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Abstract

This thesis traces themes of desire, in/completeness, queer selfhood, and historical allusion in John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Both works depict queer protagonists who relish in what Vuong describes as the “deep purple feeling,” a feeling that is “not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other” (Vuong 122). I use Lacanian psychoanalytic thought to contextualize the ways in which this is a specifically queer feeling, and I draw a connection between the abstraction of these emotional binaries and the experience of desire as an agent of solving a queer self-impression of incompleteness. I also explore the film’s and novel’s allusions to Plato’s Symposium as a method of articulating the incomplete feeling that motivates the protagonists’ erōs, finding that gnōstic production functions as a substitute for the acquisition of the “lost” Other. I discuss the Lacanian “mOther tongue” as a representation of the heterosexual matrixial rules internalized by both protagonists and their objects of desire, and frame the oppressive nature of the mOther tongue as a function of internalized homophobia. I am interested in understanding whether contemporary queer experiences of desire and incompleteness can be made sense of using classical frameworks of queer life. References to Plato’s Symposium and Ancient Greek homosexual life suggest that the act of reckoning with a complex queer subjectivity can be simplified by the privilege to relate to classical depictions of queerness.