Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space"Lesbians are adept at constructing survival strategies. Our being in this world exacts a cost, and our identities mutate to incorporate and resist that cost. The reality of our world is our relentless demand for presence, an occupation of space which we have colonized for ourselves, in the name of a configuration of desires we call 'lesbian', -- the more reflective we can become about these tactics, the more powerful is our rhetoric of existence". This book is concerned with the ways contemporary lesbians have taken up imaginative and material space. It describes the mechanics of presence, how modern lesbians have produced a discursive space which offers a refutation to the closet. Identities are produced, expressed, and authenticated by and through space. Understanding "real" and metaphorical spatial structures helps us to discover new sites of presence and resistance. Some famous spaces, such as New York, Paris, and Berlin, have been constitutive of modern gay and lesbian identities. Social spaces teach us something about the relations of domination and subordination around us, and we have seen recently in that struggle "to be", a growing politics of location and locatedness. Space is also taken imaginatively. Our narratives, which have become moral and political handbooks, provide role models for building and consolidating identities and communities. By processes of interpretation, drawing from literary and cultural theory, the author displays ways in which lesbian identities are ascribed, resisted and embraced. The structure of the book is provided by the choice of models the author sees as organizing and mobilizing contemporary lesbian desire: the hero, the flaneur, thelesbian outlaw, the butch body and the lesbian nation. The lesbian flaneur and the lesbian hero are emotive figures of movement; both explore possibilities for lesbian identity and subjectivity. Both are adaptations of mainstream representations which have been manipulated for a lesbian political agenda, by contemporary North American writers, whose works the author explores in depth. The imagination, and experience, constitute dialectically the lesbian subject, and literature, the author demonstrates, is a principal forum for the exploration and testing of lesbian subjectivity, operating on an unconscious and emotional level. |
From inside the book
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... Butch / Femme Workshop in Brighton . In a room of twenty lesbians , only two self - identify as such in the introductory session . I grow increasingly uncomfortable as the group proceeds to list enthusiastically on a flow chart their ...
... butch body which is eroticized . The butch compounds this dichotomy of the self and other ; she is both . And more the butch is an excess : de Lauretis again : - the butch - femme role - playing is exciting not because it represents ...
... Femme Manifesto ( forthcoming ) ; see also various chapters in Munt , Butch / Femme : Inside Lesbian Gender . 6. Gayle Rubin , ' Of catamites and kings : reflections on butch , gender , and boundaries ' , in Joan Nestle ( ed . ) , The ...
Contents
The Lesbian Flâneur | 30 |
The Butch Body | 54 |
The Lesbian Outlaw | 95 |
Copyright | |
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