Short Story Portfolio: 'Interior: Monkeyboy’; ‘Heretics’; ‘Bearings’
- Submitting institution
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Queen Mary University of London
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2659
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Creative Writing Portfolio
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- These three stories use different narrative and formal strategies to consider aspects of queer identity, including elective family formation, adolescent desire, political consciousness, and resilience in the face of homophobia. Set in Britain, France, and South Africa, and published in the UK, USA, and South Africa, they build on an ongoing investment in writing queer subjectivity across time, culture, and nation.
‘Interior: Monkeyboy’ considers the experiences of a bi-national male couple in contemporary Britain adopting a boy from the social care network; this traumatised child disrupts the couple’s settled lives and challenges the narrator, an American, to reframe his relationship with his husband and his own sense of alienation in Britain. The story explores the collision between ludic formal practices and subject matter as serious as queer adoption.
‘Heretics’ follows a contrapuntal temporal schema that juxtaposes the American narrator’s romantic obsession with a French exchange student and his later realisation of the French boy’s rightwing politics, set against the Balkans conflict of the 1990s. The story reflects formally on adolescent maturation and political awakening, to ask what happens when youthful affinities have to be recalibrated later in life.
‘Bearings’ returns to South Africa, offering a suite of characters marked by queer adolescent obsession, class conflict, and race. Commissioned by painter Kate Gottgens and her gallery SMAC, the story functions as a narrative explosion of her visual world, and a text to which her paintings can be understood as illustrations.
Excerpts from ‘Bearings’ were presented at a conference at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) in 2018. ‘Interior: Monkeyboy’ is in development as a feature film with Flanery as screenwriter.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
