Lesbian Desire Research Articles

No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian (review)

Reviewed by: No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian Peter Dickinson Catherine Lake and Nairne Holtz, editors. No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian. Insomniac. 316. $21.95 Their chosen title notwithstanding, it seems to me that editors Lake and Holtz have a rather narrow view of what constitutes Canadian lesbian fiction. How else to explain Susan Knutson's vaunted claim, in her introduction to the anthology, that No Margins 'is the first of its kind – the first anthology to gather together, and showcase, as such, Canadian lesbian literary fiction'? Intuiting perhaps some slack jaws among her readers, a footnote to this statement does acknowledge the 'ground-breaking work' of Dykeversions: An Anthology of Lesbian Short Fiction (1986) and Dykewords: An Anthology of Lesbian Writings (1989), as well as two collections edited by Lee Fleming: By Word of Mouth: Lesbians Write the Erotic (1989); and Tide Lines: Stories of Change by Lesbians (1991). I would add to this list Betsy Warland's InVersions: Writing by Dykes, Queers, and Lesbians (1991); Makeda Silvera's Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology (1991); and the four volumes of Hot and Bothered: Short Short Fiction on Lesbian Desire (1998–2003) edited by Karen Tulchinsky. One discovers, then, that it is the qualifying adjective 'literary' that allows Knutson to stake a claim for this anthology's precedence. As far as I can tell, 'literary' in this case refers to 'award-winning,' 'best-selling,' and for the most part 'large press' lesbian fiction. Indeed, Lake boldly acknowledges the exclusiveness of the company when she writes that with this collection she set out 'to create an intentional gathering of our contemporary [lesbian] greats into one collection.' Presumably the further qualifier 'contemporary' explains why the earlier achievements of Marie-Claire Blais and Jane Rule have been 'set aside' in favour of showcasing the work of Dionne Brand, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Shani Mootoo, among others (although the inclusion of work by Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt confounds this theory). And yet it does not explain why Camilla Gibb, Helen Humphreys, SKY Lee, and Pearl Luke have been passed over. The descriptor 'lesbian literary fiction' does allow the editors to exclude a rich tradition of lesbian genre fiction in this country, in particular work by mystery writers such as Lauren Douglas, Marion Foster, and Eve Zaremba. Ditto the children's and young adult fiction produced by Rosamund Elwin, Jennifer Whiteford, and Catherine Brett. Finally, much of the best, and most political, of lesbian writing in this country is challengingly experimental, and would that Lake and Holtz's exploded margins had included work from Gail Scott, Margaret Christakos, or Beth Follett. To be fair, the editors do include an example of speculative fiction from Luanne Armstrong (the apocalyptic 'A'thyraa'), and Marlatt's contribution is a dense critical fiction of [End Page 432] the sort we have come to expect from the author of Ana Historic. But, as Knutson again notes, 'The majority of pieces in this collection . . . are representational, bearing witness to lesbian lives in all their wide variety of experience and expression.' This also translates into most of the pieces being rather chaste, and another category necessarily excluded by the 'literary' is that of lesbian erotica. I do not wish to diminish in any way the merits of the work included here. After all, it is the combined literary merit of this work that is the raison d'être of this anthology. My concerns have more to do with the politics of lesbian publishing in Canada, and with the historical role that small-press anthologies of the sort cited above have played in that politics. Those earlier anthologies were published after much struggle precisely as a way of creating a space for writing that otherwise would not have found an audience. By contrast, No Margins collects short stories and novel excerpts from Governor General's and Giller Award–nominated writers who for the most part need no advertisement. Those who do are consigned, instead, to a 'Selective Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Literature with Lesbian Content.' Drawn from a larger online database created by Holtz, the bibliography is an important, if quirkily esoteric, resource (why include...

