Queer texts, queer history, and a prosthesis problem

In thinking about my post for this week I felt the temptation to use Chen’s article on toxicity to help me formulate a proper queer reading of The Member of the Wedding, a reading that the text, with its agonies over the incomprehensibility of heterosexual marriage, seems to beg for and that I never really tried this quarter. But strangely, though I was so sure a queer analysis would be a cinch, I encountered some trouble in my attempts to use my text to say something about toxicity as a way of understanding queerness. Certainly queerness is here in Member, and ties to Chen are evident. The family formation of Berenice, Frankie, and John Henry in the kitchen can be described as a model of queer domesticity à la Chen, as the kitchen is a non-reproductive space and the state of relationships within it bear an uncanny resemblance to the toxic domesticity that Chen and her lover share: “Distance in the home becomes the condition of these humans living together, in this moment, humans who are geared not toward continuity or productivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes” (Chen 277).

            And yet there seems to be something historically specific about theorizing with toxicity that puts a wrench in the notion of putting it in dialogue with McCullers’ mid-20^th century work. The panic about Chinese lead in toys and considerations of immunity and multiple chemical sensitivity are specific contemporary examples that seem to say that thinking with toxicity is made necessary by a particular historical and geopolitical condition. For Chen, toxicity matters because we theorize in the West in the 21^st century. So how can the present’s toxicity matter to McCullers in 1946, and (or?) how can 1946 speak to the present?

            When queer texts seem to want to speak to each other across decades but history gets in the way, perhaps the question becomes how to formulate a queer conception of history. Because I know how to use the internets and I took a queer theory course once, I am well aware that there has been plenty of thought about what it might mean to queer history, but as I only have 600 words I’ll content myself with arguing that I think Nicholas Watson has something to say about it. Watson argues that historians should “work with, as well as on, the models of thought and feeling they study, adapting these models for historiographic use” (1) and through the use of this strategy he proves that the past exists in the present through the collective imagination, as a phantasm. An argument that the past doesn’t just haunt the present but is actually present within it can be understood as a queer move because it destabilizes the notion that history has a linear reproductive thrust, instead suggesting a model where the past and present are bound together by imagination.

Guy who lost his hands in WWII says: "Prostheses,
like seminal historical events, are hard to ignore!"

            I think it’s easy to argue that this queer conception of the past is a solution that allows me to use McCullers to talk about toxicity and vice versa. After all, Watson writes that the “living spirit” of the past survives “among other places, in the branch of the cultural imaginary called scholarship” (6), and the fact that he uses medieval modes of thought to make an argument about historiography in 2010 suggests that Watson, at least, wouldn’t mind a visionary strategy that invokes 1946 for my present use. But here I can’t help but remember Chen’s discussion of her mask as prosthesis: the prosthesis allows her to function in the toxic world but also marks her disability. In using Watson as a tool that would allow me to connect McCullers and Chen, have I created some sort of textual prosthesis or at least suggested one is necessary? What are the implications of suggesting that texts whose central concern is queerness can/should/must develop queer ways of talking to each other (as I’ve just done), and then using a third text to prosthetically connect the two—does a move like this, in the context of queer theory, mark queer texts as deficient?