Abstract
What form can a queer life story take? It is easier for the historian of sexuality to approach this distinctively contemporary question by thinking more precisely about what it rejects. Most obviously, it challenges a story of heterosexual and gender conformity. Teresa de Lauretis, Marilyn Farwell, Judith Roof and others have argued that many narratives are ‘organised around the patriarchal goals of marriage and reproduction […] enforcing what has become known as “compulsory heterosexuality”’.1 Queer lives are not organized around these goals and we might surmise that in narrating them, one would seek a form that expresses this disaffection. But equally, queer rejects the conventions of the sexual dissident’s coming out story, whether it be the conversion model of autobiography or its biographical equivalent, the detective’s quest for the truth.
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Notes
William Stephenson (2000) ‘William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy and Queer Autobiography’, Auto/Biography 15:1, 5–21, p. 6.
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© 2011 Margaretta Jolly
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Jolly, M. (2011). ‘Perversity to match the curtains’: Queering the Life Story with Grayson Perry. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_7
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