Chapter 9 - Queer Narrative

Summary

Narrative theory has been used extensively by queer theorists to reconceptualize the cultural workings of sex, gender, and sexuality, not to mention race, nation, indigeneity, and class, among other key categories. This chapter provides an overview of some queer renderings of narrative. The chapter focuses on the interconnections between narrative, sexuality, modernity, and colonialism before considering some dominant narrative genres and queer critical engagements with these: the transition autobiography, the coming out narrative, and the “progress” narrative, explored at the level of the individual and of the collective and historical. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the uses of some of these narrative forms in the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in the Republic of Ireland.