\u201cQueerness,\u201d writes Love, is \u201cboth abject and exalted\u201d (3). This contradiction permeates the queer studies as one side aspires to \u201cfix\u201d the abjection by disregarding it and imagining a utopia, while the other emphasizes the suffering of queer lives.<\/p>\n
The attempt to deny the past, without properly dealing with it, can misfire; such an attempt is only \u201ca symptom of haunting,\u201d of pretending without succeeding (1). Queer novels, like The Well of Loneliness<\/em>, that anchor in queer suffering, are the novels that stay and haunt the readers the most, not the happy ones. Suffering seizes while happiness makes us forget. The forcibly imagined utopia for queer lives can create a delusion, a discrepancy between reality and fiction, and ultimately, apathy. In another word, we don\u2019t care about ourselves when we are happy and others don\u2019t care about us when we are happy (or pretend to be). The \u201cmass-mediated images of attractive, well-to-do gays and lesbians\u201d can generate apathy on a larger scale, within the public (3). We have had our equity, so why should anyone care about us, why should pay attention to the “reality of ongoing violence and inequality” (3). Denial of this reality for an “imaginative fix” makes it easier to happen again, to allow it to keep happening unchecked. Denial can also disregard the legacy of our ancestors, disregarding what has propelled and led us here. Love says we cannot risk such amnesia.<\/p>\n On the other hand, suffering can individualize as well, meaning that we can become it, be consumed by it, and, as Love cautioned, be \u201cdestroyed\u201d by it (1). And so the challenge for Love is to understand suffering and not be consumed into the totally crippling victimhood. Even though she claims she does not know how dwelling into the \u201cdark side\u201d can brighten queer lives, she does not mean to brighten it, at least not in the sense of \u201cwishful thinking\u201d or an amnesiac \u201cutopian desire.\u201d Going backward and \u201cfeeling backward\u201d on \u201cpainful and traumatic\u201d queer literature is not to be equated with being retrograde or homophobic. Love means to understand the past, to move beyond victimhood, to reconcile<\/em>, in order to live better, to engage with the \u201carchive of feeling,\u201d to honor the roots of queer literary history (4).\u00a0 Such roots indelibly always involve suffering and without such roots, the propagation and history of queer lives and queer literature would not be possible. The future of queer lives, then, depends on how to reconcile<\/em> with that suffering, to understand what it meant to be \u201cliving with injury\u2014\u2014not fixing it\u201d (4). No denial or utopia can advance our lives if we cannot understand and reconcile with the unavoidable rememory of our own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cQueerness,\u201d writes Love, is \u201cboth abject and exalted\u201d (3). This contradiction permeates the queer studies as one side aspires to \u201cfix\u201d the abjection by disregarding it and imagining a utopia, while the other emphasizes the suffering of queer lives. The attempt to deny the past, without properly dealing with it, can misfire; such an attempt … Continue reading Learning to Live With Injury<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}