QUEER-PROBLEMS AS A FACT OF AESTHETICS IN THE WORKS OF OLES ULIANENKO

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to establish why the author uses images of queer identities on the example of Oles Ulianenko’s works. The research methodology is based on the hypothesis that to achieve the specified goal should be possible providing the three methods are used, namely hermeneutic, the comparative-typological, and the corporal-mimetic method to analyse fiction. The scientific novelty of the research is that queer issues are represented as an aesthetic phenomenon in Ukrainian literary studies for the first time. The Conclusions. First, the queer content depicted in the works under analysis proves that people find their ability to derive pleasure from various actions, ideas, fantasies, and things, related to sexual sphere, extraordinary significant. Second, the ability and desire to receive pleasure can be limited neither by laughter nor by the death threat, which ontologically should allegedly deny sexual urges. Third, direct portraying of people’s conflicting abilities and desires is specific aesthetics. Fourth, queer content does not exist by itself since it is an inevitable peculiar accompaniment of passion, being a queer phenomenon which violates not a fancy moral but a real rational norm. Fifth, the works by Oles Ulianenko are artistically powerful because he does not neglect anything in his desperate attempts to reach extreme aesthetic limit, opening almost unlimited horizon of senses which is completely different, much deeper than any ideological, political, or pedagogical speculation. Sixth, this horizon is determined by a wonderful and simultaneously imperfect, and exciting artistic strategy, caused by queer efforts to overcome the last limits of erotic and sexual decency.