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Impossible Women

其他書名	Lesbianism and Representation in American Literature
出版	Tufts University, 1997
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=VLLxtgAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This study examines articulations of female sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, considering the ways in which lesbianism is associated with both the resistance to and the logic of representation. Reading Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia," essays by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Henry James's The Bostonians, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Toni Morrison's Sula, and writing by Elizabeth Bishop, it traces the cultural construction of lesbian sexuality in and as language. Requiring that lesbianism symbolize, and be abjected in the place of, the non-meaning that troubles meaningful discourse, the patriarchal symbolic order equates lesbian sexuality with tropes of resistance to representation, including the pre-oedipal, transference or displacement, the disembodied voice, the real, repetition-compulsion, and the uncanny. This project, therefore, takes "lesbianism" not as an essential identity, morphology, or even, necessarily, object choice, but as a name for the set of discursive effects that are culturally displaced onto figures of perverse or excessive female desire--as, that is, the cultural understanding of female sexuality which, by alluding to a preoedipal bond with the mother and a non-genital organization of desire, or by failing to contribute to the work of reproduction, seems imbued with an essential morbidity