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"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …