Abstract
The Cold War witnessed the worldwide emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) minority communities. Activists struggled for the political, social and cultural recognition of sexual and gender difference as a mode of group identification rather than as criminal behaviour or psychological deviance. As LGBTQ existence was perceived increasingly as a ‘lifestyle’ linked to market niches, this once-radical minority paradigm became a neo-liberal export of the United States, where it originated. LGBTQ-identified authors often strove to humanise queer persons by promoting their social recognition, although their reparative efforts also often emphasised individual personhood over group identification. Cold War queer literature thus cultivated new perceptions of queer existence beyond the limits of LGBTQ identity politics, perceptions with continuing value for readers today.
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Notes
- 1.
Copi (Raúl Damonte Botana), The Homosexual, or the Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself, in Copi, Four Plays, trans. by Anni Lee Taylor (1971; Surrey: Oneworld Classics, 2012), p. 42.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 64.
- 3.
See Frédéric Martel, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World, trans. by Patsy Baudoin (2013; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), p. 192.
- 4.
See Simon Karlinsky, ‘The Case of Gennady Trifonov’, New York Review of Books, 10 April 1986, p. 44; and Kevin Moss, ‘Gennady Trifonov’, in Moss, ed., Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature, an Anthology (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1997), pp. 226–7.
- 5.
See Yevgeny Kharitonov’s Pod domashnim arestom (Under House Arrest, 1998).
- 6.
On the recognition, humanisation and construction of LGBTQ political subjectivity, see Alexander García Düttmann’s Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition (1997) and Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004).
- 7.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 130.
- 8.
Peri Rossi, ‘The Art of Loss (Elizabeth Bishop)’, in Peri Rossi, State of Exile, trans. by Marilyn Buck (2003; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008), pp. 95–7.
- 9.
Bishop, ‘One Art’, in Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 178.
- 10.
Keenaghan, ‘Queer Poetry, Between “As Is” and “As If”’, in Scott Herring, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 44.
- 11.
Boone, My Walk with Bob, new edn (1979; San Francisco: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2006), p. 36.
- 12.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 146.
- 13.
Bifo (Franco Berardi), Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (New York: Verso, 2017), p. 8.
- 14.
Rukeyser, ‘The Clark Lectures’, Scripps College Bulletin, 42: 4 (1968), p. 4.
- 15.
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 178.
- 16.
Donoso, Hell Has No Limits, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine (1966; Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), p. 151.
- 17.
Ibid., pp. 154–5.
- 18.
Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, new edn (1949; Ashfield: Paris Press, 1996), p. 32.
- 19.
See Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 49–75; Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), pp. 88–115; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, new edn (1988; New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 19–38, 109–28.
- 20.
Recommended histories about American LGBTQ activism include Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States (2011), Vicki Eaklor’s Queer America: A People’s GLBT History of the United States (2008) and Marc Stein’s Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (2012).
- 21.
See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–14.
- 22.
See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, new edn (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 57–91.
- 23.
Bannon (Ann Weldy), I Am a Woman, new edn (1959; Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2016), p. 69.
- 24.
Ginsberg, ‘America’, in Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956), p. 43.
- 25.
Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, in Ginsberg, Howl, pp. 24–6.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 27.
Duncan, ‘The Homosexual in Society’, in Duncan, Collected Essays and Other Prose, ed. by James Maynard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 11 (emphasis in original).
- 28.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 30.
Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 38.
- 31.
See Allen Young, ‘Out of the Closets, into the Streets’, in Young and Karla Jay, eds, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, new edn (1972; New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 6–31.
- 32.
Abelove, Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 88.
- 33.
Shelley (Martha Altman), ‘On Being Asked, “What Do You Do?”’, in Shelley, Crossing the DMZ (Oakland: The Women’s Press Collective, 1974), p. 1.
- 34.
Shelley, ‘Working on RAT: May 1970’, in Shelley, Crossing the DMZ, p. 21.
- 35.
Wieners, ‘Children of the Working Class’, in Wieners, Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike (Boston: Good Gay Poets, 1975), pp. 34–5.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 37.
Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), p. 65.
- 38.
Eng, ‘Freedom and the Racialisation of Intimacy: Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism’, in George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, eds, A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2007), p. 43.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 40.
See Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).
- 41.
Namjoshi, The Fabulous Feminist (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012), pp. 53–4.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 44.
Qiu, Notes of a Crocodile, trans. by Bonnie Huie (1994; New York: New York Review of Books, 2017), p. 54.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 234.
- 48.
Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, in Adnan, To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is: An Etel Adnan Reader, Volume I, ed. by Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda (Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2014), p. 339.
- 49.
Blasius, ‘Theorising the Politics of (Homo)Sexualities across Cultures’, in Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia, eds, Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), p. 237.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 229.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 229 (original emphasis).
- 52.
Ibid., p. 229.
- 53.
Combahee River Collective, ‘Combahee River Collective Statement’ (1977), Combahee River Collective, https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the-combahee-river-collective-statement.html (accessed 29 January 2019).
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Lorde, ‘Litany for Survival’, in Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 255.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 256.
- 57.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera, new edn (1987; San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), pp. 106–7.
- 58.
Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, trans. by Linda Coverdale (1990; New York: Atheneum, 1991), p. 4.
- 59.
Alameddine, Koolaids: The Art of War, new edn (1998; New York: Grove Press, 2015), p. 19.
- 60.
Dlugos, ‘Retrovir’, in Dlugos, A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, ed. by David Trinidad (Callicoon: Nightboat Books, 2011), p. 423.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 423.
- 62.
Dlugos, ‘D.O.A.’, in Dlugos, Fast Life, p. 535.
- 63.
Delany, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Five, in Delany, Flight from Nevèrÿon, new edn (1984; Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 348.
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Keenaghan, E. (2020). Reading Cold War Queer Literature Today: Recognition Beyond LGBTQ Identity Politics. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_6
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