PhD student research interests
REBECCA POHL
Alternative Constructions of Space and Sexuality in Recent British Fiction:
Sexing the Labyrinth
Recently, space has emerged as a key interest in literary analysis and critical theory (Blanchot 1962; Bachelard 1964; de Certeau 1984; Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991). Gender and sexuality have remained central concerns over the past decades and continue to offer new perspectives on experience and representation (Butler 1990, 1993; Roof 1991, 1996; Doan 1994; Halberstam 2005; Ahmed 2006). The proposed research seeks to combine these two issues by examining what appear to be specifically gendered and sexualized engagements with space. Thus, it intends to establish a link between the negotiation of homosexuality and the space of the labyrinth.
This link is explored in three novels by contemporary English women writers: Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault (1996), Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987) and Sarah Waters' Affinity (1999). These novels' characters enter various forms of labyrinths while negotiating their sexualities (the madhouse, the city, the gaol). The aim is to look at the labyrinth as a specific and idiosyncratic manifestation of space that offers an alternative concept especially in terms of perception as it relates to gender and sexuality.
Space, understood as both a narrative category and an experiential construct, is embedded in a visual framework and — following Foucault's analysis of the panopticon and the dissemination of power that establishes the connection between visibility, space, and normative control — is thus inherently political. How, then, can this spatial constriction be transcended to allow for alternative sexual experience and representation, i.e. non-normative experience? Does the labyrinth offer an alternative space in which alternative sexualities can be lived, can be explored? Why might the labyrinth be an appealing spatial alternative? How does it allow for alternative experience? What are its erotic implications? What are the mythological implications? While it is a superbly structured space it also appears playful — how is this contradiction engaged with?