Inconsequence by Annamarie Jagose

Lesbian studies has often been framed around invisibility. Annamarie Jagose argues that the preoccupation with visibility is part of the problem it tries to solve, and that the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality depends less on visual recognition than on a cultural attachment to sexual sequence: what comes first and what comes second, which also implies precedence. Reading novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, she shows how pairs such as first and second, origin and outcome, and heterosexual and homosexual reinforce heterosexual precedence. The book intervenes in lesbian historiography, from the fin-de-siècle codification of sexual types to a post-Kinsey pulp sexology text, arguing that all categories of sexual identity are belated back-formations.