The purpose of my thesis is to explore lesbianism in Adrienne Rich¡¦s essays and poetry. Rich has earned her reputation as a major American poet and essayist since the 1950s. Most attention has been paid to her extraordinary poems and revolutionary prose. However, the issue of lesbianism has seldom been focused on or fully discussed. Therefore, I would try to present a panoramic view on how lesbianism has been developed in Rich¡¦s works. In the first chapter, I have tried to delineate various definitions of ¡§lesbian¡¨, and formulate my own definition. Besides that, I have also introduced some theoretical perspectives of lesbianism. In the second chapter, the discussion is mainly on Rich¡¦s concepts¡X ¡§institutionalization of heterosexuality¡¨, ¡§lesbian existence¡¨ and ¡§lesbian continuum¡¨¡Xwhich were brought up in the essay ¡§Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.¡¨ In the third chapter, my aim is to delineate the development of Rich¡¦s lesbian perspective in her poetry. The discussion consists of three parts: the first part covers the revelation of women¡¦s oppression; the second is stressed on the concept of androgyny; the last part will present Rich¡¦s idea that women¡¦s power should be based on close relations among women.

Née en 1935, Monique Wittig est aujourd’hui célèbre surtout grâce à ses textes théoriques, mais elle est aussi l’autrice d’une œuvre littéraire éclectique, complexe et subversive. Au centre de de sa production littéraire et théorique, il y a le corps. Tout d’abord, nous nous proposons donc d’étudier la relation entre corps du texte et corps humain dans l’œuvre de l’autrice. L’attention que Wittig focalise sur le corps est strictement liée à son idée de langage. À son avis, la langue peut opérer une « plastie » sur la réalité et, de la même manière, les mots ont un côté matériel qui touche notre vie quotidienne. De plus, le langage peut nous heurter et il joue un rôle précis dans la construction des injustices sociales. Ma thèse vise donc à sonder cette violence langagière qui est véhiculée par les textes littéraires et par le langage quotidien. Finalement, nous nous proposons d’analyser le personnage lesbien qui peuple les livres de Wittig. Le corps de ce protagoniste est traditionnellement monstrueux et effrayant : Wittig se réapproprie cette tradition afin de démontrer dans quelle mesure les corps lesbiens sont au même temps vulnérables et puissants. Bref, le personnage lesbien de Monique Wittig n’est pas seulement la femme qui aime une autre femme, mais il est un être humain qui échappe à toute norme hétérosexiste et dont le corps est à la fois heurté par les mots et grâce aux mots peut devenir puissant. / Even if Monique Wittig was a very talented writer, she has been especially studied as an essayist. At the center of both her fictional and political universes is the human body. First of all, I intend to examine the relationship between the body of the text and the human body described in the text. The attention that Wittig pays to the body of the text is interrelated to her idea of language. According to her, language can operate a “plastic surgery” on reality. In the same way, the book as an object and the act of reading can operate on the perception of one’s identity and body. In other words, the language has a material side that affects our everyday life. It can seem a banal statement, but Wittig goes further in her thought: words hurt us and cooperate in the development of social injustices and class hierarchies. On account of this, my research aims to investigate this particular kind of violence that literary texts and common language perform on our bodies. Finally, Wittig’s lesbian characters will be analyzed in the last part of my work. The body of this peculiar lesbian protagonist is traditionally represented as ambiguously monstrous and scary. Wittig takes this tradition back and she manipulates it in order to show how lesbian bodies are vulnerable and strong at the same time. In short, Wittig’s lesbian characters are not simply women who love other women: they are people who do not fit in the heteronormative binary system and whose bodies are made of and from words, and it is through words that they can create a different reality.

This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience. / text

The aim of this thesis is to study representations of identity and (in)visibility in Swedish lesbian novels written in the 1930s, and to provide a summary of Swedish lesbian literature up to the early 21st century. This study has been done through a close reading primarily of Charlie by Margareta Suber (1932), Fröknarna von Pahlen by Agnes von Krusenstjerna (1930–1935) and Kris by Karin Boye (1934). Lesbian literature is discussed as a loose category, a construction which can be used as an analytical tool in a conscious and reflexive way, with its basis in the categories of author, text and reader. In short, I define lesbian literature as novels written by women, about lesbian figures and/or relationships, and for lesbian readers in the sense that the literature depicts lesbians from an insider’s perspective. As regards the period before 1930, the focus is on romantic friendship and the excitement zone when the romantic friendship becomes a sexual one, as seen in the fictitious case of Sin fars dotter (1920) by Lydia Wahlström. Sexological theories, the image of “the new woman” and changes to the law all colour the first half of the 20th century. This is seen in Charlie by Margareta Suber, where the author makes use of many such explanations in her creation of a lesbian figure. A reading of Fröknarna von Pahlen by Agnes von Krusenstjerna shows an intricate pattern of relationships at its heart. My analysis charts several same-sex couples, a lesbian single woman and two collectives; that is to say, the female collective and the male homosexual collective. The relationships between women are many-faceted and include everything from romantic friendship, kinship and sensualism to eroticism and shared parenthood. In my analysis of Kris by Karin Boye, I focus on Malin, the main character, and the development of her sense of identity, in which the struggle between the language of the world around her and her own emotional experience of love for a woman is a central theme. After the 1930s, the historical context changed in terms of everything from decriminalisation in 1944 via the homophobic panic of the 1950s to the impact of queer theory in the 1990s. Swedish lesbian literature addresses everything from crime of passion (murder) to the coming out process of young women. There exists in all novels from the 1930s an interplay that is (in)visible: the characters or lesbian relationships depicted are both visible and invisible at the same time. The characters are more or less aware of the potential risks attached to being visible as a lesbian, and often they do not notice themselves when this occurs. During the course of the 20th century, (in)visibility becomes replaced by openness and secrecy, and the visibility of the lesbian characters is politicised. / The abstract is translated by Janet French.

This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.