LONELY AFFECTS AND QUEER SEXUALITIES: A POLITICS OF LONELINESS IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CULTURE

Abstract

<p>In this thesis, I explore the manner in which loneliness has been presented culturally, scientifically, politically, and academically as the asocial antithesis of happiness. I suggest lonely people are presented throughout these discourses as misfits, trapped by their lonely feelings and in danger of entrapping others. I further put forth that the impetus to understand and promote a conception of loneliness as depressive and alienating is politically inflected, strengthening neoliberal models of sociality that rely upon particular notions of good citizenship. As a consequence, Western scientific, academic, and cultural discourses continue to reinforce particular brands of “productive” intimacy (heterosexual, middle/upper class, able-bodied, white, monogamous partnerships), while strategically policing the lonely person’s presumed immaturity, negativity, and illegibility.</p> <p>The thesis begins by considering how recent scientific studies are lodged in evolutionary models, with the implication that they position loneliness as an abnormal and dangerous setback to Western sociability and its progress. As a corollary, I demonstrate that contemporary cultural narratives such as Dan Savage's "It Gets Better Project" that have surfaced in order to address queer, teen suicide, bullying, and violence tend to frame loneliness as a degenerate feeling that warrants survivalist tactics and adaptations away from queerness. In scientific and cultural discourses alike, then, loneliness has become stuck onto queer subjects and can only be understood as a condition that infects a sub-set of weak and vulnerable subjects. Judged for their seeming narcissistic and unhappy tendencies, queer sexualities come to be considered dangerous and contagious, and lonely queer bodies are being represented in scientific, cultural, and social media narrativizations as the reason for a larger, Western failed happiness.</p> <p>The body of the thesis deepens and extends these concerns by analyzing the marked tension between the figurative language that speaks of loneliness as a pathology and an (a)political desire for selfish individualism. I suggest that in light of the current failures of Western sociality what is needed is a space for an understanding of the everydayness of loneliness and its potential to be political. Drawing on critical work on affective politics, this thesis makes a space for the lonely queers among us. Focusing attention on four key areas— the science of loneliness, lesbian narcissism, childhood sexuality, and queer disability—I argue that loneliness is neither an exceptional trauma, nor is it extraordinary: rather, it is every subject’s inheritance. By envisioning loneliness as possibly pleasurable as much as it is traumatic, and by seeing the act of declaring oneself lonely as a political strategy, I argue that we may be encouraged to re-evaluate the ways in which we experience relationality, human empathy, and sociality. Moreover, our shared loneliness as Western subjects may actually have the potential to rupture the rigidity of societal paradigms (sexism, ableism, classism, racism, and homophobia) that are based upon exclusion, upward mobility, and capital gain.</p>