Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Sexologists, What of the Night?: Parody and Resistance in Nightwood

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/m900p0914

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  • The present study considers the mid-nineteenth century origins of the term “sexual inversion,” as it became applied to a variety of nonnormative subjects and sexual practices. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) has long been recognized as a discursive space wherein socially constructed notions of sexuality and gender are interrogated. A key to viewing Barnes’ literary representation is a historicization of sexual inversion as it was defined by major practitioners from the advent of the term to the publication of Nightwood. Without this historicization, Nightwood’s parodic resistance defies meaningful analysis. Reading Nightwood through Judith Butler’s work on parody and Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of disorientation opens up a space for Barnes’ innovative literary representations of male, female, and nonbinary homosexuals within the modern sexological, scientific discourses of inversion. Through parody, Barnes responds to sexological claims and identity categories that sexological discourse used to constrain and control gender and sexuality. Rather than modern sexological discourse being monolithic, Barnes shows that resistance to gender normativity and identity categories was alive and well in the twentieth century. By resignifying the material construct of the invert as an imaginary and wayward symbol of human desire, Barnes opens a door to those who would question, resist, and disrupt gender binaries.
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  • 89 pages

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