Lost Causes challenges gay civil rights arguments grounded in etiology, the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, ‘recruitment’ or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form in British and American literature and popular culture, Valerie Rohy argues that claims for biological determinism accept opponents’ fears of ‘homosexual reproduction.’ Her readings include contagion in Borrowed Time, influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, chosen identity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness, drawing on Lacan to ask not what causes homosexuality but what homosexuality causes.
Details
| Title: Lost Causes |
| Author: Valerie Rohy |
| ISBN: 9780200000000 |
| Subtitle: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory |
| Genre: LGBT Studies/Social Sciences; Literary Criticism |
| Subject(s): |
| Publication Date: 42313 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Oxford University Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 237 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Includes readings of The Well of Loneliness and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch. |
| Book_ID: 118904 |