Be gay, do crimes: Queer Gothic Reimaginings

Be Gay, Do Crimes: Queer
Gothic Reimaginings
@RomGothSam
#RomancingTheGothic

Queer Gothic Re-imaginings
Queer
• ‘In addition to examining the representations
of same-sex desire in gothic fiction… I
attempt to show the ways in which all
normative – heteronormative, if you will –
configurations of human interaction are
insistently challenged.’ (George Haggerty)
• ‘To be queer, when taken outside of the
sexual connotations of that term, is to be
different… Queer is, in this respect, a matter
of both setting oneself aside (personally or
aesthetically) as different, and of reflecting
upon that process by a textuality that may lie
at any point between camp parody and
confrontational acerbity.’ (Hughes and Smith)
• LGBTQIA+/GRSM
Gothic Reimaginings
• Re-imagining existing narratives –
either concrete texts or existing
structures
• Queer desire
• Queer characterisation
• Queer de-/re-constructions

Queering Demonic Temptation
• St Anthony – ‘The Father of All
Monks’

Historia von. D Johann Fausten -
1587
‘And indeed when he did succeed
in being alone to contemplate the
Word of God, the Devil would
dizen himself in the form of a
beautiful woman, embrace him,
debauching with him, so that he
soon forgot the Divine Word and
threw it to the wind.’

Christopher Marlowe – Faustus – 1592
• Faust requests a wife
• A Devil appears garbed as a woman
• ‘Tut, Faustus, marriage is but a ceremonial
toy. If though lovest me, think no more of it…
I’ll cull thee out the fairest courtesans.’
• The appearance of Helen
• ‘Her lips suck forth my soul’
• It ‘comes at a time when Faustus’ repentance
is most likely’ - Whitehouse

• From camel head to dog to page to singer to
Biondetta
• ‘Instead of tempting his victims with easy to satisfy
sexual passion, the Devil uses the more complex
concepts of love and desire.’ (Muller)
• ‘What would be so disastrous about Alvere’s [sic]
making love to Biondetta?’ (Porter)
• ‘This is no woman’
• The mystery not of gender but of ontological
status… or is it?
1772

Fairytale vs. Gothic Transformation
Fairy-Tale Transformation
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Marina
Warner (2002)
• The shape-changer
• The definitive change to a form
that‘more fully expresses them and
perfects them than their first form’
• Temporary transformation
• What unifies these three types of
magical transformation is the idea
of a complete transformation—a
‘become’. (Hirst, ‘Gothic Fairy-
Tales and Deleuzian Desire, 2018)
Gothic Transformation
• ‘The key focus is not a completed
transformation but a process, a
confusion of forms and identities or
a mutation—a ‘becoming’.’ (Hirst,
‘Gothic Fairy-Tales)
• The differentiation between forms
is increasingly blurred – both
externally and internally
• Werewolf

Queering Demonic Temptation in Matthew
Lewis’ The Monk (1796)

‘Although the disclosure of the
novice’s femininity seems…to
dismantle the queer attractions
between the monk and the novice
that had been generated during
the time when the cross-dressing
novice had maintained her male
disguise, it remains difficult to
divorce…this strange sight of ‘love
in a convent’ from the tale’s initial
concerns with homoerotic
desiring.’ (Townshend)
Although undoubtedly attracted by her
‘beauteous orbs’ – Ambrosio’s decision
making is more complex
Interest
Existing relationship with Rosario
Pride

