The queer theory

Queer theory emerged in the early 1990s from the fields of women's studies and queer studies. According to Marinucci (20), queer theory is based on feminist challenges to the concept that gender has to do with the essential self, as well as the study of gay or lesbian careful scrutiny of socially produced sexual actions and the formation of identities. Whereas gay or lesbian studies focused on natural and unnatural behavior in relation to homosexual behavior, queer theory broadens its focus to include all sorts of identification or sexual activity that fall into deviant as well as normative categorization. Queer has been related predominantly to subjects of gay, lesbian and bisexual, however also involves subjects like gender corrective surgery, gender ambiguity, intersex and cross-dressing.

Truman Garcia Capote was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter and novelist. Several of his works like nonfiction, plays, novels and short stories are acknowledged in literary classics. He was known for his works like In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. One of his work Other Voices, Other Rooms released in the 1940s recognizes how Capote has used gothic paradigms as well as the process of the text of compromising Gothic motifs to pinpoint the queer characters who in this case are the two teenagers (Freeman,219). Furthermore, the Camp discourse of the text is emancipating power which quenches the approaching background of the Southern-gothic to uncover the young characters’ sexual potentials. In the middle of the sea of fiction of late 40s-50s which regularly entrenched the loss of the homosexual character, this story functions as an exemption: over a hilarious Camp artistic, the work reciprocates its innate queer desires.

Capote uses various elements of queer literature in the novel. These elements include the characters and their characteristics, themes, plot, setting, the point of view, tone and conflict. These elements are significant in developing the novel as a queer literature. The setting has an immense effect on the plot and characters who assist in developing the novel as a queer literature through their traits. This paper will discuss the novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms as an example of a queer literature.

Other Voices, Other Rooms apparently froze scene are salient in part because they review concepts of queer cosmopolitan, movement or flight. Randolph comes up with his analysis of queer movement when he narrates stories of the love that is lost and linking in early days of a dandy. Randolph was once a traveler and painter, he spatially and temporarily mergers the pleasure and qualms about his past that was mobile with a stagnant present which is a perilous disparity to the normative idea of “metro normativity” or mobility. Randolph’s delicate nature towards the moveable dandyism of his preceding but his disable affect confinement yields other queer desires. His bedbound yet inventively moveable body eventually breakdowns merits amongst stasis and movement. Randolph narrates that he prefers immobile queer pleasures of the Landing to Joel, who at the start repels their boredom of this way of life and tries to elope.

Randolph unexplained instances that he is “desperately, desperately ill” permits him to retreat from the outside world. Though postal amenity becomes a means of postponed cosmopolitan wish through which Randolph sanctions his unusual disabled movement from within the landing. Each day Randolph thumbs through an almanac listing “every town and hamlet on the globe” (Capote,154). Randolph then sends mails to his unanswered love interest, Pepe Alvarez, well sentient of dead end mails sent to various town every day. These letters seem to do away with possibilities of contacts by daily reducing the city in Randolph’s Almanac, but they are more of a passive enactment of nostalgia. The futility of Randolph’s letters that bear no specific addresses model a non-theological approach to queer contact that thwarts narrative expectation of able-bodied intimacy.

Randolph finds a possible life outside of the Landing more stifling than the illness that often confines him to his bedroom, his duties as caretaker of the paralyzed Edward Sansom, and his mentorship of Joel. Once he and Joel move outside of the Landing in an attempt to visit the local hermit, Little Sunshine, the violent surveillance of the world disorients him: Randolph walks “in a circle, his hands stretched before him as if he were playing blind man’s bluff . . . He shook himself like a wet animal, And Joel realized then the truth; he saw how helpless Randolph was: more paralyze than Mr. Sansom, more childlike than Miss Wisteria, what else could he do, once outside and alone, but describe a circle, the zero of his nothingness?” (Capote, 22). Randolph lapses into repetition once he is untethered from the multiple bodies and subjectivities of the Landing. Even as Joel witnesses this helpless perseveration and loss of strength in the outside world, he also notices the beginnings of his willingness to care for Randolph (Freeman,219).

Once outside, Randolph muses about what would become of him if he moved away from the confines of Skully’s Landing. He speculates that he would collapse into a hellish version of de-individualization than what he finds at the Landing: “If I were wise as the mole, if I were free and equal, then what an admirable whorehouse I should be the Madame of; more likely though, I would end up just Mrs. Nobody in Particular, a dumpy corset less creature with a brick head husband and stepladder brats and a pot of stew on the stove” (Capote, 45).Here Randolph rejects caretaking economy based on reproduction and fixed gender roles but also rejects independence from the bodies he cares for. Te collectivity of his life with Amy, Edward Sansom, Joel, and Zoo afford him the space to perform his queerness while also situating himself firmly in a community that rejects false binaries of individual versus collective, past versus present, able versus disabled, and mobile versus static. At first, Joel cannot accept this disability empathy and instead attempts to enter other queered and disabled communities, on an excursion to the freak show with his tomboy companion, Idabel, before returning to the Landing.

