The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Reframing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self

Abstract

In my experience, religion strives to drive a wedge between queer folk and their sexuality. Further, by perpetuating the sexualised construction of identity, it excludes particular sources of knowledge as fit only for people situated comfortably within its heteronormative models. Yet there is plenty of evidence that many queer lives are open to sources of ‘spiritual’ insight (as I will define it) beyond the heteronormative filters of the standard model. I present an extract from my memoir, a work in progress titled The Boy in the Yellow Dress, to demonstrate how the practice of life writing can produce versions of subjectivity that are resistant to homophobic constructions. Such praxis works not only to ‘talk back’ to the culture but also to uncover and reclaim previously unrecognised knowledge resources, detoxified of the homophobia embedded in conventional religion and the pathologising discourses of medicine. The dis-illusionment that many gay men go through is re-presented as a stripping away of illusions, precipitating a radical inquiry into the nature of being that I propose is at the very heart of spiritual practice. Taking the famous Zen interrogatory ‘Show me your original face before your parents were born’ as a pointer, I argue that, rather than upholding a fixed notion of self that is culturally produced, historically situated, and politically defended, in its quest for continuing liberation queer intelligence can prove responsive to the deconstructive imperative inherent in certain ‘Eastern’ approaches to religious practice.