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Elizabeth Wahl - Invisible Relations - 9780804729567 - V9780804729567
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Invisible Relations

€ 158.90
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Description for Invisible Relations Hardback. This book explores how representations of intimacy between women included both a sexualized model of the "lesbian" tribade and an "idealized" model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression. Num Pages: 376 pages. BIC Classification: 1DBKE; 2AB; DSBD. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 152 x 161 x 28. Weight in Grams: 650.

This book explores the ambivalent and often contradictory ways in which English and French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented relations of intimacy between women. These representations included both a sexualized model of the “lesbian” tribade and an “idealized” model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression. Although these two perceptions of female intimacy may seem mutually exclusive, the author argues that both operate as defining parameters, not only for literary representations of relations between women but also for cultural responses to those institutions in which women could gather—salon, convent, theater, or brothel.

Despite increasing evidence ... Read more

Analyzing a variety of legal, medical, and historical materials, as well as literary texts—by Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Madeleine de Scudéry, Catherine Descartes, Delarivier Manley, and John Cleland—the author outlines a combination of cultural and historical circumstances that contributed to or were symptomatic of increasing consciousness and concern about female homosexuality in England and France. Relating this sexualized model of female intimacy to idealized images of female friendship in mainstream literary texts allows the author to recover an incipient discourse of female homosexuality. She also delineates cultural fantasies about the outcome of unregulated contact between women, as well as underlying fears that such intimacy could foster aberrant social and political behavior in addition to unauthorized sexual relations between women.

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Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
1999
Publisher
Stanford University Press United States
Number of pages
376
Condition
New
Number of Pages
376
Place of Publication
Palo Alto, United States
ISBN
9780804729567
SKU
V9780804729567
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About Elizabeth Wahl
Elizabeth S. Wahl is an independent scholar.

Reviews for Invisible Relations
" Invisible Relations breaks important new ground in the study . . . of female intimacy and homoeroticism. . . . An insightful, intelligent book that will challenge how scholars have traditionally perceived female intimacy and female communities in the Enlightenment."—Choice "A work of impressive scholarship. . . . of solid value in presenting new material to scholars of the ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Invisible Relations


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