Lesbian lives - Nicky Hallett

Does our sense of what is said - or not said - to be "factual" shape our sense of sexuality and self? How far have representations of lesbianism moved from the pathology and deviancy of the 1920s and 1930s to the lesbian chic of the 1990s? And how far is the notion of a specific lesbian identity problematised by the contradictions of identity politics and the heterosexism of critical language?;This study addresses these questions of lesbian representation. It considers the subject within the broader context of gender, sexuality and the construction of identity in a postmodern culture, comparing the coded, the indirect, the oblique and the hidden of the 1920s with the "out" of the queer 1990s. Building on the numerous studies of lesbianism in fiction and popular culture, the book explores the construction of lesbian identities in popular and critical biographies, autobiographies and diaries, as well as newspaper stories, obituaries and reviews. As notions of identity, self and other become more fluid, it uses genre and period to examine lesbian critical theory and to move beyond existing notions of the permissible and the acceptable in a call for a more radical critical language. The book extends the boundaries of enquiry with an investigation into the ways in which lesbians self-represent and are themselves written about in the so-called "factual modes" of non-fiction.