Looking Like What You Are : Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity / Lisa Walker.
2001
HQ75.5 .W35 2001eb
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Title
Looking Like What You Are : Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity / Lisa Walker.
Author
Walker, Lisa, author.
ISBN
9780814724064
Published
New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2001]
Copyright
©2001
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers
10.18574/nyu/9780814724064.001.0001 doi
Call Number
HQ75.5 .W35 2001eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
305.48/9664
Summary
Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import. Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. In particular, she explores the implications of a predominantly visible model of sexual identity for the feminine lesbian, who is both marked and unmarked, desired and disavowed. Walker's textual analysis cuts across a variety of genres, including modernist fiction such as The Well of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s and the 1960s, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory. In the book's final chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," Walker argues that strategies of visibility are at times deconstructed, at times reinscribed within contemporary lesbian-feminist theory.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
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print 9780814793718
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
Introduction: In/visible Differences
ONE Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the Modern Lesbian
TWO Debutante in Harlem: Blair Niles's Strange Brother
THREE Lesbian Pulp in Black and White
FOUR Strategies of Identification in Three Narratives of Female Development
FIVE How to Recognize a Lesbian The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Contents
Preface
Introduction: In/visible Differences
ONE Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the Modern Lesbian
TWO Debutante in Harlem: Blair Niles's Strange Brother
THREE Lesbian Pulp in Black and White
FOUR Strategies of Identification in Three Narratives of Female Development
FIVE How to Recognize a Lesbian The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author