Date of Award
May 2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Member
David Coombs
Committee Member
Erin Goss
Committee Member
Matthew Hooley
Abstract
Queer readings of the Gothic traditionally privilege and prioritize a lens of stabilized sexuality at the forefront of their framework for tackling the genre and its works, often dismissing the destabilizing effects of gender queerness in their theoretical pre-occupations. This thesis takes up Susan Stryker’s political project of de-centering and de-privileging queer-sexuality as the primary lens of queer critique and does so through a reading of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” to read Carmilla as a prototypically trans character, a topos that is woven in and inseparable from her status as a paradigmatic Gothic monster. The Gothic is read as trans and the trans as Gothic through a framework constructed with Ian Hacking’s notions of “Making Up People,” tracing the pessimistic past and trauma in the advent of queer identities in how they are constructed. It also examines some of the earliest crystallization of transgender embodiment in medical literature through Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex as a way to understand the transgender-tinged queerness of Carmilla fifty-six years prior. This thesis then concludes that both Gothic technology and the technology of medical literature, where gender-aberrant subjects are concerned, are devoted to a necropolitical project of creating boundaries for the kind of gender-aberrancy they explore, ensuring through necropolitics that the monstrously gendered subject cannot upend hegemonic notions of gender that it is created to undergird.
Recommended Citation
Ranahan, Dennis, "“The Profoundest Arcana of Our Dual Existence, and Its Intermediates”: The Technology of Monstrously Gendered Bodies in “Carmilla” and Havelock Ellis" (2021). All Theses. 3491.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/3491