UC San Diego

The following dissertation takes faggotry as an analytic for thinking about queer freedom. By queer freedom, I mean both the freedom to be queer and a queer relation to freedom. Faggotry is a phenomenon of mixing that swirls together people, performances, things, and so on along queer lines. In particular, faggotry is a mixing of racial, gender, and sexual performances that produces one as an Other (being queer) and also that allows one to experience the world queerly (relation to freedom). Alongside queer theories, such as José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, schizoanalysis serves as my guiding methodology. I draw on various schizoanalytic concepts and critiques from Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.In each chapter, I study a twentieth-century American novel that is relevant to the phenomenon I describe as faggotry. The chapters are arranged in the order of their movement toward queer freedom, from Burroughs’s impossibility of queer freedom to Carson’s manifestation of queer freedom. My analysis begins with William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, in which freedom is not possible for a faggot. Burroughs’s faggot, I contend, is socially produced with no possibility of escape, yet Burroughs’s text performs the destructive task of schizoanalysis by deterritorializing sexuality. Next, I turn to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. In Baldwin’s novel, escape repeatedly appears on the horizon of the protagonist’s consciousness, but, in my reading, he fails to follow the lines of escape to find queer freedom despite having the conditions for a schizoid breakthrough. After Baldwin, I analyze Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade: A Novel.” Nugent’s text produces a ground on which queer freedom becomes possible. I argue that this ground is best understood as what Deleuze and Guattari call a “Body without Organs”—the basis for desire. Finally, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse presents a red monster who learns to love himself, becoming free, despite a history of abuse and “wrong love.” I contend that Carson’s red monster learns to quasi-cause himself, thereby effecting the positive tasks of schizoanalysis.