Goth's Dark Empire

3. That Obscure Object of Desire Revisited: Poppy Z. Brite and the Goth Hero as Masochist

72 G G G G Go o o o ot t t t th’s h’s h’s h’s h’s D D D D Dark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire 3. That Obscure That Obscure That Obscure That Obscure That Obscure Object Object Object Object Object of of of of of D D D D De e e e es s s s siiiiire re re re re R R R R Re e e e ev v v v viiiiisited sited sited sited sited Poppy Z. Brite and the Goth Hero as Masochist Poppy Z. Brite’s importance to the Goth subculture was best expressed for me through this response I received to an online questionnaire: “Do I read Poppy Z? I ALREADY TOLD YOU I WAS A GOTH!”1 Anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with Goths should recognize as typical my respondent’s astonishment that I would need to ask. Davenport-Hines calls her “the most impressive goth novelist to emerge in the USA in the 1990s” (345). And in case that seems faint praise, he also describes her novel Exquisite Corpse as “surpass[ing] even [her] Lost Souls as one of the century’s finest gothic texts” (362). Although Brite has been and remains enormously popular with Goths of all sexual and gender identifications, my focus in this chapter will be on the appeal of her fiction to young women, both inside and outside that culture. This seems to me the approach most likely to reveal what it is about Goth’s constructions of gender and sexuality that has made this subculture a major target of official discourses and policies that try to normalize the young. I focus on girls and young women here because in official regulation of the sexuality of the young, females are always the hardest hit. If traditional binary gender identification is seen as essential to the proper socialization of the young into their roles as useful participants in our consumer culture, as seems strongly suggested by virtually any collection of abstinence education materials, then Goths constitute a problem. But if Goths follow the sixties’ tradition in dark rebellion, so well represented by Angela Carter, of violently subverting sexual norms in order to free women from the tyranny of domestication, then they constitute a crisis. To explore the roots of that crisis, I will look at some of the major (counter)cultural contexts that That Obscure Object of Desire Revisited 73 determine the reception of Brite’s novels within a reading community of young women, especially, but not only, those who identify themselves as Goths. The late 1980s popularization of Goth and its influence on youth cultures has been crucial to the formation of a large number of young women’s gender and sexual identities, as Lauraine Leblanc shows in her study of girls’ resistance to cultural norms through involvement in music subcultures (81– 83). We can understand Brite’s novels better if we read their representations of sexuality and gender without imposing some of the most common interpretive frames used by critics working on youth cultures now, because those approaches make fundamental assumptions about sexuality that do not match concepts of sexual and gender identity in the Goth subculture from which the texts arise. Reading the sexual dynamics of the novels in ways suggested by the subculture that contains them can reveal much about the attraction of sadomasochism for postmillennial youth and the various meanings assigned to gender in the contemporary Goth(ic) aesthetic. Brite’s novels might initially seem a strange place to examine how the masochistic male body is displayed as an erotic object for women, since passionate attractions and affairs between males are central in her work, while females are peripheral at best. But consideration of some aspects of the Goth subculture that contextualize Brite’s fiction helps explain the importance of the female spectators who sometimes figure as characters within the texts and who we can assume, for reasons I will discuss, make up a significant part of each novel’s audience. Goth social scenes, at least its public events and club nights, are filled with male masochistic spectacles explicitly staged for females’ as well as males’ enjoyment. If I wanted to comment on my local Goth scene in Portland , Oregon, I might discuss the 1997 Impulsive Theater production of Titus Andronicus reimagined as the story of Tamara, Queen of the Goths, dressed...