Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

Who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

Who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, Who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, Who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, This paper attempts to interrogate this very discursive queer identity and performative politics in Ginsberg's poetry.I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,ĭragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,Īngelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, Nevertheless, the agency of a Deleuzian 'queer masochism' entailed in a Butlerian queer performativity can be inferred as a potential strategy for refashioning queer literary politics. However, there can be located a counter-subversion at work in this portrayal of queer masculinity by virtue of its drawing from the very heteronormative constructs that it intends to subvert. These ecstatic performances reveal gender and sexuality as 'performative,' contributing towards a construction of a 'homosexual masculinity' which is subversive of heteronormative politics. The writing back by the marginalised sexual 'Others' employs the agency of representing pain as liberating, subversive, and pleasurable.

In a de Certeauan portrayal of 'queer' sexual encounters, the actors tend to subvert notions of the heteronormative hegemony over sexuality, sexual bodies, and masculinities. Allen Ginsberg's Howl presents a complex idea of queer identity politics restructuring American urbanity.

Ginsberg poems howl