Queer Literalism: The Task of Analogy in Crip/Mad/Queer Studies

• In Event: Mad/Queer Pedagogies of Dissent

Abstract

The 2000 movie Chuck and Buck features a stalker protagonist, Buck O’Brien, who may have an intellectual disability and may or may not identify as gay. If the film refuses common axes of minority identity (disabled, gay), it nonetheless reveals a distinct problematic of “thinking straight” in its refusal of neurotypicality, heteronormativity, and even homonormativity. As awkward in content as it is in low-quality video format, this anxious comedy should be addressed in the context of writer and lead-actor Mike White’s other productions of “abnormal” subjects, including The Good Girl (2002), Year of the Dog (2007), and Enlightened (2011). White seems interested in both the limits of personal autonomy and what disability studies frames as interdependency models of debility and capacity in social spheres. Yet the analogy between cognitive disability and gay male identity is so pointed in Chuck and Buck that it is worth unpacking in our current moment when the terms “crip/queer” and “mad/queer” studies are gaining academic fluency.

On the one hand, Buck appears as “developmentally arrested” -- a moribund psychological term that some queer theorists of non-normative time have implicitly referenced, perhaps uncritically from the vantage of disability studies. On the other hand, Buck’s specific inability to read social cues and engage metaphorical nuance might suggest his position on the updated “autism spectrum.” Properly diagnosing this character is hardly the point; rather, I am interested in how both diagnosing and politically mobilizing the abnormal has placed crip, queer, and mad in a relationship that exceeds both liberal analogies. Following Buck’s own solution of writing a play to assuage his unrequited love for Chuck, his childhood friend and lover, I offer that mad/queer studies should advance new theories of aesthetics.

I would argue that this film participates in a subfield of queer aesthetics that I am calling “queer literalism.” Since the 1990s, certain queer filmmakers have responded to the overdetermination of “AIDS and its metaphors” with various forms of allegorical collapse, absurdist adaptation, and a tendency to analogize queerness with cognitive disability. While rejecting various forms of normativity, Chuck and Buck seems to work a form of “disability face” performance and adaptive ego psychology. I contend, however, that Buck’s progress narrative actually challenges biopolitical regimes of “wellness” through a radical collapse of language, things, and senses that complicates the very terrain how poststructuralist and materialist theories have clashed through “queer” and “crip” over the last few decades.

Mike White's oeuvre and his character Buck employ a version of the Lacanian sinthome, as Buck rebuilds his world through a form of queer literalism. Chuck makes allegories, or “fairy tales,” but does not understand them in a normative world. Crip/mad/queer studies may reappropriate the Lacanian sinthome to theorize an aesthetics of interdependency in modes beyond deterministic identity politics.

Author

• Heather N. Lukes, Occidental College