NOTE: Jorge Calderon is not a current MLA member as of 25 April.

Queer Affect & Embodiment in Recent Canadian Literature

This panel will present current research by three scholars at the intersections between affect, embodiment, and recent Canadian literature published in English and French. The inaugural research of Dickinson (1999), Goldie (2001), Martin (1977-1995), and Schwartzwald (1991, 2015) situates the queer figure historically, culturally, and textually by examining overt and covert expressions of gay/queer identity and how these constitute challenges to discourses of nationalism. Schwartzwald (1991) and Martin (1994) demonstrate the intertwining of queer desires and identities in the rhetorics of Quebec nationalism, the fetishization of the Quebec “other” in strategies of decolonization. In film, photography, and the visual arts, Thomas Waugh's (2006) work addresses themes of body representation, sexuality, and the urban and national space of gay, lesbian, and queer subjects.

Building on this previous scholarship, this panel proposes to foreground the queer speaking subject who enunciates, in first-person, the specificities of affect and corporeality as forms of self-fashioning. Although affect is prelinguistic and precedes the constitution of identity of self and others, this panel will examine the ways in which queer affect intersects with and shapes queer bodily practices. Kosofky-Sedgwick (2003) and Heather Love (2007) use “backward feelings” such as shame to discuss repression, transgression, and disavowal, but also how these negative affects may be catalysts for the politicization of queer bodies. The work of Hocquenghem (1972), Berlant (2011), and Ahmed (2004) analyze affect in the intersubjective, interrelational, and material context, while the work of Bersani (1987), Edelman (2004), and Muñoz (2009) analyses the emancipatory potential but also the limits of anti-relationality in the construction of queer subjectivity.

With this theoretical background in mind, we have selected three panelists who will present 18-minute papers that discuss queer affect and embodiment in a recently-published corpus. We will begin with “Unfulfillment and Incompleteness of the Gay Self in Simon Boulerice’s Géolocaliser l’amour” by Hasheem Hakeem. This paper examines the relationship between social networks, particularly dating apps such as Tinder and Grindr, and anti-relationality. By analyzing Boulerice’s portrayal of the unfulfillment and incompleteness of a young gay man navigating the online dating world, Hakeem proposes to show how negative affect – from feelings of loneliness to rejection – shapes and constructs the gay self. Drawing on Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity, Hakeem argues that moving beyond the antisocial nature of gay dating apps is ethically necessary in order to open up the possibility of new forms of relationality and kinship that are not tied to queer self-destruction.

In “Trans Care and Empowerment in La fille d’elle-même,” Jorge Calderón analyzes the affective resistance of the trans protagonist from childhood until her transition in an autofiction by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay. Calderón is interested in how writing an autofictional novel is a way of dealing with the traumas caused by systems of gender binaries for trans subjects. He also approaches the question of writing from the point of view of the empowerment of trans subjects and of the communities they constitute based on the storytelling of their experience of stigmatization and marginalization in a mostly cisgender family and society. In his paper, Calderón highlights how affect and embodiment are central and inseparable when one thinks about trans subjectivity.

Finally, in “Blush: Affect, Desire and Bodily Failure in My Body is Yours by Michael V. Smith,” Domenico Beneventi discusses the 2015 memoir which takes hold of the queer body in all its affective complexity: from the refusal to be caught in the scopic regime of the heteronormative gaze to the obsessive pursuit of embodied pleasures of the flesh, and finally, to the celebration of queer failure in the sense described by Jack Halberstam. If Smith’s memoir questions gender and sexual conformity, it also indulges in explicit descriptions of sexual pursuits and encounters, and these will be analysed using queer anti-relationality theories proposed by Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman.

By taking up questions of queer resistance and negativity – whether anti-relational or not – through the lenses of affect, embodiment, sexuality, and the ethics of care, these three papers will explore Canadian texts of queer enunciation linked to the affective body and its construction by self and others. In doing so, we will highlight the transformative potential of telling and sharing personal stories of queer marginalization, failure, and unapologetic desire.