Nikolina Knezevic

 The Signifying Junkie: (M)otherness and Autobiography in Tainted Love by Stewart Home

Postmodernist discourse assumes that a society based on immutable notions of cultural categories, self, and political structures  perpetuates conditions for social oppression and politics of exclusion. In the realm of letters, the bourgeois notion of the subject is manifested in the fixation on the figure of the author. A critique of such a society is among the focal points of Stewart Home’s book Tainted Love. For that reason, it challenges autobiography as the most obvious generic manifestation of such an understanding of subjectivity and society. Home’s ghost-written autobiography of his (m)other is also a critique of the dominant culture’s totalizing tendencies reflected in its hijacking and comodifying counterculture. The book presents the collapse of the sixties swinging London hippie and beatnik scenes through increased consumption of drugs and the authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. This is portrayed through the main female protagonist  – the writer’s  (m)other, the signifying junkie of the title. Due to the complexities of her living conditions, Home never met her. Consequently, her presence in the book is a peculiar form of absence, attributing to her lingering spirit symbolic meanings of social and cultural significance. Her involvement in high-class prostitution  is a social commentary, depicting the predicament of living in capitalism. Simultaneously, Home addresses the question of the literary canon and its redescription. The paper will analyze these topics contextualizing them within the cultural and theoretical frameworks presented in “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” by Stewart Home from Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, a collection edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, Burroughs Live, collected interviews edited by Sylvére Lotringer, and Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson.

Nikolina Knezevic is a third year doctoral student in the English program at the Graduate Center CUNY. She teaches at Baruch College. Her main interests include, but are not limited to, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Anglo-American fiction, transcultural and crossdisciplinary exploration of creative expressions and social responses in contemporary liquid culture.