Slight of Home: Queer Theory, Joseph Losey, and the Architecture of Desire

Abstract

This thesis aims to bring the notion of slightness to bear on a reading of domestic space in the films of the American-born, British film-maker Joseph Losey. By drawing on psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural materialist frameworks, I examine the material traces, patterns, and forms of house and home, which cannot be folded into logics of identity. Rather than parsing a form of domesticity that is queer because of the nature of the intimacy or sexuality that it houses, I argue that the queerness of domesticity can be found in the forms, patterns and details of home which are too subtle to rise to the discursive level at which home becomes a disciplinary category.

Although the theoretical frame of this project is largely informed by psychoanalytic and specifically Lacanian-orientated queer theory, its focus on slightness marks a departure from the emphasis on negativity that has qualified this branch of the field. Examining in detail the Losey’s films The Servant (1963), Eve (1962), Secret Ceremony (1968), and The Go-Between (1971), and drawing on materialist, semiotic and architectural points of reference, I explore the ambiguities of desire that inhere in the forms and detail of domestic space. I interpret these not as a deficit or withholding that either stands to be corrected or that insists on its own lack, but rather as a texture or quality already realized in its insignificance. In this way, the thesis offers a way to reframe the negativity associated with Lacanian psychoanalytic queer theory and to think of the queerness of domesticity as a kind of slightness that can be read in the forms domesticity takes.