Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia

Author

Jacob Elias Aplaca, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Nancy K. Miller

Committee Members

Steven Kruger

Wayne Koestenbaum

Subject Categories

American Literature | American Studies | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Literature in English, North America | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Other Arts and Humanities

Keywords

Queer/Trans Theory & Politics, Autobiography & Life Writing, Melancholia, Antinormativity, Relationality, 20th & 21st Century American Literature

Abstract

Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I treat these texts as sites of instructive tension in which the edginess of queer is made less certain in light of autobiography’s presumed and derided status as, in Lisa Lowe’s words, the “liberal genre par excellence,” offering “narrative expression” and “aesthetic form” to the liberal individual subject (46-7). What might we learn of queer psychic and social becoming, I ask, if we risk narrowing the aperture of our analysis to the queer “individual” and their smaller-scale impulses toward resistance and complicity? How might such a narrowing make sensible other forms and scenes of queerness, however perilous, eclipsed by the romance of the antinormative? And, finally, why is autobiographical writing a particular apropos means of addressing these questions?

In the case studies that comprise the chapters of this dissertation, I approach the generic category of queer autobiography through the psychoanalytic lens of melancholia, which I argue offers a robust means of theorizing how we are, often despite ourselves and the political ideals we hold dear, implicated in a wider and cruel social world. Reading works by Alison Bechdel, Andrea Long Chu, The Lady Chablis, Leslie Feinberg, Carmen Maria Machado, and more, I show how queer autobiographical writing offers us a unique occasion to think about, without dismissing, various queer becomings across a number of irreducible, uneven, and individual contexts that are driven by melancholic relations to social institutions, histories, and phenomena we would likely dismiss as antithetical to queerness in the first place—racial capitalism, misogyny, archival erasure, and more. In so doing, Bad Becomings ultimately shows how queer autobiographical writing might help us to better understand, and thus fully reckon with, the unpalatable psychosocial complexities and political contradictions of contemporary queer life, identity, and politics eclipsed by queer theory’s beleaguered attachments to the promises of the antinormative.

Recommended Citation

Aplaca, Jacob Elias, "Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5736