Violation and volition: Representations of the molested boy in the American post-war gay novel
Item
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Title
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Violation and volition: Representations of the molested boy in the American post-war gay novel
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:f0ce14d2293d:11673
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identifier
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12262
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Creator
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Schneiderman, Jason,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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LGBTQ studies | American literature | Gender studies | American Novel | Boys | Child Sexual Abuse | Gay Novel | Masculinity
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Abstract
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This dissertation considers representations of molested boys in the postwar American gay novel. It argues that gay novelists between the end of World War II and the early 2000s created a new genre, a kind of anti-bildungsroman of the molested boy. In this genre, the molested boy is presented as being on a trajectory toward an adult subjectivity that is withheld, missing, or incoherent. The genre arose as a narrative strategy to resist a dominant discourse of homophobia that conflated child molesting with gay adulthood. Gay authors disrupted that conflation by refusing adult portrayal of the molested boys. The narrative emphasis of these novels is on the boys rather than on their future selves. In refusing the eschatology of adulthood, these novels insist on the boys as full and imminent beings, rather than proto-adults. The logic of recovery and healing is rejected as obscuring and devaluing the boyhood experience.;The introduction traces the genealogy of pedophiles and boy lovers in the later twentieth century, concluding that mainstream gay activism has done more for gay youth than organizations like NAMBLA. Chapter One considers Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, a novel which ends when the boy protagonist enters adulthood, and James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, in which the molested boy experiences an incoherent adulthood. Chapter Two considers Samuel R. Delany's Hogg and Dennis Cooper's Try, both novels about boy protagonists whose survival depends on their continued sexual availability to the adults around them. Chapter Three begins by examining how Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin suspends adulthood through an extended adolescence; it concludes by showing that Michael Lowenthal's Avoidance can portray both the molested boy and his adult self because homonormativity has redrawn the boundaries of public and private. The conclusion reiterates the arguments of the dissertation through the lens of abjection.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
