Between “Queer Space” and “Queer Landscape”: Imagining/Reappropriating a Literal Sense
摘要
By rereading well-established geoliterary issues–space and landscape–from a queer perspective, the chapter suggest the presence and the concrete action of a literary queer imagination of spatiality throughout the twentieth century. By means of a powerful investment on one’s own geographical imagination, ancestors of a contemporary queer literature, and figures of a radical change both in theory and in queer writing express the will to cross borders, identify with and appropriate specific spaces—thus contributing to situate in the present, and historically retrace, the queer, trans*, migrant subjectivity. In this respect, it underlines the importance of reconstructing a history of queer literary landscapes, albeit a contradictory one. Nevertheless, such a history of alternative ways of living, if read through a geocritical lens, provides insightful forays into what may be seen as a queer tradition of writing. Thus, a set of characteristic motives comes forth, encompassing the creation of characters emblematizing marginality and transgression, set against inspiring “exotic” landscapes, in Gide’s L’immoraliste; Anzaldúa’s constant drive towards mobility, to crossing borders; the troubled crossing, and the gradual appropriation of the big city, in Lorde’s Zami; the unresponsive contours of European cities, as described in the memoir Princesa, by de Farias Albuquerque.