A queer recurrence: Sexuality, gender, and lesbian temporality, 1892–2007

Melody Catherine Jonet, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a range of texts to formulate a theory of alternative temporality in lesbian public cultures. It builds on a growing body of scholarship in queer, gender, and postcolonial studies that challenges normalized conceptions of time. This dissertation devises a model of lesbian return, a kind of "time travel" device or gesture employed in a number of texts by queer female cultural producers to enact a return to past identities and cultural moments deemed valuable to lesbian subjectivity. I begin demonstrating this theory of return with a reconsideration of the "invention" of the female homosexual as a category of identity in US culture. I then turn to the literature of the Anglo lesbian expatriate community in early twentieth century France. I argue that writers such as Natalie Clifford Barney respond to definitions and representations of female homosexuality established by nineteenth-century French male authors. This chapter then demonstrates how the trope of return carries on in the writings of Carole Maso, a contemporary US author who "returns" to and complicates the idea of the American lesbian expatriate in France through encounters with French racism. My dissertation next investigates the ways lesbian visual artists in the late 1980's and early 1990's restage depictions of lesbians and female masculinity by employing tropes of gay male culture. Finally, I analyze The L Word, a multiracial television series about lesbians that exemplifies and proliferates the trope of return by revisiting and complicating cinematic, literary, and cultural representations of lesbianism.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Sagar, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Womens studies|Gender

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