Search results for ""Author Margaret Sonser Breen""

So much of great literature centres on explorations of gender, sex, and sexuality. What does it mean to be a proper man or woman; what if one cannot be properly called either? Should one wield one's sexual power politically? What is the relation between law, divine or secular, and sexuality? What does it mean to fail at doing gender? These are just some of the questions that this volume, edited by Margaret Breen, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Connecticut, examines. Essays will consider a range of texts, including Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, in light of issues of gender, sex, and sexuality, and their interplay.

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Deeply engaged in women's rights debates and discussions of the 'third sex,' Are They Women? is about the lively communities of lesbians across turn-of-the-century Central Europe. It is one of the first lesbian novels written in German-indeed, in any language. It is also one of the very few pre-Second Wave feminist texts to provide a positive, non-pathologizing, and romantic portrait of lesbians. As such, it complicates the dominant critical narrative of pre-liberation lesbian literature, whereby heroines conventionally face loneliness, imprisonment, madness, death, and heterosexual conversion. A work of popular literature with cultural significance, Are They Women? is both highly readable and remarkably progressive for its time. This is the first complete English translation of the novel, and the only edition in print in any language. The historical appendices provide contemporary materials on homosexuality, as well as compelling images from German feminist periodicals of the time.

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