Queer Cultural Memory and the Contemporary Gay Experience

当代同性恋的经历越来越倾向于过去。通过对21世纪酷儿文学选集中这种逆向取向的分析，这个项目询问当代同性恋经历是如何被我称之为“酷儿文化记忆”的东西所构建的。我的假设是，后石墙时代的成年主体中出现的这种向后取向是这一代人积极接受酷儿过去的结果，这种接受可以被理解为同性恋定义危机的症状，这种危机是由表面上结束的迫害所带来的。当代小说家艾伦·霍林赫斯特、莎拉·沃特斯、科尔姆·托宾、加思·格林威尔和迈克尔·坎宁安的作品中都表现出了这种对过去的奇怪转向。这个研究项目属于酷儿时间性领域，在这个领域中，文化记忆的概念到目前为止几乎没有被提及。这个项目也有助于现有的关于酷儿文化记忆的讨论（主要是关于恢复失去或被压抑的酷儿过去），通过对建立在Jan和Aleida Assmann的工作基础上的记忆进行更细致和复杂的解释。

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.