Search Results

This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.

This chapter examines three lesbian novels published by Egales and Odisea—Marosa Gómez Pereira’s Un amor bajo sospecha (A love under suspicion, 2001); Marta Fagés’ Amores prohibidos (Forbidden loves, 2002); and Libertad Morán’s A por todas (After them all!, 2005)—in an attempt to outline the parameters of the debates about gay and lesbian marriage in the context of a changing Spanish society. Both Amores prohibidos and A por todas present the political reality of Spain’s heterosexist society, where relationships of queers either gays or lesbians are condemned, often resulting in queer activisms. Contrariwise, Un amor bajo sospecha speaks of the triumph of lesbianism from its initial societal misrecognition. Through examining Bertram J. Cohler’s and Phillip L. Hammack’s article “The Psychological World of the Gay Teenager: Social Change, Narrative, and ‘Normality’” (2007), the chapter summarizes the disparity between politics and lesbian literature depicted by the lesbian novels.

This chapter discusses the liberation movements of the 1960s and the emergent writing that followed. During the 1960s, literature had played a crucial role in the formation of ethnic identity and the creation of ethnic pride. Proponents of Hispanic American literature built upon a tradition as far back as the sixteenth century. The 1960s also saw the creation of a new pan-Indian consciousness exemplified by the Chicago Conference of 1961, which brought together hundreds of Native Americans from different tribes to discuss issues of common interest. Meanwhile, for Asian Americans, the 1960s offered a different legacy, in the form of the law-abiding “model minority.” And finally, though gay and lesbian writing has been around since the time of Socrates and Sappho, gay and lesbian literature as a field only emerged during the late 1960s.

The male telegraphers whose voices originally predominated in disembodied speech forums sometimes suggested that women should be excluded from virtual speech forums, and often worried that women should interact in the virtual world in traditionally gendered ways. Such nineteenth-century women telegraphers as Ella Thayer and Lida Churchill nevertheless voluminously produced literature that provided a format for their own technologically enabled literary utopias of new gender forms in the telegraphic virtual realm. Telegraphy seems to have appealed to women writers exactly because it provided a freedom that authors otherwise achieved primarily through the creation of literature. The freedom women experienced virtually emboldened the inscription of newly gendered models for both virtual and physical-world selfhood through the creation of women telegraphers’ literature.

The chapter illustrates the personal accounts and recollections of Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge and their path for the discovery of queer identities and their search for lesbian science fiction. The chapter also discusses Griffith and Pearson's views and experiences as writers of queer science fiction.