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The Body of Work

John Rechy’s Sensual Poetics

Bucher, Michael

American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 302

2019

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Abstract

John Rechy, best known for the international bestseller ‘City of Night’ (1963), begins to publish explicitly gay short stories and essays on Chicano life in ‘Evergreen Review’ in the late fifties. In depicting the lives of hustlers and queens, Rechy’s early fiction also provides the first affirmative images of transwomen in American letters. ‘The Body of Work. John Rechy’s Sensual Poetics’ is the first book length study of the writings of this pioneer of both queer and Chicano literature. It argues that his work is shaped by two lines. The first line, shot through with loneliness and despair, is marked by a phrase that Rechy, a lapsed Catholic, uses throughout his oeuvre: “no substitute for salvation.” The second line, a camp or sensual line, is first implied in the presence of drag and unfolds in a Series of defiant gestures throughout Rechy’s work. It emerges from moments of resistance and solidarity in pre-Stonewall America. The tension between these lines is constitutive of Rechy’s poetics.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Cover Cover
Titel III
Imprint IV
Contents VII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX
1 INTRODUCTION: HONEY, YOUR MUSCLES ARE AS GAY AS MY DRAG 5
Review: The Body of Work 31
Survey of Secondary Literature on Rechy’s Work 59
2 THEORY: WRITING AND RELATING 81
Writing as an Anti-Social Act? 83
Henry Heifetz and the Anti-Social Writer 83
Leo Bersani and the Anti-Social Thesis 86
Lee Edelman and Anti-Relational Queer Theory 90
Style and the Forging of New Relations 94
Foucault on Relations, Modes of Life, and Style 95
Foucault and the Ambiguity of Power in the Invention of Homosexuality 101
Foucault, Deleuze and the Function of Literature 105
Deleuze and the Politics of Literature 109
The Minor: Infamous Men, the Lumpen, and the People to Come 119
Deleuze and Guattari: Minor Literature 120
The Lives of Infamous Men 124
The Lumpen & Transgender History 132
Rechy’s Sensual Poetics 141
3 GROWING WINGS: „CITY OF NIGHT“ (1963) 147
Rage against the Helplessness of Man 147
Queens and Militancy 165
Unpredictable Patterns: Sexual Trauma and Minor Literature 179
4 A NEW FOCUS ON THE BODY: „NUMBERS“ (1967) 201
Fabulous Muscles 202
Park Life 223
5 AT ODDS WITH GAY LIBERATION: „THE SEXUAL OUTLAW“ (1977) AND „RUSHES“ (1979) 247
Between Non-Fiction Novel and Urban Pastoral: A Proliferation of Genres 249
Bodybuilding and the Art of Living One’s Life 272
Rechy and S&M 282
6 THE GESTURES OF INFAMOUS PEOPLE: „ABOUT MY LIFE AND THE KEPT WOMAN“ (2008) 295
7 CONCLUSION 315
BIBLIOGRAPHY 323
Backcover Backcover