“Sensible” Suicide,Brutal Selfishness,and John Hughes’s Queer Bonds

Abstract

Queer bonds conceptualize inventive and resistant modes of belonging, sociability, and relation that push at, through, and outside normative relational systems and their normative commitments. The essay juxtaposes contemporary gay suicide discourse, specifically the “It Gets Better” campaign and 2009’s Prayers for Bobby with the 1985 Molly Ringwald made-for-TV film Surviving: A Family in Crisis, examining how normative familial bonds in discourses of heterosexual suicide produce a resistant and relational discourse of brutal selfishness. Contrary to a rhetoric of selfishness, mediated representation of gay youth suicide reproduces a discursive link between gay identity and suicide that constructs gay suicide as problematically logical, sensible, and intelligible. Conceptualizing a queered rhetoric of selfishness, resisting gay suicidal logics, the essay looks to queer bonds forged in John Hughes’s ‘Brat Pack” films of otherness as maps of relational resistance and inventive articulations of non-normative modes of queer selfishness and belonging.

Keywords

Queer Relationality Suicide Gay and Lesbian Bonds

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