Abstract

Homelands: Nation, Narration, and Queer Journeys intervenes in contemporary debates around citizenship, nationalist ideology, and sexuality, and articulates the shifting strategies available to minority subjects for constructing identity and community in relation to the nation and national culture in contemporary America. My study draws on and forges linkages across a variety of poststructuralist, queer and postcolonial critical traditions that address the relationships between identity, subjectivity, society and nation. Throughout this project I resist a simplistic understanding of identity, and consider the complex intersections of sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and age , in order to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the relations of minority voices and subjects to the nation. Throughout Homelands, I map the rhetorical strategies, discourses, and structures of sentiment that produce a sense of belonging/not-belonging to community and nation. Working from a variety of minority perspectives that challenge, interrupt, and sometimes contribute to the homogenizing, normative logic of national ideology, I examine a number of queer ways of belonging/not-belonging that attempt to reinvent not only notions of identity and community, but also of political participation and the public sphere in late twentieth-century America. ;In Homelands, I focus specifically on the various modes of the journey narrative and posit that this broadly conceived genre offers the most comprehensive considerations of both the time and space of the nation, as well as the functions of history and location in the construction of a national identity. Throughout, I chart the movements of marginalized voices and communities that redraw the psychic and physical boundaries of the nation, insert alternative or minority histories into nationalist ideology, and redefine the constitution of the nation. In examining the changing relationships of margins to center in the fractured public and political spheres, Homelands reflects upon not only the coming into a critical national consciousness of minoritized groups and voices, but also the fragile and conflicted state of the nation in post-WWII America