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Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is a foundational work of lesbian literature and has been characterized as a queer text. This essay begins with resistance to reading the novel as a wholly celebratory queer text because of how it positions a form of essentialized lesbianism against queer sexualities that are coded as deviant and abnormal. Nonetheless, Rubyfruit Jungle brims with queer narratives, queer scenes, and queer characters. In the essay’s second half, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading to engage with potential queer readings the novel affords. I show how readers can recuperate the queer sexualities the novel documents in ways that the novel – with its specific historical and political positionality – did not or could not account for.
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Through application of the contemporary term transmasculinity and the more historical stone butch, the author questions the critical tendency to perceive American writer Willa Cather only as lesbian while ignoring or undertheorizing a transgender longing at play in her fiction, short stories, and letters. While biographical evidence must not be approached as simply coterminous with literary production, as literature often exceeds or resists such alignments, Cather's letters in particular suggest a strong identification with her male fictional alliances. Analysis of her letters alongside two of her most treasured, and disparaged, novels, One of Ours (1922) and The Professor's House (1925), conveys Cather's wish for an idealized masculinity, both for herself and for Western culture, that would survive two coeval historical processes and events: the closing of the American frontier and the First World War. Through what the author calls a stone butch “armature,” she and her characters retained masculine dignity despite historical foreclosure of Cather's manly ideal, Winston Churchill's Great Man, who was for her the artistic and intellectual casualty of the period. Cather expressed the peculiar nostalgic longing present in stone butch, and in the explosion of new forms of transmasculinity in the present. This suggests that historical transgender styles don't disappear entirely, even as new categories emerge.
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Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is typically read as representative of the negative effects of trauma. This essay suggests that one’s shame can be used to recompose the shamed self, enabling one to (re)connect with others.
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Using social and queer theory on domination, sexuality and gender, this contribution explores how the queer American author Dorothy Allison celebrates the vilified transgressive lesbian body. As, in the 1970s, the mainstream american feminist movement crystallized around the definition of an acceptable sexuality in the name of femininity, female sexual practices were standardized according to strict identity frames, carnal desire was denied, and transgressive lesbians who play with gender roles were defined as abject. In response to this extreme taming of the body, Allison interrogates the notions of masculinity and femininity, domination and submission in her exploration of sexual pleasure and traumatized sexuality. She celebrates the aggressiveness and masculinity of queer lesbianism, promotes the fluidity of gender roles, and asserts the primacy of the flesh,sensuality, and materiality in sexuality.
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Analysant les romans de Nina Bouraoui, en particulier Mes mauvaises pensées, Appelez-moi par mon prénom et Nos baisers sont des adieux, cet article démontre comment l’écrivaine transforme l’extrême violence de sa prose – à raconter son sentiment de blessure face aux identités distinctes d’auteure française, algérienne et queer qu’on veut lui imposer – en un véhicule capable de transmettre des affects plutôt qu’une logique narrative. En reliant certaines œuvres d’art (y compris ses propres textes littéraires) à d’autres corps dans une même virtualité en tant qu’« émetteurs-récepteurs » d’affects, Bouraoui en arrive à suggérer la possibilité d’une nouvelle sexualité queer affective, c’est-à-dire relationnelle et allant au-delà de l’orientation sexuelle de chacun(e).
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Le présent article trace d’abord un bref portrait de trois conceptions dominantes de l’identité sexuelle : le modèle patriarcal, le modèle féministe et le modèle postmoderne. Puis, après avoir présenté plus longuement le dernier, il analyse deux romans relayant cette conception postmoderne de l’identité de sexe/genre, l’un écrit par un homme (Self, de Yann Martel, paru en 1996), et l’autre par une femme (Ce qu’il en reste, de Julie Hivon, paru en 1999). Dans ces deux romans, qui revêtent de ce fait une importante dimension politique, les identités figées sont mises à mal tant discursivement que formellement - par la déconstruction des signes du passé et la mise en place de dispositifs énonciatifs confondant hommes et femmes, par exemple. Ils participent ainsi à une conception culturaliste de l’identité sexuelle, selon laquelle le genre est une performance.,This article begins by briefly introducing three major frameworks for conceptualizing gender identity : a patriarchal model, a feminist model and a postmodern model. After exploring the third in greater depth, it offers a reading of two novels of postmodern gender identity, one by a male author (Self by Yann Martel, 1996), one by a female author (Ce qu’il en reste by Julie Hivon, 1999). Both novels, which are therefore strongly political, challenge the concept of predetermined gender identity on the levels both of discourse and of form, by deconstructing older concepts and by blurring gender lines. They are therefore grounded in a view of gender identity as cultural construction and performance.
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In her paper, "A Bakhtinian Perspective on Feminist Lesbian Crime Writing," Sarah Posman discusses how the Bakhtinian concepts "ethos" and "chronotope" add to the discussion of feminist lesbian crime writing. She sets out from a Bakhtinian typology of action stories and situates recent crime writing as a curious mixture of mission stories and transformation stories. Focusing on the innovative potential of feminist lesbian crime writing, Posman explores how such stories tackle the iconically masculine and heterosexual conventions of the detective story and manage to balance tradition and subversion successfully. Posman infuses her analysis with issues central to feminism and queer theory and considers how a feminist lesbian detective hero can "change the world," that is, how such an "other" ethos impinges on crime writing's conventional chronotopical constellation. The hero and world under discussion are those of the popular Kate Delafield series by Katherine V. Forrest.
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My essay theorizes femme/butch family romances against the grain of dominant feminist and lesbian thought that desexualizes the space of mother/daughter desire. I do so through a reading/recoding of the infringing incestuous mommie-boy desires that surface in an archetypal lesbian novel, Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart.