Looi van Kessel

In his novel 63: Dream Palace, the American author James Purdy attempts to undo the cultural mechanics that make sexual acts legible as signs for sexual identity. In this chapter, Looi van Kessel problematizes the reading strategy that privileges certain cultural interpretations of sexual behavior over other possible readings. He argues that different incongruent readings are always simultaneously possible, making it impossible to straightforwardly read sexual acts as signs for sexual identity. This is demonstrated by doing exactly what the novel attempts to resist: prioritizing a specific reading over other possible readings, which foregrounds the interpretative violence that is committed by the constant misreading of its main character's sexual acts - by characters in the novel as well as potentially by its readers.

In their performance Timelining, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly explore the
ways in which intimate relationships are constituted in time. The performance consists of a memory game in which two performers retrace their shared history as a couple. Throughout the performance, the various actions prompted by the memory game question the unity of the couple, instead casting the performers’ relationship as what I will call a two-togetherness. This article looks at Timelining through the lens of queer temporality to scrutinize the operations of different social experiences of time in the constitution of the couple as a two-togetherness. It then interrogates, investigates, and explores the ways in which the performance undermines normative assumptions about the constitution of intimate relationships within time. By breaking down categories of time and memory, Gerard and Kelly suggest that each intimate relationship, whether normative or queer, is constituted through the impossibility of conforming to normative conceptions of time.

James Purdy’s novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) challenges the notion that sexuality is part of an identity that is interior to one’s self. Central to this argument is a brief scene from the novel in which the sexual identity of one of the characters, Amos Ratcliffe, is narrated as an Oedipal fantasy of patricide and incest. Read through the lens of melodrama this article suggests that the novel, and this scene in particular, exposes sexual identity as an exteriority that is projected onto a person by his or her environment. This constitution of sexual identity is enforced through the confession, which is central to both the psychoanalytic Oedipal scenario and melodrama. Melodrama, however, problematizes the psychoanalytic confession to an interior truth that is subsequently assumed as sexual identity, for it foregrounds the exteriority onto which the truth-claim of the confession is based. As such, reading Eustace Chisholm through the lens of melodrama opens up a way to think about sexuality without taking recourse to identity.

This paper explores the turns that LGBTQ activism has taken since the emergence of digital television and its convergence with other digital and new media outlets. As a case study, this paper takes an episode from the popular television series RuPaul's Drag Race. The episode in question was regarded as being transphobic by a large group of online LGBTQ activists. The debates that followed the airing of this episode and which were mostly staged on digital and online media, point towards a transformation of queer activism to which traditional media outlets have yet to respond.

In many of his novels, American novelist James Purdy shows concern for the conflation between sexual acts or desires and sexual identity. Central to these concerns is the notion that people have to make their sexual identity legible to the outside world in order to be recognized as subjects. Through word plays on characters' names and by constantly rewriting and commenting on the Oedipal fantasy of the constitution of sexual subjectivity, Purdy draws attention to the repressive misreading that this 'making legible of sexual identity' induces. Already in his 1956 debut novella 63: Dream Palace Purdy makes use of these strategies in order to problematize the legibility of sexuality, and especially the conflation of homosexuality with anal desire. The novel centers on the misreading of its protagonist, Fenton Riddleway's sexuality through a series of displacements from anal to oral fixations. In my analysis I will show how Purdy c hallenges the legibility of homosexual desire as anal fixation, that is, the misreading of desire for anal intercourse as a marker for homosexuality. However, the novel also turns its theme of the illegibility of sexual desire into its own organizing principle. Through the invocation of the Oedipal " motherfucker " and its play with punctuation in which the colon (" : ") of the title can be taken literally for its homonym, the anatomical colon, the novel becomes an allegory for (mis)reading itself. Taking my cue from the story's Oedipal riddle, I will argue that it is the act of reading – the act of reconstructing the identity of the novel's " motherfucker " – that constitutes its main character as homosexual. Underlying my analysis, then, will be the question whether it is at all possible to " read " someone else's desires, without claiming their desires for/as your own.

Frans Kellendonk's novel Mystiek Lichaam (1986) is marked by a strong tendency towards negativism. Leendert Gijselhart, in particular, is a character who constantly draws on a repertoire of negativity: misogyny, homophobia and antisemitism. Leendert (who in the novel identifies as homosexual) could therefore be seen as what Lee Edelman calls a sinthomosexual: a subjectposition that is made manifest by an identification with the absolute negative of the death drive, and which Edelman argues to be often associated with homosexuality's negation of futurity. Edelman shows how an analysis of the sinthomosexual can uncover dominant fictions of (hetero)normativity. In my discussion of Mystiek Lichaam, I propose to read Leendert (but also other characters) through the lens of sinthomosexuality in order to analyse how their identification with such a negative subject position functions in the light of the novel's radical negativity.

