Material fantasy: Identification as history in United States lesbian and gay literature and culture.

摘要

In this dissertation, "Material Fantasy: Identification as History in US Lesbian and Gay Literature and Culture," I argue that the current rift in America between queer theory and lesbian and gay historiography, if it is to be eased, demands a joint study of material history and psychic identification. I look specifically at Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Cold War-era physique magazines and lesbian pulp novels, to show that pre-Stonewall lesbian and gay history has been importantly a history of psychic identifications. My first two chapters focus on Cather and Crane, both of whom understood their homosexuality in terms of an atavistic affiliation with Native American culture. I suggest that for both writers, this affiliation is an attempt to nationalize their homosexuality through America's back door: first by identifying the Indians as their own spiritual ancestors, then by suggesting that American culture itself emerged from "vanished" Indian cultures. Arguing against the idea that culture is merely representational, however, I stress the inseparability of national fantasies and material production. Hence, with my third chapter, I turn from literary to mass cultural materials, and describe the hunger for American citizenship that shaped the gay male body culture of Cold War-era physique magazines, arguing that the magazines' idealization of supposedly tolerant ancient civilizations was a closeting strategy that kept them from running afoul of federal officials in the 50's and 60's. Finally, my fourth chapter argues that lesbian pulp fiction, enjoying a resuscitation in the 1990's as a form of camp enjoyment for contemporary lesbians, offers allegorical ways to imagine the recent history of the lesbian/gay social movement as a history of the political vicissitudes of affective bodies. I therefore use my discussion to bring together questions of embodiment and enfranchisement that generally have been separated into psychoanalytic and historical quarters.