Wonder boys : tales of the extraordinarily queer adolescent

[摘要] This project explores how different novelists and performers situate fantasies of queer adolescence through particular culturally constructed spaces of home. Central to this analysis is the figure of the ;;Wonder Boy.;; Memoirs and narratives of queer adolescence tend to construct the central subject as ;;extra-ordinary;; to use Biddy Martin's term. In these works, the central characters' difference is articulated via non-normative physical traits, cross-gender characteristics (the inversion trope), deviant behaviors -- the mother's boy, etc. The queer child is often described as a genius, gifted, and therefore perceptive to the ways in which he is culturally read and to the ways in which his childhood is different from a ;;normative;; one. Through the works of Truman Capote, John Rechy, Paul Monette, and the Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy, varying processes of inscription are explored in a series of narratives that allow for a rethinking and re-articulation of the relationship between spatial configurations of home and the formation and performance of queer identity.; With ;;home;; as a site of ;;mandatory and compulsory;; heterosexuality within these narratives, the figuration of the child's relationship to rooms, to occupants of those rooms, and to the rules prescribed for behavior in them, also becomes the paradigm for adult negotiations through broader social spaces within dominant culture.

[发布机构] University of Southern California . Libraries