Derek Frasure 1

V for Valerie: Lesbianism in V for Vendetta

Scholars of Alan Moore and David Lloyds V for Vendetta have correctly pointed out the
novels overt political themes, such as negotiating anarchy vs. monarchy and the efficacy and
morality of violence and terrorism to achieve anti-totalitarian goals.
1
However, many critics have
ignored or misinterpreted the works overt focus on homosexuality.
2
As Alan Sinfield has noted,
critics make texts like V for Vendetta safe by making them about everything other than
lesbianism.
3
Thus, significant details that drive both plot and idea have been overlooked. V for
Vendetta investigates how institutional heterosexism is reified by hegemonic norms, militarism,
psychologization, and discursive power expressed and resisted at multiple sites between normal
interlocutions, confessions, and Vs obscure and intertextual speeches. By exploring the way
institutional heterosexism is reified by the above-listed elements, Foucauldian power dynamics
of expression and simultaneous resistance explain the way heterosexism leads to Vs sexual and
gender revolution.
The story of Valerie informs Vs political activities by exposing the psychologization,
hegemonic norms, and overt oppression that the heterosexist Norsefire government has codified
into policy and culture. Readers are given access to Valeries story as a note written on toilet
paper to Evey while she resides in the adjacent prison cell. That Valerie is subversive enough to
warrant confinement immediately confronts the reader with the realization that giving an account
of herself through the historically masculine construct of the written word is a way of continuing
her resistance.
4
Todd Comer comments on Valerie hiding the pencil inside her by noting that
Valeries writing reframes representation by (unproductive) sex [. . .] Such writing represents a
deeply embodied and hence, mortal agency. Due to the location of this pencil, the invaginated
writing and identities that follow operate according to a new notion[.]
5
The note presents the
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society being resisted, along with an understanding that these new notion[s] and new
writing[s] and identities are to be understood through lesbianism. Valeries note tells the story
of her life, focusing on her awakening and identity as a lesbian. She tells the story of her first
girlfriend when she was fifteen, and how the romance was broken by the schools institutional
framework as Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew.
6
Staring at a
pickled rabbit foetus, Valerie writes that Sarah, her girlfriend, did outgrow it, but she did not.
7

Her interest in the rabbit foetus comes from identification with the essential nature of life; talking
about Sarahs phase at the same moment illustrates the conflict between essentialist and
constructionist positions on sexuality. Being confronted by this question, which characterizes so
much of the discourse on homosexuality, prompts the realization that nature versus nurture is a
homophobic question either way the answer turns out,
8
since both girls were still cruelly ripped
away from their childhood romance. Sarah has her identity as a person with fluid sexuality
eradicated by this question, further illustrating its normalizing function.
9
The previously
referenced panel insists that the ontology of homosexuality is less important than the experience
of it. In addition, casting Valerie as the constructionist representation leaves her subjected to this
normalizing force, which is inherent in a heterosexist discourse that insists on such a binarism to
be proposed. Similarly, she is still subjected to the masculine force that paints her as a passive
body or life to be acted upon.
10
This illustrates the invaginated nature of Valeries writing
since it underscores the lack of cohesion in nature versus nurture arguments, which center on
what productive forces act or do not when one is literally invaginated in the womb.
Valeries story and its implications continue as it incorporates a critique of cultural
attitudes in the private and public sphere. Valerie comes out to her family by taking a girl home
to meet her parents. A week after she comes out she moves to London to enroll in a drama
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college because her mother said Valerie broke her heart.
11
This passage, along with the earlier
one, exposes the cruel psychologization used to socialize children to hegemonic norms of sexual
and gender conformity. Also, there is a demonstration of the performativity associated with
sexual and gender continuums since Valerie knew she was a lesbian long before she had to
perform the act of coming out to her parents, to whom she presented herself as straight before.
12

The note continues that she met Ruth working on the film The Salt Flats. Ruth sent her roses on
Valentines Day and they loved each other for three years. However, after the Norsefire take
over they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth [. . . .] They burned her with cigarette
ends and made her give them [Valeries] name. She signed a statement saying [Valerie] seduced
her.
13
The metaphorical gang-rape of the phallic cigarettes forced on Ruths body is reminiscent
of attacks for rejecting the world of men frequently carried out on lesbians called corrective
rape.
14
Perpetrating sexual violence on Ruth achieves her torturers goal of negating her
lesbianism through a confession of seduction. Her torturers want to hear that Ruth was tempted
by Valerie and needs their correction, since she should have been defined as straight all along,
but was momentarily confused. Women are indefinable in a masculinist, phallocentric culture
and language and this is necessarily more prevalent with lesbians, because they are other from
both the masculine universal and the heterosexual hegemony. Lesbians are necessarily an
indefinable, unspeakable, and even unthinkable category of existence.
15
Thus, it becomes
necessary to make confessions, particularly those of seduction that lead to the knowledge of
lesbianism as deviant actions, rather than a valid modality of being. The truth of lesbianism as
impermanent is used as a cultural knowledge produced to distract from the unstable construction
of heterosexuality.
16
Playing at ignorance that lesbians really exist in the same sense as
heterosexuals serves as a knowledge of the cultural truth of their nonexistence.
17
In truth,
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homosexuality is an open secret, just visible enough to be controlled,
18
but not so visible that it
would gain separatist power against the culture into which it has been forcibly integrated by
passing as straight and going underground.
The end of Valeries note indicates the ways in which militarism supports heterosexism.
Ruth kills herself in her cell for betraying Valerie, and Valerie writes:
They came for me. They told me that all of my films would be burned. They shaved off
my hair. They held my head down in a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They
brought me here and gave me drugs. I cant feel my tongue anymore. I cant speak. [. . .]
It's strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses
and I apologized to nobody. I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish . . . Except
one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having.
We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I
don't know who you are. Or whether you're a man or woman. I may never see you. I will
never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you
escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day
people have roses again.
19


