This collection of essays explores the shifting definitions of the terms lesbian and postmodern, the lesbian in contemporary fiction and Hollywood film, and the pitfalls and rewards of the recent lesbian theory.

"Allen’s work is virtually unique among American writers. It illustrates a deep knowledge of the issues raised by the postmodernists, yet she does not succumb to the playing field, constructing instead her own philosophical direction and aesthetic." —Sarah Hoagland Jeffner Allen shapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. The surprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbian lives—a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women—informs these reflections.

This book traces the further development and emergence of American philosophy, particularly Naturalism and Pragmatism, against the backdrop of still-dominant Hegelian philosophy, during the third decade of the 20th century, through the addresses and biographies of the presidents of its oldest and largest philosophical society. Of special interest is the previously unpublished presidential address of Henry Walgrave Stewart, second president of the Pacific Division of The American Philosophical Association. The work contains the biographies, photographs, and addresses of 24 (...) past presidents, and photographs and addresses of others. No other publication has collected the presidential addresses of this, the largest society of philosophers, during its third decade of existence, and in no other publication are the biographies and photographs of all of its presidents available. While some histories of this period in 20th century American philosophy have been written, and while some collections of articles by philosophers exist which include writings of some of these individuals, none has concentrated on a representation of the leadership of. (shrink)

The Truth That Never Hurts brings together for the first time more than two decades of literary criticism & political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power & social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim Black feminism for Black women in the early seventies, this authors works has been ground breaking in defining a Black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of Black & other women of color; in representing (...) the lives of Black lesbians & gay men; & in making connections between race, class, sexuality, & gender. Her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of Black women's literature. This essay also presented the first serious discussion of Black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, Black & Jewish relations, & homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; & police brutality against Rodney King & Abner Louima. It also includes a never before published personal essay on racial violence, the day-to-day life of Kitchen Table Press, & the bonds between Black women that make it possible to survive. This authors writing offers a rare combination of intellectual challenge & an accessible personal voice. her commitment to telling the truth about difficult, even volatile issues, makes a unique contribution to American literature & social thought. (shrink)

Recent writing by Jewish lesbians is characterized by challenging and evocative reflection on themes of home and identity, family and choice, tradition and transformation. This essay is a personal journey through some of this writing. An exploration of the obvious and troubling tensions between lesbian or feminist and Jewish identities leads to the paradoxical but ultimately unsurprising suggestion that lesbian identity and eroticism can provide a route of return to and affirmation of Jewish identity.

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as (...) a democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

This article focuses on Dorothy Allison’s novel Trashto map how truth functions in the so-called ‘sexual outlaw’s’ efforts to establish a legitimate subject position within lesbian feminism. It suggests that truth is the most valued commodity in establishing that position regardless of one’s position(s) as a sexual outlaw. Sexual outlaws use truth to move from arguing that their sexuality is one of many legitimate expressions of desire to contending that they have developed a more truthful representation of the lesbian than (...) have ‘cultural’ feminists that dominated lesbian feminism in the late 1970s. (shrink)

