(H/B) INTIMATE FRIENDS

Παρουσίαση

Intimate Women offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.
Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris.
In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
HUSBAND-WIFE COUPLING
"A Scheme of Romantic Friendship": Love and Same-Sex Marriage
"Emancipated Females": The Rome Community
QUEER RELATIONSHIPS
"They Venture to Share the Same Bed": Possible Impossibilities
"The Gift of Love": Religion and Lesbian Love
CROSS-AGE AND CROSSED LOVE
"A Strenuous Pleasure": Daughter-Mother Love
"Passion ... Immense and Unrestrained": Destructive Desires
MODERNIST REFASHIONINGS
"Familiar Misquotation": Sapphic Cross-Dressing
"A Love of Domination": The Mannish Invert and Sexual Danger
Conclusion: Beyond the Family Metaphor
Appendix: The Principal Intimate Friends
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index