{"id":40482,"date":"2026-06-07T06:33:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T06:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/?p=40482"},"modified":"2026-06-07T06:33:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T06:33:41","slug":"making-it-ours-queering-the-canon-gay-lesbian-and-queer-studies-by-mark-d-hawthorne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/making-it-ours-queering-the-canon-gay-lesbian-and-queer-studies-by-mark-d-hawthorne\/","title":{"rendered":"Making It Ours: Queering The Canon (Gay, Lesbian, And Queer Studies) by Mark D. Hawthorne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\r\n\r\nHawthorne’s argument moves through the literary canon and finds closets everywhere. Not just in explicitly queer literature, but in the foundational texts that have never been read that way. The closet isn’t unique to coming-out narratives. It operates as a structuring principle across canonical literature\u2014a spatial and psychological mechanism that organizes how characters move through the world, what they can say, what they must hide.\n\n\n\n\n\nBy applying queer methodology to texts that aren’t explicitly queer, Hawthorne proposes something larger: that reading itself can be a queer practice. That the tools developed to understand queer literature have applicability beyond their original context. That canonical texts contain patterns and structures we’ve failed to recognize because we weren’t looking for them.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe subsequent scholarship that uses his framework demonstrates the reach. Villette, Dracula, Frankenstein\u2014texts written long before ‘coming out’ was terminology\u2014reveal themselves as narratives built around closets. Characters concealing, revealing, navigating the space between secret knowledge and public presentation. The closet functions simultaneously as haven and prison: a space where something true can exist, and a space where that truth gets contained, restricted, prevented from expanding into the world.\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat Hawthorne uncovers is that this tension predates modern queer identity. The mechanisms were there in Victorian literature, in earlier texts. The emotional logic of the closet\u2014safety and suffocation coexisting\u2014is older than the word. Reading with that awareness transforms how entire works function. It reveals authors grappling with concealment and disclosure as central human problems, not marginal concerns.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
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