Looking Like What You Are

Looking Like What You Are

by Lisa Walker
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 01/04/2001

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Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.

Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. In particular, she explores the implications of a predominantly visible model of sexual identity for the feminine lesbian, who is both marked and unmarked, desired and disavowed.

Walker's textual analysis cuts across a variety of genres, including modernist fiction such as The Well of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s and the 1960s, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory.

In the book's final chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," Walker argues that strategies of visibility are at times deconstructed, at times reinscribed within contemporary lesbian-feminist theory.

ISBN:
9780814784747
9780814784747
Category:
Gay & Lesbian studies
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
01-04-2001
Language:
English
Publisher:
NYU Press
Lisa Walker

Lisa Walker lives on the far north coast of NSW where she is completing a PhD in creative writing. Lisa has had a radio play produced for ABC RN and was the winner of the Byron Writers Festival short story award.

She was a finalist in the ABC Short Story Award and won second placed in the Henry Savery and Port Stephens Literature Awards.

Lisa is the author of Liar Bird (HarperCollins, 2012) and Sex, Lies and Bonsai (HarperCollins, 2013) and her debut YA novel is called Paris Syndrome (HarperCollins 2018).

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