Coming Out of Feminism?

Has Queer Theory "grown out" of Feminism – in both senses? If it has, is that process a coming–out story? Despite a parallel chronology, with 1969 marking a key moment for both movements, and despite all their common and mutual debts, the political differences with which both are all too familiar affect their own relationship as well. One difference may be generational, with the 70s women′s movement acting as mother or midwife to the 90s generation of queers; another may be between the overlapping but distinct debates of gender and sexuality; a third between the different situations of men and women. But do these views themselves create arbitrary and caricatural oppositions between two bodies of ideas that should remain vitally connected? This book opens up a number of original and challenging approaches to these questions, with contributors (from the fields of literature, philosophy, film studies, anthropology and psychoanalysis) including Emily Apter, Trevor Hope, Biddy Martin and Gayle Rubin.

List of Contributors.

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

1. Sexualities without Genders and other Queer Utopias: Biddy Martin.

2. Sexual Traffic: Gayle Rubin (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley).

3. Sissies and Sisters: Gender, Sexuality and the Possibilities of Coalition: William Spurlin (Columbia University).

4. Reflections on Gynophobia: Emily Apter (UCLA).

5. Mother, Can′t You See I′m Burning? Between Female Homosexuality and Homosociality in Radclyffe Hall′s The Unlit Lamp: Trevor Hope (University of Rochester).

6. Desiring Machines? Queer Re–visions of Feminist Film Theory: Carole–Anne Tyler (University of California, Riverside).

7. André Gide and the Niece′s Seduction: Naomi Segal (University of Reading).

8. Savage Nights: Mandy Merck.

9. Coming Out of the Real: Knots and Queries: Elizabeth Wright (Girton College, Cambridge).

Index.

Naomi Segal is Professor of French Studies at the University of Reading. She is the author of The Banal Object (1981), The Unintended Reader (1986), Narcissus and Echo: Women in the French Récit (1988), The Adulteress′s Child (1992) and André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy and is the co–editor of Freud in Exile and Scarlett Letters (1997).

Mandy Merck teaches on the Sexual Dissidence MA programme at the University of Sussex. The former series editor of Channel Four Television′s ′Out on Tuesday′, she is the author of Perversions: Deviant Readings (1993) and After Diana (1998). Her next book is In Your Face: Essays on the Representation of Sex.

Elizabeth Wright is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984), Postmodern Brecht: A RePresentation (1989), and the editor of Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (1992). Her newer books are Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (1998), Speaking Desires Can be Dangerous: Psychoanalysis, Language and Literary Theory (1999) and The Zizek Reader, co–edited with Edmond Wright (1999).