rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Lost causes
    sub title: narrative, etiology, and queer theory
  name:
    name part: Rohy, Valerie
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2015
    copyright date: 2015
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: viii, 237 pages ; 23 cm.
  abstract: Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology, that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction." hat is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory, two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves, to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction, contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms, why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable, while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.
  table of contents: Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Cause and Effect -- 2. On Homosexual Reproduction -- 3. Strange Influence: The Picture of Dorian Gray -- 4. Return from the Future: James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography -- 5. Desire and the Scene of Reading: The Well of Loneliness -- 6. The Future in Ruins: Borrowed Time -- 7. Contingency for Beginners: The Night Watch -- 8. Conclusion: Multiply and Divide -- Notes.
  note: Valerie Rohy.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: American literature
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: English literature
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Homosexuality in literature
  subject:
    topic: Queer theory
  subject:
    topic: Narration (Rhetoric)
    topic: Social aspects
  subject:
    topic: Homosexuality and literature
  subject:
    topic: Gender identity in literature
  subject:
    topic: LITERARY CRITICISM
    topic: Gay & Lesbian
  subject:
    topic: SOCIAL SCIENCE
    topic: Gay Studies
  classification: PS169.H65 R64 2015
  classification: 809/.93352664
  identifier: 9780199340194 (hardback)
  identifier: 0199340196 (hardback)
  identifier: 9780199340200 (paper)
  identifier: 019934020X (paper)
  identifier: 9780199340217 (electronic bk.)
  identifier: 2014005144
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 140508
    record change date: 20151206124950.0
    record identifier: in00003507706