the haunted house as a site of queer trauma
While I was working on my MFA thesis paper, I read a lot of queer theory. I am by no means an expert, but I do know a bit more than average. Queer theory is a branch of critical theory—itself a branch of philosophical thinking that critiques and challenges systems and structures of power (e.g. race, white supremacy, class, gender, patriarchy, etc.)—that focuses its analytic lens on systems and structures of normativity with a specific emphasis on those concerned with gender, sexuality, and identity. In this way, queer becomes more than an orientation or identity; queer is a radical, disruptive ideology. Queer is different than gay because gay describes sexual orientation, not a set of political beliefs and actions. Because queer theory is a lens through which we can analyze and interact with media, we can blend it with other analytical and philosophical approaches. This is exactly what Sara Ahmed does in her 2006 book, Queer Phenomenology.
You don’t have to understand what phenomenology is (a philosophical approach to understanding something by observing how it exists), nor do you have to read Ahmed’s book (though I implore you to because it is wonderful and digestible). All you need to know is the following:
I was working on a thesis paper about the inherent queerness of the gothic genre by focusing on the vampire as a tragic queer figure;
I was in a two-year Masters of Fine Arts program;
I could not stop thinking about how vampires are queer;
Ahmed is a brilliant queer theorist and Queer Phenomenology was an integral part of my transformation from “just some game designer” to “just some game designer and theorist;”
The quote I am about to discuss almost shattered my fixation on twilight and its vampires (who are so fucking gay don’t even get me started);
And finally, I am dead set on getting my PhD so that I can write my dissertation about this next fixation of mine, which was entirely brought about by me reading (and rereading) this quote.
Are you ready? Here we go. “Now in living a queer life,” Ahmed opens, “the act of going home, or going back to the place where I was brought up, has a certain disorienting effect. As I discuss in chapter 2, ‘the family home’ seems so full of traces of heterosexual intimacy that it is hard to take up my place without feeling those traces as points of pressure” (Ahmed 11–12).
Fuck.
That quote—those two sentences—irreversibly changed my entire academic career. And I could not be more grateful.
Let’s unpack this, shall we?
“Living a queer life” means more than just being gay, as I previously argued. It means being radical and disruptive. It means challenging social and societal norms surrounding gender expression, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sexuality. Ahmed says that by living this way, by embodying queer politics, the feeling at home, at the place where we grew up, is fundamentally changed. It is disorienting. Queer people can—and often do—feel like they cannot be themselves at home because it is “so full of traces of heterosexual intimacy.” These traces are reminders that queerness has no place in the “family home.” The entire structure of the family unit is built to generate, affirm, and enforce heteronormativity. It is disorienting, discombobulating to come from a queer life and a queer home and return to the “family home,” the place where you were raised because you are aware that there is no room for you, for your politics, or for your identity. Taking up one’s space in the “family home” becomes a struggle and you are constantly feeling the pressure of bumping up against the systems built to invalidate your identity and experiences. Ahmed’s use of the word “traces” was what really got to me. It reminded me of ghosts, and that got me thinking about one of the very first books I read as part of my thesis research: Laura Westengard’s Gothic Queer Culture.
In their book, Westengard argues that the gothic and queerness are inextricably linked. She specifically looks at how trauma operates in gothic media, how queer media uses gothic motifs to express a queer trauma, and how the gothic mode relies of queer techniques of meaning making. They assert that “[…]there is something about gothicism that resonates with the experience of queer precarity in a system built to maintain normativity, a connection between existing in a world built to deny and devalue queer expression and the creation of gothic content. In other words, if something is both queer and gothic, look under the surface to disinter the insidious trauma buried there” (Westengard 2). So here’s the thing about gothic media: trauma is often represented through the haunting, the return of the repressed. And ghosts—the monsters that haunt—are traces of trauma left behind. When you are living a queer life and you return to the “family home,” you are haunted by the traces—ghosts—of heterosexual intimacy because they serve as a reminder of the accrued “trauma of being queer in a system built to invalidate and destroy anyone who strays from the norm” (Westengard 3).
This is the premise of my current line of academic inquiry: I read the haunted house as a site of queer trauma. I will outline a framework for understanding the House as a representation of family legacy, of the bloodline, of generational logics that builds upon existing queer theory about the Child as a representation for the potential of new generations created via heterosexual coupling and reproduction. The House (I get to give it a capital ‘H’ because Lee Edelman gave “the Child” a capital ‘C’) is the structure that the Child exists within; while the Child is all about futurity, the House is rooted in legacy. The House is the enforced heteronormative family unit that transfers power from one generation to the next. Queer people are not welcome in the House because they threaten the continuation of the legacy; queerness threatens to destroy the foundations of the House. And so the House is haunted for us: haunted by the insidious, accrued trauma Westengard focuses on as well as the traumatic moments that we live in terror of. I will propose a new way of organizing the family that queers the notion of the House and queers the way in which it is haunted.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke UP. 2006.
Westengard, Laura. Gothic Queer Culture. U of Nebraska P. 2019.