Citation

Harris WC. J. Homosex. 2018; ePub(ePub): 1-32.

Affiliation

a Department of English , Shippensburg University , Shippensburg , Pennsylvania , USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00918369.2018.1522810

PMID

30307797

Abstract

Girls Will Be Girls (GWBG) delivers a substantive queer-feminist critique of heteronormative animus toward women and gay men through jokes that weaponize that animus for insurgent purposes. The film's rape and abortion jokes showcase the provocative notion that negative representations of femininity might be wielded strategically and, in fact, more resonantly because they resist recuperation by marginalizing normative hierarchies. GBWG's enactment of gay male femininity deploys queer dissidence by ameliorating pain through mockery while emphasizing the costs of heteronormative and patriarchal inflictions. This essay offers a test case for a queer feminist politics-one that, without discarding the imperatives for and rewards of more materially grounded political work, mines the critical as well as affective affordances of rage, mockery, and indignity against heteronormativity's arbitrary but still formidable injunctions. A queer feminist reading of camp denaturalizes heteronormativity with a potency that queer theory and feminist theory might harness yet more effectually in less divided collaboration.

Language: en

Keywords

Camp; drag; feminism; gay femininity; gender performance; heteronormativity; homophobia; misogyny; queer theory; transfeminism