This volume of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke continues the story of Edmund Burke, the Rockingham party in British politics, and the American crisis. By 1774 Burke was already recognized as a master of parliamentary debate and an accomplished writer. By 1780, however, his reputation was to have risen substantially. Probably the most important single reason was his Speech on Conciliation with America, which was presented to the House of Commons in March 1775, published, and circulated to (...) a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. In that speech, Burke used the full force of his intellect and eloquence to set out the Rockinghams' first comprehensive plan for achieving lasting peace in the Empire. The public commendation he received helped him to gain recognition for offerings such as his second conciliation proposal in November 1775, and his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. It also gave him some of the confidence he needed to announce the Whig party's historic conversion to a moderate reform programme in his celebrated speeches on economical reform in 1779 and 1780. Numerous writings and speeches in this volume are transcriptions of previously unpublished manuscripts from the collections at Sheffield and Northampton. These allow the reader new insights into the workings of Burke's mind not just in relation to the major political issues, but also to a multitude of engaging subjects such as education, capital punishment, religious dissent, and the return of the Rockingham Whigs to government power. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this volume is to introduce these philosophers to readers who do not yet know their writings at first hand.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault's work has had a significant impact on feminist and lesbian/gay scholarship in the United States. These explorations of gender and/or sexuality in which feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars rely on Foucault's ideas carry significant implications for the organization of knowledge in our culture beyond the issues of gender and sexuality narrowly defined. Many feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars in the United States initially read Foucault primarily as a historian. Since roughly 1985, many such scholars have (...) increasingly considered and critiqued the philosophical implications of his work, elaborating an account of the assumptions about gender and sexuality that reside at the core of ostensibly universal descriptions of human subjectivity. ;Participants in debates about the "social construction" of sexuality during the 1980s observed that Foucault did not originate social constructionist work in the field, widespread assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the social constructionist position differs importantly from Foucault's analysis of sexuality as the truth of subjectivity. Historians in the United States have modified many of the substantive claims in Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. More recently, scholars have attended less to Foucault's substantive claims in favor of his approach to questions of knowledge and subjectivity. ;Feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars have long suspected that gender and sexuality play a major role in authorizing subjects to produce knowledge. Many such scholars continue within existing modes of inquiry to substitute their own, sympathetic versions of their selves for prejudicial, hegemonic versions. Scholars working off of Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers increasingly suspect that prejudicial assumptions about gender and sexuality lie embedded in the very definition of current modes of inquiry, and thus require a fundamental reconceptualization of knowledge. (shrink)

Putnam’s style is rarely discussed in the secondary literature. In this paper I provide one approach to the kind of writing that philosophy becomes in Putnam’s hands. I focus on Putnam’s argumentative pluralism and, more specifically, the practical form that pluralism takes in Putnam’s commitment to the essay form. I argue that Putnam’s use of the essay form is a crucial expression of his pluralism. Looking at some ancestors of the Putnam essay, I pay attention to the specific hybrid qualities (...) of the philosophical paper. I make a connection between the live tensions at work within the essay form and Putnam’s vigorous resistance to dichotomies in philosophy. I suggest that Putnam’s philosophical resistance to such dichotomies can be understood as the practice of a certain kind of irony. My primary example is Putnam’s work on the fact/value dichotomy. I suggest that Putnam’s irony might present an alternative to the dominant conception of irony in contemporary American philosophy: that of Richard Rorty. (shrink)

This book is a standard anthology of writings of the 19th-century New England transcendentalists.

Putnam’s style is rarely discussed in the secondary literature. In this paper I provide one approach to the kind of writing that philosophy becomes in Putnam’s hands. I focus on Putnam’s argumentative pluralism and, more specifically, the practical form that pluralism takes in Putnam’s commitment to the essay form. I argue that Putnam’s use of the essay form is a crucial expression of his pluralism. Looking at some ancestors of the Putnam essay, I pay attention to the specific hybrid qualities (...) of the philosophical paper. I make a connection between the live tensions at work within the essay form and Putnam’s vigorous resistance to dichotomies in philosophy. I suggest that Putnam’s philosophical resistance to such dichotomies can be understood as the practice of a certain kind of irony. My primary example is Putnam’s work on the fact/value dichotomy. I suggest that Putnam’s irony might present an alternative to the dominant conception of irony in contemporary American philosophy: that of Richard Rorty. (shrink)

Introduction to Giambattista Vico: The Anglo-American perspective Marcel Danesi. Giambattista Vico (-) In, the Neapolitan rhetorician and philosopher, ...

In a wide-ranging study, Josh Cohen argues that the American fixation with image - literally celebrating the surface, the visual, the spectacular spaces of the cinema and the city - has produced a crisis of literary perception, with crucial cultural and political consequences.

