Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Reviews
- Essays
- Letters
- Sinister Wisdom, 11, fall 1970
- Village Voice, October 1972
- Signs, winter 1977
- Signs, II:4, 1977
- Frontiers, IV:2, 1979
- Chrysalis, No. 9, fall 1979
- “Feminist Review,” The New Women's Times, February 29–March 13 1980
- Gay Community Center Newsletter, July 1980
- Women and SF: Three Letters
- Written to Venom, November 27 1981
- Sojourner, 10:8, June 1985
- The Women's Review of Books, II:9, June 1995
- The Women's Review of Books, III:6, March 1986
- The Seattle Source, April 11 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, III:12, September 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, IV:10–11, July/August 1987
- Lesbian Ethics, 2:3, summer 1987
- Gay Community News, January 22–28 1989
- The Women's Review of Books, VI:7, April 1989
- SFRA Newsletter, No. 172, November 1989
- Extrapolation, 31:1, spring 1990
- Publication of the Modern Language Association, March 1992
- Sojourner: The Women's Forum, September 1993
- The Lesbian Review of Books, I:3, 1995
- Index of Books and Authors Reviewed
Publication of the Modern Language Association, March 1992
from Letters
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Reviews
- Essays
- Letters
- Sinister Wisdom, 11, fall 1970
- Village Voice, October 1972
- Signs, winter 1977
- Signs, II:4, 1977
- Frontiers, IV:2, 1979
- Chrysalis, No. 9, fall 1979
- “Feminist Review,” The New Women's Times, February 29–March 13 1980
- Gay Community Center Newsletter, July 1980
- Women and SF: Three Letters
- Written to Venom, November 27 1981
- Sojourner, 10:8, June 1985
- The Women's Review of Books, II:9, June 1995
- The Women's Review of Books, III:6, March 1986
- The Seattle Source, April 11 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, III:12, September 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, IV:10–11, July/August 1987
- Lesbian Ethics, 2:3, summer 1987
- Gay Community News, January 22–28 1989
- The Women's Review of Books, VI:7, April 1989
- SFRA Newsletter, No. 172, November 1989
- Extrapolation, 31:1, spring 1990
- Publication of the Modern Language Association, March 1992
- Sojourner: The Women's Forum, September 1993
- The Lesbian Review of Books, I:3, 1995
- Index of Books and Authors Reviewed
Summary
Author's Note
If academic intellectuals have a besetting vice it's abstraction. It's so easy to lose awareness of people's concrete situations in studying their rhetoric or the structures of their situations. I don't know if Rita Felski has incorporated a down-to-earth knowledge of gay lives in the late 1890s into her book, but I do know about being gay in the 1950s and 1960s (I was there) and it seemed to me that she didn't. Where does the money come from? Who gets it? What do they have to do to get it? What happens if they don't do it? Questions like these tend to slip silently out of many academic theories. Some years ago I read a poem by Oscar Wilde, a flamboyant exoticerotic affair written when he was an undergraduate of nineteen. It seemed to me rather overblown in its purple and sensuous imagery – until I realized that he was writing about his own kind of sexuality and suddenly I could see the conflict in the poem itself between wanting to say it straight out and knowing that he couldn't. Saying it could put you in jail. You could be stuck in a mental hospital. Your career could be ruined, your family could desert you, your job could disappear. In Wilde's time these were not possibilities but dead certain. In fact, they happened. It's things like this that most academics tend to leave out of their theorizing when the people in question are not like them. And that is a very, very bad thing for everyone.
To the Editors:
In “The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch” (PMLA, 106 [1991]: 1094–105), Rita Felski doesn't emphasize the writers' conscious motives for the fin-desiècle “cult of art and artifice” (p. 1094) she otherwise treats so well. Of course, her forthcoming book may do just this, but I think her article scants the extent to which the writers involved knew what they were doing.
First – and I don't think this can be emphasized too much – careers and lives could easily be smashed by any openness at all [about homosexuality], and everyone knew it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Country You Have Never SeenEssays and Reviews, pp. 292 - 294Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007