War baby: Race, nation, and cultural conceptions of lesbian motherhood
Item
-
Title
-
War baby: Race, nation, and cultural conceptions of lesbian motherhood
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:af726722ca58:11286
-
identifier
-
11712
-
Creator
-
Brundage, Lisa Ashby,
-
Contributor
-
Jane Marcus
-
Date
-
2012
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
LGBTQ studies | African American studies | Womens studies | Black studies | Hall | Radclyffe | Larsen | Nella | L Word | motherhood | reproduction | Warner | Sylvia Townsend
-
Abstract
-
The Interwar period was a time of exaggerated social anxieties about gender, race, class, and sexuality. One of the primary vehicles for expressing this agitation was through a pronatalist cultural focus on maternity that posited women as gatekeepers of racial purity, traditional gender roles who perform a specifically patriotic duty---akin to men's military service---through reproduction. Concurrently, thanks to the ubiquity of Radclyffe Hall's image after the obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness in 1928, the general public in England and the USA had a visual, collective idea of "the lesbian" for the first time. "The lesbian" was in many ways a foil for the idealized, domestic mother, and three novels from this period that are frequently considered classics of lesbian literature all place a heavy, yet currently under-explored, emphasis on the embattled relationship between lesbianism and maternity: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929). Despite her notoriety, Hall's novel places a deeply conservative value in women's reproductive capacity; a driving force in the plot is the female invert Stephen Gordon's need to compel her "normal" lover Mary Llewellyn to heterosexual reproduction---to prevent Mary from using lesbianism as contraception---over Mary's protestation. Warner's novel takes a more politically radical stance, tracing its protagonist Sophia Willoughby's disillusionment with white, aristocratic motherhood, ultimately having her reject not just marriage and maternity, but other forms of kinship in order to focus on her personal and solitary process of political radicalization. Larsen's novel focuses on the domestic and racial entrapment of bourgeois marriage and motherhood. Larsen conjoins the paranoia of racial and sexual passing through metaphors of pregnancy; Clare Kendry's paranoia about producing a black baby is recapitulated in Irene Redfield's anxiety about her attraction to Clare. These themes are reinvigorated and retold in contemporary narratives about lesbian mothers. The final chapter focuses on the lesbian television soap The L Word (2004-2009), which problematically posits the lesbian nuclear family as a locus of social protest and, along with gay military service, a primary conduit for fighting institutionalized homophobia.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