Televising queer women: a reader

A Critical Introduction to Queer Women on Television Resisting, Reiterating, and Dancing Through: The Swinging Closet Doors of Ellen DeGeneres' Televised Personalities C.Moore Mommy's Got a Gal-pal: The Victimized Lesbian Mother in the Made-for-TV-Movie K.Kessler Complicating the Open Closet: The Visual Rhetoric of Buffy the Vampire Slayer 's Sapphic Lovers T.Cochran 'Can You Just Be Kissing Me Now?': The Question(s) of Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer C.Masson States of Emergency: The Labors of Lesbian Desire in ER D.Heller Mapping Lesbian Sexuality on Queer as Folk R.Beirne A Label Like Gucci, Versace, or Birkenstock: Sex and the City and Queer Identity T.Adkins 'Going Native on Wonder Woman's Island': The Exoticization of Lesbian Sexuality in Sex and the City M.M.M.Hidalgo 'This Is the Way We Live...and Love!': Feeding on and Still Hungering for Lesbian Representation in The L Word M.Pratt '[E]verything else is the same': Configurations of The L Word M.C.Jonet & L.Anh Williams 'Shades of Grey': Articulations of Bisexuality in The L Word J.Moorman Paradigmatically Oppositional Representations: Gender and Sexual Identity in The L Word F.Davies Pink Heels, Dildos, and Erotic Play: The (Re)Making of Fem(me)ininity in Showtime's The L Word E.Douglas There's Something Queer Going on in Orange County: The Representation of Queer Women's Sexuality on The O.C. A.Burgess

Catherine Clay, British Women Writers 1914–1945: Professional Work and Friendship.

THIS book presents five case studies of professional friendships between women writers in the period 1914–45, together with an informed overview of theories of lesbian desire and romantic friendships. Each study provides a distinct perspective on what Clay terms an epistolary ‘trade in work and desire’; rejecting the polarization of ‘work’ and ‘desire’ in many biographical accounts, Clay reveals an interchange of lesbian desire and professional support in these women's correspondence. The friendships studied range from the often cited example of the flatmates and fellow writers Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain to the writer Stella Benson's influential friendship with the psychiatrist Laura Hutton. The Benson–Hutton friendship is Clay's discovery, but she also pulls out new evidence to add to Marion Shaw's and Mark Bostridge and Paul Berry's acute biographies of the Holtby–Brittain friendship: unpublished letters suggest that Brittain, a paragon of heterosexual love and motherhood, harboured romantic feelings for Holtby which were displaced onto professional exchanges. The opposite has long been assumed, although it seems unlikely that any such passion was ever acted upon.

Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema by Lucille Cairns

866 Reviews the rejection of literarymovements and stated doctrines. Noel's poetry interrogates identity,time, and thepower and failings of language. Itsmaterialism emerges from his intense engagement with the physical, and his insistence on the bodily basis of thought as he explores mental space and processes. La Chute des temps(I983) and L'Ete languemorte (I982), included here along with the short text 'encore', are among Noel's most significantworks, exemplifying his poetic preoccupations and individual style. The long texts are divided into three cantos and, in La Chute des temps, two intercalated 'counter-cantos'. The short, unpunctuated lines lead to frequent instances of enjambment that contribute both touncertainty of interpretation and to a sense of acceleration, 'falling' (discussed by Rothwell, pp. I8-23), or, touse Noel's preferred term, 'precipitation'. Noel's writing performs the passing of time even as itattempts to lay itbare. He writes of poetry that 'quelque chose appelle dans lemouvement I de sa propre disparition' (p. 70). La Chute des tempsisalsomotivated by a constant questioning each section opens with the line 'qui'-and it implicates a 'tu' figurewho is simultaneously an other within the text, the subject itself, the reader, and an evocation of silencing. L'Ete languemorte more clearly involves an interlocutor, and this poem explores love and desire through the lens ofmemory. Rothwell's approach as translator is 'mildly foreignising' (p. 41), which is help ful for readers of French who are offered new interpretations and ambiguities. It is particularly effective in revealing the earthiness ofNoel's language thatunderpins its more abstract formulations, and itdoes full justice toNoel's own tendency to render French strange in the experimental 'contre-chants'. The introduction traces Noel's poetic writing since the late I950s, bringing out the continuities and developments between volumes, and explicating complex images and concepts with great lucidity.An ideal introduction toNoel's poetry, italso forges links between diverse texts for those readers already familiarwith this challenging and compelling body ofwriting. UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM EMMA WAGSTAFF Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema. By Lu CILLE CAIRNS. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2oo6. 223 pp. /50. ISBN 978-o-7486-2 I65-I. Despite the increase in representations of lesbians in recent French and francophone cinema, scholarly attention to these images has mainly been restricted to journal ar ticles and chapters inedited volumes. Lucille Cairns's characteristically eloquent and well-researched monograph thereforemakes a decisive contribution toknowledge in the field of 'lesbian/gay/queer cultural studies within a French language cinematic context' (p. 19 ) . Cairns's corpus spans theperiod I936-2003 and encompasses both avant-garde and mainstream productions. Moreover, she includes a range of genres, both fictional and factual, and examines short-,medium-, and full-length features. The incorporation of non-French francophone filmsallows Cairns to engage in enriching transnational comparisons, although these are unavoidably within Western cultures; Cairns was able to findjust one filmabout lesbians in a developing francophone country-Joseph Gai Ramaka's Karmen Gei fromSenegal (200I). The book is underpinned by an impressive array ofwritings on sexuality by key psychoanalysts and philosophers, including Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, and Foucault. Additionally, Cairns engages with a broad range of scholarly debates on filmicmediations of lesbianism. Furthermore, she includes reviews from both the MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 867 mainstream and lesbian press, thus usefully adding the voices of others to her film readings. Structurally, thebook groups the films into the fourmost prominent modes of representation: 'criminality', 'pathology', 'liminality', and 'lesbo-affirmativemise en-scenes of desire'. These chapters are then subdivided into smaller units; forex ample, Chapter 2, entitled 'bad girls', categorizes the images into the subsections of 'sin', 'vice', and 'aggression, violence, bestiality'. The reader can thus construct a nuanced understanding of thedominant representational modes of lesbianism. Some films are included inmore than one chapter, as is the case with Jean-Pierre De nis's Les Blessures assassines (2000), which simultaneously conforms to stereotypes of lesbians as both criminals (p. 33) and incestuous (p. 76), but which offers explicitly erotic 'scenes [that] are none the less ripe forthe lesbian viewer's delectation' (p. I69). Cairns thereforereflectstheambiguities of screen depictions of lesbianism which can not be pigeon-holed into single,monolithic...

Religion als Relikt? Christliche Traditionen im Werk Fontanes by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, Hubertus Fischer

MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 897 positions: while the bourgeois women's movement maintained women's difference from men and argued that it was precisely thisdifference that would justify theircon tribution to the public sphere, more radical thinkers, such as Dohm, subscribed to the 'egalitarianmodel', which privileged 'reason over biology' (p. I3). Other women, such as Reventlow, cannot be called feminist,but theydid contest the accepted view ofwomen in a strikingway: Reventlow called for the liberation ofwomen's sexuality outside marriage. The women novelistsWeedon examines 'articulate the emotional and psychic dimensions ofpatriarchal oppression' (p. I69) or depict female characters who overcome it. The study is a good introduction to little-knownworks of fiction such as Frapan's Arbeit and Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland, and offers some original readings of better-known novels, such as the account of repressed lesbian desire inReuter's Aus guter Familie. But this isnot, primarily, a study of literaryworks: Weedon reads her novels for theirpolitical content. The readermay at first wonder whether the fictional status of the novels is important, and indeed, inChapter 7,Weedon uses autobio graphical works to fulfil the same function in her argument that novels do in other chapters. In her conclusion, however,Weedon makes a convincing case for the special status of fiction, for its capacity to 'negotiate censorship' and act as an imaginative sitewhere 'resistance can be voiced' (p. i66). Surprisingly little reference ismade to existing secondary literature, either in the main text or in the bibliography, and there are some typographical errors. Rich in detail and inquotation (translated intoEnglish), however, Gender, Feminism, and Fic tionwill prove useful to scholars and students of the period, helping them to avoid generalizations in their references to nineteenth-century views on women, and as a point of entry for the study of fictionbywomen of theperiod. BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ANNA RICHARDS Religion alsRelikt? Christliche Traditionen im Werk Fontanes. Ed. by HANNADELF VON WOLZOGEN and HUBERTUS FISCHER. (Fontaneana, 5)Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2oo6. 27I pp. E38. ISBN 978-3-826o-3545-6. Wisely skirting around the irresolvable question whether Fontane, a son of Prussia's Huguenot community, had any real personal faith, this collection takes as its subject the varied and complex representation ofChristian themes inhis work. It opens with Bernhard Boschenstein's lucid, handsomely illustrated essay reveal ing Fontane's admiration forRenaissance art that depicts Christ or theMadonna not as purely heavenly or earthly beings, but as figureswhose divinity resides in their representative humanity; and his belief that artists active after the demise of the tradition of religious painting could achieve the same religiously tinged human universality with contemporary scenes (Turner, Millais) better thanwith a necessar ilyderivative, mannered depiction of biblical figures (Bocklin). Images of butterflies and wheels are brought tomind by Hugo Aust's choppy, abstruse interpretation of Die Poggenpuhls using themedieval philologist Friedrich Ohly's model of four le vels of textualmeaning (literal, allegorical, moral, and sacred). Hans Ester contrasts thewholesale adoption ofChristian discourse inNietzsche's anti-Christian polemics with the subtle use of biblical allusions in Fontane's fiction,where they delineate characters and their interrelationships, and sometimes, through the implicit compact between author and reader, take on a narrative function of theirown. Bernhard Losch considers the representation in theWanderungen and the novels of the competing claims of the law as an absolute ordering principle and the impulse towards clemency when individuals transgress the law under exceptional pressures; 898 Reviews unfortunately this interesting topic isonly perfunctorily connected to thequestion of religion, and Losch's textual analyses do not penetrate farbeyond the surface. Using examples from several novels, Eda Sagarra demonstrates how sensitively Fontane explores the psychological impact of differentconfessional backgrounds on his char acters, and how attractive he found thedirection and comfort offered by Catholicism to those of itsadherents who sincerelywish toatone fortheir sins.Hubertus Fischer's subject isKonrektor Othegraven, theLutheran clergyman with a tincture ofCalvin ismwho meets a heroic soldier's death in Vor dem Sturm. Fischer traces a namesake who fought in theWars of Liberation, the probable source of Fontane's familiarity with him, and the changes made in turning him into a fictional character. In a close analysis of Unterm Birnbaum, Wulf Wiilfing argues that the failures...

Recent Studies in James Shirley

This essay surveys scholarship on James Shirley from 1970 through 2006. Critical interest during this period turned from Shirley's construction of unified dramas to his engagement as a Caroline professional playwright sympathetic to the royal court yet willing to criticize it subtly through his works, including the much discussed masque The Triumph of Peace. Few substantial studies have been devoted solely to Shirley, and essays often invoke his plays among examples by his peers. Nevertheless, brief but groundbreaking analyses of his artful plot construction, treatment of the female actor, staging of lesbian desire, and engagement in the political debates of the 1630s have raised the profiles of The Lady of Pleasure, The Bird in a Cage, Hyde Park, and The Cardinal. (K.H.N.)

Cal/liope in Love

This article provides a critical reading of heterosexist determinism and the erasure of lesbian desire, activity and subjectivity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Middlesex.

