Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory - Paperback

by Valerie Rohy (Author)

Causality dominates today's discussions of LGBT rights: anti-gay voices imagine gay proliferation through seduction, influence, and corruption, while queer communities largely embrace biological determinism, saying they are "born gay." Reading popular rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present day, Lost Causes decenters etiology from queer politics, engages abject tropes of "homosexual reproduction," and considers the effects of retroactive, absent, and contingent causality.

Author Biography

Valerie Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality.