RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER is one of the most important yet controversial figures in the history of queer German cinema. His films often depict sexualized bodies and aesthetics, debatably to the point of fetishism, without affirming an explicit LGBTQ politics. This essay proposes that Fassbinder's depiction of gender performativity is key to understanding and assessing the queerness of his oeuvre's engagement with representations of otherness and visual pleasure. Linking feminist and queer theory, I examine how the New German Cinema director emphasizes a stylized femininity acted out by female characters in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant(The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss(Veronika Voss, 1982). These female-focused films, I argue, speak to the ways in which he draws attention, throughout his body of work, to Western cinema's interest in performativities of difference, not only of gender but intersecting aesthetics of race, class, and queer sexualities. As he focuses on women as they manipulate feminized clothing, gestures, and objects to perform an everdoubling representation of female difference, Fassbinder reveals that cinema eroticizes aesthetic and bodily imitations of otherness that can never be fully contained within a gender binary or within the cinematic frame.

Cinematic Subjectivity and Queer Excess

Fassbinder's films often explore the relationship between cinematic images of sexual otherness—which engage bodily and aesthetic performativities of gender, race, class, and sexuality—and visual pleasure. This is due in part to the artistic and sociohistorical context in which his films were produced. As a key filmmaker in New German Cinema, a movement that emerged in West Germany in the 1960s, he, along with his counterparts, unsettled notions of German identity, film authorship, and cinematic identification. The movement gained much of its momentum from state initiatives aiming to revitalize German film culture following a period of American control over the country's film markets after the Second World War. As a result, a small number of independent-minded, mostly male directors utilized government sponsorship to establish themselves as art cinema auteurs in Europe and the United States.

In Henry Yule's glossary of Anglo-India terms, Hobson-Jobson, there is a telling entry under the word home: ‘Home always means England. Nobody calls India home – not even those who have been here thirty years or more, and are never likely to return to Europe.’ Victor Jacquemont had made a similar observation: ‘People do not come here to live and enjoy life; they come – and this is the case in all states of society here – in order to gain something to enjoy life elsewhere.’ In this concluding chapter, I focus not on property speculation and house building in urban and suburban Delhi, or on ways of ruling through oblique methods of control, or on trying to get rich quickly or improve one's social standing, but rather on a deep-seated feeling that was present in the conscious minds of all my subjects: the desire to return to live in Britain. All five, at one time or another and regardless of their degree of Indian assimilation, harboured this desire, although only one of them would properly achieve it and then, apparently, without any real happiness. Through the records of their dreams of home, I now explore meaning in the establishment of a pedigree for the descendants of David Ochterlony; William Fraser's unfulfilled desire to build in Scotland; the family responsibilities of Charles Metcalfe; and the architecturally energetic but personally tragic later life of Robert Smith.

‘Who can wonder that he clings to the only country in the world where he can feel himself at home?’ mused Reginald Heber after one of his with encounters with David Ochterlony shortly before the latter died in the summer of 1825. Heber's accounts have played a major role in the construction of an orientalist narrative of Ochterlony's long life in India, with his oft-repeated descriptions of elephants, red tent encampments and other examples of ‘eastern habits’. These, however, deflect us from a deeper and more rounded understanding of the man who had, just a few years earlier, thought seriously about returning to live in Scotland and who in his will made arrangements for his grandson and only male heir, Charles Metcalfe Ochterlony (1817–91), to do just that, providing him with an income-producing estate on land with historic family associations.

Despite the aftershock that resulted from the murder of William Fraser in 1835, the British East India Company had now entered into a period in which its supremacy in Delhi, on the surface at least, seemed unruffled. It appeared to be on a secure and prosperous footing. But was this really the case and, if so, to what degree was this apparent stability maintained by fine-tuning the continuing links between the public behaviour of British officials and the conventions of the Mughal nobility? Did these behaviours change at all? To attempt an answer, I examine the houses of the long-serving Company official Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe (1795–1853), William Fraser's successor in the office of Agent and Commissioner at Delhi, as the post of Resident had come to be known. Metcalfe, operating just behind the facade of Mughal sovereignty, occupied the post from 1835 until his death, for such a long time that he was popularly known as the ‘King of Delhi’. His building activities can be understood as the manifestation of the hegemonic position he now held over both Delhi's British and its Indian society.

