Item – Thèses Canada

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Numéro d'OCLC
57393126
Lien(s) vers le texte intégral
Exemplaire de BAC
Exemplaire de BAC
Auteur
Tapley, Heather,1966-
Titre
The American hobo-sexual : a connective history in material queer culture.
Diplôme
Ph. D. -- University of Alberta, 2003
Éditeur
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, [2004]
Description
3 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Résumé
'The American Hobo-Sexual: A Connective History in Material Queer Culture' redeploys queer as temporal practices of non-productive expenditure and, in the process, locates what I term the hobo-sexual at the juncture of nineteenth century discursive productions of labor and sexuality. I develop the hobo-sexual, in other words, at the intersection of both not-for-profit sex and work practices, or at the crossroads of a queer materialism. Influenced by both feminist materialism and poststructuralism, my formulation of the hobo-sexual extends the recurrent metaphor of the nomad in French poststructuralist theory--a metaphor that promotes anti-Oedipal desire as resistant to capitalist grand narratives that value fixity--but, as well, my project charts the material consequences of such practices of desire and resistance. In mapping the hobo-sexual in American literature and culture, I enable a connective history of 'classed' queer practice, rather than one based solely on identity politics. My research shows a prevalence of transient sexual practice, both heterosexual and homosexual, among American hobos of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet these same sexual practices are consistently eclipsed in social and medical discourses by a national emphasis on reforming the hobo's pathological desire to wander, as opposed to remaining fixed, in employment. My work on the hobo-sexual foregrounds the hobo's agency and transience in sex and work, both of which, in bourgeois discourse, have been dismissed as simply degenerative. The hobo-sexual, likewise, disrupts assumptive discourses of the American hobo as white and male. I argue that the carceral continuum of Jim Crow disciplined much of the African-American male laborer's transience and agency, while the term prostitute obscured the hobo lifestyle of sisters of the road. Employing the hobo-sexual as a connective figure in material queer culture, I argue that such twentieth-century American writers as Audre Lorde, Sarah Schulman and Eileen Myles produce hobo-sexual characters that challenge and, therefore, expose the misogyny, homophobia and racism historically used to buttress the homo-social thematic in dominant national discourse. The end result is a ' classed' queer extension of American, feminist, lesbian/gay and hobo history.
ISBN
0612880583
9780612880580