Queer Words, Queer Images by Ronald Jeffrey Ringer

Author:Ronald Jeffrey Ringer [Ringer, Ronald Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814774410
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Power to Shape Gay Characters

YA novels that address homosexuality are embedded in a complex network of power relations, including, among other agents of power, authors, readers, editors, reviewers, and library acquisition staffs. A clearer conception of the nature of this network of power relations can perhaps be achieved by focusing on a very specific manifestation of power—namely, the power to shape fictional characters. Who/what possesses this power?

The first and most obvious answer to this question is that the author, of course, is the agent of power responsible for the shaping of a character. Undoubtedly, the author figures largely in this process; however, the nature of the power relations in which these texts are embedded is such that the author is at once in and out of control. As soon as an author decides that he/she will address a particular audience of actual readers, for example, he/she is no longer the sole shaper of characters. From this point on, the characters’ shape is determined not only by the author’s desires, but also by the exigencies associated with addressing a particular audience of readers.

In the case of the YA texts under consideration, the target audience consists primarily of adolescents. Adolescents are not exactly children, nor are they exactly adults. Rather, they are exactly neither and both of these things. The child-adult ambiguity associated with adolescent audiences constrains the author’s free shaping of characters, resulting in symptomatic ambiguities related to the presence-absence of homosexual characters and experiences in these texts. To the extent that the adolescent readers are adults, it is permissible to treat homosexuality frankly; to the extent that the adolescent readers are children, it is necessary to treat homosexuality with probity. The adolescent audience slips into the crack between childhood and adulthood, and, as a result, the author’s depiction of homosexual characters takes on a corresponding duality of presence and absence. The homosexual character, both present in and absenced from the novel, functions as a sort of ghost in the machine, a gay poltergeist whose role is central to the novel but whose actions are more often than not marginalized and ghettoized, occurring off-stage and out of sight.

In addition to authors and audiences, the genre in which the author chooses to write also possesses the power to shape characters. Characters in a tragedy, for example, are in some measure predetermined by their appearance within a tragic text. Similarly, homosexual characters appearing in the problem-realism genre are in some measure predetermined by the very nature of the genre in which they operate.

One of the generic factors of problem-realism that influences the depiction of homosexual characters centers on space constraints. “These texts,” note Nilsen and Donelson, “tend to be condensed. With less space in which to develop characters, authors are forced to develop characters as efficiently as possible. One way to be efficient is to use stereotypes.”23 While the potential for stereotyping gays is not unique to YA texts, the space constraints operating in this genre make these texts particularly vulnerable to stereotyping.

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