Passionate communities : reading lesbian resistance in Jane Rule's fiction / Marilyn R. Schuster.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-264) and index.

Sailing to Galiano: Jane Rule at Home -- The Journey: Crossing Over -- Reading Then, Reading Now -- Reading Queerly -- This Not Quite Promised Land -- Self-Reflections: Growing Up Midcentury, Middle Class, Middle Child -- Readers and Writers: "Language Is as Primal a Drive as Sex" -- The Politics of Fiction: Barbara Gittings, Resisting Lesbian Reader -- Readers Writing -- Resisting Reason -- Sexuality and Citizenship -- Reading Fiction, Doing History -- Defining Histories -- Defining Fictions -- Defining Theories -- Defining Stories -- The Headmistress -- The Married Woman -- Reading the Stories: A Resisting Lesbian Subject -- Revising Fictions: Early Experiments -- "Trapped in the Hope of a Real Articularity" -- Disguising Desire: Not for Myself Exactly -- Denying Desire: This Is Not for You -- Unsettling Women -- Composing Selves: Dueling Narratives -- "Home Movie": Projecting a Lesbian Subject -- Desert of the Heart: Resignifying Sexuality -- From Permanent Resident to Desert of the Heart -- Defining Powers -- Ritual Performances -- Desert Visions -- Reflections of Power -- Memory Board: Resignifying Gender -- Brothers and Sons -- Leave Taking -- Composing Selves: Memory and Personal Histories -- Construction Sites: Narratives of Houses and Homes -- Going Home (Again) -- Home Invasion: "A Television Drama" -- A House of Language: Against the Season -- Under Siege: The Young in One Another's Arms -- Contesting Communities -- Parading Differences -- Mapping Boundaries -- Quarrelsome Communities: Contract with the World.

Print version record.

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures. From her earliest novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal encounters with the author to elicit the ways in which Rule interrogates the meanings and politics of sexuality, the relationship between sexuality and language, and the stakes of communities in individual claims on identity. Passionate Communities is a thorough, engaging, and long-overdue study of an important voice in lesbian literature and gay and lesbian politics.

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