Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference (Gender in Writing) Book

In exploring the development of Anglo-American lesbian writing since the early 1970s, this study contextualizes and re-evaluates certain key works of theory and fiction by relating them to the political and cultural movements of the period. These include the Lesbian Feminist Movement, the writing of the lesbian sexual radicals and Queer politics. As well as discussing fiction and theory separately, Palmer also explores the interaction between the two. She examines the way writers as different as Caeia March, Sally Miller Gearhart and Sarah Schulman rework in fictional form ideas from lesbian and or Queer discourses. The study explores the contradiction and interaction between popular forms of lesbian writing such as the thriller and the comic novel, which appropriate and revise mainstream genres, and academic approaches based on psychoanalysis and postructuralism. Theorists who are discussed include Radicalesbians, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Political fictional genre such as the Coming Out novel are considered, and the study concludes with a discussion of the treatment of fantasy, narrativity and sex in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson, Ellen Galford, Jane DeLynn and Schulman.Read More