Feminist Theorizing as ‘Transposed Autobiography’

This piece considers personal investments endemic in academic writing, more specifically, in Lesbian Studies. Taking Elizabeth Bowen's phrase, “transposed autobiography,” as a starting-point, the author briefly discusses the development of lesbian/straight feminist debates, and continues to explore the relative absence of lesbianism in current feminist and queer theorizing. Three ‘moments’ serve to explain the casting aside of lesbian desire: the subsidence of lesbian/straight feminist debates, the prevalence of ‘race'/ethnicity in critical theorizing and the emergence of post-theoretical trends of thought.

The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter

The Theatrical Politics of Chicana/Chicano Identity: from Valdez to Moraga

Critical opinion over the role of popular culture in relation to ethnic and cultural identity is deeply divided. In this essay, Elizabeth Jacobs explores the dynamics of this relationship in the works of two leading Mexican American playwrights. Luis Valdez was a founding member of El Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers' Theatre) in California during the 1960s. Originally formed as a resistance theatre, its purpose was to support the Farmworkers' Union in its unionization struggle. By the early 1970s Valdez and the Teatro Campesino were moving in a different direction, and with Zoot Suit (1974) he offered a critique of the race riots that erupted in East Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, the subsequent lack of reasonable judicial process, and the media misrepresentation of events. Valdez used setting, music, slang, and dress code among other devices to construct a sense of identity and ethnic solidarity. This provided a strong voice for the Chicano group, but at the same time a particular gendered hierarchy also distinguished his aesthetic. Cherríe Moraga's work provides a balanced opposition to that of Valdez. Giving up the Ghost (1984) helped to change the direction of Chicano theatre both in terms of its performativity and its strategies of representation. Elizabeth Jacobs explores how Moraga redefines both the culturally determined characterization of identity presented by Valdez and the media representation of women. She also utilizes theatrical space as a platform for a reassertion of ethnicity, allowing for the innovation of a split subjectivity and radical lesbian desire. Giving up the Ghost, Jacobs argues, provides a trenchant critique of communal and popular culture discourses as well as a redefinition of existing identity politics.

Catherian Friendship; or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality

While critics often regard Cather's male friendships as the closeted voicing of lesbian desire, this essay suggests that these intimate same-sex relations are rather uninterested in modern U.S. sexual identity. To do so, it charts how Cather's men refuse the movement from friendship to homosexuality in order to wreck the designs of a legible sexual history, and to fracture the historical march from passionate same-sex friendship to urban gay subculture. Focusing on The Professor's House, it views these deliberate failures of sexual expression as beneficial outcomes of her regional male bonds.

Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen's Passing

B eginning in the 1910s and 1920s, a series of novels advocate that African Americans commit themselves to as bell hooks calls African-American ethnic pride (9-10).' By loving blackness, the novels promise, African Americans will advance African-American culture, overcome internalized racism, and achieve emotional stability.2 Together, these novels create a powerful, early 20th-century discourse about embracing ethnic pride and resisting assimilation into white culture.

"The Queen's Twin": Sarah Orne Jewett and Lesbian Symmetry

Do some ideas "survive all changes of time and national vicissitude"? The question belongs to Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), the South Berwick, Maine author whose fictions are spun from communities of widowed women living along the Maine seacoast after the death of the shipping industry in Maine. A regional author ever mindful of differences between individuals, regions, and nations, whose fictional sea-captains know "a hundred ports . . . and could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet,"Jewett nevertheless invents female characters who share uncanny, sexualized, exactly symmetrical understandings between them. This essay explores the concept of symmetry and the corresponding affects living in and around those figurations of lesbian desire. "The Queen's Twin" is the title of Jewett's most unusual section in her masterpiece,The Country of the Pointed Firs, and the moniker refers to Mis' Abby Martin, a Maine woman who is convinced that she and Queen Victoria are twins, despite the ocean between them. Throughout the stages of her life, Abby has tracked the similarities between them, including a shared birth date, marriage to men named Albert, sons named Edward, widowhood, and countless other shared realities. Abby's passionate interest in Victoria builds as much on the coincidence of their mutual birth and imagined twinship as on the differences in their stations. Abby's cognizance of their differences occasions the richness of these affective moments.

