MOURNING, GENDER MELANCHOLIA, AND SUBVERSIVE HOMOEROTICISM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’

Abstract: Postmodern re-interpretations of Freud’s theory of mourning have been utilised by political activists to challenge hegemonic gender constructions and heterosexism, most nota-bly during the AIDS epidemic. In Psychic Lives of Power, Judith Butler, using Freud as her source, identifies a culture of ‘gender melancholy’, whereby the gender binary and heteronormativity are established through the incorporation of the excluded and ungrievable same-sex love-object through heightened gender identification. By exploring the relationship between mourning and gender/sexual roles through the lens of Butler’s notion of gender melancholy, I will examine the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours ne-gotiate between self and civilisation; rendered apparent in the uncovering of a subversive homoeroticism and in the metaphor of mourning one’s lost youth and the death of the other. In a comparison between modernist and postmodernist approaches to gender melancholia and non-normative mourning practices, I will examine to what extent these texts utilise psychoa-nalytic approaches to mourning to challenge the hegemony of the gender binary and heterosexism in society