Queer Cultural Memory and the Contemporary Gay Experience

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The contemporary gay experience is one increasingly oriented towards the past. Through analysis of this backwards orientation in a selection of 21st century queer literature, this project asks how the contemporary gay experience is structured by what I will call 'queer cultural memory.' My hypothesis is that the appearance of this backwards orientation in subjects coming of age in the post-Stonewall era is a result of an active uptake of the queer past by this generation and that this uptake can be understood as symptomatic of a definitional crisis in gayness brought about by an ostensible end to persecution on such grounds. This queer turn towards the past is exhibited in the work of contemporary novelists such as Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, Colm Toibin, Garth Greenwell and Michael Cunningham. This research project falls within the field of queer temporality in which the concept of cultural memory has figured surprisingly little to date. This project alsocontributes to existing discussions of queer cultural memory (which are primarily concerned with recovering lost or repressed queer pasts) by moving towards a more nuanced and complex construal of memory that builds upon the work of Jan and Aleida Assmann.