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10. Queer Spaces and Emotional Couplings in Deadwood
- University of Nebraska Press
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208 10 Queer Spaces and Emotional Couplings in Deadwood Michael K. Johnson Building on the way Linda Mizejewski closes her essay by exploring the signi ficance of the lesbian relationship between Jane and Joanie, Michael Johnson argues that “theories of queer space and postmodern theories of sociology, each of which is concerned with the relationship between public space and private space and with movements between the two,” offer particularly fruitful approaches to Deadwood. In an analysis of the series’ homophobic language, he points out that Deadwood persistently calls viewers’ attention to sexual practices generally invisible until the end of the third season. Invoking “queer theory ’s multivalent understanding of the word’s usage and meanings” and its interest in the dialectic of public/private and its relationship to space and drawing on Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s “sociology of mobilities (and the recognition of associated immobilities),” he focuses primarily on “the way Deadwood uses and represents space” and the ways in which what is designated public and private is “undermined by characters’ movements back and forth between them,” noting in particular the homelessness and constant movements of Joanie and Jane. Mobility allows characters such as Trixie and Jewel, whose stories are “juxtaposed” at the end of season 1, to “explore the possibility of a new self.” Like Jennilyn Merten, Johnson argues that emotion is important to Deadwood, suggesting that “emotional experience . . . may be a more transgressive form of queer experience than sexuality in Deadwood.” The series’ “‘emotional couplings ,’ which may or may not involve physical sexuality, and which may involve same-sex couplings as well as opposite-sex ones,” originate in private spaces but “ultimately affect the public world of Deadwood” and thus are central to the series’ major theme: the evolution of a society in a frontier town. Johnson concludes that “the alliances forged in this newly formed society sometimes make possible the realization of private desires heretofore deemed impossible.” Deriving its sense from post-structuralism rather than empirical history , queer space demarcates a practice, production, and performance Emotional Couplings in Deadwood 209 of space beyond just the mere habitation of built and fixed structures . Against the domination of space by abstract constructs of urban planning and the implantation of technologies of social surveillance, queer space designates an appropriation of space for bodily, especially sexual, pleasure. Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations Spatial models of civil society do not attend to how people (and objects ) move, or desire to move, between the supposedly private and public domains. Indeed, it is often argued that the very freedom of mobility holds the potential to disrupt public space, to interfere with more stable associational life and to undermine proper politics. But focusing on movements within and across public space brings into view subaltern publics that have potentially disruptive politics. . . . We suggest that public and private life have always been mobile, situational , flickering and fragmented. Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “Mobile Transformations of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Life” A queer space is an activated zone made proprietary by the occupant or flâneur, the wanderer. It is at once private and public. Jean-Ulrick Désert, “Queer Space” For a television series that has very few gay or lesbian characters, Deadwood contains an astonishing number of references to homosexuality and homosexual practices. Male characters consistently and constantly refer to one another as “cocksuckers.” “Yeah,” Al Swearengen comments to Mr. Wu about one of the two men who have stolen a heroin shipment. “Cocksucker. Swe’gen bring you cocksucker” (1.10). One of the aforementioned dope-stealing cocksuckers , Leon, comments to Al while shooting up in a bathhouse, “I’ll apologize. Bring that slant-eyed bastard over here. He can get in the fucking tub with me. I’ll apologize and then I’ll kiss him. And then I’ll tie him off and I’ll shoot him up and then I’ll blow him . . . with fucking soap” (1.10). Arrested for the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, Jack McCall taunts [3.144.124.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 08:48 GMT) 210 johnson Seth Bullock, “Did you love Hickok so much? Was you sweethearts? Did he stick his dick up your ass?” (1.5). Al, holding up a list of names of officials in Yankton to be bribed, comments, “First notice of our cost to avoid getting fucked in the ass by those legislative cocksuckers” (1.9). Although Al waxes poetic about the possibility of opening a house that caters exclusively to what he...