Lost Causes

Causality dominates today's discussions of LGBT rights: anti-gay voices imagine gay proliferation through seduction, influence, and corruption, while queer communities largely embrace biological determinism, saying they are "born gay." Reading popular rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present day, Lost Causes decenters etiology from queer politics, engages abject tropes of "homosexual reproduction," and considers the effects of retroactive, absent, and contingent causality.

Autorentext

Valerie Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality.

Inhalt

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