Keith Vaughn – ‘The Temptation of St
Anthony

Protective Closeting and/or
internalised homophobia
• ‘A genre that is notorious for its presentation of verboten sex
acts – voyeurism, rape, incest, sexual torture and bondage,
adultery, cuckholdery, “illegitimate” pregnancy – the classic
British Gothic, to the best of my knowledge, presents no
scenes of male-male sodomy, no direct homosexuality that
might join the parade of spectacalized perversions.’ (Bruhm)
• The homoerotic relationship established here between the
Abbott and the Novice is specifically pedagogical and
pederastic (Tuite)
• On both a representational and textual level, Rosario's
gender-switch evades the fugitively inscribed figure of
homoerotic desire, by turning one of the men into a woman,
even though this gender-switch functions retrospectively to
explicitly sexualize the relation between the Abbott and the
Novice. (Tuite)
• I am interested in reading it as a gesture
of protective closetting in the wider cultural context of
homosexual persecution in Britain and Northern Europe
(Tuite)
• By reveiling and reinscribing the trope of homoeroticism as
diabolical and pathological this return to the homoerotic plot
is also a return to the closet and to the plot of homosexual
panic. (Tuite)
Heterosexual Desire as Monstrosity
• ‘Ironically, Ambrosio’s desire to experience a
heteronormative relationship leads him, unwittingly, to
commit incest with and murder his own sister.’ (Brewer)
• Ambrosio pursues increasingly heteronormative desires
• ’Homophobia comes to control a scene where it is the
destructive force of heterosexuality that is really at stake.’
(Bruhm)

Queering Gender Identity in The Monk
‘The ambiguous sexuality of Rosario/Matilda provides a backdrop of
homoeroticism against which the larger dramas of the plot are played
out. When Matilda reveals herself in turn to be an agent of
Satan…gender recedes as the determining factor in desire.’ (Haggerty)
• Is Rosario/Mathilda’s identity simply a question of the sexual
orientation of Ambrosio?
• Subject/Object of desire
• Gender identity

• Provides a starting note of ambiguity
• Places Ambrosio as equal to the virtuous
female
• Rosario/Mathilda/(Demon)
• ‘Father’ continued he in faltering accents, ‘I
am a woman’
• ‘Both unfeminine and threatening to
Ambrosio’s own sexual identity.’ (Brewer)

‘For Matilda, gender is performative, and she refuses to be limited to a
fixed gender identity in either he physical appearance or her behaviour.’
(Brewer)
‘The narration of The Monk seems to reflect Lewis’s contradictory
tendency to make sexist generalizations while affirming, at least
implicitly, the capability of women to defy and even triumph over social
mores and expectations.’ (Brewer)
Although Mathilda/Rosario’s identity ‘does not seriously undermine the
prevailing social hierarchies, it does expose the arbitrary and
contingent nature of gender identity.’ (Brewer)

Question Break
Do you have any questions?

The Vampire: From Queer Monstrosity to
Celebratory Queerness
‘Christabel’ – Coleridge ‘Carmilla’ – Le Fanu Carmilla The Gilda Stories – Gomez
1816 1872 2014-2016 1991

Early Vampire Tales – Fact and Fiction
• ‘The Shoemaker of Breslaw’ in
Henry More’s An Antidote
against Atheism - 1655
• Paul Ricaut – The State of the
Greek and Armenian Churches –
1679
• The Arnold Paul Case – 1732 –
London Magazine
• Don Augustin Calmet – Treatise
on Apparitions… - 1752
• ‘Der Vampir’ – Ossenfelder –
1748
• ‘Bride of Corinth’ – Goethe –
1797
• ‘Wake not the Dead’ - Ernst
Raupach - 1800
• Thalaba the Destroyer – Robert
Southey – 1801
• ‘The Giaour’ – Byron - 1813

Vampiric theology
• Vampirism as a result of excommunication
• ‘On Vampirism’ – 1823 – ‘This we apprehend is the real source
of the vampire superstition’
• Vampirism as a punishment connected with the
unconfessed, the condemned, the self-murdering, the
outcast
• Vampirism as the offspring of religious othering
• Vampirism as a form of embodied damnation –
entrapment in a corrupted flesh

A Queer Theology of the Vampire
Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-
Pollution and All its Frightful
Consequences – 1725
• There was a frequent conflation of
different forms of ‘transgressive’
sexuality.
• Sex is ‘the carnal commerce of the
two Sexes, for the continuance of the
Species’
• ‘They give themselves over to
uncleaness… because the spirit cannot
dwell with pollution’ (victory of the
‘flesh’)
• Infectious damnation
• Unable to propagate ‘naturally’, the
queer subject infect new subjects,
spreading a moral and spiritual
infection

Act or Identity – The Theological
Paradigm
For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and
the Spirit against the flesh: and they are
contrary the one to the other; so that ye
cannot do the things that ye would -
Galatians 5:16-17
For whoever keeps the whole law and yet
stumbles at just one point is guilty of
breaking all of it – James 2:10
Ye have heard that it was said by them of
old time, Thou Shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh
on a woman to lust after her hath
committed adultery with her already in his
heart – Matthew5:27-28
• Within this theological paradigm, your
acts are inseparable from your spiritual
state and/or identity
• An act is a product of your sinful nature
and it is a corrupting force
• An act is not confined to a physical action
• There is a constant battle between ‘flesh’
and ‘spirit’ even if you have already
won/lost

Submission to a queer temptation
A willed submission
Transgressive
passion
A shared
damnation
An infectious
transgression
Christabel is ‘innocent’ but flawed while
Geraldine acts in part as a manifestation of the
sins of Christabel’s flesh, that Christabel both
accepts and welcomes into her home and into
her bed… Geraldine has agency of her own and
emerges as a ‘predator’, but she is also as much a
victim of the vampiric curse, the triumph of the
flesh, as Christabel. As such, she adheres to the
pattern of the vampiric other or mortal immortal
whose damnation causes them to act both ‘Faust’
and ‘Mephistopheles’, both ‘tempter’ and ‘fallen’,
erasing the clear distinction between ‘innocence’
and ‘guilt’. (Me)

Carmilla – Love, Cruelty, Possession,
Contagion and Death
• Laura and Carmilla
• Dangerous and disruptive desires
• A threat to patriarchal, bourgeoise order
• Carmilla ‘represents aristocratic female
homosexual desire’ but ‘the physical
nature of the relationship between the
narrator and the vampire is a far cry from
mutual lesbian desire and can be more
clearly seen in this light as a masculine
fantasy of and about lesbianism.’
(Stoddard)
• ‘infectious sufferer of this reciprocal
female diseasing’ (Stoddard)

Carmilla – Love, Cruelty, Possession,
Contagion and Death
• ‘Sexual deviancy is figured as vampirism, their
vampirism both an excuse for and a projection of
what is considered deviant’ (Wisker)
• ‘This is not female sexuality, not turned toward
itself but turning on itself, and the result is not
desire for love but cruelty, possession, contagion,
and potentially, death.’ (Stoddart)
• The hysterical female
• Female sexuality in need of policing
• The brutal death of the monstrous and abject
female avatar of a desire outside partriarchal,
imperial and bourgeois control

Carmilla – A Love Beyond Death
“I have been in love with no one, and
never shall," she whispered, "unless
it should be with you."
How beautiful she looked in the
moonlight!
Shy and strange was the look with
which she quickly hid her face in my
neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs,
that seemed almost to sob, and
pressed in mine a hand that
trembled.
Her soft cheek was glowing against
mine. "Darling, darling," she
murmured, "I live in you; and you
would die for me, I love you so."
To this hour the image of Carmilla
returns to memory in ambiguous
alterations – sometimes in the
playful, languid, beautiful girl;
sometimes in the writhing fiend I
saw in the ruined church; and often
from a reverie I have started,
fancying I heard the light step of
Carmilla at the drawing room door.’

Carmilla – Re-imagined
• 2014 – 2016
• A vlog-style web series in
the style of ‘The Lizzie
Bennett Diaries’
• Set at Silas University
• Differs significantly from
the source material
• Reimagining of Carmilla’s
basic story

Carmilla Reimagined
• Reseeing Carmilla through the queer gaze
• Queer creators/queer audiences
• Control over the narrative
• No mediating male voice
• From secret record to public account
• From passive to active/victim to heroine
• From rejection (Elle) to acceptance
(Laura)
• Freedom from the past (vampirism not
necessarily entrapment)
• Away from a narrative of infection
• No dead gays here, thank you very much

‘We take blood, not life’
• Louisiana – 1850
• Yerba Buena – 1890
• Rosebud, Missouri – 1921
• South End – 1955
• Off-Broadway – 1971
• Down by the Riverside – 1981
• Hampton Falls, New Hampshire -
2020
• Land of Enchantment - 2050

‘We take blood, not life’ – Vampirism
Reimagined in The Gilda Stories
• ‘Since Gilda is not straight, male,
or white, “she is, in every way
possible, the opposite of
Stoker’s count’ (Lewis)
“Now you must drink.”
She held the Girl’s head to her
breast and in a quick gesture
opened the skin of her chest. She
pressed the Girl’s mouth to the
red life that seeped from her
Soon the flow was a tide that left
Gilda weak. She pulled the
suckling girl away and closed the
wound.’

‘A Fair Exchange’
‘They say they need this exhilaration in order to live this life. They are
simply murderers. They have no special need; they are rabid children.
In our life, we who live by sharing the life blood of others have no need
to kill. It is through our connection with life, not death, that we live...
… And as you take from them you must reach inside. Feel what they are
needing, not what you are hungering for. You leave them with
something new and fresh, something wanted. Let their joy fill you. This
is the only way to share and not to rob. It will also keep you on your
guard so you don’t drain life away.’

Critique and Reimagining
• “Single issue view of Black freedom”
• Colour-blind politics
• Capitalist economy
• ‘Decentralizes male desire, ‘whiteness
and European Culture’ (Patterson)
• Anti-normative stance
• Heteronormative power structures
• Rejection or erasure of (black) female
sexuality and bodies
• Gilda is never defined by one aspect of her
identity.
• ‘Gomez’s conception of the vampiric
family rejects assimilation altogether.’
(Jenkins)
• Sharing
• Found family
• Gender indeterminacy
• ‘In disentangling gender indeterminacy from
its associations with powerlessness and racial
shame, queer neo-slave narratives reframe
that indeterminacy as a powerful resource of
resistance and survival not only for enslaved
people, but for postbellum African Americans
as well.’ (Lewis)

‘Let’s have a toast. To the family of friends we
gather about us. May we live and love eternally.’
‘What is family? How do we live inside
our power at the same time act
responsibly? How do we build
community? How do we connect
authentically across gender, ethnicity,
and class lines?’

Queering the Gothic Romance
A young ingenue from the country
A move to a new isolated location
A brooding master with dark secrets (?)
A house with secrets
Family trauma
Murder, mystery and mayhem

Queering the Gothic Romance
• ‘Gaywyck’ by Vincent Virga
• Published 1980 by Avon
• 45,000 copies sold on first printing
• ‘Over aeons there has been a spate of dreadful,
formulaic romantic gothics spawned by the
monumental Jane Eyre, where a secret is nestled in
the heart of the book… In the 1970s after
Stonewall, the secret became the distant and cruel
husband’s having a male lover – instead of a mad
wife – in the attic/stable/guest room. The
revelation of her husband’s homosexuality spins the
poor, innocent wife into a maelstrom of horror.’
(Virga)

‘A Male Lolito’
• Robert Whyte
• Miss Grimmond
• Donough Gaylord (yes, really)
• Cormack Gaylord
• Denvers and Keyes
• Goodbody and Mortimer
• Brian
• Steven
• Jones
Content Warnings
• Incest brother/brother
• Incest father/son
• Paedophilia
• Dub con
• Multiple rapes
• Castration
• Murder
• Having sex with the wrong
brother
• An orgasm so devastating it
made him impotent for 14
years

Reworking the Gothic Romance
The Problem
• Homophobic tropes
• Diminished personhood for
protagonists
The Solution
• Homosexual lead
• ‘[Robert’s] psychological
dilemma is not his being gay; it’s
his being human and prey to
romantic delusions.’
• Modelled on Jane Eyre, Robert is
willing to leave

Reworking the Gothic Romance
• Prescribed masculinity
• Best friend is an old lady
• Enjoys reading
• Extremely sensitive
• Artistic
• Emotionally expressive
• Emotionally abusive dark hero
who’s pretty terrible…
• ‘He is the most generous, the
kindest, and the most
compassionate person in New
York.’
• Refusal to communicate
• ‘I was so startled by my behaviour
[bursting into tears] that I became
flustered… he told me that he
understood because he had
experienced the same grief.’
• Open expression of affection
• ‘I was flustered by this bold
expression of affection. In my
family, no on touched; we rarely
kissed. And he called me
beautiful.’