Joel returns to the Landing and recognizes that it offers its own queer pleasures through a substitute mobility prompted through disability. Landing’s inter-implicated social world rotates around the care of paralyzed Edward Sansom. The domestic caretaking world accustoms the initially uncomfortable and skeptical Joel to the contingent pleasures of corporeal blending with disabled bodies (Fahy, Thomas and Project, 47).

When the mother of Joel, Randolph his cousin introduced him to his immobile father for the first time and acquainted him with the delicate movements, he utilizes to communicate. Joel breakdown Randolph’s as well as Amy’s specifically forms of gender into “Siamese twins: they seemed a kind of freak animal, half-man-half-woman” (Capote, 56) as they teach Joel the best way to take good care of Sansom. The last name of Edward that is Sansom is considered a superhuman biblical warrior; he stops the masculinists imagination of Joel of his father as an “a circus strongman . . . A big swell millionaire.”

Radclif is suspicious that the man who wrote the letter to the aunt of Joel cannot be considered to be manly enough. Especially, the handwriting used in the letter makes the father more suspicious. However, what is actually exciting is that gender suspicion as well relates with a real dishonesty. The father to Joel later finds out that Joel never wrote any letter, but Randolph did. As we are aware, Randolph is not confined to the manly-man gender expression.

Sam Radclif is exhibiting that he is self-conscious and aware that he is inflicting his own opinions onto others. However, he also does not really care. Moreover, he puts the word "real" in quotation marks, as though it were the uncertain selection of terminology. And it is, there are no one "real" means to be a boy. He had his idea of what a real man ought to be alike and to some extent the child offended them.

Within secluded bedroom scenes, these elaborate descriptions of inert mobility take place far from the medicalization and standardization of bodies that is symptomatic of modernity in the outside world. Gender is much more fluid within the Landing’s atmosphere as well: the Landing’s servant, Zoo, relays to Joel the story of Randolph’s paralyzed mother, Angela Lee, who moved swiftly through physical states of gender (Blackburn et al. 13).

The assessment of Joel of Idabel is that she is a girl but behaves like a male, “tomboy.” According to him, a tomboy is regarded as dreadful. However, what is fascinating is that the nasty lady from his past, Eileen Otis is the one referred to as the tomboy. In the case she would have been a boy, people would have said that she is a bully, but not the specific term of gender. Besides, he also had a tomboy as a sister, and from the days of Otis, he had developed a strong hatred of any tomboy. Eileen Otis with roughneck who was little and beefy used to stay on the same block in New Orleans; she used to have a habit of approaching him, stripping his pant off then throwing them on the highest point of the tree (Freeman,219).

In his movement from New Orleans to the Landing in search of his father, Joel gradually develops a bodily consciousness that is imbricated with the bodies of others. Upon discovering that Zoo was attacked by her former lover and now bears a scar on her throat, he muses: “Maybe she was like him, and the world had a grudge against her, too. But Christa mighty he didn’t want to end up with a scar like that. Except what chance have you got when there is always trickery in one hand, and danger in the other” (Capote, 78). Instead of precipitating an immediate rupture between a young white boy’s gothic imagination of potential violence and the actual gendered violence enacted upon a black woman’s body, the sight of Zoo’s scar causes Joel to consider how his own body is also vulnerable to disruption. Somewhere between solipsism and identification, Joel imagines a bodily connection with Zoo that provides a conduit for him to identify with other marked and disabled bodies.

In conclusion, the novel has greatly served as a queer literature through its plot, setting, the point of view, tone and the characters. Capote has used gothic paradigms as well as the process of the text of compromising Gothic motifs to pinpoint the queer characters who in this case are the two teenagers. From the novel, it is evident that gays struggle a lot to open up on their sexual orientation. Rodolph depicts the plight that the modern homosexuals face when they try to open up about their sexual orientation, they are affected psychologically since they are afraid about how the society will judge them

Works Cited

Blackburn, Mollie V, Varoline T.Clark, and Emily A Nemeth. “Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT- Themed Literature: What Queer Literature can Offer Young Adult Readers.” Journal of Literacy Research, vol.47, no.1, 2015, pp 11-48, doi: 10.1177/1086296X15568930

Fahy, Thomas R., and Project Muse. Understanding Truman Capote. University of South Caroina Press, Columbia, 2014.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, Durham [N.C.], 2010.

Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2003.

Justice, Daniel H., and James H Cox. “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory.” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of The Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, vol.20, no1, 2008, pp. xxiii-xiv, doi:10.1353/ail.0.0003.

Marinucci, Mimi, Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection between Queer and Feminist Theory. Zed Books, New York; London;, 2010.

Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Prnguin Books, 1964. Print.