Male fantasies about lesbian desire: A review of Spike Lee’s film She hate me

Male fantasies about lesbian desire: A review of Spike Lee’s film She hate me

The Appalling Mrs. Luna: Sibling Love, Queer Attachment, and Henry James's The Bostonians

Flannery's article situates Mrs. Luna of The Bostonians in a number of contexts, most notably the novel's critical reception, the relationship between sibling love and queer subjectivity in contemporary theory and narratives of the lost, returned and over-embodied sibling in US culture. It argues that sibling love, jealousy and insight are utterly crucial to James's writing and protection of lesbian desire.

Another story: the (im)possibility of lesbian desire

abstract This article offers a psychoanalytic exploration of the possibilities and impossibilities of representing lesbian desire within the terms available for such a project. It pays attention to the implications of the assertion that all identity is constructed within a patriarchal economy. The article traces some of the major strands of thought within feminist and queer psychoanalytic theory which engage with the positioning of lesbianism as doubly perverse (because it bespeaks actively desiring women, and women actively desiring other women). Ultimately this piece gestures towards the complex positionalities found in the simultaneous existence of the psychoanalytic denial of lesbian sexuality and, concomitantly, the language to speak (of) the desiring lesbian subject; and the fact that lesbians have used both psychoanalysis and language to speak (of) themselves and their pleasures.

Amy Lowell, American Modern (review)

Reviewed by: Amy Lowell, American Modern Susan McCabe Amy Lowell, American Modern. Edited by Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 208 pp. $60.00/$23.95 paper. This welcome collection of essays marks an important moment in modernist criticism. Since her death in 1925, Amy Lowell has been subjected to an almost systematic exclusion from literary consideration. Even the wave of feminist and queer criticism that has swept modernist studies in the last fifteen years has left her archive nearly untouched. Lowell's absence from the canon ostensibly stems from Ezra Pound's labeling her renovation of Imagism as "Amygism." The famous rivalry between Pound and Lowell is treated here as having "more to do with egos than with images" (xiii). In her lifetime, Lowell's best-selling volumes of poetry (she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1925), her entrepreneurial support of other writers, her dynamic lecture and reading tours, her prolific output of criticism and poetry, her "endless experiments" and "refusal to repeat herself" (xvii), all warrant more than the often "derisory" footnote she has been allocated (xii). This collection vigorously counteracts the homophobia and sexism as well as the deprecatory responses to Lowell's visceral presence that have characterized much criticism to date. Melissa Bradshaw, for instance, contends that Lowell's obesity disrupted gender expectations, "as fat female bodies evade easy classification, destabilize categories, invite paradox" (179). The editorial challenge of Amy Lowell, American Modern is thus to "begin in earnest a critical reevaluation, to build a solid critical basis for evaluating her poetry, her criticism, her politics, her influences, and her influence" (xviii). Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, who have also edited a companion Selected Poems, showcase essays that traverse this panoramic range of concerns. Although the editors maintain that they omitted from the Selected Poems many of Lowell's narrative poems that may "present an important gender critique, but do so in a context of excessive melodrama, and at times even gratuitous violence and bloodshed" (xvi), this volume of essays is not similarly [End Page 89] framed. I was glad to find "The Basket" (among poems singled out as "gratuitous") treated as an instance of "gothic heterosexuality" in Jaime Hovey's insightful essay on Lowell's appropriation of "courtly love" to offer "a model for lesbian modernists of lovers who could not marry" and whose "satisfaction was delayed, derailed, or denied" (81). Taken as a whole, the essays successfully represent Lowell as multi-dimensional. Jayne Marek emphasizes the poet's goal "to launch imagism in a fresh way" (155). Oddly, one of Lowell's major "offenses" was her "democratic" sensibility. In her relentless "marketing" of imagism as a "group" venture, Marek explains, she sought "to create a public which shall no longer be bound by the Victorian tradition" (156). Rather than focus on Lowell's poetry, Paul Lauter speculates about the "virtual absence of discussion" of "the considerable body of her critical writing," concluding that what has "so menaced" her critics is her insistent "boundary-dissolving qualities" (4). Playing up yet another facet, Margaret Homans discusses Lowell's two-volume biography of Keats. Lowell's study not only recasts Keats as Imagist poet, underscoring his favoring the decorative over the allegorical, but also willfully misreads her predecessor's annotations to use in her own poems. As did other female modernists, Lowell struggled to "make it new" while exploring gender and sexuality. As several essays amplify, Lowell strove, as Munich argues, to reconcile "a body life and a mind life" (12). Lillian Faderman's essay, pivoting upon Lowell's long-term relationship to Ada Dwyer Russell, argues that the poet's narrative poems use "illicit heterosexuality" to explore lesbian desire, while many of her lyric poems "deal more directly with her passionate interest in another woman" (66). The close scrutiny of poems provided here is one of the most compelling components of reclaiming Lowell, who has been too readily dismissed on stylistic grounds. The volume depicts Lowell as a "breakthrough" writer in her efforts to make "modernism" more widely legible while cultivating aesthetic freshness. With incisive verve, Andrew Thacker (applying Bakhtin's theories) examines Lowell's inventive use of "polyphonic prose" to...

