Passionate Communities : : Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule's Fiction / / Marilyn R. Schuster.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Archive eBook-Package Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Schuster, Marilyn R.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [1999]; ©1999
• Year of Publication: 1999
• Language: English
• Series: The Cutting Edge ; 17
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures. From her earliest novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal encounters with the author to elicit the ways in which Rule interrogates the meanings and politics of sexuality, the relationship between sexuality and language, and the stakes of communities in individual claims on identity. Passionate Communities is a thorough, engaging, and long-overdue study of an important voice in lesbian literature and gay and lesbian politics.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- ONE. Sailing to Galiano -- TWO. Resisting Reason -- THREE. Revising Fictions -- FOUR. Composing Selves -- FIVE. Construction Sites -- SIX. Contesting Communities -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR