Free Delivery Over $100
|
|
|||
|
||||
Overview"Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America. Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America. Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of ""the gay outlaw"" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of ""homo-ness"" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Leo BersaniPublisher: Harvard University Press Imprint: Harvard University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 13.00cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 21.00cm Weight: 0.272kg ISBN: 9780674406209ISBN 10: 0674406206 Pages: 218 Publication Date: 01 October 1996 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsHomos is an extremely persuasive analysis of the anticommunal freedom made possible by perverse sexuality...Bersani's argument is at once subtle, even brilliant.--Peggy Phelan Contemporary Sociology In his provocative and sure-to-be-controversial book, Homos , Bersani argues for the need to preserve the 'otherness' that he maintains is the essential core of homosexual identity. -- David Wiegand San Francisco Chronicle Author InformationLeo Bersani is the Class of 1950 Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
||||
