Radical bursts, voids and turns in representations of queer gay male grief

Antu Sorainen (Redaktör), Paul Boyce (Redaktör), Trude Sundberg (Redaktör), Elisabeth Engebretsen (Redaktör)

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Sammanfattning

The ghost of the pandemic is an unavoidable part of the gay male sexuality, as Lynne Segal recalls in her above reference to The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (2001). Tim Dean (2009) has suggested that HIV is inherent in how gay men animate the controversy around barebacking as risky intimacy forces us to drop our psychological barriers and makes us vulnerable. Segal (2017, 44), on her part, advocates the idea of radical happiness in overcoming and surviving structural depression, psychic sorrows, and grief inherent to our times, and notes that “the pressure we are under to banish all spectres of sadness and failure is one of the reasons many people feel unhappy in the first place...”

My essay seeks to examine queer grief in personal, cultural, and historical terms. Drawing on the struggle with witnessing a sudden death of an important person in different societies and era with a relevant queer desire or identity, and the coupling of the war or the pandemic reveals the subtleties, the complexities, and the agony of modern (gay) male queer grief.



It wonders at the current voids, avoidance, and outbursts of the representations of male queer grief much before and long after of the initial outburst of the AIDS pandemic. I look at these issues by discussing the representations of complex gay grief in two Netflix tv series – Tore (2024) and Good Grief (2024) – and the figure of Larry in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge (1944).
Originalspråkengelska
TidskriftLambda nordica.
Antal sidor20
ISSN1100-2573
StatusInsänt - 28 feb. 2024
MoE-publikationstypA1 Tidskriftsartikel-refererad

Bibliografisk information

Dr. Antu Sorainen, PhD, is Docent in Gender Studies, working as Principal Investigator at the University of Helsinki.
She was the Director of the research team “CoreKin – Contrasting and Re-Imagining Margins of Kinship” (Academy of Finland, 2016-2020). Her current research project focuses o Protolesbian Personal Histories and Nationalist Sentiment in the 1920-30s Finland (The Cultural Foundation of Finland, 2019-2024).
She has conducted empirical studies in queer sexualities, especially in the legal field. She is the co-author of a book on the conceptual history of “Sittlichkeit”, and is publishing on queer kinship and inheritance practices.
Sorainen was an Academy Fellow at the Academy of Finland and the PI of the research project titled “Wills and Inheritance Practices in Sexually Marginalised Groups” (2014-2019).
• Orcid.org/0000-0002-3956-8352

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