Abstract
This dissertation examines ‘conventional’ representations of queer and marginal identities in three texts: Moonlight (2016), a film directed by Barry Jenkins; Lost and Found in Johannesburg (2014), a memoir by Mark Gevisser; and Pride and Prejudice (The Gerald Kraak Anthology: African Perspectives on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality) (2017). I apply Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection from her essay Powers of Horror (1982) to examine the process whereby queer, marginal, and dominant subjectivities are formed. In addition to Kristeva’s theory, I employ Judith Butler’s reworking of abjection in Bodies that Matter (1993), in which she discusses her concepts of ‘legitimacy’, ‘intelligibility’ and ‘citationality’, to examine how ‘abjected’ and thus marginalised subjects might be ‘legibly’ reconstructed. Chapter One argues that Moonlight represents the construction of subjectivity, offering a close reading of the protagonist’s ‘self-abjection’, a term relating to his internal repudiation of ‘undesirable’ aspects of himself. Moving away from Moonlight’s depiction of isolated, intimate and deeply personal struggles, Chapter Two shifts the discussion to the broader social systems that inform subjectivity by analysing the themes of borders and transgression emphasised in Lost and Found in Johannesburg. I argue that Gevisser’s memoir deconstructs oppressive social systems, such as the racist and homophobic ideology of apartheid-era South Africa, by indicating how geographic, urban, and ideological borders are inherently permeable. Here, the notion of ‘social/urban abjection’ is explored in relation to the construction of the dominant ‘social body’ of the apartheid state. The third chapter of this dissertation maintains that Pride and Prejudice engages with the reconstructive possibilities of abjection by centring queer characters and subjectivities within the literary collective of the anthology, thus creating a new ‘symbolic legitimacy’ in which the conventional marginality of the subjects is positively reconstituted. Altogether, I argue that the texts discussed in this dissertation collectively contribute to the trajectory of my analysis of subjectivity and abjection: firstly, I explore the intimate and isolated experience of the queer individual’s internal struggle; secondly, I focus on the broader social abjection of groups of marginalised people in the city-space of Johannesburg (a microcosm of apartheid South Africa); and, lastly, I turn to the re-affirming possibility of the literary collectivisation (the anthology) of conventionally ‘abjected others’. Although the texts under study are distinct in their focus and genres, they all approach abjection productively to contest iv normative and marginalising representations of queerness while underscoring the literary possibilities of renewed and recentred queer subjectivities.
M.A. (English)