Relating this to the issue of the ‘homosexual’ will not only rely on the immediate context of historical discourse but also on André Gide’s literary models. The enemy is a Zola-like naturalism. The latter’s use of a pre-natured world which art represents is set against fictive and imagined worlds, such as those of Gide, where difference is experienced in different ways and in a process not of discrimination but of emergent becoming. In effect Gide’s model of sociality is entirely non-binary.
Why concentrate on a world of men?
Discuss the limitations of depicting a male-only world – Vaughan’s issues with gender. Suggest that to include identifiable difference would ‘normalise’ his fictive world by the use of binary differentiation and he must avoid this. Important that full range of relationships are present in a mono-sexual-gender environment. The identification of binarism as a problem in queer theory. The ‘queer’-‘normal’ binary (found in texts like Lehmann’ biography and Peter watson’s life) is not equivalent to the gay-straight one. ‘Normal men’ in the 1940s have sex with men and women (the sailor icon – especially in America &/or Burra on which there is a good literature – refind refs). In general the enemy is a predestined sexuality that Gide sometimes talks about (in The Counterfeiters for instance) in order to identify a limitation of human experience. This will feed into existential non-essentialist phenomenological philosophers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
Interpenetration of bodies to form a body (corpus) – use ‘Street Group 1964’, Assembly of Figures II Gouache (both in current Osbourne-Samuel exhibition) before looking at nine ‘Assemblies Of Figures’.
Note this sample of homophobic exclusion:
For it is the male body which presides over Vaughan’s entire pictorial production. Vaughan’s paintings are linked to his early wartime National Service duty, in the Royal army Medical Corps; that is to say, his project is to tend the male body.note
Mellors (1987:25):
note says ‘See for example his drawings of barrack-room life, in Keith Vaughan Journals and Drawings, 1939-1965, 1966.
I could have as a structure
- Introduction Groups in defining Queer Performativity – the performative theorised for sexual assembly (legs akimbo) and for painting as bodily act, layers of skin.
- 2. Tending to the Male Body (individual & social body – figure & group). From War Journal and drawings to contrast Coal Fatigue above. Then the plasticity of interpenetrated male bodies (and working class hands_) – non-articulated male bodies v. verty articulated Lehmann / Watson ones.
- 3 Performing Queerly as a Body. The Assembly Paintings and how they grow as Bodies of Men.
- 4 Conclusion. The queer is triumphant, and like Gide’s notion of the ‘bent’ celebrates sensation as the basis of communality.
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