List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Queer Cultures and Insidious Trauma
1. Haunted Epistemologies: Gothic Queer Theory
2. Live Burial: Lesbian Pulp and the “Containment Crypt”
3. Monstrosity: Melancholia, Cannibalism, and HIV/AIDS
4. Sadomasochism: Strategic Discomfort in Trans* and Queer of Color
Performance Art
Conclusion: The Challenges of Neoliberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Laura Westengard is an associate professor of English at the
New York City College of Technology, City University of New
York.
"The real reason why Gothic Queer Culture is impossible to put down
is that in addition to being meticulously argued, it is
celebratory. In the spirit of Lady Gaga’s gleefully bloody and
irreverent meat dress, with which Westengard opens the book, Gothic
Queer Culture gracefully sidesteps moralizing judgements of the
artists and writers whose challenging work it examines, choosing
instead to emphasize the affirmative power of reveling in the lurid
grey areas that queer artists and their work so often
occupy."—Elizabeth Simins, Art Discourse
“This tour-de-force of literary and cultural analysis connects
eighteenth-century Gothic obsessions with traumatic realities of
the twenty-first century. Queer theory, lesbian pulp fiction, the
melancholy of AIDS, and sadomasochism—Laura Westengard helps us to
understand these phenomena as never before.”—George E. Haggerty,
distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California,
Riverside
“Westengard takes a common idea—that gothic is queer—and inverts it
to show the effects of unacknowledged trauma on marginalized
communities. Gothic Queer Culture establishes Westengard as an
exciting new voice in critical trauma studies, gothic studies, and
queer theory.”—Nowell Marshall, author of Romanticism, Gender, and
Violence: Blake to George Sodini
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