Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative

Tory Young, Tory Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000346152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book argues for the importance of narrative theories which consider gender and sexuality through the analysis of a diverse range of texts and media.

Classical Narratology, an allegedly neutral descriptive system for features of narrative, has been replaced by a diverse set of theories which are attentive to the contexts in which narratives are composed and received. Issues of gender and sexuality have, nevertheless, been sidelined by new strands which consider, for example, cognitive, transmedial, national or historical inflections instead. Through consideration of texts including the MTV series Faking It and the papers of a nineteenth-century activist, Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative heeds the original call of feminist narratologists for the consideration of a broader and larger corpus of material. Through analysis of issues including the popular representation of lesbian desire, the queer narrative voice, invisibility and power in the digital age, embodiment and cognitive narratology, reading and racial codes, this book argues that a named strand of narrative theory which employs feminist and queer theories as intersectional vectors is contemporary and urgent.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.

Queering narrative voice

Susan S. Lanser

ABSTRACT
Narrative theory has paid less attention to queer possibilities than narrative itself warrants. This essay takes up the specific subject of narrative voice and asks how it might be 'queered' by considering three distinct meanings of the verb 'to queer'. Seeking as well to establish compatibility between feminist and queer understandings of voice, I explore ways in which both homodiegtetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third-person) narrative might take queer forms. Homodiegetic narration may articulate queer sexuality in either implicit or explicit ways; homodiegesis may also resort to strategies of gender ambiguity that render impossible the attribution of a narrator's sex. I also undertake a revisionist engagement with heterodiegetic narration and with the conventional linkages made between the gender of an author and the gender attributed to the narrative voice. I argue that heterodiegetic narration is conventionally queer insofar as it resists sexual determination through textual means. Finally, I call for a queerer understanding of narration while also questioning the value of different definitions of 'queer' for narratological thinking. The essay also proposes an understanding of narrative voice in relation to gender and sexuality that compatibly crosses queer and feminist thought.

Queering is the covering of a Wall when it is new built, that Rain drive not into it.¹ [Randle Holme, 'Terms Used by the Bricklayer' (1688)]

Not even the Oxford English Dictionary can pin down the word 'queer'. Of 'uncertain origin' and shifting syntax, queer has described, over half a millennium, the strange and the suspect, the criminally counterfeit, the ill and the inebriate, the disconcerting, the interfering, the merely puzzling, or ridiculous - and all this even before sexual messages seized the term. How fitting, then, that 'queer' continues to slide beneath scholarly fingers even as its usage has become academically ubiquitous. While the OED now recognises the adjectival 'queer', if rather elliptically, as describing 'a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms', it still does not acknowledge any of the three academic uses of the verb: (1) to make a claim for the non-heteronormative sex, gender, or sexuality of someone or something; (2) to disrupt or deconstruct binary categories of sex, gender, and/or sexuality; and (3) to disrupt or deconstruct any entity by rejecting its categories, binaries, or norms.

Although 'queer' is most often deployed as an adjective, and most often rejected as a noun for its dangers of reifying identities of sexuality and gender, each of its three verbal meanings also enjoys a lively academic life. Scholarly articles claim to queer 'the globally intimate', 'old time religion', 'the countryside', 'maritime archaeology', 'nonverbal communication' 'the workplace', 'the state', 'ecological studies', and in the present case, 'narrative voice'. All three meanings of 'to queer' get evoked in this panoply. The edited collection Queering the Countryside, for example, aims to show 'how important rural America can be in the movement to expand equality for LGBT people' - the first meaning - while also leaning playfully on the third: "'Rural America" is strange. Some might even go so far as to say it is queer'.² Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands' project of 'Queering Ecocultural Studies' deploys the second definition, by arguing that biological evidence reveals the 'sexually diverse interactions' of non-human organisms.³ V. Spike Peterson, writing in Political Geography, aims at 'Queering the Globally Intimate' through a capacious 'poststructuralist concept' whereby 'queering' means 'deconstructing or "making strange" what appears as "normal" or as the "natural order of things'".⁴

This incongruous capaciousness of 'queer' extends to the study of narrative. Take, for example, The Turn of the Screw, which along with its author Henry James has been more than a little subject to queering. The text's own dozen uses of the word 'queer', while not explicitly sexual, certainly 'resonate', as George Haggerty notes, 'with a hint of transgressive sexuality'.⁵ Not surprisingly, then, scholarly investments in queering this novel encompass all three academic meanings: in the first instance, for example, Rictor Norton's claim that Peter Quint is an 'aggressive homosexual'; in the second, Ellis Hansen's argument that sexual ambiguities implicating the entire cast of characters, including the seemingly straight and stolid Mrs Grose; and in the third instance, Eric Savoy's exposure of the baffling obliquity of the entire text.⁶ Indeed, what Savoy calls 'queer formalism' - a term that has also entered the visual arts - seems to be grounded in the interactions among all three definitions of 'queer'.⁷

In this piece, I too take up all three meanings of the verb 'to queer' - to transgress normative sexualities, to dismantle sexual fixities, and to dismantle all fixities - to ask what we might gain by bringing any one of them to bear on fictional narrators.⁸ In so doing, I also aim to trouble a major assumption in feminist narratology and indeed in my own work: that the binary of gender necessarily figures in the writerly and readerly engagement with narrative voice. I focus specifically on what Genette calls narrative person ('who speaks?') because this aspect of narrative form carries mimetic investments worth considering in queer terms. Through this encounter, I want both to trouble the feminist narratology that I have been instrumental in shaping and to suggest ways of addressing the paradoxical mandate to 'queer' gender and yet to affirm gender's significance for apprehending narrative. These efforts, in turn, lead me to interrogate both the relationship between authorial gender and narrative voice on which feminist narratology has tended to rely and the efficacy of narratology itself for a queer politics.

