In Gothic Queer Culture, Laura Westengard proposes that
contemporary U.S. queer culture is gothic at its core. Using
interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer
art, literature, and thought--including ghosts embedded in queer
theory, shadowy crypts in lesbian pulp fiction, monstrosity and
cannibalism in AIDS poetry, and sadomasochism in queer
performance--Westengard argues that during the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges
and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly
gothic aesthetic.
Gothic Queer
Culture examines the material effects of marginalization,
exclusion, and violence and explains why discourse around the
complexities of genders and sexualities repeatedly returns to the
gothic. Westengard places this queer knowledge production within a
larger framework of gothic queer
culture, which inherently includes theoretical texts, art,
literature, performance, and popular culture.
By analyzing queer
knowledge production alongside other forms of queer culture, Gothic
Queer Culture enters into the most current conversations on the
state of gender and sexuality, especially debates surrounding
negativity, anti-relationalism, assimilation, and neoliberalism. It
provides a framework for understanding these debates in the context
of a distinctly gothic cultural mode that acknowledges violence and
insidious trauma, depathologizes the association between trauma and
queerness, and offers a rich counterhegemonic cultural aesthetic
through the circulation of gothic tropes.