Hermeneutical intervention of the resolution is good to create cracks in the symbolic representation of queer folk.
Bradway ’23 – [Tyler Bradway (Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Cortland, and author of Queer Experimental Literature),“The Queerness of Character-Details,” Modern Language Quarterly (2023) 84 (2): 207–238, https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335697] EY
This conclusion makes a certain sense if we understand character as a form of reification that forces us to mistake characters for real people with psychological interiority. If we take characters as real, we miss how they are effects of linguistic and narrative conventions. By extension, if we take queer characters as real, the argument goes, we overlook how queerness is an effect of cultural norms, discursive structures, and social power. Rather than a force of antinormative potential, queerness becomes an ahistorical core of the self, an identity to be represented like any other without threatening dominant structures of gender and sexuality. Queer characters seem to contain queerness by reifying sexuality as subjectivity. Hence queer theory treats character and other representational forms, such as narrative, with great skepticism.2 For example, Teresa de Lauretis (2011: 244) defines queer texts as those that “pointedly [disrupt] the referentiality of language and the referentiality of images.” To find queerness in a text, queer theory looks to the cracks in representation. This is why queer readings tend to privilege nonmimetic elements of style such as syntax, enjambment, and rhythm, which seem to elude representation, or rhetorical tropes such as irony, catachresis, and zeugma, which destabilize representation by proliferating meaning. These forms are “queer,” on this account, because they rupture the structures of signification that buttress the heteronormative symbolic order.