Date of Award

Spring 2004

Document Type

Legacy Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

English

College

College of Humanities and Fine Arts

First Advisor

Nelljean Rice

Abstract/Description

I would like to borrow a phrase from educator and queer theorist Andre Grace to examine Angel 41 in terms of a "narrative vignette" - an intimate space without structured borders. I would like to examine the work as a space whose edges blur into the culture, politics, and religion that surrounds it. This narrative vignette strives to exist among these surrounding structures (culture, politics, religion) and at the same time questions what this co-existing means with structures that seem to impose themselves upon it. Angel 41 is a queer narrative vignette by its own act of questioning its place among these structures. My use of "queer" is not to suggest another structure built to compete against those structures before mentioned. Queer is not structure. Queer is anti-structure. And as such, queer narratives are not defined by borders tightly squared off. Queer is defined by its ability to blur the edges as "a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories" (Barry 148). As proposed in Angel 41, queer does not exist within the borders of culture, politics, or religion. And it will not tolerate a fringed existence outside these borders. Queer positions itself above culture, politics, and religion where there are no borders, only a blurring.

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