A fraternity prank? But the pose he strikes is not silly at all. He’s lissome, elegant” (p. 120). In the next frame, Alison’s hands are shown holding two photos, side-by-side. One show’s her father lounging in a men’s swimsuit, shirtless, wearing sunglasses, and smiling fully into the camera. The other shows the younger Alison, likewise smiling toward the camera. Here, Bechdel writes of the former image, “In another picture, he’s sunbathing on the tarpaper roof of his frat house just after he turned twenty-two. Was the boy who took it his lover?” (p. 120) and then of the latter, “As the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine?” (p. 120). In this series of images, past and present come together, allowing the older Bechdel to look at images of the young Bruce and her younger self and recognize, through the layering of time, her father’s sexual identity relative to her own. The images and text provide both a flashback to Bechdel’s younger self, just coming out as lesbian, as well as a foreshadowing of that self, embodied in the younger Bruce, whom she is now able to recognize as gay. She draws the photos together, summarizing, “The exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces—it’s about as close as a translation can get” (p. 120). Hence, Fun Home uses foreshadowing and flashback to show multiple ideologies through the layering of timescales through juxtaposition of text and images.