Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

Queering the Real: Antisociality and the impossible nothing of queer

Abstract
This project charts a logic of queer antisociality along literary, cinematic, and theoretical works. Reading across a collection of textual case studies from Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, and Samuel Beckett, as well as films from Derek Jarman and David Cronenberg, this thesis thinks through antisociality, employing it as a critical approach to reconcile moments of textual disorientation as queer encounter. The ambition of this thesis is not to designate certain works as queer texts, or to suggest a unifying queer thread across them; it is the very nature of queer as resistant to coherence and continuity that such a task could only ever fail. Rather, reading through antisociality offers a way to think queerness beyond a rubric of sexual difference as what frustrates or works against established forms of knowledge and trace modes of queer negation along inconsistent lines as aporetic junctures, opacity, and incoherence. This approach is developed in conversation with Lee Edelman’s Bad Education where he conceptualises queer aligned to the incomprehensibility of the Lacanian Real – as being outside of identity markers or systems of recognition. Queer as such does not locate an ontology or a sexuality, but rather resists determinate meaning and troubles categorisation; queer is that which disturbs coherence. To think queerness then, Edelman suggests, is to think beyond the structural limits of language. Following this invocation to think queerly beyond structures of knowledge, this project contemplates its application and details what it might look like to do so. Each chapter then illustrates forms of queer negation that resist the controls immanent in language, and articulates antisociality as a way of thinking, and indeed a way of reading, attuned to semiological abstractions and improper grammar as queer methods of resistance. Since queer cannot be secured within language, this thesis works to reframe incoherence as queer encounter that changes shape across whatever given literary or visual landscapes. Antisociality then operates as a conceptual lens to locate queer not as content but as form: as structural idiosyncrasies that frustrate comprehension and unsettle conventional logic. Writing this thesis and working across different texts and mediums then allowed for a mapping of the different ways that queer is discursively constructed while simultaneously conceptualising modes of resistance that work against these constructions.
Type
Thesis
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Date
2025
Publisher
The University of Waikato
Rights
All items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.