Among the many controversial themes that James Purdy has touched upon in his work, the topic  of incest might stand out as one of the most provoking. In several of his novels and short stories, characters engage in various forms of incestuous relationships. These relationships can be heterosexual or homosexual, intergenerational or among siblings, consensual or even committed unwittingly. Yet, in whichever shape or form these relationships occur, they always seem to function as a commentary on the social taboo on incest.
Striking in Purdy’s fiction about incestuous relationships is his sometimes literal use of Freud’s Oedipus complex. The literally acting out of this theory raises questions about the social construction of this complex, and the effect it has on the subjectivity production of Purdy’s characters.  In this paper, I propose to read several instances of incest in James Purdy’s work through the lens of Kaja Silverman’s reevaluation of the positive and negative Oedipus complex. She asserts that the positive Oedipus complex, which interpellates the subject into dominant fictions of the family – including its taboo on incest –, is always accompanied by the negative, or homosexual complex. It is this doubling of the Oedipus complex that constitutes a resistance to the dominant fiction of family relations. A reading of Purdy’s imagining of incestuous relations from the perspective of a double Oedipus complex allows us to rethink the social construction of the incest taboo and explore its effect on the production of marginalized subjectivities.

Recent inquiries into sociocultural categories of time has brought contemporary queer theory to argue that the dominant discourse on private and public time has been shaped by norms of linearity, productivity and procreation. Those that are out of synch with “heteronormative” or “straight time” (Freeman, Halberstam, Muñoz) face the danger of being marginalized in a society that dictates temporal categories associated with masculinity and heterosexuality. The project of queer temporality tries to subvert the hegemony of straight time, and recover deviant subjectivities by looking at their aesthetic and political production.
Gerard and Kelly’s performance Timelining, which was performed at The Kitchen in March and April 2014, explores subjectivities that are out of phase with linear, progressive time. Timelining features couples who share a history – as friends, (former) lovers or siblings – and who trace back their shared past through verbal and embodied recollections. Time, as represented by the performers, is non-linear, interrupted, and unwinds backwards. The score of the performance demands its performers to share their joined memories with each other, but also with their audience. However, this shared time is often out of sync or disrupted. Through their choreography Gerard and Kelly explore how the performers’ staggered time produces new categories through which we can think about memory and relationality. For this paper, I will propose a reading of Timelining as a production of queer temporality. I will argue that through their performing of time differently, the performers of Timelining make available different modes of experiencing memory and relationality in time.

James Purdy’s novels teem with queer characters that voluntarily undergo physical violence, or enforce others to inflict mutilations upon their bodies. These characters often struggle with expressing a deviant sexuality or with the negotiation of their place as queer in a predominantly rural and patriarchic environment. Their resorting to extreme physical violence, such as disembowelment or crucifixion, can be read as a last attempt to claim sovereignty over their bodies and sexuality. In this paper I will discuss two novels that are exemplary for such instances of such extreme physical violence: Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) and Narrow Rooms (1978).
I will relate the notion of sovereignty over the body to Patrick Anderson’s (2010) treatment of hunger strikers and how they are perceived as threatening since their performance is a spectacle, but at the same time defy every form of representation. They challenge those who govern over their bodies and defy existing hegemonies by claiming agency over their bodies and resorting to extreme measures that call for action. I argue that having voluntarily inflicted intense and lethal violence upon one’s own body, such as many of Purdy’s characters have, follows a similar disruptive pattern. These characters give an ultimatum that challenges patriarchic hegemonies and which demands an acknowledgement of their deviant sexuality. Through the reading of the two novels by Purdy, I will argue how the performance of self-inflicted violence can assert sovereignty over the body and sexual identities within hegemonic systems of patriarchy and heteronormativity.

