Queer Gothic
An Edinburgh Companion
Edited by Ardel Haefele-Thomas
- Explores Gothic themes through nuanced queer lenses
- Re-visits past ideas of queer theory and expands on them within Gothic context
- Focuses on time periods, genres, and queer Gothic modes
Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion features sixteen essays that interrogate queer theory’s intersections with the Gothic. By re-visiting the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and pushing queer theoretical frameworks into new territory, this volume explores the ways that Gothic and queer work alongside each other: one as a marginalised genre and the other as a marginalised identity. Considering both major and lesser-known Gothic works, and ranging from the canonical (poetry and fiction) to the popular (film, video games, music, and visual and performance art), it offers queer and trans perspectives on a wide selection of Gothic modes, genres and texts from fiction such as Hugh Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate, films from Nosferatu to The Cured and TV shows including In the Flesh and Pose.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Queer Gothic: 'I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey'
Ardel Haefele-Thomas
Part I: Queer Times
Chapter 1 - Desiring Deformity in the Romantic Gothic
Jeremy Chow
Chapter 2 - Queer Gothic: Romantic Origins and Victorian Innovations
Jolene Zigarovich
Chapter 3 - Strange Cases of the Queer fin de siècle: Law, Medicine and the Gothic Imaginative Mode
Jamil Mustafa
Chapter 4 - Gothic Cinema and Sexology in the Weimar Republic: Towards a Queer Gothic Aesthetic on Screen
Dennis Wegner
Chapter 5 -‘Tarting up ideas in costume jewellery’: Contemporary Gothic Camp
Thomas Brassington
Part II: Queer Monsters
Chapter 6 - Queer Vampires: What We Want Is In The Shadows
S. Brooke Cameron
Chapter 7 - Queer Zombies
Xavier Aldana Reyes
Chapter 8 - ‘Queer-Wolves and Wolf-Boyz and Were-Bears, Oh My!’: Queering the Wolf in New Queer Horror Film and TV
Darren Elliott-Smith
Chapter 9 - ‘Spectrality is in part a mode of historicity ’: Representations of Spectrality in Queer Historiography and Contemporary Fiction
Paulina Palmer
Chapter 10 - Witchcraft, Gender and Queerness in Contemporary British Literature
Silvia Antosa
Part III: Queer Forms
Chapter 11 - Queer Gothic Poetry
Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Chapter 12 - Queer Gothic Visual Art: A Twisted Path From The Eighteenth Century To The Twenty-First
Laura Westengard
Chapter 13 - Queering Gothic Slash Fandoms: Harry Potter, Ginger Snaps and Worldbuilding
Gregory Luke Chwala
Chapter 14 - Solidarity Is More Than A Slogan: Queer Representation in the Virtual World
Dawn Stobbart
Chapter 15 - ‘Y’all ain’t from around these parts’: Queer Displacement in American Folk Horror
Amanda Cruz
Chapter 16 - This Is What Queer Resistance Looks Like: AIDS Gothic Art
Ardel Haefele-Thomas
Bibliography
Filmography
Notes on Contributors
Index
This is a book that’s urgently needed, and it doesn’t disappoint. Its sixteen authors provide an up-to-date exploration of queer Gothic, reflecting a rapidly changing theoretical field and ranging widely across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. The result is a rich, riotous feast of ideas, sure to tantalise, provoke and spark new conversations.
What about the gothic genre lends it so naturally to conversations of queerness and queer theory? What about queer frameworks creates opportunities to investigate the tensions and possibilities of the gothic narrative? Each essay in Ardel Haefele-Thomas’s collection seeks to answer these questions by analyzing stories, both classical and contemporary, and examining the ways in which the queer gothic genre offers a place to explore the world when one decides to play by different rules. Written in an engaging manner that will appeal to students and scholars of the genre, Queer Gothic is also accessible to the general reader and may pull people in through its examination of more contemporary gothic storytelling types (e.g., video games and slash fiction). Like most collections, some contributions are stronger and of broader interest than others, but every essay seems like a necessary and relevant piece to the overarching conversation about the queer gothic as a narrative space in which queer dilemmas and desires can be represented and marginalized identities can find their own voice.
Summing Up: Highly recommended.
