[{"key":"dc.contributor.author","value":"Maurer, Holly","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.accessioned","value":"2026-04-01T16:25:01Z","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.available","value":"2026-04-01T16:25:01Z","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.issued","value":"2026","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.identifier.uri","value":"http:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/2429\/93877","language":null},{"key":"dc.description.abstract","value":"This thesis traces themes of desire, in\/completeness, queer selfhood, and historical allusion in John Cameron Mitchell\u2019s 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Ocean Vuong\u2019s 2019 novel On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous. Both works depict queer protagonists who relish in what Vuong describes as the \u201cdeep purple feeling,\u201d a feeling that is \u201cnot good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn\u2019t have to live on one side or the other\u201d (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\u2019s and novel\u2019s allusions to Plato\u2019s Symposium as a method of articulating the incomplete feeling that motivates the protagonists\u2019 er\u014ds, finding that gn\u014dstic production functions as a substitute for the acquisition of the \u201clost\u201d Other. I discuss the Lacanian \u201cmOther tongue\u201d 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\u2019s 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.","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.language.iso","value":"eng","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.publisher","value":"University of British Columbia","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.rights","value":"Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International","language":"*"},{"key":"dc.rights.uri","value":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/","language":"*"},{"key":"dc.title","value":"Tracing the queer imperfect : frameworks of completeness and desire in John Cameron Mitchell\u2019s Hedwig and the angry inch and Ocean Vuong\u2019s On earth we\u2019re briefly gorgeous","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.type","value":"Text","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.name","value":"Master of Arts - MA","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.discipline","value":"English","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.grantor","value":"University of British Columbia","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.contributor.supervisor","value":"Severs, Jeffrey, 1974-","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.graduation","value":"2026-05","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.type.text","value":"Thesis\/Dissertation","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.affiliation","value":"Arts, Faculty of","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.affiliation","value":"English Language and Literatures, Department of","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.campus","value":"UBCV","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.scholarlevel","value":"Graduate","language":"en"}]