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Full-Text Articles in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee Jan 2013

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …


Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience And Masculinity In Bryher's Historical Fiction, Haley M. Fedor Jan 2013

Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience And Masculinity In Bryher's Historical Fiction, Haley M. Fedor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project analyzes three of Bryher's historical novels, while also providing background on the shadowy figure of Bryher herself. Looking at Gate to the Sea, Roman Wall, and Ruan, each serves to represent lesbianism in a variety of coded or metaphorical ways. Various geographical locations or landscapes serve to either represent or depict homosexual desire, and also construct queer spaces for characters to traverse. Limited scholarship exists on any of Bryher's works, particularly that which looks at lesbian sexuality. The genre Bryher writes in allows for a cross-writing of lesbian characters, or gendering lesbian characters as male, and displays awareness …


Queering The Sublime: Virginia Woolf, Sexology, And Sexuality, Emily Whitmore Jan 2013

Queering The Sublime: Virginia Woolf, Sexology, And Sexuality, Emily Whitmore

Masters Theses

Using Virginia Woolf's novels, The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, I begin to explore moments where the characters experience the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke. Woolf uses the traditional sublime, but complicates the concept beyond its initial intention. The moments that mimic the sublime, but include the body, the natural world, and artistic creativity grows into what I will call the "queer sublime," which is new for both Woolf scholarship and for the sublime. Woolf's experimentation with the term and part of the "queer sublime" also helps to create a different …