International Workshop
QUEER NARRATIVES OF EXILE, TRAVEL, AND MOBILITY: REPORT
Claudiana, 6 June 2024
The workshop took place at the midway point of the four-year research project “Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900-1969,” which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund and led by Ben Robbins, PhD (Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck). The workshop considered the representation of LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups in works of literature and film that are concerned with exile, migration, and transnational movement. It investigated the different social, legal, and historical pressures that have shaped the movements of oppressed and minority groups, and it looked at different techniques from literature and film that have been used to represent these experiences. The papers were transnational in scope, focusing on narratives that move across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. The workshop was well attended by roughly 40 participants, an interdisciplinary mixture of colleagues and students from different departments at the University of Innsbruck and guest students and scholars. Three international cooperation partners from the “Networked Narratives” project also participated and presented: Heather Love (Department of English, University of Pennsylvania), Ralph Poole (Department of American Studies, University of Salzburg), and Robyn Warhol (Department of English, The Ohio State University). Love, Poole, and Warhol are internationally renowned scholars in queer and feminist literary and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Consequently, the workshop offered a great opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue between visiting scholars and researchers at the University of Innsbruck.
Ben Robbins’s welcome and introduction began by highlighting the relevance of the workshop topics by considering how queerphobic legislation continues to shape cultural production. He briefly discussed how Great Britain’s Section 28—a series of laws introduced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1988 that weren’t repealed until the early 2000s in Great Britain—prohibited public educational institutions from “promot[ing] the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” (Pyper and Tyler-Todd). Section 28 led to the silencing of a British generation, particularly younger Gen Xers and senior millennials who were born between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Robbins illustrated how the impact of Section 28 is becoming more evident in British queer cinema produced by filmmakers from this generation. Queer British directors such as Charlotte Wells (born 1987) and Andrew Haigh (born 1973) have created films that creatively respond to the prohibitions of a previous era in what Robbins termed “Section 28 dramas” that travel backwards in space and time. Wells’s 2022 film Aftersun and Haigh’s 2023 film All of Us Strangers both stage encounters between queer adults and their parents in imagined scenarios from the past. These are the kinds of connections between pressures on queer lives, mobility, and narrative form that the rest of the workshop analyzed in detail.
In her presentation, Robyn Warhol began by providing a methodological framework for analyzing narratives of exile, travel, and mobility using intersectional and queer narratologies. She introduced three key developments in queer narrative theory: the queer archive, teleology, and the chronotope. She described the queer archive as a “personal scrapbook,” which combines elements of the public and private. She used insights from her book Love Among the Archives (2015, co-written with Helena Michie), which is based on 50 years’ worth of diaries and letters, to illustrate the different ways in which the life of a Victorian, middle-class gay man can be narrated (for example, as a Bildungsroman, marriage or inheritance plot) through the piecemeal contents of the archive. Warhol also considered the struggle of narrating queer lives due to their resistance to teleological structures, since they do not necessarily move inevitably to marriage and reproduction. Outlining advances in queer narrative theory, Warhol introduced some alternatives to teleology, including features such as repetition and alternative temporalities, the repudiation of cause-and-effect structures, and the refusal of closure. Warhol concluded by adapting Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, in which time and space are considered to be inseparable in narrative, to situations of forced or restricted movement. She situated this concept in the body, since, she emphasized, you cannot be in a specific time without being in a specific place—the two are inseparable in experience and in narrative. As a case study, she referenced Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s recent article from 2019 that analyzed Israeli-Palestinian checkpoints—described in narratives written by and about both Israelis and Palestinians—as a chronotope of the road that embodies blocked movement and dead time. Warhol concluded with an invitation to look for chronotopes in queer narratives of exile, and to consider how the road may be structured differently for queer people.
Ben Robbins’s presentation, “The Anglophone Queer Exile Narrative in Transnational Context(s),” moved through different stages in queer history to show how narratives of exile may be characterized by retrospection: a desire to speculate on what might have been possible in the past had social and legal oppression not previously shaped queer lives. The exile narratives he considered attempt to fill silences of the past by revisiting works that had previously been censored or destroyed. Robbins focused on two fictionalized memoirs— Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind (1976) and John Lehmann’s In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976)—in which the queer British and American authors revisit their experiences of exile in 1930s Germany and Austria as a result of queerphobic legislation and attempt to fill gaps in their own archives. He considered three common narrative features that circulated across these texts: a negotiation of the precariousness of the queer archive; hypothetical focalization, or perspectival speculation on what could have been recognized or narrated in the past had circumstances been different; and chronotopes of queer exile, with a focus on the unpredictability of characters’ movements through space. Robbins concluded that the exile literature of Isherwood and Lehmann shows us how the involuntary mobilities of queer characters produce narratives with neither fixed destinations nor predictable outcomes.
Antonio Salmeri (Department of Romance Studies, University of Innsbruck) gave a paper titled “Sophia Loren in a Transatlantic Frame: Between Gender and Time-Image,” which focused on the transatlantic cinema of the Italian actor between Italian and US film traditions and cultures. Salmeri considered the gender roles and cliches with which Loren has been associated, but also explored the paradoxical nature of her star image; while she is made a spectacle of erotic interest in her films, she cannot be reduced to a passive role. Salmeri introduced a range of techniques that undercut Loren’s status as an object of visual consumption in transatlantic cinema, such as her self-reflexive stardom and role-playing, since she often plays actresses in metafictional works, and her ability to evade the desires of the anti-heroes that surround her, particularly in Italian comedies of the 1960s. In the discussion that followed, Salmeri reflected on the comedy genre and its particular affordances in terms of drawing attention to the artificiality of filmic roles for women. He also considered the evolution in the transnational framing of Naples, Loren’s home city— whereas in the 1960s Naples was synonymous with Italy, in the contemporary moment it has been positioned as the Other of Italy.
In the afternoon session of the workshop, Ralph Poole’s paper explored queer Turkishness in pan-European cinema. Poole began by considering how definitions of home have been redefined for queer people and invited us to consider home as a transnational and transcultural space of longing and attachment. He applied these concepts to two films about queer Turkish migrants: Beyto (2020, dir. Gitta Gsell, Switzerland), which explores a three-way relationship between two Turkish men and a woman who plan to move to Germany, and Zenne Dancer (2012, dir. Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay, Turkey), which centers around a trio of queer Turkish men engaged in migration from country to city. Poole compared the two works as illustrations of the notion that finding a home for queers requires involuntary mobility. Poole read these films using concepts from queer narratology and queer theories of migration and diaspora. He also reflected on the limits of these approaches, which derive from Euro-American social, political, and cultural contexts, when dealing with non-European contexts. He performed a transnational reading by illustrating how these works adapt and queer the Heimatfilm genre—popular in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria from the late 1940s to early 1960s—by drawing on features of fluidity and flexibility that this mobile genre accommodates. Poole drew on the narrative theoretical concept of dis-narration to illustrate how these films work to question the narrative that we have seen.
Heather Love, in her presentation “‘Life as a Whole’: Oscar Wilde’s Writing from the Other Side,” examined the book De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), which Wilde completed while in prison at Reading Gaol before he went into exile after his release in 1897. Love interrogated the gaps between the meanings of exile, travel, and mobility, in particular the difficulty of distinguishing between forced and chosen exile in the lives of queers who are marginalized in multiple ways. She looked into how Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency in 1895 brought an end to his cosmopolitan status as a “travelling salesmen of himself.” She approached Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol as a state of exile from his “life of pleasure and literary sociability.” Love deftly analyzed the various forms of narrative inversion that appear in De Profundis, a text in which Wilde presents his infamy y as the obverse condition to his fame and celebrity. She also countered established readings of the work, which considers it to be a condemnation of irony and the antithesis of the comic, epigrammatic style for which Wilde was famous. Instead, Love argued that Wilde’s love of pleasure and beauty finds its counterpart in his embrace of suffering as a spiritual exercise, and he disavows neither. Love ultimately concluded that Wilde’s life served as an example of the ambiguities of forced exile, as a literary figure associated with both privilege and marginality.
There was also a poster exhibition of student projects from the “Gender Experiments in Fiction” Master’s course in the Türing-Saal, which was coordinated by Dorothee Birke (Department of English, University of Innsbruck). Students presented gender experiments in narrative from five texts: short stories by Emma Donoghue (“The Tale of the Rose,” 1993), Sarah Hall (“Mrs Fox,” 2013), Kristen Roupenian (“Cat Person,” 2017), and Ali Smith (“The First Person,” 2008), and a novel by Ursula LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969). Participants in the workshop were able to look around the posters and engage in discussion with the students. Birke and Robbins gathered feedback from the students in a follow-up session of the seminar on 13 June. Students observed that they enjoyed the alternative presentation format as it was more open and comfortable, and there was more time for questions and answers. They looked forward to applying the ideas they gathered from the workshop in their final papers, including the methodologies introduced by Warhol and the concepts discussed in relation to queer archives.
The day concluded with a final roundtable, chaired by Birke, in which Love, Poole, Robbins, and Warhol discussed topics covered in the workshop further and made some connections between teaching and research. The panelists considered their experiences of teaching queer narratives in classroom environments where students come from diverse international backgrounds and different regional environments (for example, urban versus rural). Poole considered how to create an environment in which students feel comfortable to talk about their own identities within the context of analyzing contemporary queer cultural works. Love described the classroom using Ellen Rooney’s concept of the “semiprivate room,” a space in which one is free to talk about the self without completely tying it to one’s individual identity, which may exclude others: a form of impersonal intimacy.
Works Cited
Pyper, Douglas, and Joe Tyler-Todd, “The 20th Anniversary of the Repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988.” House of Commons Library, UK Parliament, Research Briefing, 28 Nov. 2023, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0213/
Lanser, Susan S., and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. “Narratology at the Checkpoint: The Politics and Poetics of Entanglement.” Narrative 27.3 (2019): 245-269.
Michie, Helena, and Robyn Warhol, Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor. Edinburgh UP, 2015.
Rooney, Ellen. “A semiprivate room.” differences: A journal of feminist cultural studies 13.1 (2002): 128-156.