Queer Ambivalence: Fantasies of Belonging in the Lesbian Imaginary

Abstract

This dissertation examines the representation of affective relations in theories and histories of attachment within lesbian cultures across 20th and 21st century Western contexts. Using critical discourse analysis through feminist affect studies and cultural studies frameworks at the intersection of psychoanalysis, attachment theory and trauma theory, it investigates widely disseminated representations of lesbians and queries the trope of ambivalent attachments in the lesbian imaginary. It asks, what are the affective dynamics that characterize the relationship between trauma, fantasy and attachment in the lesbian imaginary, and what are the personal, interpersonal and collective implications of this characterization? The author introduces a theory of systemic attachment trauma, queer codependency, and the concept of lesbian rage-fantasy to examine how affects produced by experiences of gender and sexual oppression can be managed by fantasies of belonging that facilitate collusion with hegemonic logics and promote political disavowal. Through interdisciplinary and intersectional analyses of lesbian life writing, novels, television series, and psychology literature, the author presents a genealogy of affective ambivalence in discourses and representations of lesbian attachments. The dissertation theorizes the affective transmission of gender and sexual oppression by analysing widespread lesbian tropes that circulate in the lesbian imaginary: the stories of lesbian u-hauling, lesbian longing, serial monogamy and lesbian processing, and lesbian figures like the codependent lesbian, the angry lesbian and the lesbian [love] addict. The chapters present a poststructuralist, decolonial, and critical deconstruction of the signifier lesbian that de-pathologizes lesbian feeling and makes intelligible the ways in which queer ambivalence can materialize in relation to systemic and interpersonal trauma.