Queer(ing) urban regeneration: decay, dwelling, and kinship in London writing, 1981 –

Preston, Patrick (2019) Queer(ing) urban regeneration: decay, dwelling, and kinship in London writing, 1981 –. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis explores queer urban regeneration in London writing since 1981. My discussions are situated in the contexts of AIDS, the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation, and the embedding of neoliberalizing logics in the organization of urban space-time. How have queer London writers registered these seismic shifts? And in what ways can queer print cultures resist normative modes of urban regeneration? I seek to theorize regeneration queerly, focussing on themes of dwelling, decay and kinship in three chapters.
Chapter one focusses on how the Docklands has been imagined and re/produced in print. I analyse the regeneration of Butler’s Wharf and nostalgic productions of nation in planning and marketing texts. How did discourses of rejuvenation prescribe ideal modes of dwelling in the city, figuring queer lives and bodies as waste? And how do queer representations of the Docklands recuperate overlooked lives, spaces, and modes of dwelling in ruins.
Chapter two intervenes in critical discourses of Soho through close readings of Jeremy Reed's poetry of queer sex work. Reed registers built regeneration, elegizing a disappearing queer landscape. Through his poetic overproduction, Reed regenerates the city queerly, disrupting dominant imaginaries. I discuss how queer readers and writers dwell in queer print cultures, elaborating the interdependency of city, body, and text; and the tactical use of reading and writing as a mode of getting by in quotidian life.
Chapter three explores the re/production of homophobia and AIDS-phobia in print media, and its affects on everyday city life for marginal others. This frames a study of Derek Jarman’s diaries; specifically Jarman’s writing of cruising on Hampstead Heath. I foreground the diaries here to explore how this urban hinterland functioned as a vital space of dwelling and kinship for Jarman and others, elaborating the potential of queer sex publics in the time of AIDS.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Users 11011 not found.
Date Deposited:	17 Oct 2019 10:19
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2019 10:19
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/72636
DOI:

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