The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (review)

Reviewed by: The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso Inmaculada Pertusa (bio) Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 255 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Since the mention in 1625 of the existence of an original copy of the autobiography of the Basque noblewoman Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650), there have been many different versions of her life's adventures and misfortunes available to readers and spectators alike from the early modern times to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The story of a young girl, escapee from the limiting walls of a convent, disguised in male garments and determined to join (and to fight against, if necessary) the legions of brave warriors already established on the seductive and dangerous shores of the New World, grew in popularity proportionally to the development of the mystery surrounding her [End Page 188] sexual identity. From the moment that the first news pamphlet or relación spoke in 1613 of the existence of a valiant and admirable Lieutenant Nun, or Monja Alférez, Erauso stopped being just a brave woman dressed in men's clothing to become an enigmatic transgressive female figure ready to be used by any cause that needed to attract the public's attention with the retelling of her ambivalent legend. The lack of an autograph or original copy of Erauso's autobiography contributed to the publication of multiple versions of the manuscript over the years; versions that, for one reason or another, have adapted, changed, added, or omitted important passages of the life of the Monja Alférez, also changing in the process the essence of this intriguing figure of the seventeenth century. In fact, the existence of so many versions and adaptations of the manuscript and the notable variations between them has also led many literary critics to develop serious doubts about the authorship of the autobiography, which also calls into question the function of the document as a testimony of the role of women as writers during the early modern period. Through careful analysis of the different documents produced during the past four hundred years, Sherry Velasco demonstrates that what all narratives have in common to a certain extent is the tendency to "'correct' Erauso's same-sex desire by rehabilitating the transgressive lesbian, or by presenting homoeroticism in terms of a heterosexual configuration" (xii). In any case, Velasco's innovative study privileges the analysis of the representation of (or the lack of) the lesbian desire inscribed in the autobiography and its many versions, evaluating the effects of this transgendered spectacle of the nun on the public and the reader during its nearly four centuries of existence. In the first chapter of her study, Velasco introduces the figure of the Monja Alférez as a seventeenth century monstrous spectacle (a woman and a man, but neither of them; a nun and a soldier, but neither of them; a heroic figure and a cruel criminal, but neither of them) that saved her persona from being completely dismissed by the different dominant discourses of the time (medical, religious, legal) precisely because of the very essence of the monstrosity that she represented. Despite being described in the documents of the time as a "eunuch, a pseudo-hermaphrodite, and a masculine woman" (31), there was no evidence that Erauso possessed the physical characteristics of both sexes, as other icons did. Nevertheless, Velasco goes on to confirm that the fact that Erauso was determined to eliminate her breasts, and not only to disguise them temporarily, was a sign of her intention to eradicate her natural gender identifiers permanently, separating herself from the culturally accepted representation on the stage of the woman dressed as a man, and placing herself on the edge of monstrosity, worthy to become the focus of the public gaze, provoking a mixture of fear and attraction. As Velasco notes, the figure of the warrior woman does not appear only under the name of Monja Alférez; during her time many other women opted to exchange their female robes for masculine costumes guided by different interests [End Page 189] and purposes, from purely...

Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture Cecilia Morgan Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Edited by Irene Gammel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2002. Pp. xiv, 348, illus. $70.00 Making Avonlea is the result of both editor Irene Gammel's longstanding interest in L.M. Montgomery's relationship to Canadian culture and of a widespread scholarly fascination, in Canada and abroad, with Montgomery and her work. Originating from a conference held in 2000 at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, this collection of essays explores both the meanings and manifestations of Montgomery and her most famous characters, Anne and Emily of New Moon, in a wide variety of genres and locations. Twenty-three authors have contributed to this book; most of them write from either the discipline of English, with a specialization in Canadian literature, or from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as gender studies and cultural studies (which includes film, television, drama). One essay comes from music history. There also are pieces that are as much reflections on the more personal, material, and sometimes embodied meanings of 'Anne' and Montgomery to these authors' lives (for example, Tara Nogler's essay on working in a Japanese theme park, performing Anne) as they are academic work. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian popular culture, the authors of Making Avonlea argue, are compelling and significant topics for both scholarly and popular communities. Making Avonlea is divided into three parts: Avonlea's cultural weight and Avonlea as iconography; Avonlea on film and television and as music and drama; and Avonlea as tourist landscape. The first section deals primarily with Montgomery, Avonlea, Anne, and Emily in literature and spans the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades and selected periods in the twentieth century; its authors consider topics as diverse as Montgomery's visual imagination, the meanings of hair in Green Gables, international images of Emily, and the controversy over English professor Laura Robinson's paper on lesbian desire in Green Gables (given at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Edmonton, 2000). Part two explores the treatment of Montgomery's novels in Kevin Sullivan's television adaptation (at both 'macro' and 'micro' levels); the role of the Disney Corporation in Sullivan's Road to Avonlea series; CBC's Emily of New Moon series; Paul LeDoux's play, Anne of Green Gables; and the music of Elaine and Norman Campbell, Don Harron, and Mavor Moore's long-running musical. Part three looks at the construction of 'Avonlea' as a tourist site, both in its geographic manifestation in Prince Edward Island and as an imagined terrain and community that is [End Page 634] recreated elsewhere, whether in Japanese theme parks and clubs or in electronic discussion groups around the world. As Gammel points out in her introduction, there is no one 'unified thesis' or particular approach that underpins the book. While all of this work is written from feminist perspectives, it also represents a mixture of other theoretical approaches to understand the formation of Avonlea as an imagined community in its cultural manifestations (including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Dawn H. Currie, and Angela McRobbie). Many of the essays point to, though, the shifting boundaries between 'high,' 'middle,' and 'low' cultures that Montgomery's work and its subsequent iconography illuminates, although with a few exceptions they do so in ways more contemporary than historical. Furthermore, Making Avonlea illustrates another boundary, one that has been constructed to neatly divide the personal, subjective, and local from the 'academic,' objective, and national. A number of these scholars identify with Montgomery's work on both these levels, often simultaneously, and see that identification as a source of strength, not weakness. While I find this approach intriguing (for while historians do so as well, they usually are not so honest about it), it has its pitfalls, for it can lead us to focus more on the poetics and less so on the politics of cultural production. While some authors consider issues of race, ethnicity, and representation (for example, Christopher Gittings in his essay on both the original and the television version of Emily), the...

Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature by Lucille Cairns (review)

Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature by Lucille Cairns (review)