Authors: Lisa Walker
ISBN-13: 9780814793718, ISBN-10: 0814793711
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: April 2001
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Lisa Walker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine.
Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.
Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. In particular, she explores the implications of a predominantly visible model of sexual identity for the feminine lesbian, who is both marked and unmarked, desired and disavowed.
Walker's textual analysis cuts across a variety of genres, including modernist fiction such as The Well of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s and the 1960s, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory.
In the book's final chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," Walker argues that strategies of visibility are at times deconstructed, at times reinscribed within contemporary lesbian-feminist theory.
Walker (English, U. of Southern Maine) focuses on the question of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Preface | ||
Introduction: In/visible Differences | 1 | |
1 | Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the Modern Lesbian | 21 |
2 | Debutante in Harlem: Blair Niles's Strange Brother | 58 |
3 | Lesbian Pulp in Black and White | 103 |
4 | Strategies of Identification in Three Narratives of Female Development | 139 |
5 | How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are | 182 |
Epilogue | 211 | |
Notes | 215 | |
Works Cited | 251 | |
Index | 267 | |
About the Author | 281 |