Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
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Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses—losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.Martha Miller - Gay and Lesbian Review WorldwideFeeling Backward is a brilliant work...Love looks fearlessly at literature from the past in which circumstances related to gender tend to produce victims rather than heroines. She establishes that our literature has been affected by homophobia and demands that we consider the implications of this fact. Love contends that we need to look at history and social politics less like Lot's wife, who's destroyed by looking back, and more like Odysseus, who listens to the past but isn't destroyed by it. The past haunts us whether we acknowledge it or not; we may be "looking forward," as we like to assure ourselves, even as we're "feeling backward."
Introduction 11 Emotional Rescue: The Demands of Queer History 312 Forced Exile: Walter Pater's Backward Modernism 533 The End of Friendship: Willa Cather's Sad Kindred 724 Spoiled Identity: Radclyffe Hall's Unwanted Being 1005 Impossible Objects: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Longing for Revolution 129Epilogue: The Politics of Refusal 146Notes 165Acknowledgments 189Index 193
