Twentieth century queer literature and orientalism

Abstract

This thesis explores the intersection of orientalism with queer literature through an analysis of Andre Gide's The Immoralist, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. It pays particular attention to how the oriental locales and images are utilized in order to facilitate the sexual awakenings of the protagonists and how the oriental and the homosexual other are in fact managed and constructed by similar processes. To elaborate how the orientalist narrative plays a part in sexual identity formation, I look at three different novels that make use of oriental locales, characters or dynamics in vastly different ways and pay close attention to how these authors subvert the oriental binaries in order to make explicit the particular positionalities of their characters and queer identities at large.