酷兒慾望與身體-空間：約翰·瑞奇 《夜城》與艾倫·霍林赫斯特《游泳池圖書館》中的空間探討

Abstract

Abstract Scholars from various academic fields have elaborated on the term of queer space and pointed out the cardinal feather of queer space: “the impossibility of integration with everyday life,” as stated by Betsky. A great amount of studies have also devoted to the formulating such a space; theories of alternative space, such as Edward Soja’s notion of the Thirdspace, Foucault’s conceptualization of the heterotopia, are adopted to create the queer space. This thesis also takes the queer space’s incompatibility with everyday space as the point of departure, it does not, however, aim to look for another alternative definition of this alternative space. Rather, it looks into how the queer body negotiates through everyday environment by zooming in on the subtlety of the bodily movement: the direction of walking in the crowds, the position of sitting behind the window, or the orientation of one’s body towards or away from certain objects. In the first chapter, I examine the incompatibility of the queer body in the omnipresent heteronormative world and argue that the alienation from one’s sexuality not only works on the psychological level but is also an embodiment of the bodily space. While Brown insists that closet is a metaphoric as well as physical space, I maintain that for the sexual outlaws of City of Night, the closet is not a space imprisoning the mobility of the body; instead, it touches on body, pressing on the skin. In the following chapter, I analyze how the underground desire comes to terms with the world in the underground space. In The Swimming-Pool Library, the underground is not an alternative space, yet it has distinctive spatiality of unintelligibility and opacity that is utilized for Will to articulate homosexual desire. After looking at the distancing and approximating of queer space, in the last chapter I concentrate on the urban space, which plays a crucial role in relation to the presentation of queer desire in both texts. I invoke Deleuze’s philosophy to facilitate the discussion, and from this point of view, the city is not examined as empirical space but as forces with which the queer bodies resonate. I maintain that the city is not a space where the repressed desire could be liberated, but instead, the assemblage of city and queer desire forms a line of flight for both the narrator to create new territory, new experiences. Reading the queer space from the perspective of the body, of the intimacy between body and space, this thesis does not attempt to define the queer space: what constitutes the queer space, how it works, or whether it exists after all; nor has it the ambition to challenge or subvert the dominance of heteronormativity. In this study, queer space is the everyday practice: it is to find the queer style of walking on the street, to curl up in a comfortable corner to daydream, and to reverberate with the pulses of the city.