Wesleyan announces

Insane Passions
Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film
By Christine E. Coffman

How the insane lesbian became a popular stereotype

_________________________________________________
In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as the Papin affair, the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacans effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes Nightwood, and H.D.s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century filmsincluding Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the psychotic lesbian repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected. Christine E. Coffman is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In this astute and forceful book, Coffman teases out when womens paranoid aggression was a convenient fantasy that fueled various artistic and intellectual agendas, and when it marked a genuine crisis about the terms and enigmas of sexual identity itself. Christopher Lane professor of English, Northwestern University Engages an important theoretical fault line running through psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, literary criticism, and popular culture. Coffman has grounded these theoretical debates in relevant texts that help to illuminate what's at stake. Kendall R. Phillips associate professor of communication and rhetorical studies, Syracuse University 336 pp. 6 x 9 Jacketed Cloth 0-8195-6819-8. $49.95 EAN 978-0-8195-6819-9

Publication in December 2006

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Save 20% when you order from our web site and use discount code W300.

__________________________________________________________________________________
Order from your favorite bookseller or from:
UPNE, 1 Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon, NH 03766 USA. Call toll-free (800) 421-1561 or

FAX (603) 448-9429 Individuals must prepay and include postage: $5.00 for first book, $1.25 for each additional book.

Exam Copy Policy College and university professors may request exam copies of eligible books for consideration in their courses. Requests should be on institutional letterhead and accompanied by $5.00 per book to cover shipping and handling.

Foreign orders: Call (603) 643-5585 to order. Individuals must prepay in US dollars and include postage: $8.00 for first book, $2.50 each additional book.

Web site: www.wesleyan.edu/wespress