Abstract
This thesis locates and delineates paranoia as immanent structures of feeling that impinge on the narrative and aesthetic field of contemporary gay cultural narratives. I undertake the risk of reinstalling paranoid consciousness into the Holly-phobic imageries of gay men to reveal the persistence of the disciplinary order and praxis of heterosexism that suppress the affective expressivity and dynamics of gay male characters. Rope and Call Me by Your Name are discussed as “canonical” exemplars of mainstream queer cinema of paranoia. As if to counter the paranoid effacement of gay male subjectivity and desire within the Hollywood enterprise, film and cultural critics resort to the paranoid interpretative lens that expose the overarching heteronormative structure enforced upon queer representations. A comprehensive review of the paranoid literature and rhetoric of queer criticism is offered – with reference to particularly anti-social queer theories as symptomatic of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. This section is enlaced with my own reflection and intervention that speak back to Williams’s structures of feeling that traverses as practical consciousness both critical and cultural texts. An intermediary section on para-symptomatic and imminent critique follows, mapping out underdeveloped conceptual space and speculating intervention in the methodological rivalry between paranoid and reparative approaches in queer studies. I elucidate the crucial implications and productive outcomes of the symbiotic criss-cross of these two reading positions, both of which are in fact emergent queer aesthetic structures that should be re-orientated as the ontology inscribed in the text and the body of the character. The said theoretical sections above are followed by the study of New Gay Sincerity and gay male melodrama – two independent genres that creatively deliberate via the realist undertow and ordinary structure of feeling the current-minded-ness of post-millennial gay lives and sociality. I first turn to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Mark Weeden’s That is All, paying heed to the affective implications of the films’ slow, non-dramatic aesthetics through which a weaker paranoia is registered and enacted alongside the contemplative mode of observational realism. From here I demarcate a para-dramatic subjective and affective dimension of gay subjectivity emerging from the everyday narrative realm.