The Queerness of Character-Details

Abstract

Abstract This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension of character as an aesthetic form. Character-details beckon for queer uptake, or the recirculation of character-details into contexts, genres, and media to unlock new narrative trajectories for queerness. Character-details thus highlight the promiscuously queer relationality of character as an aesthetic form. The essay then turns to A. K. Summers’s graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014), which takes up the character-details of Tintin to expand the narration of gender nonconformity. Finally, the essay traces how character-details focalize bisexual queer eroticism in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” from Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Taken together, these texts exemplify the centrality of queer characters to—and character as an aesthetic form in—contemporary queer literature.