Elizabeth Susan Wahl explores how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and French writers represented intimacy between women, through both a sexualized model of the ‘lesbian’ tribade and an idealized model of female friendship without sexual expression. She shows how these two models shaped literature and cultural responses to places where women gathered, such as the salon, convent, theater and brothel. Drawing on legal, medical and historical sources and on writers including Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine Descartes, Delarivier Manley and John Cleland, she recovers an emerging discourse of female homosexuality and the fears it provoked.
Details
| Title: Invisible Relations |
| Author: Elizabeth Susan Wahl |
| ISBN: 9780804736503 |
| Subtitle: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment |
| Genre: History; Lesbian Studies; Literary Criticism |
| Subject(s): Social Science |
| Publication Date: 1999-07-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Stanford University Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 373 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: |
| Book_ID: 119035 |