Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past

Freccero, Carla

doi:10.1002/9780470690864.ch10

Cited by 35 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…In queer theory and literary criticism, the idea of haunting was first established by Terry Castle, who argued that the idea of the lesbian is a constant ghostly presence through Western culture (Castle 1993). In history it has more recently been invoked as a means of re-emphasising the significance of pleasure, desire and identification in the work of queer historiography (Freccero 2007). Queer spectrality as an approach to history, writes Carla Frecerro, 'may allow an opening up -or a remaining open -to the uncanny and the unknown but somehow strangely familiar .…”

Section: Spectral Trailsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Going on an outing: the historic house and queer public history

Oram

2011

Rethinking History

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Using the metaphor of ghosting, this article examines the ways in which lesbian, gay, queer (and other) visitors have looked for sexual dissidence in historic houses and their former inhabitants by exploring the complicated processes through which visitors both identify with those queer past lives, and experience a sense of otherness or historical distance from them. It focuses in particular on two sites: Plas Newydd, home of the Ladies of Llangollen; and Sissinghurst, the garden created by writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. The article questions the distinction (and often implicit hierarchy) made by academic historians between identification and queering, between similarity and otherness, in public history. Identifying historical figures as having had same-sex relationships is important in constructing a sense of selfhood for many queer women and men. Visiting a significant historic site can therefore be seen as an act of pilgrimage. Yet ghostly hints of the otherness (or alterity) of the past are inherent in the complexity of the historic house. This dissonance is provoked by contrary interpretations of the household's past found in biographies or published diaries of former residents, guidebooks and exhibition displays about their lives, and the interpretation strategies of curators. The materiality and spatial qualities of the old building create further narrative complexity, inevitably reflecting both distinct layers of time, and domestic layouts which support or challenge an assumed story of interior family life. These complex possible readings overlap to disrupt heteronormative presumptions about the historic house and instead reveal elements of queer domesticity.

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Section: Spectral Trailsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Going on an outing: the historic house and queer public history

Oram

2011

Rethinking History

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“…Much of the scholarship in spectral studies emphasizes the metaphoric and symbolic nature of ghosts, suggesting that behind them is a negotiation with the histories of trauma, violence, oppression, and neglect (Freccero 2007;Gordon [1997] 2008, Oram 2012. For Avery Gordon, the ontological status of ghosts is dependent on human actors; Gordon writes, 'to write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects' (Gordon [1997(Gordon [ ] 2008.…”

Section: Ghosts and Hauntingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Haunted Intimacy: Spectral and Vital Space within a Historic House Museum

Franz¹

2021

M&S

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Merchant’s House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences, continuing to keep the everyday things of the house embedded in the intimate space of a family’s home. Throughout this article, I explore how those connected to the house as staff, visitors, and volunteers present the ghosts of the Tredwells and, based on these peoples’ experiences, I examine the Tredwell house within a museological framework of, what I term, haunted intimacy, that keeps the house in vital relation to the family.

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“…Emma Russell's observation that we look to the synchronicities between a hauntological approach and queer temporalities is especially useful and has prompted us to examine these links further. Freccero's (2006Freccero's ( , 2007 work is mentioned briefly in the collection, and their work explicitly pulls from the language of spectrality, as well as queer approaches to -and lived experience of -time. Utilising the language of haunting and ghosts, Freccero considers how 'the Derridean concept of spectrality [might] reconfigure familial, nucleated, heteronormative temporalities' (Freccero, 2007: 337).…”

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confidence: 99%

Ghost Criminology review symposium: Editors’ response

Fiddler¹,

Kindynis²,

Linnemann³

2023

Crime, Media, Culture

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The Ghost Criminology collection is an attempt to both capture and survey the seeming 'spectral turn' that has occurred within the discipline. The contributors were invited to consider the spectral within their on-going research projects or to explore how it might be applied to the criminological. To be clear, when we refer to this as a ghost criminology, we are using this as a conceptual metaphor. This is not an exploration of the supernatural. Rather, it is a means to examine phenomena that hover between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. It hopes to capture a sense of time experienced as 'out of joint' and the implications that has for the study of crime, criminality and punishment. We employ the language of spectrality and haunting to explore the lingering effects of violence, the traces and atmospheres of sub-cultures, and -in Derrida's phrasing -the secret of kept secrets. Our hope, then, was to provide some initial shape to an emerging sub-discipline of ghost criminology. In this we owe a considerable debt to Avery Gordon's (2008) Ghostly Matters. It provided a framework to examine individuals and groups subject to violences that excluded them from the disciplinary archives and visual systems. Gordon's ( 2008) over-arching argument is that Sociology has not contended with its ghosts -the lingering effects of colonial practice, its subjugation of knowledge, and a complicity in patriarchal capitalism. Our aim with the collection was to extend this approach to criminology. It is a means for the discipline to reckon with its past, its inheritance and debts, whilst also providing a means to conceptualise how the future acts on and through the present. In doing so, we have also been drawn towards Derrida's notion of hauntology. In Mark Fisher's (2014) phrasing, hauntology explores how the forces of the no longer and not yet can be felt in the now. To put this slightly differently, Brown (2001, 149-150) phrases it that [w]e inherit not 'what really happened' to the dead but what lives on from that happening […] and inspirit[s] our imaginations and visions for the future

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Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past

Cited by 35 publications

References 0 publications

Going on an outing: the historic house and queer public history

Going on an outing: the historic house and queer public history

Haunted Intimacy: Spectral and Vital Space within a Historic House Museum

Ghost Criminology review symposium: Editors’ response

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