Reading books and watching movies, plays, and operas are activities that people carry out on a day-to-day basis in their lives. Activities like these are referred to as the experience of fictional narratives, and they may provide people with distraction from daily demands and possibly initiate intellectual inspiration. The most valuable thing about studying fictional narratives for nursing students is empathy. People who read a lot of fiction become more empathic, because fiction is a simulation of social experiences, in which people practice and enhance their interpersonal skills (Oatley K, 2002). When an individual reads a story, emotions are triggered by that story, such that an effective impression is elicited by the narrative.
Halperin (1995) describes queer as “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominate” (p.62), which is furthered by Edelman’s idea that queerness can never define an identity, it can only ever disturb one (2004); definitions of queer and queerness are often divergent and contradictory, due to the fluidity of the discourse (Sullivan, 2003), but is consistently affixed to LGBTQ+ issues and communities. Thus, queer is objectively defying (hetero)normative assumptions, of gender binaries, sexual relationships, and monolithic heterosexual institutions (Bell et al. 1994; Jackson 2006), aiding in promoting poststructuralist narratives. This is developed by Hall’s (2003) idea on queer theory, that ‘there is no “queer theory” in the singular, only many different voices and sometimes overlapping sometimes divergent perspectives that can loosely be called “queer theories”’ (p.5), as it is a highly individual positionality with differing experiences that are not coherent. The resistance to these hegemonic heterosexual institutions is an embodied, emotional statement, in which people must defy the norm, and (possibly) ‘come out’ (Corrigan and Matthews, 2003); consequently, this highly personal phenomena affects the formation of personal identity in relation to queerness and queer space (Coleman, 1982) which can insight emotions of pain, grief, happiness, anger and love which constitute and shape how place is experienced to individuals (Anderson and Smith, 2001). Being queer, impacts upon the constitution of self within place, the ontological understandings of feeling in or out of place, and the performativity of sexuality/identity in-situ (Butler, 1990).
Establishing Homonormativity?
Since the coming out of the geographical discipline (Binnie, 1997), academics in queer discourses have concerned themselves with critiquing heteronormativity, a socially-constructed culture that prioritises traditional heterosexual relationships, and alignment of biological sex with sexuality, gender identity and gender roles (Brown, 2011). Heteronormativity is society as we know it, that reinforces cisnormative gender assumptions and discriminate against those who do not conform (Aultman, 2014). But more recently, the queering of the discipline has allowed for the emergence of homonormativity, to describe and critique the forms of assimilated homosexuality into mainstream heterosexual culture (Brown, 2009). Duggan (2002) defines this new homonormativity as:
“A politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions
and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the
possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatised, depoliticised
gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumptio
