Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory

ISBN-13: 9780199340200 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 248 str.

Valerie Rohy

Opis

Causality dominates today's discussions of LGBT rights: anti-gay voices imagine gay proliferation through seduction, influence, and corruption, while queer communities largely embrace biological determinism, saying they are "born gay." Reading popular rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present day, Lost Causes decenters etiology from queer politics, engages abject tropes of "homosexual reproduction," and considers the effects of retroactive, absent, and contingent causality.

Recenzje

In Lost Causes, Valerie Rohy brilliantly deconstructs a long tradition of gay etiology, not to ask the usual illogical questions about the causes of homosexuality, but to ask why we ask and how we ask. She offers us a refreshing new way to read those great novels of gay origins-all those pictures of Dorian Gray and those wells of loneliness, which are more elusive than we often think.

O autorze

Val Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (SUNY Press, 2009) and Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Cornell University Press, 2000).