PhD student research interests
Matthew Helmers
The stated research question of my Ph.D. project is: 'How is the homosexual subject conceptualized?' However, attempting to provide an answer for this question has become a challenge, and it is this challenge which I am now pursuing more in depth. To this extent, I am examining traditional ways in which the homosexual subject has been conceptualized, and then rethinking these conceptualizations in light of internal incongruities between the analyses and conceptualizations and the source texts. My main avenue of inquiry at the moment is through the line of 'homosexual panic' and panic in general, and attempting to reassess what this 'panic' means for the subject, and how it is rendered intelligible within culture. To this end, I am looking at the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and also the earlier works of Lacan, Freud and Caillois, and ultimately attempting to combine these views with the judicial interpretation of homosexual panic, and then rethinking all of these structures through the 1980s writings of Jean Baudrillard. Ultimately, I'm hoping to come to an understanding of subjectivity or 'selfhood' and how this concept dialogues with concepts of panic throughout the 1900s in English and American cultures.