World Building and Foundation Shifting: Queer World Creation through the Transgressive and Obscene Literatures of Story of the Eye and Nightwood.

I'm working with two literary texts, Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, that explore sexuality in very different ways. My paper explores the differing modes in which these two novels explore what can be considered deviant sexualities, what can be defined as obscene, and how these ideas fit into the mode of a potential queer futurity, a vision that necessarily breaks down the inherent binaries of a heterocentric world. The paper also wrestles with the definition of transgressive literature, and what role this particular kind of genre can have on the queer world building project that I argue these two novels attempt.