Being Through Loss: A Queer Performative Reckoning With Grief

Abstract

This dissertation presents a framework for ‘being through loss’ that reframes the conditions of engagement with grief in relation to the loss of a loved other by illustrating how an experienced sense of being in the world takes and alters shape through loss. Via close readings of research on grief as psychiatric diagnosis (e.g., Simon et al 2011; Shear et al. 2013; Castelnovo et al. 2015) and autobiographical accounts of loss by Danish author and poet Naja Marie Aidt (2019) and American author and journalist Joan Didion (2005), this project makes four main contributions to contemporary debates on grief and scholarship on loss and death. First chapter opens by identifying the “ontogenetic” premise that subtends debate in Western Europe and North America, which, I argue, is predominantly focused on how to define the phenomenon of grief and accurately respond to it. I then introduce an alternative queer performative framing of grief as an organic and entangled phenomenon. Second chapter turns to a body of literature in support of the psychiatric model of grief. Challenging claims made by scholars and experts pertaining to grief as diagnosis, I illustrate the centrality of a biomedical perspective and more specifically a neuroscientific understanding of mental illness to the formation of so called “prolonged grief disorder.” I then propose that a biomedically poised psychiatric model’s reparative approach to the bereaved subject couches an anxious effort to contain life in a sovereign, humanist form, which indirectly illustrates the organic and open quality of being as phenomenon. Chapter 3 of this dissertation engages with Naja Marie Aidt’s account of the loss of her adult son Carl. Grounded in a combined analysis of Aidt’s style of expressing grief and the reception of her book in Danish media and public, I propose that available expert and vernacular models of mourning are unequipped to acknowledge the lost other as being. I trace the origins of this inability to a metaphysical presupposition that subtends psychoanalytic and contemporary models of mourning. By pertaining to the ways in which Aidt relates to Carl after the moment of his death, I propose that if acknowledged the being of the lost loved other alters an ethics of loss. The fourth chapter turns to Joan Didion’s account of the death of her husband John and the life-threatening illness of her daughter Quintana Roo. Based on analysis of Didion’s notion of “world without end,” I suggest that she offers a situated perspective on a world that operates as loss. This perspective challenges a perception of grief as a psycho-emotional state of exception and enables exploration of an embodied experience of being in a world defined by change and unreliability. I utilize Didion’s existential reflections on her tendency to control the uncontrollable for a closing methodological reflection on the challenges entailed in the onto-epistemological framework that frames my overall approach to grief. This dissertation highlights the relevance of feminist poststructuralist and queer uptakes of psychoanalysis to contemporary research on mourning and the field of queer death studies in particular, illustrating how these conceptual frameworks expand our understanding of and engagement with contemporary psychiatry as well as the models of mourning that inform expert and vernacular discourse. Furthermore, ‘being through loss’ identifies the “ontogeny” that subtends and locks contemporary debates in an exchange about right and wrong definitions of grief, and its three analytic engagements with contemporary grief literature illustrate an alternative queer performative approach to grief that not only reframes our understanding of this phenomena, but also provides us with a poetic sense of the organic and entangled qualities of an experienced sense of being in the world.