Bumping as a way of life: the pursuit of a queer relationality to come in the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Christopher Isherwood
Keywords: Jacques Derrida
fag hag
deconstruction
queer theory
Christopher Isherwood
kinship
relationality
bumping
queer literature
American literature
Hélène Cixous
gay liberation
post-45
friendship
Aimance
queer

My doctoral thesis, ‘Bumping as a Way of Life: The pursuit of a queer relationality to come in the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Christopher Isherwood’, provides a radical, queer revaluation of Cixous and Derrida’s philosophical writings on their loving friendship (aimance). At a juncture when the vividness of ‘la pensée 68’ (to which Cixous and Derrida’s writing belongs) is, if not extinct, repeatedly ‘cancelled’ within the Anglo-American academy, I champion a reassessment of Derrida and Cixous’ work. Using close analysis of their oeuvre, I contend that Anglo-American scholars’ critiques of Derrida’s work as sexist and ‘anti-praxis’ are, to a certain extent, misguided, whilst queer and feminist scholars rejection of Cixousian thought as ‘essentialist’ is, I argue, a result of poor translation and willful misreading. Through new, queer readings of Derrida’s canonical ‘Choreographies’ and Parages as well as his and Cixous’ largely unconsidered writings on aimance, I argued that their strategies for aimance’s ethical friendship as recognisably queer. I contended that Cixous and Derrida offer a playbook for queer scholars and activists to understand and foster queer friendship and community.
Cixous and Derrida’s writing on aimance employs dancerly and ‘bumpy’ rhetoric. I assert that their examinations of gender, relational ethics, and strategies of maintaining loving friendship (aimance) articulate a ‘bumpy’ way of life and relating. Bumping into others, I affirm, articulates not a unified identity but a radical identification politics of being together in difference—to bump involves an approach and retreat, an identification and disidentification with others that is both psychic and embodied. Anticipating canonical understandings of queerness by scholars such as Judith Butler, the bumps of aimance are predicated upon an ethical openness to otherness and implicate the rejection of fixed/categorisable identity for fluid, hybrid, ever-changing ways of being in/with difference that is achieved through a bumpy identification and disidentification. From the crossed paths while cruising to the jostling and dancing of the gay bar to bumping of bodies at protests, aimance’s cross-identarian bumps, I argue, animate queer life.
However, reflecting the ambivalence of the term ‘to bump’ (felicitous ‘bumping into’/violent ‘bumping off’), the success of aimance depends on mitigating the violent risks of being radically open/hospitable to others. Cixous and Derrida’s playbook provides possible strategies to mitigate that risk, but as they emphasise, to pursue aimance and its possible joys requires continuing to bump in a hope against hope. Through a radical rereading of Derrida’s ‘event’, I argue that the possibility of bumping is context-dependent.
My thesis’ second half examines Christopher Isherwood’s representation of the (im)possibilities of queer bumping in the post-war Los Angelean context of ‘Afterwards’ (1959) and A Single Man (1964). Focussing upon Isherwood’s portrayal of cross-gender ‘fag-hag’ relationalities, I argue that Isherwood’s violent depiction of the consuming fag hag is part of his broader political and pedagogic project between himself as author, his readers, and his contemporaries. This chapter represented a vital intervention in Isherwood studies. Key figures in queer literary studies have only somewhat acknowledged the racism, antisemitism, and misogyny in Isherwood’s writings. However, I contend that the few resulting critiques that have emerged, especially from within feminist scholarship, have been dismissed. I deconstruct Edmund White’s contention that female critics are too irrational to comprehend A Single Man’s true moral and ethical meaning, a statement that precludes criticism in the name of protecting Isherwood’s idol status among queer writers.
Challenging White’s contentions, I argue that Isherwood’s horrific images of fag hags as devourers of homosexual alterity are the foundation stones upon which his (un)published works’ pulpy, educational manifestos for queer ‘way of life’ and relating are built. Contradicting Isherwood’s apparent desire to bring his gay readership together as a community, A Single Man proposes a vision of homosexual being-together as being quarantined in coupled homosexual domesticity. The fag hag’s horror arises from her ability to penetrate this near sphere of bumpable proximity. She infiltrates the island space and the domestic home. In ‘Ambrose’, Maria cloaks herself, performing camp homosexuality—and once inside, usurps the kingdom, pulling homosexual loving bumps apart. Under the weight of Cold War hetero-capitalism, Isherwood’s schema and the possibility of fag-hag friendship are fundamentally in opposition. I examine the circulation and development of the horrific fag hag with/among his male contemporaries (using published and previously undiscovered letters and works by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams) and his readers. In so doing, I argue that Isherwood sought to cement a shared conception of homosexual identity and a separatist way of life that would preclude not only cross-gender but also the cross-racial bumps that animate aimance’s queer relationality.