Looking Like What You Are : : Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity / / Lisa Walker.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Walker, Lisa,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2001]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2001
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

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