The British had settled themselves on top of extant Mughal urban fabric in many parts of north India, and we have seen in previous chapters how parts of prominently sited princely palaces, baradari and other elite indigenous domestic building types inside the walls of Shahjahanabad had been reused. So had Shahjahani and later Mughal pleasure gardens, both imperial and sub-imperial, in the well-irrigated areas outside the walls to the north and west of Delhi. We have also seen how the local conventions of building for the hot climate of the northern plains had been adapted in variations of the competing classical and Gothic styles of the home culture. There are also a number of well-documented examples of the appropriation of sacred monumental structures for domestic use, occasionally mosques but more frequently the tombs of the lesser Mughal nobility – tombs that were compact in size and generally set in open, formally planned, enclosed gardens.

In this chapter I analyse the meanings of Thomas Metcalfe's appropriation of the octagonal tomb of an early-seventeenth-century Mughal nobleman, Muhammad Quli Khan, near the urban village of Mehrauli, which, by 1844, Metcalfe had begun to convert into a small country retreat.

In Chapter Two I described how, at its inception in 1803, British settlement in Delhi was mainly concentrated in the elite area inside the Kashmir Gate of the walled city, to the north of the great Mughal fort/palace or Lal Qil'a, where the remains of the two most prestigious seventeenth-century Mughal riverine palaces were located. The Kashmir Gate area led out to rough open country beyond, where new British Civil and Military Lines would later be built. In this area stood the Residency house, as well as principal administrative offices including those of the judiciary, soon to be followed by a school, a printing press and a variety of new commercial establishments. The Residency itself had grown from a Mughal garden pavilion into an assertive hybrid structure, its new, colonnaded facade hiding a Mughal interior and proclaiming growing British authority over the city.

There was another large and visually arresting house in the Kashmir Gate area, this one built in the 1820s on top of older Mughal foundations (see Plate 6). Solidly constructed and still in use at the time of writing, the house occupied part of the remains of the second palace north of the fort, originally that of Ali Mardan Khan, the vazīr or principal minister of Shah Jahan. This chapter will focus on the activities of the man who built and lived in that house, Robert Smith (1787–1873), an officer in the Bengal Engineers, and on Smith's later and related building activities in Europe. The design of the house can be attributed on stylistic, documentary and circumstantial evidence to Smith, who was its occupant in the 1820s, the decade during which he served as Delhi's Garrison Engineer. Robert Smith is one of only two of my five subjects who did not die in India, returning to live a sumptuous if isolated life in hybrid houses he would design and build in Europe. It is the houses that Smith built after he left the Company's service that reinforce attribution to him of the Delhi house, as well as other Gothicising buildings in Delhi and elsewhere in north India.

Investigation of Robert Smith's house in Delhi has been hampered by two misconceptions in the secondary literature over the identity of its occupier.

IN RECENT DECADES, the increasing fluidity, overlap, and ambiguity of sex-gender identities has been accompanied by, if not actually brought about, a reevaluation of hegemonic masculinity both as an analytic concept and as cultural practice; we see an increasing complexity and ambiguity in performances and representations of masculinity—used ever more often now in the plural form “masculinities”—in the public sphere. A careful analysis of such trends in German-speaking Europe must account for the influence of Anglo-American popular culture, media, and literature without assuming that their meaning and function are maintained without alteration when transferred to a different linguistic and cultural setting.

The complexity of cultural adaptation and the impossibility of ever just appropriating cultural forms without altering them can be illustrated using an episode from one of the three texts examined in this essay: Thomas Brussig's 1995 novel Helden wie wir(Heroes Like Us, 1997), in which protagonist Klaus Uhltzscht comes across a copy of John Irving's 1978 novel The World according to Garp(or rather, a German translation entitled Wie Garp die Welt sah) while breaking into the apartment of an individual under surveillance by the Stasi. The title immediately attracts the attention of Klaus's colleague Gerd Grabs, who steals the book with the intent to prove to the Standesamt(registry office) that Garp is a common first name. Grabs, who has given all his children one-syllable names that start with G, is excited about the possibility of naming his next son Garp, but ultimately he fails in his efforts to get the Standesamtto recognize the name. In this fashion, Brussig hints at his American literary influences, even suggesting that he has stolen from them, but also points out the impossibility of simply reusing the American source material unchanged if it is to be recognizable to a German-speaking readership.

