Passionate Communities - Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule's Fiction

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 Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal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.

About the author

Marilyn R. Schuster is Professor of French and Women's Studies at Smith College.

Summary

A study of the life and work of the lesbian writer, Jane Rule. Incorporating Rule's early work, including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan-mail, the book also draws on interviews and conversations with the author.

Product details

• Authors: Marilyn R Schuster, Marilyn R. Schuster
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.06.1999
• EAN: 9780814781333
• ISBN: 978-0-8147-8133-3
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 228 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 386 g
• Series: Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life & L; Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life & L; The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series; Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Partnership, sexuality; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories