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

by Marilyn R. Schuster

Overview

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 Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479807239
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Series:	The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series , #17
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

Resistance to dominant narratives, whether they are sanctioned by the mainstream culture or by political and sexual subcultures' is at the center of Marilyn Schuster's rich analysis of Rule's work in Passionate Communities. The first full-length study of Rule's fiction, Schuster's book is a long-overdue corrective. . . .

Interweaving biographical detail. theory, and interpretation, Schuster places Rule's narratives in their proper context as the accomplished work of an important, highly astute, and politically engaged author for whom being lesbian is never a simple or simplified way of being in the world.

Lesbian Review of Books