New Lesbian Criticism

New Lesbian Criticism PDF Author: Sally Munt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231080194
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume explores whether there can be a specific lesbian aesthetic, juxtaposed against reading as a 'woman' or as a 'heterosexual'. Contributors both explore the uses of recent theories such as post-structuralism and offer a lesbian critique of such methodologies. Close readings of contemporary lesbian fiction and popular culture focus on works such as Zami, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Wanderground, and Desert of the Heart as well as on lesbian pornography. Together the essays point to lesbian culture's ability to create new meanings for iteself and to foreground the intertextuality of lesbian identities.Contributors: Sonya Andemahr, Lisa Henderson, Hilary Hinds, Katie King, Reina Lewis, Sally Munt, Gillian Spraggs, Angela Weir, Anna Wilson, Elizabeth Wilson, and Bonnie Zimmerman.

New Lesbian Criticism

New Lesbian Criticism PDF Author: Sally Munt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231080194
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume explores whether there can be a specific lesbian aesthetic, juxtaposed against reading as a 'woman' or as a 'heterosexual'. Contributors both explore the uses of recent theories such as post-structuralism and offer a lesbian critique of such methodologies. Close readings of contemporary lesbian fiction and popular culture focus on works such as Zami, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Wanderground, and Desert of the Heart as well as on lesbian pornography. Together the essays point to lesbian culture's ability to create new meanings for iteself and to foreground the intertextuality of lesbian identities.Contributors: Sonya Andemahr, Lisa Henderson, Hilary Hinds, Katie King, Reina Lewis, Sally Munt, Gillian Spraggs, Angela Weir, Anna Wilson, Elizabeth Wilson, and Bonnie Zimmerman.

Lesbian Rule

Lesbian Rule PDF Author: Amy Villarejo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238535X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she analyzes what these representations contain and their limits. She combines Marxist theories of value with poststructuralist insights to argue that lesbian visibility operates simultaneously as an achievement and a ruse, a possibility for building a new visual politics and away of rendering static and contained what lesbian might mean. Integrating cinema studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, Villarejo illuminates the contexts within which the lesbian is rendered visible. Toward that end, she analyzes key portrayals of lesbians in public culture, particularly in documentary film. She considers a range of films—from documentaries about Cuba and lesbian pulp fiction to Exile Shanghai and The Brandon Teena Story—and, in doing so, brings to light a nuanced economy of value and desire.

Lesbians on Television

Lesbians on Television PDF Author: Kate McNicholas Smith
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
ISBN: 9781789382808
Category : Lesbianism on television
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Lesbians on Television, Kate McNicholas Smith maps concurrent contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media, focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America. Central to these shifts has been a re-imagining of queer lives - or a 'new queer visibility' - as LGBTQ+ characters have become increasingly visible within popular culture.

Proust's Lesbianism

Proust's Lesbianism PDF Author: Elisabeth Ladenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801435959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
For decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust's fiction--his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Traditional readings of the Recherche have dismissed Proust's "Gomorrah"--his term for women who love other women--as a veiled portrayal of the novelist's own homosexuality. More recently, "queer-positive" rereadings have viewed the novel's treatment of female sexuality as ancillary to its accounts of Sodom and its meditations on time and memory. Ladenson instead demonstrates the primacy of lesbianism to the novel, showing that Proust's lesbians are the only characters to achieve a plenitude of reciprocated desire. The example of Sodom, by contrast, is characterized by frustrated longing and self-loathing. She locates the work's paradigm of hermetic relations between women in the self-sufficient bond between the narrator's mother and grandmother. Ladenson traces Proust's depictions of male and female homosexuality from his early work onward, and contextualizes his account of lesbianism in late-nineteenth-century sexology and early twentieth-century thought. A vital contribution to the fields of queer theory and of French literature and culture, Ladenson's book marks a new stage in Proust studies and provides a fascinating chapter in the history of a literary masterpiece's reception.

Un/Popular Culture

Un/Popular Culture PDF Author: Kathleen Martindale
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143841210X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Theorizing lesbian, Kathleen Martindale writes, is like embarking on terra incognita. In this book, Martindale offers her lucidly written analysis as a guide through the complex and provocative terrain of lesbian literary and cultural theory. Using the publication of Adrienne Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence and the outbreak of the American sex wars as a starting point, Martindale traces the emergence of lesbian postmodernism and how lesbian-feminism changed from a popular to an un/popular culture and from a political vanguard into a cultural neo-avant garde. Martindale analyzes the theoretical implications of "creative" texts such as the graphic art and cultural commentary of Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa. She experiments in autobiography by Joan Nestle, and deconstructed lesbian genre fiction by Sarah Schulman to determine how these texts elaborate contemporary theoretical issues. These texts, she argues, are widely available and could be considered as postmodernist rewritings and revisions of the most characteristic and preferred lesbian-feminist modes of cultural expression. Her analysis raises poignant questions about how lesbians read, what they read, and what counts as lesbian theory. She concludes with a discussion of the status of queer pedagogy in academic institutions and what measures need to be taken to promote and safeguard its existence in what are often homophobic educational settings.

Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory

Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory PDF Author: Bradbury-Rance Clara Bradbury-Rance
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474435386
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory's radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian's categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism's queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

The New Feminist Criticism

The New Feminist Criticism PDF Author: Elaine Showalter
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9780860687221
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description


Lesbian and Gay Studies

Lesbian and Gay Studies PDF Author: Theo Sandfort
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761954187
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This timely book seeks to demonstrate the coherence of lesbian and gay studies. It introduces the reader to the principal inter-disciplinary approaches in the field and critically assesses their strengths and weaknesses whilst asking: What is lesbian and gay studies? When did it emerge? And what are its achievements and research agenda? The gay and lesbian movement has emerged as a major political and cultural force. It poses a series of far reaching questions about the organization of identity, the operation of power and the limits of tolerance. Lesbian and Gay Studies has emerged as a vital and enriching field. It offers challenges to more traditional disciplines and requires new forms of thought about the connections between acad

Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures

Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures PDF Author: Bonnie Zimmerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113678750X
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 926

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Book Description
A rich heritage that needs to be documented Beginning in 1869, when the study of homosexuality can be said to have begun with the establishment of sexology, this encyclopedia offers accounts of the most important international developments in an area that now occupies a critical place in many fields of academic endeavours. It covers a long history and a dynamic and ever changing present, while opening up the academic profession to new scholarship and new ways of thinking. A groundbreaking new approach While gays and lesbians have shared many aspects of life, their histories and cultures developed in profoundly different ways. To reflect this crucial fact, the encyclopedia has been prepared in two separate volumes assuring that both histories receive full, unbiased attention and that a broad range of human experience is covered. Written for and by a wide range of people Intended as a reference for students and scholars in all fields, as well as for the general public, the encyclopedia is written in user-friendly language. At the same time it maintains a high level of scholarship that incorporates both passion and objectivity. It is written by some of the most famous names in the field, as well as new scholars, whose research continues to advance gender studies into the future.

The Queer Limit of Black Memory

The Queer Limit of Black Memory PDF Author: Matt Richardson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814212226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies--Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson--in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.