Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

“The queer novel” addresses a complex object. The phrase points to fiction in which characters are identified as gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered, and in which same-sex love is prominent. But that is only one meaning of the phrase. Scholarly use of the term “queer” intends to undo our certainties about erotic desire and our definitions of agents of desire, even when eros and its agents are denominated as gay or lesbian. Hence “the queer novel” comprehends more than “gay fiction” or “lesbian fiction,” more than fiction by gay or lesbian authors, even though it takes inspiration from the same-sex eros that religion, law, and society might identify as unnatural or abnormal. Identification of what is “abnormal” overlooks the arbitrariness and instability of the institutionalized conventions on which “normality” is based. “Heterosexuality” is also an unstable category or identity, itself a queer business. As Sigmund Freud declares in 1915 in a footnote to the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , “the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is … a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact.” Eros is unruly; attempts to regulate it are costly. “The requirement… that there be a single kind of sexual life for everyone,” Freud protests in Civilization and Its Discontents , “disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, ... log in or subscribe to read full text