ABSTRACT
Affective transmissions involve complex processes of social and political mediation within a specific cultural context, and are susceptible to perversion and slippage at the point of their conversion. Distorted affects or when an affect is converted into or received as something else during its “passing” indicates the impact of power relations that define the subjectivities of bodies which distort the intended affect. Queer sex and intimacy trigger a move towards sexual gratification, as well as a retreat in postcoital time from pleasure into territories of shame, self-loathing and violence due to the negative affects stuck onto queerness through cultural, religious and political discourse. This chapter aims to locate the affective ruptures of queer sex while focusing on the transmutability of affects of pleasure into affects of shame and pain in postcoital time spaces through an analysis of Garth Greenwell’s novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness, which trace a genealogy of queer shame through multiple formal and stylistic experiments that problematise linear narratives of sexual awakening and acceptance, “becoming” queer and self-(re)invention.
