Sex after death: Francois Ozon's libidinal invasions

Abstract

By now it should be well understood, within and beyond the bounds of gender and sexuality studies, that queer praxis has been both a sustained response to a particular history of loss and an important contribution to the ongoing psychosocial project of theorizing mourning. Among other things, ‘queering’ mourning has meant overruling reticence with the antagonistically explicit; displacing mortuary and memorial decorum with improvised and impatient performances; reconceiving illness, care and forms of farewell to accommodate new experiences of familiarity with, and estrangement from, bodies; freshly embracing the work of anger, ambivalence and melancholy. It has meant risking not only futures but the very consolations of futurity in favour of preposthumous resistance to the logics of reproduction and self-bestowal. And it has meant coming to terms with pleasure at the core of the experience of mourning. To say that mourning has become a way of life is banal, for it has never been anything else. And the sanguine recommendation that loss be apprehended as ‘productive rather than pathological’ is too weak a tonic for many. But to assert that mourning entails a phenomenology of pleasure remains as provocative today as it was when Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud, early in the last century, noted with perplexity and discomfort the libidinal assertiveness of grief. ‘My impression’, Abraham wrote to Freud in 1922,