Papers:
Dark Habits
Dark Habits is the seventh publication from HOME Publishing since inception in 2015 to challenge and re-position the traditional exhibition catalogue as an artwork and commission in its own right, Dark Habits takes its inspiration from the classic Pedro Almodóvar film on the occasion of the group exhibition, La Movida at HOME, Manchester (14 April – 17 July 2017).
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Deleuze and Queer Theory
This exciting collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. Moving away from the established path known as queer theory, itsuggests an alternative to Butler's matter/representation binary. It thus dares to askhow to think sexuality and sex outside the discursive and linguistic context that hascome to dominate contemporary research in social sciences and humanities.
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Queer(ing) Masculinity: Daniel Paul Schreber & the Madness of the Penetrated Male Body
Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives
With three new essays and a reworked introduction by the editor, this volume expands a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies dedicated to Spark and her writings. Organized thematically into three parts, the volume includes essays that consider Spark as both Scottish and world author, situate Spark in the broader contexts of postwar culture, and offer exemplary readings of specific works from various critical perspectives.
A resource for students and scholars alike, this volume provides information about Spark''s oeuvre while also featuring current, theoretically informed interpretations of individual texts.
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The Importance of Being Postmodern: Oscar Wilde and the untimely
The essay will, as such, work with three specific ideas or suggestions: 1. That Wilde’s writing, particularly the critical essays, can be considered postmodern in this non-periodizing sense; 2. That the postmodern can, perhaps must, be considered in this sense, if it to be at all useful (though usefulness, as we know from Wilde, cannot be taken as a criterion for value judgments); 3. That this untimely or posthumous sense of the postmodern raises ethico-political and aesthetic questions that it must subsequently refuse or find impossible to answer if it is to remain, in any meaningful sense, postmodern.
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The Importance of Being Postmodern: Oscar Wilde and the untimely
Erotic Indifference to Time
This essay investigates narrative representations of the erotic, specifically the masturbatory erotic, as a form of sexuality indifferent to time – be it queer time, straight time, or any other frame within which we might wish to place it. Readings of works of fiction by Jean Genet, Kathy Acker and James Joyce are used to demonstrate and explore Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of the erotic indifference to time. These writers offer new ways of thinking about the languages and temporalities of the body. In their experiments with what language can do they map a different libidinal economy, one that, like a Möbius strip, describes a self-sufficient circuit that resists the logic of the either/or upon which considerations of time as straight or queer depend.
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Queer Humanism
I am going to explore the concept of queer humanism in relation to my own fiction, London Triptych and Twentysix. In this way I hope to elucidate what might be implied by the notion of a queer humanism. For me, Queer humanism immediately sets up a conflict, juxtaposing as it does two words whose meanings clash, threatening to cancel each other out and erase any meaning they might carry together, as a single concept. For humanism suggests a universality of human nature, a commonality of values or virtues that mark the human, whereas queer presupposes a radical uncertainty and difference, disrupting the neat reductive category of the human with its uncontainable, heteroclite realities.
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The Genealogy of Beefcake: or, Having Your Beefcake and Eating it Too
Theodor Adorno, in his book Negative Dialectics, reminds us that “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder”. In other words, every time we create a concept there is always something left out, something that doesn’t fit in, something lopped off in order for the concept to function in its ideal form. Like the ugly sisters hacking off toes to squeeze their bloodied feet into the glass slipper and so marry the handsome prince, our standard ways of conceptualizing inevitably distort the realities they purport to describe in order to establish a seamless identity between the concept and its object.
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The Genealogy of Beefcake: or, Having Your Beefcake and Eating it Too
Queer Past, Queer Present, Queer Future
The term queer was first used in the sense we understand it today in 1991, by the North American academic Teresa de Lauretis, when she guest edited the feminist journal differences and titled it “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities”. It had yet to take on the full cadence and colour of later theorizations, but this was its birthplace. In fact, de Lauretis would later abandon the term, claiming it had been mainstreamed by the very institutions it was meant to
attack.
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After Auschwitz: Adorno and the Aesthetics of Genocide
Suppose, for a moment, that we take Adorno’s famous remark about the barbarism of post-Auschwitz poetry not simply as a chronological marker or end-point, an ‘after-which’ something follows (in this case, culture as barbarism); nor as that which can no longer ‘be’, lest it debase, in its very being, the horror and loss of reason expressed by such an event; suppose we take it not, that is, as a purely temporal expression of something passed, some event no longer present, - not, in short, an escape from the past; but suppose, instead, or as well as, we take it, for a moment, as an ‘after-which’ that attempts to name the non-identical by marking it with an aesthetic of negation, genocide, annihilation; an aesthetic, that is, which takes Auschwitz as its greatest influence; not just its apotheosis, but its ability to mark, indelibly, the way we are, the way we live, now; its ability to comment upon, even make manifest, an entire real world.
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