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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Lesbians Are Elsewhere -- 2 Remedy and Poison Irigaray and the Lesbian Body -- 3 Space, Skin, Spiral The Aerial Letter and its Holographic Projection -- 4 Playing with the Closet Jeux d'occultation and Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons -- 5 "The Heart of the Law" Genre, Sexual Exchange and the Proper Name in Working Hot -- 6 Slash and Suture The Border's Figuration of Colonialism, Phallocentrism, and Homophobia in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza -- 7 Cindy Crawford Concludes -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Machine generated contents note: 1. First Things First -- Some Second Thoughts on Lesbianism -- 2. Remembering Miss Wade -- Little Dorrit and the Historicizing of Female Perversity 37 -- 3. Unmarriageable -- The Housing of Sexual Cultures in The Bostonians 57 -- 4. Remembering and Forgetting -- The Memorialization of Homosexuality in Mrs. Dalloway 77 -- 5. First Wife, Second Wife -- Sexual Perversion and the Problem of Precedence in Rebecca 1 o -- 6. Wild Life Photography -- Pulp Sexology and the Camera 122

It is widely presumed in queer theory today that the political value of the field lies in its antinormative commitments. A historically framed attentiveness to the context in which antinormativity came to define the queer theoretical project, however, raises the possibility that queer theory's conventional commitments to antinormativity need to be reconsidered. As part of that project, this essay traces the elaboration of the norm in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, reading it against what is often taken as its inspiration, Michel Foucault's understanding of normalization in The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Butler's description of how norms work and, more particularly, how norms might be subverted is radically inconsistent with Foucault's account of the processes of normalization that characterize modern power. This inconsistency allows us to see that, despite its apparent singularity, antinormativity is not a homogenous thing except in its field-founding force for queer theory.

This article argues that, in contradistinction to its widely promoted ethical openness to its future, queer theory has been less scrupulous about its messy, flexible and multiple relations to its pasts, the critical and activist traditions from which it emerged and that continue to develop alongside in mutually informing ways. In particular, it assesses queer theory's tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory. Returning to the controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality that has been prominently theorized as key to distinguishing between feminist and queer theoretical projects, the article traces the influence of Gayle Rubin's `Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality' through feminist and queer scholarship in order to demonstrate that, however different their projects, feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.