Suchergebnisse

In Queer Attachments, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces. This passionately argued book is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame.

In the Lesbian and Gay Studies series this work draws on literary and cultural theory to demonstrate the ways in which lesbian identities are ascribed and resisted. It looks at the identity models of the hero, the flaneur and the lesbian outlaw as well as lesbian ''space'' both materially and imaginatively

The ascription of lesbianism to the butch body is examined historically, through the pathologization of homosexuality in 19th-century sexology to the more recent elevation of the butch body in lesbianism. The other site of the pride/shame dichotomy in lesbianism is the stone butch, both the ideal & abjected sense of butchness. The reality of a butch body with its erotic surfaces & lines of force, the butch performance as a sense of autonomous embodiment, & the instability of the butch configuration are discussed. 13 References. M. Pflum

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women's Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has 'professionalized' work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom 'the personal is political' and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one's own intellectual trajectory in the form of the 'taint' of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.

This article discusses the formation of shame in a group of white heterosexual British women originally from middle-class backgrounds. Narrative interviews convey how participants perceive their lives to have been "spoiled" and stigmatised through becoming single mothers. They articulate perceptions of how their lives have fallen short of idealised heteronormative, middle-class trajectories of neoliberal success and adopt a range of narrative strategies to counter this, informed by the politics of shame in relation to single motherhood in contemporary Britain.