This essay examines Helden wie wiras part of an intertextual and intercultural semiotic web in which gendered meanings are spun for the psychosexual development of young males, of adolescents who become men in their respective societies. I situate Brussig's novel in the center of the web, which looks backward chronologically to Phillip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint(1969) and forward to Jonathan Franzen's novel Purity(2015).

FLANNERY O'CONNOR always contended that her work's value depended far less on its messages or meanings than on its artistry. A text had to succeed—first and foremost—as art before it could successfully affect a reader emotionally or intellectually. Badly written work, she felt, was not worth reading, no matter how virtuous or well-intentioned its “meaning.” Despite her own very strong Christianity (particularly her Catholicism), O'Connor disdained anything merely pious or drippingly saccharine, flaws she found in much “serious” religious writing of her time and flaws she deliberately opposed in her own style and methods. Ideas and sentiments alone, she believed, no matter how admirable, could not make “creative writing” real art. The true Christian artist, O'Connor thought, had to be an artist first and foremost, not a mere religious propagandist. Too many Christian writers, she believed, were, indeed, simple religious partisans, and O'Connor thought obvious religious dogma, tricked up in ineptly written works, did more harm than good. Unskilled “Christian literature,” in her opinion, was not only mocked by real artists but also corrupted the tastes of Christian readers.

These views are hardly surprising: after all, O'Connor was learning her craft just when the so-called New Criticism began to dominate thought about creative writing. While working on her MFA, she owned a thoroughly marked-up copy of one bible of the New Criticism: Understanding Fiction, by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. This extraordinarily influential book followed the even more influential Understanding Poetry, also by Brooks and Warren. The New Critics (or “formalists”) believed that every word mattered, as did its precise placement in a carefully designed whole. O'Connor was a committed formalist. This fact hardly explains everything about her art, but it does explain much. Some of her best friends, best teachers, and staunchest advocates were not only New Critics but leading New Critics. These included Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon. Through them and such others as Andrew Lytle and John Crowe Ransom, O'Connor quickly became a member in very good standing in formalist circles. She valued the opinions of such people, and they valued her art.

POST–SECOND WORLD WAR culture is fixated on memory and, by association, the archive, which collects, preserves, and houses documents or artefacts to be used by researchers and laypeople to confront, understand, and share the past. The range of archives in Germany and the United States of America, the two countries housing the lesbian archives I explore in this chapter, is too large to detail here, but both countries have archive cultures. US archives focusing exclusively on LGBTQ+ subjects include: the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles); the June Mazer Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles); the Archive at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center (New York City); the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum (San Francisco); the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives (Chicago); the Barbara Gittings Gay/Lesbian Collection at The Independence Branch Library (Philadelphia); the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies (Minneapolis), while Germany's queer archives include the Centrum Schwule Geschichte (Gay History Center, Cologne) and the Schwules Museum und Archiv (Gay Museum and Archive, Berlin).

Such archives house information while offering us an opportunity to think critically about systems of oppression and the interlocking mechanisms of the personal and the political. A link between archives and non-normative sexuality makes sense, for as Laura Doan and Sarah Waters suggest, “retrospection is a condition of homosexual agency,” and Heather Love locates queers among the “groups constituted by historical injury” for whom “the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.” The archive may be a site of melancholy, and the LGBTQ+ archive houses the lost and sometimes scared and scary lives of queers, but I argue that this situation exists alongside a more positive space in LGBTQ+ repositories.