This article complicates the idea that lesbian and gay kinship is based primarily on friendship, voluntarism and being free from duty and obligation. It also offers a more nuanced understanding of wills as a rich source of evidence for making claims about kinship, family and relationships. It analyses conversations about will-writing with fifteen older lesbians and gay men, taken from interviews which formed part of a wider socio-legal study on the intersection of ageing, gender and sexuality. The analysis identifies a (...) wide range of kinship formations and composition going beyond “family of choice” narratives, and also both connections and disconnections between ties of love and affection and disposal of assets in wills. Participants’ will-writing reflected four types of prioritisation: prioritising children; prioritising friends; prioritising siblings; mixed priorities. In contrast with accounts of “families of choice” as being duty-free, a sense of duty, especially towards biological family members, was evident in a number of interviews. I suggest that wills can sometimes be a rich source of evidence about kinship, but only when analysis takes into account the complexities and contingencies which can be involved. (shrink)

Eva Picardi has been one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. This collection of selected writings honors her work, confirming Picardi's status as one of the most important Frege scholars of her generation and a leading authority on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. Bringing together Picardi's contributions to the history of analytic philosophy, it includes her papers on major 20th-century figures such (...) as Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom. She examines their work in comparison with the philosopher Michael Dummett's, illuminating contrasts between American Neo-pragmatism and Continental philosophy. By considering key contributions made by Gadamer and Adorno and contrasting them with Davidson and Rorty's proposals, Picardi is able to bridge the Analytic and Continental divide. Featuring an introduction by Annalisa Coliva and new translations of previously unpublished papers, this collection emphasizes the significance of Picardi's work for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Joan Scott’s ‘fantasy echo’ is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism’s failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi’s ‘American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide’ (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi’s primary argument – that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress – unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and ignores the prominent role spectacle culture plays in the circumscription of contemporary feminism. Building upon Scott’s attention to (...) literature to interrupt fantasy echoes and their inert visions of how feminism should appear, the article interprets The Portrait of a Lady (1908) through the tools of Scott’s historiography. I argue that Henry James’s novel, focused on an American ‘New Woman’, is an early account of how young women are sold fantasies of feminist freedom through spectacle culture and troubles the assumption that older women only forge benevolent relationships with younger women out of generosity. (shrink)

This review essay covers the lesbian writing of philosopher Jeffner Allen, contrasting her fiercely separatist earlier work with her more recent experimental writing. A quest for a separate ontic space-defining difference qua Lesbian and consistently characterized by Allen as "the open"-links her earlier work with her more recent atonalities richly coded with ritual, myth, memory, and play.

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in (...) a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist (...) accounts of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Collins likewise draws (...) on Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

All the early advocates of women’s education, male and female, had proposed history as a central subject in women’s education—perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as strengthening women’s mental weakness and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness, extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides such history writing and history advocacy by materialist educational reformers, American women wrote history (...) in other modes and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now.Speculating on history as a woman’s writing practice from the earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by present-day standards none of these women could have been “good” historians. More generally, I supposed that insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and novel—and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering women’s writing further emphasizes such private, putatively unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters—we have been instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from public discourse, writing from somewhere outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of women’s writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself-conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public instances of women’s writing in our definition is to begin to see how often and how openly American women have written in such forms. We then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin constructing a different narrative of American women’s literary history. Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and articles on American and feminist literary topics. (shrink)

Explores the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns in writings by African American and Native American women.

Tuttleton assesses the influence and accomplishments of literary radicalism in the twenties and investigates the treatment of women in the American novel between the two world wars.

Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: in the spirit of Zora : traveling with the "eternal feminine" -- Returning to the margin : changed -- African American literature : like a bridge over troubled water -- Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes : envisioning the (new) "Negro artist" -- Striking down colorism in color struck : a play in four scenes -- We are not tragically colored -- Langston Hughes writing about the "the Negro artist and the racial mountain" -- (...) Transgressing boundaries of white male power in the ways of white folks -- Blackness from the inside out -- Seeing "women loving women" -- Black female journey to sexual in(sight)fullness -- "What if Mama finds out?" : entering a life-changing place of self-liberation -- When "nobody was lesbian, nobody was feminist, nobody was gay" -- Higher education that makes a difference -- "Still children of the night" : survivors against the odds -- Black boys' lives still matter : in search of a loving father -- "Spilled salt" on a Black mother's table and the struggle for maternal survival -- No shame: recovering our mother's way(s) of being -- Remembering where we came from -- Getting to the heart of the lessons : Black women teaching "other" ways of loving -- Epilogue: continuing to teach in the image of "an alternative Black man" -- It's about revolutionary manhood. (shrink)

The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published. Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, (...) Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems. (shrink)