Book Review:

Review of Robyn Ollett's The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film, University of Wales Press, 2024. 256 pp.  Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1837721382). 

Robyn Ollett’s The New Queer Gothic is a thorough, engaging review of Gothic media produced in the last 15 years. Ollett posits the need for Queer Gothic theory to adapt, both to make up for its own gaps in analysis and to reflect the contemporary public perceptions of queerness in an age when feminist discourse and queer identity have entered public consciousness.  Her study specifically draws upon contemporary literary works that navigate representations of sexuality.

From the introduction, Ollett situates her book as contingent on but divergent from the existing canon of Queer, Feminist, and Gothic literary criticism. She argues that as Queer Gothic fiction writing has evolved in the contemporary zeitgeist, so must our reading methods. Her analysis focuses on literary works written by and about women and non-binary people because of her assessment that to this point, Queer Gothic analysis has been disproportionately focused on works by and about white cis gay men. Further, she acknowledges the importance of identity politics to queer and feminist theory while focusing on the strength and value of subversive queerness as a method of challenging harmful power structures. She connects New Queer Gothic more broadly with intersectional studies, asserting that analysis of queerness and biopolitics demonstrates the value of Gothic fiction as a site for examining how power structures affect individual and social identities.

Chapter One, “The Origins of The New Queer Gothic in work of Twentieth Century Women Writers: Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Maryse Condé, Anne Rice, Jewel Gomez, and Sarah Waters,” establishes a genealogy and oeuvre of New Queer Gothic using post-WWII female authors and subsequent adaptations of their works. Ollett outlines the ways these works have been approached critically by feminist theorists and Queer Gothic theorists alike, with undue emphasis on mapping the female authors’ psychology onto the novels and psychoanalysis of their sexual and domestic lives. By establishing the formative works that set the stage for contemporary queer gothic fiction, Ollett helps to define the parameters of New Queer Gothic studies and the necessary work of analyzing female subjectivity in contemporary Gothic fiction.

 “The Queer Gothic Child in John Harding’s Florence and Giles (2010),” Chapter Two, analyzes John Harding’s 2010 reimagining of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and the narrative possibilities of the Queer Gothic Girl. She establishes the literary significance of children in the Gothic as provocative symbols of the paradox of sexuality and innocence, erotic childhood, and defiant queerness. Further, Ollett underlines how this contemporary reimagining of Florence engages with the historical understandings of female subjectivity to create a powerful, defiant subjectivity of a queer child who helps us understand both the issues with and the values of intersection queer and feminist critical perspectives.

Chapter Three, “Conventions of The New Queer Gothic and Queer Subjectivity in Black Swan (2010) and Jack and Diane (2012),” is a comparative analysis of two contemporary queer body horror films and how they each approach two motifs: metamorphosis/visual representations of monstrosity and mirroring as means to underscore queer subjectivity and the insecure borders of identity. She locates the ways in which queer subjectivity (through desire and pleasure) exists in spite of monstrous representation. Then she connects her analysis to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s paranoid and reparative reading practices to pivot into a more constructive, reparative reading of the two films, asserting that while paranoid reading is a comfortable angle for Queer and Gothic theories, it is critical to establish other means.

 “The Queer Postcolonial Gothic of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016),” Chapter Four, examines both Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian Fingersmith and its Korean film adaptation, The Handmaiden, to locate the impact of intersectional identity on the queer themes of the story. She also analyzes the way that the film uses visual spaces to enforce queer gothic themes like uncanny space, doubling, abjection, and eroticism. Ollett argues that The Handmaiden provides a valuable intersection of colonial identity and queerness that underscores her assertion that New Queer Gothic should engage with postcolonial Gothic to expand its ability to read and critique queer female subjectivity as it overlaps with colonial, racial, and national identity.

Chapter Five, “Queering the Cannibal in Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016),” analyzes Julia Ducournau’s 2016 entry into the genre of New French Extremity (NFE). Using the film to analyze questions of female subjectivity and its relationship to queerness, feminism, and national identity, Ollett theorizes queer subjectivity as it relates to ideas of biopolitics and hybridity with its investigations into the implications of girlhood and womanhood in a microcosm of patriarchal society. Ollett also conceptualizes and contextualizes the queer cannibal in Raw and debates the inherent monstrosity of the (queer) cannibal and its potential function as a punk rebellion against patriarchy and heteronormativity.

In Chapter Six, “Gothic Hybridity, Queer Girls and Exceptional States in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014),” Ollett returns to contemporary representations of queer girlhood and their engagement with themes of hybridity and exceptionalism. She connects the hybrid subjectivity of both novels to the broader theme of hybridity as a site of resistance to real systems of power. Ollett emphasizes the contrast between the two protagonists — one who burns down the world and one who fights to maintain control of her life and body — to underscore the theme present in both novels: intersectional queer feminist politics as a means of survival, both individually and as a community.

An exciting development in the general field of Queer Gothic studies, The New Queer Gothic presents several avenues for further research and development in how we approach Queer Gothic studies, particularly those that emphasize subjectivities under the queer umbrella that have had less critical attention paid to them. Robyn Ollett’s de-emphasis of psychoanalysis and identity politics is refreshing, and her contrast of paranoid and reparative readings offers a complex critical analysis that resists categorization, much like the Gothic. This book reinvigorates Queer Gothic studies into contemporary media and will be valuable to scholars as a foundational text for New Queer Gothic studies for years to come.

-5 Oct. 2024