“Creatures of the Night”and Gothic Tendencies: Queer Nightlife in Contemporary US Urban Metropoles

• In Event: Haunting, Horror, Monstrosity: Undoing Genres of Oppression

Abstract

In queer metropoles, nightlife burgeons in spaces of excess and transgression, historically where queerness is performed, embodied, and at times, violently policed. Gothic’s long coded queerness within allows for a hidden shelter where alternative identities lurk and twerk in the dark. Therefore, the familiar tropes of monstrosity, haunting, and secrecy emerge to ambivalently limit and generate queer creatures and queer characters with Gothic tendencies.Ultimately, we ask: What does it mean to be a creature of the night? And we argue that queer nightlife reclaims the darkness as a dangerous terrain that offers chances of expression, survival, pleasure, and resistance. Moreover, the darkness ambivalently exists at the intersection of liberation and surveillance, pleasure and pain, freedom and containment, and life and death because Queer nightlife serves as both a sanctuary and a battleground. As queer nightlife hauntingly thrives in these dark shelters, where the darkness itself is both literal and metaphorical; it is more than simply a setting but rather it actively shapes and delineates queer life and death. The darkness, as a site of cultural transmission, echoes Gothic tropes of spectrality, monstrosity, and secrecy that have provided the spaces for queer subcultures to thrive and harrowingly survive in the obscurity it provides. Accordingly, the project examines the Gothic dimensions of queer nightlife in contemporary urban US metropolitan spaces cloaked in darkness, as critical and foundational elements of queer identity formation, eroticism, and community sustenance. Drawing on scholarship from queer nightlife and Queer Gothic culture, we position queer nightlife as a Gothic space for queer creatures and queer characters to explore knowledge production, creative embodiment, and literal disfigurement.

Biographical Information

Christopher Rivera (Coppin State University):
Christopher Rivera earned his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Rutgers University. He holds a Master’s degree in Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies from Indiana University and he earned his BA in Spanish Education from the University of Delaware. He is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Applied Political and Social Sciences at Coppin State University in West Baltimore.

Suleyman Bolukbas (Penn State University):
Suleyman is a third-year dual-degree Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. His research focuses on gender and sexuality studies in literature and culture, queer and gothic studies, and LGBTI studies. He is especially interested in comparative and queer readings of the Gothic as an international and global phenomenon.

Authors

• Christopher Rivera

• Suleyman Bolukbas, Pennsylvania State University