This thesis seeks to challenge the current relationship between traditional psychoanalysis and queer theory by using the novels Nightwood and The Member of the Wedding to demonstrate the ways in which notions of sexual development that underpin psychoanalysis tend to be normative. Also, these novels expose discrepancies in “straight” narratives of development and self-formation by troubling fixed notions of identity. The characters of these two texts are queer children or child-like queer people who are at odds with the ways in which they have been categorized by the world around them.
In order to explore the development of the queer children in these novels, I argue in Chapter One for a queered vision of Lacan's mirror stage that does not see these children as flat, but convex. The convex mirror stage allows for precarious sexual development that does not adhere to normative notions of linearity and progression. This convex mirror stage also deconstructs the relationship between mind, body, and culture by using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold. The marriage of the fold and the mirror stage in the convex mirror allows for psychoanalysis to interrogate queerness beyond subjectivity and fixed identity.
The second chapter of this thesis explores utopian possibilities using Lacan's Agency of the Letter. Because normative structures like psychoanalysis obscure sites for queer utopian possibility, this project also uncovers the ways in which Barnes and McCullers hint at queer utopia despite its seeming impossibility. By working within the worlds that oppress them, the queer children in these novels gesture towards queer utopias.
The final chapter of this project is devoted to exploring the ways in which queer children circumvent the normative structures upheld by psychoanalysis in order to create their own paths towards queerness. Privileging “becoming” rather than “being” this chapter interrogates the relationship between queer child and notions of animalism, wildness, and primitivism. By revaluing wildness and beastliness, Nightwood and The Member of the Wedding reveal how queer children can map their own sexual development despite of psychoanalysis.
As a whole, this project is concerned with development but resists any fixed notions of identity or a narrative of development. Instead, I argue for a precarious relationship between psychoanalysis and the queer child one in which the child is constantly interrogating our notions of growth, gender, and sexuality.