Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Rohy, Valerie
Titre(s) : Lost causes [Texte imprimé] : narrative, etiology, and queer theory / Valerie Rohy
Publication : New York, NY : Oxford university press, [2015]
Description matérielle : viii, 237 pages ; 23 cm
Comprend : Cause and Effect ; On Homosexual Reproduction ; Strange Influence : The Picture of
Dorian Gray ; Return from the Future : James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography ; Desire
and the Scene of Reading : The Well of Loneliness ; The Future in Ruins : Borrowed
Time ; Contingency for Beginners : The Night Watch ; Multiply and Divide.
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-230) and index
"Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil
rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment,"
or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic
method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's
gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what
Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing
more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary
texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in
themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in
Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch,
choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and
dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion
of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into
a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative
symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must
embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable?
-- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent
negativity"
Sujet(s) : Homosexualité -- Dans la littérature
Homosexualité et littérature
Identité sexuelle -- Dans la littérature
Théorie queer
Narration -- Société
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780199340194 (hardback). - ISBN 0199340196 (hardback). - ISBN 9780199340200
(paper). - ISBN 019934020X (paper). - ISBN 9780199340217 (erroné) (ebook). - ISBN
0199340218 (erroné)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb442376590
Notice n° :
FRBNF44237659
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