The Lawrence Browne Affair – Cat Sebastian
The not so naïve new-comer
The crumbling ancestral home
The Mysterious Recluse
The terrifying Lord

Lawrence Browne
• The uneven relationship
• Split narrative voice
• Flipping tropes
• Intersectional conception of
subject position
• The monstrous other
• ‘Generic Madness’ and mental
health
• Deconstructing the monstrous
• The question of perception
• Reimagining heteronormative
familiar constructions
• Interrogations of class
Helen Kord

Asexuality as Superpower
• Queer readings of the Gothic, often concentrate on the expression of
transgressive desire.
• Asexual and aromantic representation offers the possibility of
questioning not only the hetero and cis-normative but the allo-
normative
• ‘ ‘Asexuality provides an opportunity to revise radical identity politics,
which has been invested in the toppling of compulsory
heterosexuality but has not expressed much commitment to resisting
compulsory eroticism.’(Chu)

Understanding Asexuality
• Asexual/Ace
• Aromantic/Aro
• Aroace
• The Split Attraction Model
• Demi-ace
• Grey ace
• Spectrums and Changes

Asexuality as Superpower
‘The Dream Eater’ by Anna Moon
Dan – an asexual heteroromantic cis-
man
• ‘Turns out my ace ass is still just as ace
in dreamland as he is in real life.’
Enupnion
• ‘I have been called a succubus. Or an
incubus. I am neither, and both. You
humans are quite odd with your
binaries.’
Rethinking the Succubus

Asexuality, Serial Killers and Breaking the
Narrative Impulse to Purpose
• Carrie, Ricky and Fairwood
• ‘He had it once before, only once. He’d been
fifteen… He couldn’t be certain what had seared
its way into his crotch at that moment… I don’t
want to, he pleaded with Fairwood silently, staring
at the sleeping celiing,… I don’t want to.’
• Asexuality – breaks the narrative impulse towards
purpose in terms of how arcs are framed in
relation to relationships
• Kept in the ever-living present of a developing
friendship
• A serial killer unlinked from sexual pleasure –
foregrounds his reality and complexity rather than
his killing

Female Friendship against the
Apocalypse
• Justine Ireland – Dread
Nation – 2018
• Jane McKeene and
Katherine Deveraux
• Expressing asexuality
before the words existed
• Queer Platonic
relationships
• The salvific friendship
(mutual salvation)

Friends beset on every side
• Elatsoe – Darcie Little Badger -
2020
• Lipan-Apache folklore and
world-making
• Elatsoe and Jay
• Dream vs. Threat
• Restoration rather than
creation

Asexual horror
Slasher – Season 3 – Solstice
Rosie Simon as Amy Chao
The problems of representation
• Victim of trauma
• Asexuality as brokenness
• Asexuality as deviance
Asexual horror
• Exploration of asexual
experience
• Interpersonal trauma

Bibliography – Secondary Sources
Anthony F. Bogart – Understanding Asexuality - 2015
William D. Brewer – ‘Transgendering in Matthew Lewis The Monk’ in Gothic Studies 6:2 – 2004
Steven Bruhm, ‘The Gothic Novel and the Negotiation of Homophobia’ in The Cambridge History of
Gay and Lesbian Literature – 2014
Erica Chu – ‘Radical Identity Politics: Asexuality and Contemporary Articulations of Identity’ in
Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives – 2014
Caroline Duvezin-Caubet – ‘Revamping Carmilla: The Neo-Victorian Transmedia Vlog Adaptation’ -
2020
Max Fincher - Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age – 2007
Michael Foucault – The History of Sexuality - 1976
George Haggerty – Queer Gothic – 2006
Holly Hirst – ‘Gothic Fairy-Tales and Deleuzian Desire’ in Palgrave Nature -
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0106-8 - 2018

