In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• “One and the same”: Morrison’s Queer Phenomenology in Sula
• Preston Taylor Stone (bio)

Introduction

In Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, the two protagonists are girlfriends whose relationship crosses boundaries, physical and psychic.¹ In childhood, we are told, Nel and Sula find “in each other’s eyes the intimacy they [are] looking for.”² Their connection with one another is so deep they often have “difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (83). What is sometimes referred to as the “lesbian merger” theory³ signifies the notion that two lesbians may become indistinguishable from one another because of their desire for one another. In the case of Nel and Sula, whose friendship is predicated on their sameness, we see such a merger physicalized first in their sexual play in the grass as adolescents, when they are closest emotionally, and second in Nel’s disgust at Jude’s act of infidelity with Sula, when they are furthest from one another emotionally. In the former case, Morrison delays explication of the emotion the girls feel in the moment in order to focus instead on their physical actions. The latter collapses the two into a singular pronoun, “they,” which allows the reader to modify whom is referent with each reading of the pronoun. In each case, we are alerted to Nel and Sula’s collapse into one another through formal elements: metaphor and innuendo, then syntax.

In the realist mode, we generally assume the psychic/emotional and physical planes to be distinct planes of existence, even as they may be related. Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) has a deep relation to the realist mode, presenting things as they are so well that its subject matter continues to be reason the book is banned.⁴ However, with Sula and, a few years after, Song of Solomon (1977), we see a more magical realist mode develop in her prose. At this early point in her literary career, we should [End Page 249] note, Morrison was constructing what would be a world-renowned style, and with Song of Solomon, a critical success, she joined the literary establishment. Using the framework of queer phenomenology, this article makes the case that the relationship at the center of the novel disrupts both the spatial planes on which the characters exist and the form of the novel itself. The effect this has is a queering of relation, gender, and form. I choose phenomenology because space and subjective perception seem to be quite important to Morrison’s oeuvre. From The Bluest Eye’s traumatized protagonist to Beloved’s haunting history, Morrison’s fiction could very well be characterized by the “ways of inhabiting and being inhabited by space.”⁵ Using this and other frameworks developed by queer of color theorists Gloria Wekker as well as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith’s theories⁶ will bring into focus how Nel and Sula’s relation to one another is so close—so intimate—that the traditional separation of the physical and the psychic planes is collapsed. The ramifications of that collapse manifest in the form of the novel.

This article disputes the notion that Black queer studies began with the writing of Audre Lorde, Gloria T. Hull, and others in the late 1970s and 1980s.⁷ Instead, this queer reading of Morrison’s second novel, published in 1972, combined with the theorizing of Morrison’s contemporaries pushes the foundation of Black queer studies to Sula, notably a novel Smith herself reads as “inherently lesbian” in her field-defining work “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.”⁸ The text, we will see, stands as a Black feminist text like no other because it extends back the commencement of Black queer studies and inserts this discipline into literary-aesthetic methods of critique, such as formalism.⁹ The text is as multifaceted, that is, as the discipline it ushers in, concerned as it is with complex notions of relation, temporality, and the erotic. We will attend to the queer relation between the two protagonists of Sula—an area of scholarship that has been recently overlooked in labeling Morrison’s work heteronormative and androcentric,¹⁰ even as one of the...

中文翻译：

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“同一个”：莫里森在苏拉的酷儿现象学

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• “同一个”：莫里森在苏拉的酷儿现象学
• 普雷斯顿·泰勒·斯通（简介）

介绍

在托妮·莫里森 (Toni Morrison) 1973 年的小说《苏拉》(Sula)中，两位主角是闺蜜，他们的关系跨越了肉体和精神的界限。¹据我们所知，童年时期，内尔和苏拉“在彼此的眼中找到了他们所寻求的亲密感”。²他们彼此之间的联系如此之深，以至于常常“难以区分自己的想法和对方的想法”（83）。有时被称为“女同性恋合并”理论³表示这样一种观念，即两个女同性恋可能会因为彼此的渴望而变得难以区分。在内尔和苏拉的例子中，他们的友谊建立在他们的相同性之上，我们看到这种合并首先体现在他们青少年时期在草地上的性游戏中，当时他们的情感最接近，其次是内尔对裘德不忠行为的厌恶。苏拉，当他们在情感上彼此距离最远的时候。在前一种情况下，莫里森推迟了解释女孩们当时的情绪，以便将注意力集中在她们的身体动作上。后者将两者折叠成一个单数代词“他们”，这允许读者在每次阅读代词时修改所指的对象。在每一种情况下，我们都会通过形式元素注意到内尔和苏拉的相互崩溃：隐喻和影射，然后是语法。

在现实主义模式中，我们通常假设精神/情感和物理层面是不同的存在层面，即使它们可能是相关的。莫里森的第一部小说《最蓝的眼睛》（ The Bluest Eye，1970）与现实主义模式有着深厚的联系，它完美地呈现了事物的本来面目，以至于它的主题仍然是这本书被禁的原因。⁴然而，在《苏拉》以及几年后的《所罗门之歌》（1977）中，我们看到她的散文中出现了一种更加魔幻的现实主义模式。在她文学生涯的早期阶段，我们应该[结束第249页]注意到，莫里森正在构建一种世界知名的风格，随着《所罗门之歌》的巨大成功，她加入了文学界。本文利用酷儿现象学的框架，论证了小说中心的关系破坏了人物存在的空间平面和小说本身的形式。其影响是对关系、性别和形式的酷异化。我选择现象学是因为空间和主观感知似乎对莫里森的作品非常重要。从《最蓝的眼睛》中饱受创伤的主人公到《宠儿》中令人难忘的历史，莫里森的小说很可能以“空间的居住方式和被居住的方式”为特征。⁵使用这个框架和酷儿色彩理论家 Gloria Wekker 以及奥德丽·洛德 (Audre Lorde) 和芭芭拉·史密斯 (Barbara Smith) 的理论⁶开发的其他框架，将聚焦于内尔 (Nel) 和苏拉 (Sula) 之间的关系如何如此密切——如此亲密——以至于传统的物理分离精神层面崩溃了。这种崩溃的后果以小说的形式表现出来。

本文对黑人酷儿研究始于奥德丽·洛德 (Audre Lorde)、格洛丽亚·T·赫尔 (Gloria T. Hull) 等人 20 世纪 70 年代末和 80 年代的著作这一观点提出了质疑。⁷相反，对莫里森 1972 年出版的第二部小说的这种酷儿解读，结合莫里森同时代人的理论，将黑人酷儿研究的基础推向了《苏拉》，尤其是史密斯本人在她的领域定义作品中将其视为“本质上的女同性恋”的小说。走向黑人女权主义批评。” ⁸我们将看到，该文本是一部与众不同的黑人女权主义文本，因为它追溯了黑人酷儿研究的开端，并将这一学科插入到形式主义等文学美学批评方法中。⁹文本是多方面的，也就是说，正如它所引入的学科一样，它涉及关系、时间性和色情的复杂概念。我们将关注《苏拉》两位主角之间的酷儿关系——这个学术领域最近在给莫里森的作品贴上异性恋和男性中心的标签时被忽视了，¹⁰甚至被认为是……