Finding And Fighting For Identity In Three Lesbian Narratives

With the improvement of women's social status and greater acceptance of homosexuality, there emerged a group of lesbians who initially struggled to find their identities, which challenged the binary gender system. So there arose a series of questions which were covered both social and academic aspects. In the academic field of study, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a queer theorist put forward the idea that "sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with the men". Are gender stereotypes changing? Why did changes in women's status make Sedgwick have such an idea and what did women especially, homosexual women, do to change their passive situation? All of those questions led me to search for the evolution of theories of lesbian identity to find out how they changed their gender identity in different periods.In my thesis, I shall explore the way lesbians in different historical and cultural contexts to develop a sense of themselves as lesbians and presented themselves in each specific situation. Further, I also explored how those specific lesbian theories were reflected in three texts, which are Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Rita Mae Brown's Ruby fruit Jungle (1973), Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blue (1993) through the time from 1920s to 1990s.Through contrasting analysis of the three novels, we can see that the progress of history and lesbians civil rights consciousness, their situations had changed from passive suffering at first to fighting against actively for their rights and finally challenging the convention. Therefore, it is an inevitable trend that gender stereotype will be forced to change.