William Hughes and Andrew Smith – ‘Introduction: Queering the Gothic’ in Queering the
Gothic – 2009
Jerry Rafiki Jenkins – ‘Race, Freedom, and the Black Vampire in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda
Stories’ in African American Review - 2013
Christopher s. Lewis – Queering Personhood in the Neo-Slave Narrative: Jewelle Gomez’s
The Gilda Stories in African American Review – 2014
Sabine Meyer – ‘Passing Perverts, After All?: Vampirisim, (In)visibility, and the Horrors of
the Normative in Jewlle Gomez’ The Gilda Stories’ in Femspec - 2002
Markus Muller – ‘From Parody to Parodox: Jacques Cazotte and the Emergence of the
Fantastic’ in Journal of the Fantastic – 2004
Kathy Davis Patterson –’Haunting Back: Vampire Subjectivity in the Gilda Stories’ – Femspec
- 2005
Laurence M. Porter – ‘The Seductive Satan of Cazotte’s “Le Diable amoureux” in The Occult
in Literature – 1978

Nicole Prause and Cynthia A. Graham – ‘Asexuality: Classification and Characterization’ in
Archives of Sexual Behaviour - 2007
Eve Sedgwick – Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire – 1985
Helen Stoddart – ‘The Precautions of Nervous People are Infectious’: Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Symptomatic Gothic in The Modern Language Review - 1991
Dale Townshend – ‘Love in a Convent’ in Queering the Gothic - 2009
Clara Tuite – ‘Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State,
Homosexual Persecution and The Monk’ Romanticism Online – 2009
William Ulmer, - “Christabel” and the Origin of Evil,’ Studies in Philology, - 2007
Stella Cocoris Whitehouse – Women in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe – Unpublished
Thesis – 1977
Gina Wisker – ‘Devouring Desire: lesbian Gothic Horror’ in Queering the Gothic - 2009

Bibliography – Primary Sources
Anon. – The Arnold Paul Case - 1732
Anon. - Historia von. D Johann Fausten – 1587
Anon. – Onania - 1725
Poppy Z. Brite – Lost Souls – 1992
Lord Byron – ‘The Giaour’ - 1813
Don Augustin Calmet – Treatise on Apparitions… - 1752
Jacques Cazotte – The Devil in Love – 1772
D – ‘On Vampyrism’ - 1823
Johann Goethe – ‘Bride of Corinth’ – 1797
Justina Ireland – Deathless Divide – 2020
Justina Ireland – ‘Dread Nation’ - 2018
Amber Kell – Blood Signs - 2010

Sheridan Le Fanu – ‘Carmilla’ - 1872
Matthew Lewis – The Monk – 1796
Darcie Little Badger – Elatsoe - 2020
Christopher Marlowe – The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor
Faustus – 1592
Anna Moon – ‘Dream-Eater’ in The Unspeakable Gothic Anthology - 2019
Henry More – An Antidote to Atheism – 1655
Heinrich Ossenfelder – ‘Der Vampir’ – 1748
Ernst Raupach – ‘Wake Not the Dead’ - 1800
Paul Ricaut – The State of the Greek and Armenian Churches – 1679
CM Rosens – The Crows - 2019
Cat Sebastian – The Lawrence Browne Affair - 2017
Robert Southey – Thalaba the Destroyer - 1801
Vincent Virga – Gaywyck - 1980

Bibliography – Films, Vlogs, Podcasts, TV-
Series
Tomas Alfredson – Let the Right One In – 2008
Alan Ball – Tru Blood – 2008- 2014
Ron Clements – The Little Mermaid – 1989
Jason Davitt – Vampires: Lucas Rising - 2014
Jonathan Demme – The Silence of the Lambs - 1990
Alfred Hitchcock – Psycho – 1960
Alfred Hitchcock – Rebecca – 1940
Neil Jordan – Interview with the Vampire - 1995
Aaron Martin – Slasher -2016 - Present
Spencer Maybee – Carmilla Web Series – 2014 – 2016

Craig Macneill – Lizzie – 2018
Juan Lopez Montezuma – Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary – 1975
Joel Schumacher – The Lost Boys – 1987
Tony Scott – The Hunger - 1983
Jim Sharman – The Rocky Horror Picture Show - 1975
Jonathan Sims – The Magnus Archives – 2016 – Present
Roy Ward – The Vampire Lovers - 1970
Joss Whedon – Buffy the Vampire Slayer -

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