Queer Uncanny

Dr Paulina Palmer has now retired from a senior lectureship in English at Warwick University, where she helped establish the Women's Studies MA, she also lectured for the MA in Gender and Sexuality at Birkbeck, London University. Dr Palmer's publications include Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory; Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference; and Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. http://www.paulinapalmer.org.uk

• CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: QUEERING THE UNCANNY CHAPTER 2 - SECRETS AND THEIR DISCLOSURE 1 Secrets and sexuality 2 New approaches to the coming out novel 3 Double secrets: AIDS narratives 4 History/ mystery CHAPTER 3 - QUEER SPECTRALITY 1 Spectral fictions 2 Ghost stories and queer hauntings 3 The phantom-text 4 Transgender doubles CHAPTER 4 - PLACE AND SPACE 1 Theoretical approaches 2 The haunted house 3 Uncanny cities 4 Ritual and ceremony CHAPTER 5 - MONSTROUS OTHERS 1 Hybridity and border-crossing 2 Demons and robots 3 Carnivalesque fantasies

Palmer's argument is clear: the uncanny has provided fertile ground for writers attempting to negotiate the intricacies of the queer experience. For that reason, The New Uncanny is not only an interesting intervention in Gothic scholarship, but also to queer literary criticism. Proving that queer writing is very much in currency, Palmer manages to impress the urgency of such writing and the need to recast its relation to the uncanny as not tangential but endemic to queer existence. She proposes in her conclusion that, whilst concerned with similar ideas, lesbian and male gay writing generally avoid combined portrayals of queer desire, and that, as a result of queer influence, the two might merge and interrelate. Xavier Aldana Reyes, The Gothic Imagination