Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall

Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall

Nealon, Christopher

Paperback

Series: Series Q

General World HistoryGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 0822326973
ISBN13: 9780822326977
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Oct 8 2001
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.47 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What is it like to feel historical? In Foundlings Christopher Nealon analyzes texts produced by American gay men and lesbians in the first half of the twentieth century--poems by Hart Crane, novels by Willa Cather, gay male physique magazines, and lesbian pulp fiction. Nealon brings these diverse works together by highlighting a coming-of-age narrative he calls foundling--a term for queer disaffiliation from and desire for family, nation, and history.

The young runaways in Cather's novels, the way critics conflated Crane's homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopian captions of muscle magazines, and Beebo Brinker, the aging butch heroine from Ann Bannon's pulp novels--all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two models of lesbian and gay sexuality. The inversion model dominant in the first half of the century held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary ethnic model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gay men and lesbians. Nealon's unique readings, however, reveal a constant movement between these two discursive poles, and not, as is widely theorized, a linear progress from one to the other.

This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth-century history.

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