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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... radical and lesbian feminism into one metaphor , and then to claim the inauguration of a radical state , as a form of political mobilization . Her brief introduction in ' Remarks ' indicates her affiliation with nationalist ideology ...
... nationalism only to discover that the implicit ' nostalgic desire for normalcy , normalcy , normalcy'77 unravelled the radical impetus for future structural change , spinning them around and returning them to 155 THE LESBIAN NATION.
... radical and the oppressive discourses of nationalism . 3. Ernest Gellner , Nations and Nationalism . Oxford : Blackwell , 1983 , pp . 48-9 . 4. Ibid . , p . 1 . 5. Eric J. Hobsbawm , Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge ...
Contents
The Lesbian Flâneur | 30 |
The Butch Body | 54 |
The Lesbian Outlaw | 95 |
Copyright | |
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