New Editors for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

The publication of GLQ 12.1 in December 2005 marks the moment when we officially take over from Carolyn Dinshaw and David Halperin as the new co-editors of the journal. Although it\u27s a transition that has been some years in the making (Annamarie first came on board as Associate Editor for Volume 9 and has been a co-editor for Volumes 10 and 11, and Ann was associate editor for Volume 11), Volume 12 represents the beginning of a genuine partnership between the two of us

Housework, Sex Work:Feminist Ambivalence and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman

Included as part of the Official Selection in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles brought the then twenty-five-year-old Chantal Akerman to international attention. Widely acclaimed for its thematic and formal originality, the novelty of Akerman’s film was nevertheless immediately recognizable to a new generation of feminist film scholars, who were, in that same mid-1970s moment, taking up psychoanalytic models to theorize relations between femininity and its cinematic representation. Much of this work took Jeanne Dielman as a key text, reading its sustained attentiveness to the grindingly real time of quotidian female domestic routine as a more general critique of the social marginalization of Western women. Yet the initial feminist reception of Akerman’s film hinged ambivalently on Jeanne Dielman’s representation of the temporalities of a female everyday. The feminist film critics who wrote about Jeanne Dielman often emphasized the interventionist force of Akerman’s lengthily held shots of culturally insignificant housework activities, as if subscribing to a folk-Bazinian faith in the aesthetic value of the deep-focus long take. As Jagose will argue with reference to key scenes as well as material aspects of the film’s production, however, this feminist championing of Akerman’s film style enabled a covert subscription to a different order of temporality, endorsing a sense of lived time animated by the generational divide between second-wave feminism and the women it succeeded. Annamarie Jagose is a professor in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. Internationally known as a scholar in feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies, and queer theory, she has published four monographs: Orgasmology (2013); Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (2002); Introduction to Queer Theory (1998), and Lesbian Utopics (1994). She co-edited the Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013) with Donald E. Hall. She has previously held research fellowships at Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, and the University of Manchester. From 2003-2011, she co-edited the leading humanities sexuality studies journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Ann Cvetkovich. Jagose is an editorial board member of a number of international journals in gender studies and sexuality studies. She is also an award-winning novelist.Annamarie Jagose, Housework, Sex Work: Feminist Ambivalence and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, lecture, ICI Berlin, 26 October 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e151026

Contribution

Annamarie Jagose, Contribution to the panel ‘On Asymmetry’, part of the symposium The Ontology of the Couple, ICI Berlin, 9–10 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 23:28 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160609_20

'We cannot live without our lives' : the struggle for identity in lesbian literature written in English

This thesis notes and analyses the treatment and development of the lesbian identity in twentieth century lesbian literature written in English. It begins by discussing various definitions of lesbian and lesbian literature both as understood by popular usage and developed by lesbian literary theorists. The connections between lesbian literature and the lesbian community are examined and acknowledged. The progression of the literary lesbian identity from invisibility to tragedy to celebration is discussed in relation to five pre-1960 lesbian texts. The main body of the thesis is concerned with the new lesbian text which first emerges in the late 1970s and attempts to rid itself of stigmatisation. Key areas of interest are literary separatism and fantasy surround the attempt at destigmatisation arm initially discussd theoretically and than in some detail in relation to three specific texts: Mich le Roberts' A Piece of the Night, Anna Livia's Accommodation Offered and Suniti Namjcshi’s The Conversations of Cow

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader

With the publication of 'The Routledge Queer Studies Reader', we pay homage to the publication, nearly twenty years previous, of 'The Routledge Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader'. Consistent with the notion of performativity that was a grounding concept for one influential strand of theorizing in the 1990s, the appearance on bookshelves around the English-speaking world of the 'Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader' confirmed the emergence of a new scholarly field, in so far as its own chunky materiality 'constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express'. It was less its authoritative heft-weighing in at 666 pages, the 'Reader' drew together forty-two essays, dwarfing every other similar title in the field to date-than the fact that, in laying a claim to the genre of the reader, it also laid claim to the broader existence of a capacious and thriving field of work, sufficiently coherent to be understood as lesbian and gay studies

The Year That Was

AUSTRALIA, CANADA, INDIA, NEW ZEALAND, PAKISTAN, SINGAPORE, SOUTH AFRICA, WEST INDIES: Retrospective 1986, WEST INDIES, GERMAN INTEREST IN THE NEW LITERATURES IN ENGLIS