Queer kairos: resistance, resilience, and hope AND Queer assemblage in Running with scissors

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Daniel George Powers (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Ben Clarke

Abstract: Drawing from Erin Rand’s argument in Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance, I detail the resistant manner in which queer emerged in national and academic realms within the late twentieth century. This political and rhetorical resistance, I contend, forms much of the impetus of queer scholarly theory and application, and effectively made queer theory and queer culture resilient to the general normativity surrounding it. In other words, queer became a subject and field of study in postsecondary education simultaneous with the national social and cultural issues of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, that rhetorical resistance and resilience of the queer social movement became synonymous with academe’s subject and field of study in its analysis, critique, and evolution. However, this resistance as it was originally conceived, and on which I argue queer theory is founded, does not account for the inclusivity the LGBT community has begun to experience within the twenty-first century. As queer individuals’ lives continue to be validated, as queer individuals continue to live openly today, I offer—in Cheryl Glenn’s terms—a “hopeful” outlook for the possibility of queer theory and culture in the twenty-first century through expanding the field to include more literary, cinematic, and other (newer) culturally significant texts produced by queers to move forward in analyzing, more deeply, what is queer. AND In this paper, I define assemblage and its territorializing forces. In this definition, I show how territorializing forces favor culturally-normative entities and how deterritorializing entities, such as queer, exist through the opposing nonnormative, even bizarre forces. This I apply to Augusten Burroughs’s memoir, Running with Scissors in which I demonstrate how Burroughs—as author, narrator, and character—narratives his move from “normal” to “queer” (“re-” to “deterritorialized”) during his own teenage years, and how it during this dissent that he is able to validate both his own queer/deterritorialized identity and the identity of his text. I ultimately hope to provide a discussion of queer identity construction through queer assemblage, a closer examination of queer content and form through narrative.

Additional Information

Publication
Thesis
Language: English
Date: 2019
Keywords
Assemblage theory, Kairos, Narratology, Queer literature, Queer rhetoric, Queer theory
Subjects
Queer theory
Rhetoric $x Social aspects
Rhetoric $x Political aspects
Burroughs, Augusten $t Running with scissors
Discourse analysis, Narrative
Narration (Rhetoric)

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