The Struggle is Real: Queer Horror, Pathology and Mental Illness

Citation

Elliott-Smith D (2023) The Struggle is Real: Queer Horror, Pathology and Mental Illness. Fear 2000. Fear 2000, Sheffield Hallam, 27.07.2023-29.07.2023.

Abstract
This keynote builds upon my previous and current research into the emergence of the New Queer Horror sub-genre in Queer Horror Film and Television (2016) and New Queer Horror Film and Television (2020). Here I argue that, in recent years, the longstanding monstrous-queer metaphors that have existed in the horror genre since its inception have ‘stepped out of the shadows’ in contemporary queer horror films, where queerness becomes explicit rather than implicit. I have been particularly interested in the use of Queer Horror narratives that foreground the impact of living a queer life in a largely oppressive, heteronormative and often queerphobic world. To explore this, this keynote will also revisit my previous considerations of zombie/monster theory and queer hauntology, both to outline how queer horror film depicts queer Otherness and to highlight the mental health implications of growing up queer. Zombie and undead narratives showcase the isolation and alienation felt both from within and outwith certain queer sub-cultures and communities, while films like Closet Monster (2015), Thelma (2017), The Quiet Room (2018), and Hypochondriac (2022) all demonstrate the impact of conservative familial repression on queer youth, resulting in the split between self and Other which is often visualised in monstrous form via the milieu of hospitalisation/medical treatment of mental illness. The performative elements of these living and undead queer figures present themselves in the corporeal reality of their experience in the form of panic attacks, self-harm, anxiety, ‘passing’ as normative, the use of therapy as a ‘cure’ and the marginalisation of the queer community. There is a sense here that this repression of one’s true authenticity never truly leaves us as queer people, even when we have come to terms with our gendered or sexual difference. Living a queer life in a queerphobic and heteronormative society has a traumatising effect on the queer individual, and indeed gives the queer person a great daily burden to carry. Horror seems a fitting genre to depict that anguish. The act of ‘coming out’ is often seen as an emancipatory and celebratory act of self-affirmation, but it can also be seen, by contrast, as one of self-immolation or self-loss and, for some people, coming out can be seen as a kind of dying. Transposing this onto the memories of one’s life in and out of the closet seems fitting. The person you may well have thought you once were, or that society had hoped you were, or forced you to be — an imposition that Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980) — is left behind upon coming out and they are essentially “ghosted.” That is, the individual’s previous sense of an assumed straight self (either assumed by oneself or by others) becomes excised and, henceforth, is largely invisible to oneself and to others, yet remains invisibly present in still ‘haunting’ the subject. For queer people, coming out is never truly an act that occurs only once, for we continually come out throughout our lives in different ways, to different people, and at different times. While we can understand this to be a repetitive, (re)affirming act, it can also be seen as a repetitive traumatic one — thus the accrual of multiple “ghostings”. Considering this, I will contemplate supernaturally-oriented Queer Horror texts Rift (2017) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2021), texts that often align themselves with what Alexandra Warwick calls ‘contemporary Gothic’ (2007). Utilising Elisabeth Freeman’s work on chrononormativity (2010), and Ellis Hanson’s reading of Sedgwick’s 1993 work on paranoid/reparative reading strategies around Gothic forms, I want to suggest that such contemporary Queer Horror perhaps moves us towards an answer to Hanson’s cautionary question in Queer Gothic (2007). Hanson asks how we can understand and enjoy the queer pleasures of paranoia and horror ‘without limiting our responses to pathologizing, moralising or just giggling’ and I want to conclude that such example texts included in this keynote offer a ‘reparative reading of the Gothic that does not seek to fully redeem us from the genre.’