The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century United StatesSUNY Press, 2002 M01 1 - 199 pages For more than a century, female homosexuality has been a frequent flashpoint for conflicts configured around such oppositions as nature and nurture, essentialism and constructivism, foundationalist philosophies and poststructuralist ones. In The Lesbian Index, Kim Emery offers the pragmatic semiotics of C. S. Peirce as a way out of this divide. In particular, she introduces Peirce s notion of indexicality, which marks the intersection of the historical world with the conceptual one, as a useful theoretical tool for tracing the development of lesbian existence and experience. Through readings of historically significant literary works, from the first known U.S. novel with an avowedly homosexual heroine (1895 s Norma Trist) to Mary McCarthy s incongruously queer midcentury account of American womanhood (1963 s The Group) to Sarah Schulman s damning re-vision of On the Road (1986 s Girls, Visions, and Everything), Emery demonstrates how fictional accounts of lesbian lives have engaged key national narratives, reexamining race, rights, private enterprise, imperialism, and other core concepts of American culture. In the process, she accumulates considerable evidence that representations of lesbian identity are not peripheral to mainstream U.S. culture, but a crucial locus and telling index of contested American meanings. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Fantasies of Origin | 15 |
Evolutionary Love | 31 |
Legal Realism and Lesbian Representation The Well of Loneliness in the United States | 57 |
Swampier Depths Deep Structures and Suppressed Desires | 79 |
Rubyfruit Revisited | 105 |
Other editions - View all
The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth ... Kim Emery Limited preview - 2001 |
The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth ... Kim Emery Limited preview - 2002 |
The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth ... Kim Emery No preview available - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract African American appears argues Bodies That Matter book's Carhart Chapter character Collected Papers conception congenital context contingent cultural discourse effect emphasis added essentialist evolutionary example experience female homosexuality feminism feminist fictional foundationalist gender Girls Hall's Harald heterosexual homosexuality identifies implications individual insistence interpretation inversion Judith Butler Judith Halberstam Krafft-Ebing Lakey Lakey's language Lesbian and Gay lesbian identity lesbian possibility lesbian subjectivity Lila Lila's linguistic logic Loneliness Mary masculine material McCarthy McCarthy's meaning Molly Bolt Molly's Munt narrative Newmeyer Norine Norma Trist novel object obscenity Peirce Peirce's perspective philosophical Plain Brown Rapper political popular postmodern pragmatism protagonist queer theory racial Radclyffe Hall radical representation Rita Mae Brown Routledge Rubyfruit Jungle Sacco and Vanzetti Schulman seems semiosis semiotic sign relations significant social specific story structuralist suggests temporality Teresa de Lauretis tion understanding University Press Vanzetti Visions and Everything women York