A heterosexist society will kill people who are queer, or are perceived to be queer through the
use of concentration camps like those in which Valerie and Ruth die in, through neglecting their
health crises, like AIDS, or through a systemic dispositif designed to make them confess,
conform, and betray those they love, leading them to kill themselves just as Ruth does. A
heterosexist society will use numerous forms of violence against its sexual and gender
revolutionaries. Language can be used to subvert and resist as Valerie does by telling her life
story as her final act, refusing to have the experience of her life obfuscated. On the other hand,
language can be its own kind of violence; the violence in the physical realm is concomitant to the
linguistic violence already done to marginal sexualities.
20
The physical violence is the fulfillment
of the threat implicit in hate speech like the lesbian jokes said around the toilet.
Yet this strong prohibition against homosexuality takes place as a way of sublimating
desires. The military is the ultimate arm of repression toward sexual dissidents, but the desire for
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militarism that results in strong male-male bonding is still a desire at its root.
21
All desire is
erotic and thus, as a desiring group with strong bonds, the military is a homosocial
environment.
22
The prohibition against homosexual desire that these groups enforce is
homosexual desire turned back on itself through homosocial norms and laws.
23
Additionally,
homosociality is a point on the same continuum as homosexuality.
24
As we know from our own
society, the power figures implementing these policies of prohibition have a disproportionate
likelihood of being gay and closeted.
25
Regardless of the oppressions probable origin in
homosocial desire, it exists and effectively reduces gay voices to silence
26
as a consequence of
normative linguistic violence that Valerie observes as her tongue feels numb and she cant speak.
The prohibitory elements in the heterosexist dispositif are also productive. The
persecution of someone for lesbianism presupposes a stable category of lesbian, thereby
perpetuating the conditions for the possibility of the experience of the existence of lesbians.
27
To
borrow a Foucauldian framework of power as productive,
28
authoritative labels handed down
from those operating in the legal apparatus constitute formative labels; whereas the conformity
or resistance to those labels are performative.
29
Besides producing sexualities, repression also
produces resistance; this is perhaps the most important productive feature of prohibition.
Resistance is the key in V for Vendetta when the mimetic chain leads to revolution.
The chain of experience leading to revolution is a mimetic process. V cannot remember
anything about his past and completely empathizes with Valerie, making her story his story. This
mimesis continues when Evey is put in a total institution in the same way V was to give her the
same strong empathy to allow mimesis to again take its route toward revolution. Evey suffers
through a similar oppression to Valerie: her head is shaved, she is imprisoned and threatened all
in the same ways; she reads Valeries story and identities with her.
30
She is forced to confront the
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forces of life while casting off the fear of death, criticize herself, and to become someone new
and revolutionary la Nietzschean self-overcoming. Her head is shaved to illustrate that she has
gone beyond what was formerly possible to a transcendent realm free of all traditional female
gender markers. As the transience of gender is grasped the category of woman is destabilized,
leaving binarisms like homo and hetero in an epistemological never-land. After Evey is released
and realizes that V is the one who was behind her imprisonment she accuses V of talking so he
doesnt have to make any sense. Nothing [he] say[s] means anything.
31
This illustrates the
value of destabilizing seemingly natural categories for sexual and gender movements because
meaningless language left by destabilized categories causes such anxiety that a reconstruction
leading to revolution occurs.
In the end, Evey takes over for V just as V took over for Valerie leaving them in a chain
of revolution that stemmed from participating in Valeries love. V leaves Violet Carsons on his
victims in honor of Valeries memory,
32
signifying that all of his revolutionary actions were
taken to further Valeries hope that one day people will have roses again.
33
The rose is a
signifier of Valeries love and of queerness in general. The rose was part of Valeries
relationship with Ruth; it was the fuel for all of Vs actions since he says hes going to give the
world what Valerie wanted it to have . . . Roses. A great abundance of roses.
34
The rose is a
symbol for a flowering of difference, love for that difference, and tolerance. The revolutionary
message is spread through messages of poetry that V calls little love notes while his explosives
and plan to destroy Parliament are stored in what he called my secret love nest.
35
He gives
control over to Evey by telling her: Its yours my love.
36
The revolutionary character is forged
in love. Love is something that will spark a true revolution and is the proper way to respond to a
repressive government and its policies. The Norsefire government was characterized by hate and
Derek Frasure 7
oppression, but that only lasts for so long before people turn to the creative and affirmative
possibilities in the message of differences in love.
There is still the question of why lesbians are chosen as the fountainhead of the
