Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history. Following a concise preface synthesizing the extraordinarily broad and encompassing history of the relation shared by homosexual communities and cities, she fittingly opens with a chapter tracing the lesbian body throughout urban and literary history, exploring Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal and Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The author acknowledges her challenge to recent assumptions regarding “the union of homosexuals and cities, namely, that the homosexuality of the city is always male,” and emphasizes an often overlooked facet of urban studies. Her treatment of the legibility of the lesbian and her privileging of this body is an important and refreshing contribution to LGBTQ studies.

Abraham is a Professor of literature and of LGBT Studies and Metropolitan Lovers evidences a marked emphasis on the relevance of literary perspectives to sociological interpretations of the city. She notes that it is in fact literature that has taught us how to “read” urban homosexuality and alludes to literary/philosophical figures such as Susan Sontag to enhance her portrayal of the theatricality of urban social life. A generous number of photographs and illustrations offer a satisfying visual element that becomes crucial to understanding the complexities of gaze and spectacle in the formulation of the modern city. Events such as Stonewall are not left unexamined in Abraham’s study as she attempts to portray as comprehensive history of the Western urban landscape through the lens of LGBTQ theory.

The tone of Metropolitan Lovers is a bit less erudite than it would appear to be based on Abraham’s scholarly career and university publisher. Her writing is lucid, accessible, perhaps more to the casual reader interested in a general introduction to an LGBTQ study of Western cities than for an academic researcher. This is not to say, however, that Abraham does not offer an insightful survey highlighting the relevance of homosexuality to the construction of the modern city. The work also provides an implicit introduction to the exercise of “queering” texts previously understood in heterocentric terms and will most certainly contribute to and stimulate future scholarship and interrogations of what it means to be urban and queer.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, June 30th 2009

Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:06:00 +0000

By Julie Abraham

University Of Minnesota Press

Are Girls Necessary? was an astoundingly great idea, exploring the lesbian in nineteenth and twentieth century lesbian-authored literature, even that which is not as explicit as the lesbian novels that make up the heart of the lesbian literary canon.

The subjects of Abraham’s examinations are a veritable pantheon of lesbian, bisexual and feminist literary icons: Willa Cather, Mary Renault, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas, et al. Granted certain literary and real-life freedoms due to their race and class, these women were able to forge the vocabulary and themes that would permeate lesbian and feminist literature well past their own lifetimes. Although the lesbian often had to be coded within heterosexual acceptability, it takes only a creative and open mind to find the subversive glimpses these authors coded into their work or left lying in the open for anyone who cared enough to look. An exploration of the means in which these women forged a path for themselves (and those who followed them) within the restraints of their time had great potential.

Unfortunately, the execution leaves much to be desired. Abraham’s prose is representative of all that is wrong with academic writing. Vague and obscurantist to the extreme, the text is heavy with the horrendous abuses of language that turn pleasant nouns into ugly verbs and replace simple, clear language with unnecessarily polysyllabic meanderings through overly complex grammar. What, must I ask, did the thesaurus ever do to her to be so mistreated and misused?

For the serious student of literary criticism willing to subject herself to linguistic torture, Are Girls Necessary? is well worth exploring. However, if you love language just a bit too much to see it battered around so callously, do not read this book.

Written by: Melinda Barton, March 11th 2009