Reading for Excess: The Queer Texts of Orlando, Giovanni’s Room, and The Color Purple

Abstract

In this last chapter of readings, I want to suggest an analytical category that may be of use to students interested in deploying the “queer theories” discussed earlier. In raising the possibility of the rubric of the “queer text” I want to remind (and, of course, remember) that it is just as vital to discuss always the limitations of such a rubric (and, indeed, the project of rubric-building), as it is to discuss its parameters and utilities. Even so, delimitations, thoughtfully explored and (self-)critically assumed allow for discrete interventions and powerful, because carefully circumscribed, arguments and interpretations. As I have suggested throughout this book, “queer” is not chaos; it is always implicated within and impacted by surrounding definitions, norms, and rules of engagement. Yet it — we — can certainly question and abrade those definitions, norms, and rules forthrightly and with overt (and covert) political intent.