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“The Symbol of My Condition”: Dynamics of Alignment with Power in Sarah Schulman’s „Rat Bohemia”

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Milewski J.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

2018

vol. 5

issue 1

21-31

This article considers how Sarah Schulman in her novel Rat Bohemia and other works utilizes her intersectional position as a Jewish lesbian writer to bear witness to her experience of AIDS epidemic. It analyzes how Schulman represents family as an institution of power to hold it accountable for the spread of AIDS epidemic in the context of her postmemory of Holocaust. It deals also with mechanisms of alignment with power within the gay community itself. Finally, it focuses on the central symbol of rats in Rat Bohemia understood as an indexical sign of the obscene. All these issues are theorized in the context of the problem of witnessing as strategies to write a testimony that remains loyal to the community and the reality of a crisis event.

Masculinities, History and Cultural Space: Queer Emancipative Thought in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys

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Milewski J.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

2018

issue 8

55-67

At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill, tells a story of gay teen romance in the wake of the Easter Rising. This paper considers the ways in which the characters engage in patterns of masculine behaviour in a context that excludes queer men, and the rhetorical effect of transgressive strategies to form a coherent identity. These patterns include involvement with the masculine and heteronormative nationalist movement, as well as a regime of physical exercise, and a religious upbringing in 20th-century Ireland. The strategies of broadening the practices of masculinity include their renegotiation and redefinition, as well as attempts to (re)construct the Irish and the gay canons of history and literature. These strategies, as exemplified by character development, become a rhetorical basis for the novel’s main argument for inclusiveness. This analysis deals with the central metaphors of space and continuity in the novel in the light of a struggle between identities. It also observes the tradition of parallels drawn between the emasculated position of the gay man and the Irish man at the beginning of the 20th century, and O’Neill’s rhetorical deployment of the shared telos in construction of a coherent gay Irish revolutionary identity.

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1 Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

1 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

2 Milewski J.

2 2018

Search results

“The Symbol of My Condition”: Dynamics of Alignment with Power in Sarah Schulman’s „Rat Bohemia”

Masculinities, History and Cultural Space: Queer Emancipative Thought in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys