Queers, freaks, hunchbacks, and hermaphrodites: psychosocial and sexual behavior in the novels of Carson McCullers.

Abstract

Focusing on her five novels, this study examines the ways in which Carson McCullers prefigures late twentieth-century queer theory analysis. McCullers' fiction incorporates the post-modern concept of a continuum of human sex and gender expression; a destabilizing examination of the interconnectedness of homophobia, misogyny, and male homosociability; a realistic representation of a hermaphroditic or third-sex category; a critique of compulsory heterosexuality; and an examination of changing cultural models in which conventional ideologies are de-naturalized and made problematic.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) calls identity itself into question as its characters transgress relational sex and gender categories. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) critiques the institution of the United States military and its promotion of aggressive heterosexual masculinity. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943) presents a woman in overalls---or a man in a red dress---who is both masculine and feminine and who challenges binary schemes of sexual identification. The Member of the Wedding (1946) presents a young girl's refusal to become "woman" as she embraces her androgyny and accommodates her differences in a world that insists on heteronormativity. Clock Without Hands (1961) locates "queerness" in a repressive social order which becomes the focus of shame and prejudice it once projected onto its socially ostracized figures.

McCullers' life itself invites a queer reading of her fiction; her personal rejection of conventionality is supported by biographical data and is reflected in her humanistic portrayals of the marginalized characters who haunt her novels.