THIS CHAPTER TRACES the lesson for cultural types implied in the relationship between the descriptions of the faces observed in Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig(1912; Death in Venice, 1928) and the observers’ behavior and cultural standing. Mann's novella begins with Gustav von Aschenbach, a Munich-based author, breaking from his work by taking a late-afternoon stroll in the English Garden. While waiting for the streetcar home, he is distracted by the appearance of a man who stands in the portico of the mortuary chapel of the Northern Cemetery, facing into the sun. Caught staring at the unexpected figure, Aschenbach looks away, senses a newfound desire to travel, and decides to postpone his book project by taking a holiday on the Mediterranean in order to put the spark back into his life and work. That evening, instead of writing, Aschenbach looks over maps and timetables. This sudden about-face is remarkable. The journey—through nature, the bustling city, reading the Greek crosses and religious inscriptions on the chapel's Byzantine facade—that would return Aschenbach to cultural production is entirely rerouted because of a desire awakened by encountering a man whom, after reflecting upon his appearance, Aschenbach chooses to avoid. Something in Aschenbach's appreciation of the stranger both disturbs him and causes him to reset his ways. This man is not the only such individual whom Aschenbach encounters and estimates during the novella. On his holiday in Istria and Venice, several men intrude uninvited into Aschenbach's world and, for the most part, cause him discomfort. In each case, Aschenbach reacts, sets his course again, and makes strategic decisions; and, in one instance, he is moved to write again. He always knows how to respond. He either avoids or pursues the figures based on his physiognomical understanding of them. In each case, concurrent facial descriptions and character assessments pave the way for Aschenbach's response. In this way, faces in Der Tod in Venedig—their physiognomical reception—motivate Aschenbach's attempt to retrieve and reinvigorate his cultural creativity.

Physiognomy matters in Der Tod in Venedig. In addition to the frequency of verbs of seeing and looking, there is a range of common to more technical words denoting “appearance” or the “face.”

ISSUES OF RACE and of race relations have long been important in commentary on Flannery O'Connor but have become especially significant in recent years. After all, O'Connor lived in a section of the United States with the highest proportion of African Americans. Blacks had suffered much misery there, first as slaves and then, often, as poor and downtrodden persons subject to legal discrimination. It might have been tempting for O'Connor, as a relatively powerful white woman, to ignore racial matters and write mainly about her fellow whites. And indeed, some critics have claimed that this is essentially what she did. They argue that blacks in her fiction are mainly background characters, that O'Connor never created a major black figure or really tried to “get inside the heads” of black people. O'Connor herself claimed that she wrote most effectively about the people she knew best, conceding that she knew little about African Americans in any intimate ways. Yet her works repeatedly explore racial issues, often in ways suggesting sympathy for blacks, support for gradual integration, and, especially, contempt for deep-seated racism.

O'Connor herself, however, has sometimes been accused of racist views. The N-word appears repeatedly in her fiction, making some of her works increasingly difficult to teach or read. Usually the word reflects the real speech of her era; avoiding it might have opened her to charges of whitewashing the uglier aspects of contemporary culture. In fact, sometimes O'Connor uses the word (especially, for instance, in “Revelation”) to mock and satirize blatant racism. Her black characters, although few in number and never central, are rarely treated with the comic disdain O'Connor reserves for racist whites. She saw deep racism as one more symptom of the pride and self-centeredness that she, as a devout Christian, considered humanity's greatest flaw. For her, racism both reflected and resulted from original sin. It would be easy to show how often she satirized racism and racists.

Yet some commentators think O'Connor did not go far enough in championing equal rights for blacks. Some have even accused O'Connor herself of racism, especially in view of various remarks she made in published— and especially some unpublished—letters. Defenders suggest that such remarks were meant to shock or mock the sensibilities of pious liberals, including some of her closest friends.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR identified herself first as a Christian in general and then as a Roman Catholic in particular. She considered her Christian identity eternal: it would not end when her physical life expired. But she also identified as a Southerner. She felt thoroughly “at home” in her region: she embraced many “traditional” Southern values, while questioning or even repudiating some others. The South was, quite simply, the place she knew best—right down to the fingertips she used in writing about it. She knew how Southerners conventionally thought, felt, behaved, and, most importantly, spoke. The language in her stories is not any abstract “English”; it is, most often, Southern English—the kind she had grown up hearing and brings fully alive on the page. Yet even though O'Connor was in all these senses a Southern writer, she thought her writings had universal human relevance. She wrote about her region because she knew it best, but her deepest concerns were with human beings in general, and especially their relations with their Creator.