This is not my first foray into queer narratology. In a 1995 essay called 'Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology' that was published in Narrative, I responded to Gerald Prince's critique of my 'Toward a Feminist Narratology' by attempting to show the significance of gender to a range of narrative elements from paralipsis to reliability. Ironically for an essay that was advocating attention to gender, however, I chose as my primary example Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992), a novel that brilliantly conceals the gender of its first-person narrator-protagonist. That essay was later adapted for Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, edited by Kathy Mezei, with the title 'Queering Narratology'. The unacknowledged tension between these two titles signals the unacknowledged tension between feminist and queer paradigms in the essay itself. Nor did I address this tension in my more recent essay, 'Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology', published in the volume Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Intervention that I coedited with Robyn Warhol in 2015; my strategy there was to couple 'queer and feminist' rather than to probe their potentially fraught relationship. But as Abby Coykendall writes in that same volume, 'combining feminist and queer studies' can 'divorce as much as unite those fields', 'constructing feminism qua feminism as not in itself queer, or queer studies as not itself feminist, and thereby rendering the association between them simply an aggregation of one species of activity onto the presumptive alterity of the other'.⁹

In the 1995 essays, I imagined that there might emerge 'a queer narratology in which questions of sexuality become a telescope through which to seek narrative elements not before attended to'.¹⁰ Yet in 2018, and despite work of extraordinary breadth and depth in queer literary studies, queer narratology itself remains underdeveloped, its relationship to feminist narratology under-explored, and its potential contribution to narratology as such unspecified. This foray uses narrative voice as one lens for probing the dissonances between queer and feminist narratologies on the way to configuring a theoretical framework that advances shared aims, and I undertake it the spirit of one of the less common dictionary definitions of queer: to inquire.

'Queer' is not the only queer term at play in this inquiry, however, for 'voice' itself is also potentially queer in my third sense because its use is almost always metaphoric without being recognised as such. Of the five meanings of'voice' common to textual studies alone, only one is literal: voice as the articulation of sound. More commonly, especially in reference to print, 'voice' signifies an expression of attitude or position ('the voice of reason'; 'a progressive voice'); a category of group identity or collective will ('the voice of the people'); a synonym for style ('a lyrical voice'); or a structural category that describes textual narrators or, Genette puts it, 'the generating instance of narrative discourse'.¹¹ These meanings also often intermingle in the phrase 'queer voice', which has described phenomena as diverse as a radio show in Houston, an art exhibit in Philadelphia, a writers' conference in Iran, man-to-man love poems of the Spanish Enlightenment, and the film 2001 's notorious computer HAL.

As a queer-invested scholar, I appreciate this fluid panoply, but as a narratologist I am dissatisfied that 'queer voice' rarely evokes that last, specifically narrative definition that will be my focus here, I want to ask within a narratological framework under what circumstances narrative voice might be considered 'queer'; whether a text that fits some definition of queer might tend towards particular configurations of voice; what the study of narrative voice might gain from its queering; and how queering narrative voice might or might not square with feminist concerns. In this framework, I take 'queer voice' to have one of three meanings corresponding to my three definitions of queer:

1. a voice belonging to a textual speaker who can be identified as a queer subject by virtue of sex, gender, or sexuality;
2. a voice that is textually ambiguous or subverts the conventions of sex, gender, or sexuality; and
3. a voice that confounds the rules for voice itself and thus baffles our categorical assumptions about narrators and narrative.

All of these forms of 'queer voice' are imbricated with conventional narratological categories and especially with the two basic configurations of narrative person that Genette describes when he distinguishes between narrators who are and are not participants in a story world - that is, between homodiegetic ('first-person') narrators who are participants in the story they recount and heterodiegetic ('third-person') narrators who are ontologically separated from the story world. Although Genette reminds us that any narrator has the structural capacity to speak in the first person, his differentiation between homodiegesis and heterodiegesis makes a critical difference to this inquiry because each form implies a different set of grammatical possibilities for inscribing narrative voice,¹² As we will see, each meaning of'queer' is thus constrained in turn by its narrative environment.

I. Queer orientations: narrators 'in' and 'out'

The most frequently evoked meaning of 'queer voice' - voice belonging to an identifiably queer speaking subject - seems to me narratologically the easiest to accommodate despite its fraught identitarian implications.¹³ Insofar as 'queer' designates an explicitly identified narrating subject speaking in the first person - usually homodiegetically but potentially also het erodiegetically - queer voice in this sense is analogous to other markers of subject position such as ethnicity, race, class, or nationality that diverge from 'degree zero' cultural assumptions about both narrators and narratees: issues about authority, reliability, and plausibility as well as assumptions about cultural norms. We might take, for example, the head-on first sentences of Moshin Hamid's brilliantly canny The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008), which at once challenges ethnic stereotypes and exploits them: 'Excuse me, sir, may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.... I see your face has hardened'.¹⁴

The rub, though, lies with the complication that dramatised narrator-characters who are, say, Pakistani, male and Muslim, like Hamid's Changez - or, female, brown, and British like the unnamed narrator of Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) - usually identify themselves openly. But queerness, especially in its complex historicity, is probably of all narrative voices the least likely to take an uncoded form. If we are thinking of 'queer voice' in the identitarian sense, then, it would be wise to distinguish between 'out' and 'closeted' narrative voices - that is, between voices sexually self-named and voices open to contestation.¹⁵ This distinction between explicitly and implicitly queer narrators potentially opens major differences not only in narrative practices but in reading practices, and one task for queering narrative theory is to figure out what those practic...