Feeling Backward by Heather Love

Feeling Backward

Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Heather Love

Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses–losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.

Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as ‘too depressing’ and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.

Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.


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Details

ISBN 9780674026520
Genre LGBT Studies/Social Sciences; Popular Culture
Copyright Date 2007
Publication Date 31-Oct-07
Publisher Harvard University Press
Format Hardcover
No. of Pages 196
Notes Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Language English
Rating Good
Paper Type Electronic Format Available
Subject History
BookID 3846

Author: LFWBooks