Robert E. Golden's annotated bibliography gives a fine sense of commentary on O'Connor as a Southerner in her career's first decade. He notes critics’ comments that she usually wrote about the South (13, 19, 22, 23, 34, 41, 44, 48), often in realistic ways (17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 30, 38, 45, 47, 50), as well as claims that she belonged to a distinctive “Southern school” (20, 24, 26, 33–34, 37, 52) sometimes characterized as “Southern Gothic” (22, 24, 32, 36, 38, 51). In fact, in 1952, Newsweek opined that O'Connor had “originated a curious kind of extremely personal fiction, odd little stories about Southerners who were backward but intelligent, brutal but poetic” (SS 9), while John Cook Wyllie, in 1955, saw her as offering “a sophisticate's view of the Deep South” (SS 33), and Sylvia Stallings, also in 1955, praised O'Connor for being “a regionalist in the best sense of that word; that is, she understands her country and its people so well that in her hands they become all humanity” (SS 35).

BECAUSE FLANNERY O'CONNOR was a woman writer, one might have expected issues of gender to be prominent in commentary about her from the start. Instead, gender has become a main concern for her critics only since the 1990s. In some ways this is not surprising, because gender became an especially important topic in literary studies in general in the late 1980s and particularly throughout the 1990s. Of course, “feminist” approaches had already begun to arise in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. Only in the 1990s and 2000s, however, did gender really become a central focus in O'Connor's commentary.

O'Connor herself never wanted to be considered a “woman writer.” Although she often wrote about female characters, she rarely treated them as females per se. Instead, she saw them—and said she saw them— mainly as individuals, with all the flaws, foibles, and, yes, sins of all human beings, whatever their race, social status, ethnic identity, or family background. O'Connor considered people first and foremost as creatures of God who either did their best to honor their creator or failed to do so, whether willfully or through complacent neglect. She was less interested in sexual identities than in spiritual flaws or aspirations. She saw herself less as a woman than as a Christian, a Catholic, a Southerner, and a flawed human being who needed constantly to focus on her relationship with God. Early critics tended to follow her lead. But issues of gender were never exactly neglected. They were always waiting off to the side, eventually inviting fuller study. The shift away from formalism that occurred in the 1970s, and the shift toward social, cultural, and historical approaches that flourished in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and that continues to this day), almost guaranteed that gender would become a central issue in O'Connor criticism.

Of all the issues explored in the present book, gender is the one that receives least attention in the early commentary surveyed in Robert E. Golden's annotated bibliography. Golden does quote from a 1961 interview: “When asked why Georgia's best writers have been women, O'Connor replied, ‘Women just have more time’” (39). This reply was probably partly facetious, but both the reply and the question indicate that the few comments on O'Connor and gender from the 1950s and early 1960s dealt with the fact that O'Connor was a woman writer.

THE 2012 DOCUMENTARY Unter Männern—Schwul in der DDR (Among Men: Gay in the GDR, 2012, dir. Ringo Rosener and Markus Stein) begins with a kind of cinematic overture.1 This overture introduces the viewer to three of the film's interviewees whose comments set the stage for the biographical and documentary nature of what follows as well as the themes that will surface in the subjects’ narratives: the gay experiences of a bygone time and place and under a nowextinct social system. The first man, Jurgen (b. 1932), calls himself old and is amused that his life now involves working in the garden; Christian (b. 1934), the second man, reveals that he long debated whether to participate in the film and to out himself, since he says that part of his life is over; the third, Frank (b. 1959), also reflects on his current situation and ponders the fantastical thought of waking up and no longer being gay.

At this point, the film's first act begins. Accompanied by music with an electronic feel, the film cuts to establishing shots of Berlin, a tracking shot of a young man on a bicycle (who we come to find out is one of the directors, Ringo Rosener) and a cut to this same man's entrance into a gay club replete with flashing disco lights and go-go boys. The tracking shot both quotes and foreshadows the use of footage from the landmark film Coming Out, the only East German feature film to focus on homosexuality. A voice-over narration by Rosener addresses the viewer, introducing us to his on- and off-screen presence, informing us that he was born in rural East Germany, not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification, and dared to be openly gay only after fleeing this more remote part of the country. This first act, in which Rosener positions the film in the present but consciously in juxtaposition to an historical past, gives us a reason for this film: a contemporary German gay man expresses his surprise at what he does and does not know about the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), the land in which he was born, and also at how his life would be different if the Berlin Wall had not come down and the GDR had survived.