Summary: | 1 Kateřina Kolářová Department of English and American Studies Anglo-American Literary Studies (English Resumé) Know Yourself: Write Yourself! Queer Subjects and the Constructions of Gender and Sexual Identity at the Turn of the 19th Century The thesis examines the normative structures that shape and pre-determine the construction of the gender and sexual identities at the turn of the nineteenth century in the British context. The focus of the study is the critical investigation of the binary - heteronormative - logic that governs the formation of these identities. The concern with gender intelligibility (and the "matrix of intelligibility") reflects the thesis's critical engagement with the technology that subjects the possibilities of identification, and in fact forms of subjectivity, to logic of specific governance. The second overarching concern of the thesis represents the attempt to encompass the diversity of the practices that the individual queer selves devise in the process of self-writing and making sense of themselves. Bringing together three diverse case studies - based upon the autobiographic texts of John Addington Symonds (1840-93), 'Michael Field' [Katherine Bradley (1849-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913)], and Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) - the thesis explores the strategies of (gendered)...
|