Thesis Format
Monograph
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Supervisor
Bruhm, Steven
Abstract
My study examines the contemporary (post-1969) boys’ school story, locating its construction of queer identity and male homosocial desire in the genre’s roots in nineteenth-century works such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). I suggest that that the genre represents a continuum stretching from what I term the canonical school story to a selection of contemporary variants in which the patterns queer desire and expression remain largely unchanged since the genre’s Victorian-era popularization. My analysis reads this continuum through the lens of Queer Theory, drawing upon Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Elizabeth Freeman to examine how queer identity and desire is represented in an environment that is often prohibitive towards such expressions. I also look at some of the ways in which childhood and adolescence is constructed in the contemporary era to show how the ways in which we continue to imagine young people in various spaces reflects anxieties about queer youth. My selection of texts ranges across several forms of media, reflecting the popular consumption and reception of contemporary stories about youth: Gordon Korman’s Young Adult series collectively known as the Bruno and Boots novels (1978-1995), the film My Bodyguard (1980), Shura’s music video for her song “What’s it Gonna Be?”, and Bill Konigsberg’s linked pair of Young Adult novels Openly Straight (2013) and Honestly Ben (2017). I conclude by arguing that the representations of queer identity in these texts leave a space open for more diverse representations of queer youth going forward.
Summary for Lay Audience
I study a selection of novels and visual texts, all dating from after 1969, that address the theme of queer identity and same-sex desire in what I call the contemporary boys’ school story. I argue that while literature and media aimed at children and adolescents that explore such themes might appear to be a relatively new development, the patterns that appear throughout these contemporary texts are traceable to the roots of the school story in the Victorian period. As a result, the ways in we continue to understand queer identities and same-sex desire remain dependent upon certain rigid conceptions of gender and sexuality. These assumptions are tied into the ways in which we continue to imagine young people as inhabiting certain spaces, from the neglected and impoverished urban child to the affluent child of the suburbs, and how these imaginings speak to cultural anxieties about queer youth. At the same time, the selection of Young Adult novels, films, and music videos that I examine continue to suggest different ways of thinking about and understanding queer adolescent identities that might signal a future in which more diverse representations of these identities may be allowed to flourish.
Recommended Citation
Fairall, Jeremy, "Schoolboy Romance: Queer Identity and Same-Sex Desire in the Contemporary Boys' School Story" (2024). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 10345.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/10345
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
American Film Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Queer Studies Commons