C. P. Cavafy and the art of queer survival

Thesis

This thesis springs from a longstanding, affective and intellectual, engagement with C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), a queer poet who lived and wrote in Alexandria. In the first instance, it reviews cases of Cavafy’s ‘queer reception’ in literature, performance, film, and the arts. Building on these examples, the thesis aims to address why and how people self-identifying as queer have been attaching, intensely and intently, to cultural texts and figures to lay claim to survival. Thus, this thesis sets to explore, and celebrate, the concept of queer survival through Cavafy’s queer afterlives and work.

At the intersections of Queer Theory, Modern Greek, and Cultural Studies, the three chapters of this thesis look at concepts which speak simultaneously to the constitution of queer subjects and Cavafy Studies: reading, seriality, and realness. The first chapter examines discursive and textual citationality, circulation, and reflexivity to challenge and revise how queers are interpellated to an inferiorised and endangered subjecthood. The second tackles the form, format, and cultural logic of ordering in series as complicit with modes of bio-/necropolitical governance since modernity. The third forwards a poetics of touch as a tactic for signifying queerness, for securing presence as well as connectivity, and an alternative to how propositional knowledge deliberates upon in/existence. All three chapters start from the cultural/social present, and then move backwards, interweaving the critical reading of contemporary works with Cavafy’s poems and items from his Archive.

This thesis contributes to Queer Theory a gesture of queer genealogising as a means to survive. It proposes, that is, genealogising queer reception as critique. To Cavafy Studies, it contributes a concerted discourse on queer Cavafy and his afterlives which brings into view tensions within the epistemological sphere. In this respect, it proposes receiving queer Cavafy as an ongoing inquiry into who is being dis/allowed to survive.

Authors: Mitsikakos, V

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mv9bzkmmj
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: Greek, Modern (1453- ), English
• Keywords: bio-/necropolitics; C. P. Cavafy; queer survival; Cavafy Archive; genealogy; queer reading; seriality; aesthetics; queer reception; indexicality
• Subjects: Reception studies; Gay men's writings, Greek; Queer theory; Poets, Greek (Modern); Cultural studies