Key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography, drawing new conclusions on the important and often overlooked work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.
Noreen Giffney is a research coordinator in the Graduate Research and Education Programme in Gender, Culture, and Identity in the Humanties Institute at the University College Dublin, Ireland.
Title: The Lesbian Premodern (The New Middle Ages)
Author: Giffney, Noreen
ISBN: 9780230616769
Binding:
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication Date: 2011-01-11
Number of Pages: 236
Weight: 0.4401 kg
The editors of The Lesbian Premodern have gathered here the work of some of the most prominent and accomplished scholars of pre- and early modern female sexualities. In the brilliantly conceived and executed latter part of the book they bring provocative scholars of later periods into conversation with this medieval and early modern scholarship. The result is a dynamic interrogation of fundamental concepts, demonstrating vividly how this pre- and early modern material impacts the entire field. - Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University
It has been the case for some time now that the most rigorous and mind-bending queer scholarship focuses on medieval and early modern sexualities. This collection represents what is best in this work, and clears the way for an open-ended conversation across periods. Prepare to be schooled in the pleasures of anachronism. - Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania
The Lesbian Premodern's editors have collected a rich and flexible set of texts that speak to and out of myriad sources to discover sites where same-sex desire might be discerned in small gaps in the history of the inaudible . . . The Lesbian Premodern's daring derives from its editors' purposeful gathering of texts that tangle temporalities to make a nonmodern lesbian - italics and quotation mark free - typographically possible. - Michele Aina Barale, Amherst College
The Lesbian Premodern is a stunning achievement in laying the groundwork for a long overdue transhistorical sexuality studies, one that does not assume simplistic diachronicities between the past and present, but which instead tracks and problematizes the complex and untimely traffic between 'Then' and 'Now' . . . . What emerges is a potent and unprecedented framework for the writing of new lesbian histories and theories, as well as the forging of new relational virtualities between scholars who might otherwise never 'hook up'. - Eileen A. Joy, editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and Lead Ingenitor, BABEL Working Group
