Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space In The Wake Of The CityU of Minnesota Press - 353 pages "Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The "gay village," "gay mecca," ""gai Paris," the "lesbian flaneur," the "lesbian boheme"--these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential. Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel Delany, Robert Gluck, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how--and how effectively--queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin's constellations of Paris, "capital of the nineteenth century." Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin's city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress. If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm's book we discover how,looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his "dialectics of seeing"; how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history. |
Contents
1 | |
1 Love at Last Sight or The Dialectics of Seeing in the Wake of the Gay Bathhouse | 63 |
2 The City of Collective Memory | 101 |
3 Queer Passages in Gai Paris or Flâneries through the Paradoxes of History | 145 |
4 The Lesbian Bohème | 195 |
Other editions - View all
Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City Dianne Chisholm No preview available - 2005 |
Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City Dianne Chisholm No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
allegory American Arcades Project artists aura avant-garde Bartlett Baudelaire Berlin Chronicle Betsky bohème bohemian boulevards bourgeois Buck-Morss capitalism capitalist century Chelsea Girls city’s collective memory commodity critical critique cruising culture Delany Delany’s desire dialectical image dream East Village Eileen erotic experience fantasy fetish fiction figures flâneries flâneur Futuransky gay bathhouse gay baths gay village gaze gentrification Glück haunts homosexual Ibid lesbian and gay literary living London Lower East Side Lydia Main Brides mass metropolitan modern montage motifs narrative narrator neighborhood novel numbers Paris Parisian Park passage Passagen-Werk past phantasmagoria political Press production prostitution queer city queer constellations Queer Sites queer space radical Rat Bohemia Rent Boy revolution revolutionary scene Schulman Scott's Scott’s flâneur Second Empire sexual shock social space Square stage street stroll subculture theater tion Tompkins Square Park Trans urban space Visions and Everything Walter Benjamin White woman women writing York
References to this book
Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France Mr Denis M Provencher No preview available - 2012 |