Abstracts Category : Other

Writing the hyphen: queer masculinities, nationalism, and literary transnationalism

by Shaun Bell

This thesis examines the representation of nation and masculinity in the work of Australian authors Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Sumner Locke Elliott, and Christos Tsiolkas across the mid-late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. All these authors occupy distinct positions in Australian literature; their work crosses fiction and biography to articulate narratives of outsider subjectivity and experience that challenge cultural-nationalist formations. The first half of this thesis opens up a queer and transnational terrain of literary self-construction through the symbol of Greece, which it reads through Eve Sedgwicks identification of the shared etymology of queer and trans-, to schematise the generative capacity of the always-already queer modalities of masculinity within cultural-nationalist imaginaries. Chapter One reads the self-producing capacities of Greece found throughout Whites oeuvre as coterminous with his late-career coming out, and connected to modalities of social critique. Chapter Two reads Greek-Australian author Christos Tsiolkas as inheritor of Whites capacity to disturb national complacencies. It identifies Tsiolkass literary renegotiation of the nation within his evocation of maleness as marked by queer and migrant subjectivity. The second half of this thesis reads key aspects of critically under-read mid-century authors, Boyd and Elliott. By addressing their ambivalent position in literary criticism, this discussion reveals new frameworks for reading in the unrecognised dynamics of sexuality and identity in their writing, attenuated by the public/private cathexis of the closet. Chapter Three looks to Martin Boyds self-generating alignment with Rome and Classicism as expressing an ambiguous homosocial/sexual desire, centred on the eroticisation of the sacralised male form. Chapter Four reads Sumner Locke Elliotts recurrent confrontation with scenes of origin. This analysis identifies Elliotts ur-scene as a site of backwards coming out that significantly reorients Elliotts origin story as queer narrative and critique of Australian society. The thesis demonstrates that together, these authors draw our attention to transnational and cosmopolitan scenes of literary significance, troubling and de-stabilising the coherent space of the nation. By realigning these authors in a genealogy of queer-transnational literature, this thesis argues for subverted dynamics of masculine national mythologisation.Advisors/Committee Members: Olubas, Brigitta, English, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW.