Interview met Rebecca Brown, a writer’s writer - Een kritische schrijversblik op gender, seksualiteit en de LGBT-gemeenschap

Abstract

Rebecca Brown is a contemporary American lesbian author who has been working mainly in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. This essay grew out of an interview with the author, and it sheds light on the way in which Brown’s writings manage to defamiliarise gender roles and norms, and testify to the importance of writing from a female perspective. Brown’s work is sensitive to the feminisation of nurturing roles and the supposed incompatibility of queers with childcare (hence, with futurity). Other discussion topics included the public character of (homo)sexuality and the historical invisibility of lesbians that Brown’s work takes issue with. The current trend of ‘homonormalisation’, in turn, is crucial to understand the importance of Brown’s concerted attention to those early queer activists who tend to be disregarded nowadays, but whose work remains relevant and, as Brown explains, unfinished. Clearly Brown does not hesitate to address problems within the queer community, as is also exemplified by her refusal to gloss over the taboo topics of same-sex violence and power imbalances within the LGBT-community.