| My dissertation examines the work of four Anglo-American modernist women writers before 1930: Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Nella Larsen. This dissertation argues that the question of the place of the polymorphous lesbian subject is negotiated through other questions of identity, through national belonging, class, and racial affiliation. This desiring woman--bisexual, lesbian, invert, queer--is characterized as much by her discursive affinity with the subjects of colonial discourse as she is by her nontraditional sexuality. Her mobile identity emerges in a dialectic where sexual dualisms of bodily wisdom and bourgeois convention are mapped onto debates of what constitutes racial and national "natures"--the dualisms of colony and metropolis, country and city, Occident and Orient, primitive and civilized.; Initially I show that Stein's play with colonial discourse and the figure of the "primitive" reflects not only her own fraught identity as a white Jewish lesbian, but larger social concerns about social identity and the production of "home" as a racially and morally homeogenous national and domestic space. I use Virginia Woolf's Orlando to discuss the relationship between the production of femininity and the production of national identity as performance and masquerade. In chapter three I explore Hall's construction of the lesbian "invert" as a national subject in order to show both the pleasures and pitfalls of the appeal to the nation--to national belonging--as a strategy for legitimating an identificatory position. In chapter four I use Nella Larsen's Passing to explore the racialized spectre of perverse sexuality as a site of African American feminine resistance to white bourgeois respectability. I conclude that in contesting the frame of the nation itself, these sapphic modernist identities exceed stereotypical inscriptions and reconfigure the authoritative knowledges which produce both the nation and its colonizing discourses. |
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