The Lesbian Postmodern [Paperback]

Laura Doan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1994 | ISBN-10: 0231084110 | ISBN-13: 978-0231084116 0

This volume of essays examines a realm as yet untouched in literary and cultural criticism and gender theory; a specifically lesbian postmodern. The essays trace, on the one hand, how some lesbian cultural theory and production foregrounds a politics of difference and marginality and thereby critiques the dominance of patriarchal and heterosexual hegemony through a variety of postmodern strategies and techniques. on the other hand, some essays note how a postmodern aesthetic, with its valorization of difference, sexual plurality, and gender blurring, assists lesbian cultural production. In the opening section, contributors scrutinize the shifting definitions of the terms lesbian and postmodern and explore the potential, as well as the danger, engendered by this new conceptual territory. Subsequent essays turn toward literary and visual representation and popular culture to discern how a lesbian postmodern might enable an interventionist or transformative politics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

As an exploration of the relation between the lesbian, conceived within the context of cutting-edge work on gender theory, and postmodernism, a term also requiring critical scrutiny, these essays generate a rich and complex arena for the study of both terms. This collection offers new work of interest to scholars in feminism, postmodernism, critical and gender theory, gay and lesbian studies, popular culture, and literature. -- Review --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Laura Doan is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo. She is the editor of Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr (March 15, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231084110
• ISBN-13: 978-0231084116
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,330,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and thought provoking, October 11, 2006

By 

E. B. MULLIGAN "Bronwyn" (Tampa, Florida) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lesbian Postmodern (Hardcover)

I bought this book because Tee Corinne in her anthology of short stories "Courting Pleasure" described it as having "...broadened the parameters in which lesbian sex is discussed."

The book description and review above summarize the book nicely

Contents

1. Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern, by Robyn Wiegman

Part One. Theorizing the Lesbian Postmodern

2. Racing the Lesbian, Dodging White Critics, by Sagri Dhairyam

3. Lesbians and Lyotard: Legitimation and the Politics of the Name, by Judith Roof

4. Refiguring Lesbian Desire, by Elizabeth Grosz

5. The Postmodern Lesbian Position: On Our Backs, by Colleen Lamos

6. Irigaray's Female Symbolic in the Making of Chicana Lesbian Sitios y Lenguas (Sites and Discourses), by Emma Perez

7. Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post) Mechanical Reproduction, by Cathy Griggers

Part Two. Textual and Performative Strategies

8. Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Postmodern, by Laura Doan

9. Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities, by Judith Raiskin

10. Almost Blue: Policing Lesbian Desire in Internal Affairs, by Dana A. Heller

11. We Girls Can Do Anything, Right Barbie? Lesbian Consumption in Postmodern Circulation, by Erica Rand

12. F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity, by Judith Halberstam

13. The Butch Femme Fatale, by Terry Brown

14. Sandra Bernhard: Lesbian Postmodern or Modern Postlesbian?, by Jean Walton

From the series Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies