Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rules Fiction (The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series) ISBN-13: 9780814781302

ISBN-13: 9780814781302

Binding: Hardcover

Author: Schuster, Marilyn R.

Details: About the Author

Marilyn R. Schuster is Professor of French and Womens Studies at Smith College.

Product Description

In this new full-length study of Jane Rules life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rules 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), Rules 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 Incorporating all of Jane Rules early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal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.

Review

“A strong, effective, and readable portrayal of how twentieth-century American parents have invested and over-invested in their children. In a fairly short compass, Stearns has demonstrated many of the things that historians have tended to belabor-the role of expertise, why despite their declining numbers, children have become so important socially, the new realm of consumption, how the anxiety about children has become a central matter in twentieth-century culture and even an identifier of American life. Stearns knows what is going on and that children are not a means to express other anxieties, but the very source of many of the anxieties we express.”
-Paula S. Fass, University of California, Berkeley

“Anxiety is the hallmark of contemporary parenting. Todays parents are tormented by fears of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, child abductions, and juvenile drug and alcohol use. In perhaps his most timely and exciting book, Peter N. Stearns explains with wit and humane insight how modern mothers and fathers came to agonize incessantly about childrens personality development, school performance, and psychological well-being.”
-Steven Mintz, University of Houston

“In what is his trademark style, Stearns creates an artful synthesis that is both revelatory and captivating. An at times unsettling analysis of parental angst, the book is replete with worthy insights for historians and contemporary parents alike.”
-“The Journal of American History”,

“Stearns points to a number of contemporary phenomena, each of which he considers an expression of parental anxiety. Steans appears to be particularly sensitive to the upward mobility of kids grades.”
-“The New York Review of Books”,

“The book is more than a synthesis of existing scholarship. It is a compendium of ideas – some personal, mostly scholarly – about the experience of parenting in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is imaginative and thought provoking.”
-“History of Education Quarterly”,

Release Date: 01-06-1999

Package Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English

Part Number: part_0814781306

Number Of Pages: 272