Dough Girls and Biscuit Boys The Queer Potential of the Countercommunal Grotesque Body within Modernist Literature

• Published in: Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 57 - 80
• Main Author: Renzi, Kristen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2015
• Subjects: American literature; Embodiment; Failure; Help Seeking Behavior; Irony; Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1886-1966); Journalists; Marriage; McCullers, Carson (1917-1967); Medicine; Modernism; Novellas; Semiotics; Sexuality; Strikes; Suffering; Truth; Violence; Work Environment
• ISSN: 1071-6068; 1080-6601; 1080-6601
• DOI: 10.1353/mod.2015.0016

The irony, of course, of the tasty sign of love being simultaneously a grotesque symbol of the imposition of violence-the violence of suffering, the violence of forced conformity that such suffering implies, the violence of the community feeding off of human suffering and sameness as the fit conclusion to a delicious meal-indicates, if not an antihumanist message, at least some skepticism regarding the positive effect on community of common human ingredients like love and sympathy.5 More interesting to me, however, is the suggestion regarding grotesquerie and embodiment that Miss Lonelyhearts's reference to the heart-wound cookie-cutter sameness of human experience posits: not that human commonality is, in truth, grotesque nor that violent grotesquerie is actually normatively common but that the sign of bodily normativity is fundamentally indistinguishable from that of bodily grotesquerie in the modernist textual landscape.