Book Cover
E-book
Author Jagose, Annamarie Rustom, author

Title Inconsequence : Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence / Annamarie Rustom Jagose
Published Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]
©2002

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Description 1 online resource : 16 halftones
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. First Things First -- 2. Remembering Miss Wade -- 3. Unmarriageable -- 4. Remembering and Forgetting -- 5. First Wife, Second Wife -- 6. Wild Life Photography -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary The field of lesbian studies is often framed in terms of the relation between lesbianism and invisibility. Annamarie Jagose here takes a radical new approach, suggesting that the focus on invisibility and visibility is perhaps not the most productive way of looking at lesbian representability. Jagose argues that the theoretical preoccupation with metaphors of visibility is part of the problem it attempts to remedy. In her account, the regulatory difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality relies less on codes of visual recognition than on a cultural adherence to the force of first order, second order sexual sequence. As Jagose points out, sequence does not simply specify what comes before and what comes after; it also implies precedence: what comes first and what comes second.Jagose reads canonical novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Daphne du Maurier, drawing upon their elaboration of sexual sequence. In these innovative readings, tropes such as first and second, origin and outcome, and heterosexuality and homosexuality are shown to reinforce heterosexual precedence. Inconsequence intervenes in current debates in lesbian historiography, taking as its pivotal moment the fin-de-siècle phenomenon of the sexological codification of sexual taxonomies and concluding with a reading of a post-Kinsey pulp sexological text. Throughout, Jagose reminds us that categories of sexual registration are always back-formations, secondary, and belated, not only for those who identify as lesbian but also for all sexual subjects
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-204) and index
Notes In English
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 19. Feb 2019)
Subject English fiction -- History and criticism
Homosexuality and literature -- Great Britain -- History
Lesbians in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / LGBT.
English fiction.
Homosexuality and literature.
Lesbians in literature.
Great Britain.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501725838
1501725831