"On May 31st 2012, we organized a whole-day art event called Cultuur?Barbaar! (“Culture?Barbarian!”) at Scheltema Leiden (http://barbaarskunstcomplex.wordpress.com). Around fifteen artists and acts from several disciplines (visual art, poetry, music, photography, conceptual art) got together to perform their interpretation of the theme barbarism for an audience of around 150 visitors. The event was an artistic response to the conference Barbarism Revisited: New Perspectives on an Old Concept, which was organized by Leiden University and the University of Bonn from May 30th to June 1st 2012. Our goal was to “barbarise” the conference.
To “barbarise” the conference, for us, meant to intervene in the academic discussion without reverting to the same theoretical dialogue that belongs to it. Our intervention was to take shape through artistic research. According to Balkema and Slager’s definition, this is a form of research in which the art event is used as a means of producing knowledge other than the knowledge obtained through academic discourse, by using a different language and methodology, and focusing more on the experimental and tentative nature of making artistic statements. That this is not done unproblematically, is something we found out when we tried to engage in academic concepts through this mode of artistic research, in the vein of Hubert Damisch.
The objective of our joined presentation is, then, twofold. First, we want to read the art event critically, asking whether we succeeded in our goal. At the same time, however, we want to discuss our methodology (i.e. art-based research) and bring it in discussion with Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on the problems of creating concepts through art. While remaining close to the art event itself, discussing the projects of several participants, we will also question, in a broader sense, the effectivity of trying to contribute to (or intervene in) a conference through an art event."

"In his 1985 novel Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, Naguib Mahfouz uses doubt as a central motive. He provides a narrative of testimonies in which he produces several witnesses, each offering their own version of “the truth,” in order to reconstruct the identity of Akhenaten. The appearance of these contradicting witnesses is a strategy which makes the validity of these testimonies from the first instance already highly distrustful. Rather, It makes the identity of Akhenaten more elusive than stable. However, Mahfouz purposefully generates doubt towards the presented testimonials as to create an identity that lies outside of the binaries of good and evil, right and wrong. Akhenaten’s identity becomes one that can no longer be judged from these binary positions and thus opens up the possibility to reflect on his history and identity in different terms.
Through the analysis of Mahfouz’ novel, I will explore the possibilities of using doubt within the genre of the testimonial as a productive strategy. Doubt, as will become clear, not only undermines existing knowledge or testimonials, but also has the possibility of producing a narrative that goes beyond binary positions. In doing this, the use of doubt as a narrative strategy opens up the option to reconstruct a history that lies outside of existing narratives. The unstable identity that is created through doubtful testimonies can, as the analysis of Akhenaten will show, finally start to generate its own knowledge."

Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (’92-’95) presents the reader with a rather fantastic account of the outbreak of AIDS in the New York gay community. Not only does the text focus on the epidemic’s impact on personal lives, but also on the initial reactions of the authorities on the outbreak itself.
These ‘events,’ surrounding the AIDS epidemic, have been extensively researched in the past decades. However, these studies are oft confronted with the impossibility of making the actual event present in their historiographic writing. Historical theorists such as Frank Ankersmit have argued that we can only know history through text, and that all our knowledge of historic events is always mediated. The event in history then seems to have been lost as an object for historiographic studies. Not only are we distanced from it in time, but also the transposition of occurrence into language has removed us further from the possibility of knowing the event in itself.
Why then, do we still study history, and more importantly, how can we reinstate the past event into our present knowledge and to what avail? The answer to these questions could possibly be found in Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern theory on historiographic metafiction. By dramatizing the past event, literature can aid historiographic writing by making the event again present in our current knowledge. The dramatisation of events in Angels in America provides us with new insights about the impact of the outburst of AIDS in New York of the 1980’s. Thus by analysing this texts' dramatization of the impact of AIDS on personal lives, I will explore the possibilities that literature has in opening up the debate on history through the re-enactment of the past event.

Looi van Kessel and Nynke Feenstra collaborate in a new blog series on the intersection of different minoritizing identifications. In this post, they discuss the work of Deafies in Drag and how they contribute to LGBT acceptance within the Deaf community.

http://www.leidenartsinsocietyblog.nl/articles/towards-an-inclusive-academy

On June 10, I organized a conference that addressed issues of diversity and inclusivity through the concept of trans*. This is an account of the challenges that I encountered while organizing the conference.

http://www.leidenartsinsocietyblog.nl/articles/james-purdy-and-the-oppressive-liberation-from-the-closet

While the Gay Liberation Movement tried to liberate LGBTs by "coming out of the closet", authors such as James Purdy regarded this strategy as oppressive. Voices such as his are important to be heard when writing the cultural history of gay liberation.

https://gay.nl/articles/224767/film-stonewall-drukt-historische-personages-naar-de-marge/

Tijdens de Roze Filmdagen, het LHBT-filmfestival dat afgelopen donderdag van start is gegaan in Amsterdam, gaat de film 'Stonewall' in première. Al meteen bij de release van de trailer kwam de film op veel kritiek te staan. Promovendus Looi van Kessel onderzoekt aan de Universiteit Leiden de representatie van non-normatieve seksualiteit in films en literatuur. Wij vroegen hem naar zijn visie op de film.