revolutionary message of love rather than heterosexual women. Blending Judith Butlers reading
of Lacan with my own reading of Freud, I believe an answer can be reached through
psychoanalytic routes. A girl gives greater or equal weight to the clitoris as an erotogenic zone.
The clitoris is a phallus (anatomically and in the symbolic realm). The point at which she is
grown up is when she subsumes the clitoris to the vagina in erotogenic primacy, since Freud
thought vaginal orgasms were the determiner of womanhood. The status of becoming a woman
only occurs through the loss of phallic primacy. Thus, a girl unconsciously realizes the state of
being a woman is necessarily a loss. She must lack something (a phallus) so that a man can fulfill
his desires in providing what the woman functionally lacks. This will set up a pattern for the way
in which many things in a heterosexual woman's life will occur, and creates femininity as an
entire system of lack that masculinity exists to fulfill. The loss of the phallus makes her
sublimate desire (sexually and generally) so that she can be a woman who is feminine in
allowing men to have their phalluses (fulfilling their masculine desires both sexually and
generally).
37
Thus, lesbians can remain in some regards phallusized, when heterosexual women
cannot. To retain the phallus makes lesbians more capable of pursuing their own desires and their
own causes, since they have been more incoherently sexually socialized into the system of lack
that heterosexual women are forced into. This makes lesbians the perfect site for the inception of
a revolution. Similarly, the feminine is often formulated as a lack of male presence or as the
presence of a male lack,
38
so too the female homosexual can be formulated as the presence of a
heterosexual lack. The creative possibilities presented here in different loves are distinct from
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heteronormative ideology, history, government structures, etc. and therefore can be a spearhead
of revolution that would not come if left to just the sphere of heterosexuality.
One may object that V does most of the work in tipping the revolution toward happening
and there is no direct evidence that he is gay other than a small amount of stereotyping as being
theatrical.
39
It is true that his sexuality can only be speculated on since he was placed in Larkhill,
which houses homosexuals as well as a variety of other problematic citizens for the Norsefire
government. He does, in fact, state his love for Evey, so it is entirely possible that V is
heterosexual. Regardless of his actual desires, V is still queer and this places him outside the
heteronormative world of Norsefire Britain. V is strongly connected with Oscar Wilde, Britains
most notorious homosexual.
40
V is an artistic, sensitive (i.e. unmanly), leisured (when not
fighting), gender-norm-violating public figure who affects social perception in the field of
sexuality and gender; his name becomes unspeakable in the same manner as Wildes because it
stands for an idea at odds with the status quo.
41
Vs Violet Carsons are his calling card in the
same way that Wilde is associated with carnations.
42
Moreover, Vs mode of dress provides a
powerful zone of ambiguity on which to rebuild sexual and gender codes.
43
The ambiguity of the
style of dress that makes him visibly androgynous is far more threatening and far more
revolutionary than any other choice. With the exception of being called he it would be
incredibly difficult to tell if V is a man at all since he is first seen saving Evey where she says: I
didnt think anybody came to Westminster at night except. You know . . . women.
44
There is a
minimum of evidence that allows for certainty that V is a man, but to figure him as a hyper-
masculine superhero is a gendered genre assumption resting on comics conventions that most of
Moores works subvert.
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Ultimately, V for Vendetta is a text that leaves readers with a suggestion for something
they should reject. V explains the imprisonment to Evey by saying that he just showed [her] the
bars.
45
The bars of heterosexism and sexism are what imprison the mind and society at large,
and the text has exposed them to readers. Now he reminds Evey that They offered you a choice
between the death of your principles and the death of your body;
46
she chose the death of her
body over that of her principles and this is the message that the novel brings outside the bars
created by the panels. It is now in the hands of individual readers if they will take the
revolutionary message to love and spread it to bring down the institutions, policies, and cultural
attitudes that cause such oppression. If women as a group can be more coherently phallusized to
recreate femininity as a gender not based on lack, if men as a group can recreate masculinity as a
gender that isnt based on domination, then humanity will be Vaulting, veering, vomiting up the
values that victimized [it]. Feeling vast, feeling virginal [. . .] This [new] vitality. . . .This
vision.
47





















Derek Frasure 10

Notes

1. John A. Lent, Constructing the Readers Perspective in V for Vendetta, International
Journal of Comic Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 182-202, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost
(accessed June 11, 2012); Rjurik Davidson, Vagaries & Violence in V for Vendetta, Screen
Education no. 46: 157-162, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed June 11, 2012).
2. Michael D. Friedman, Shakespeare and the Catholic Revenger: V for Vendetta,
Literature and Film Quarterly 38, no. 2: 117-133, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost
(accessed June 11, 2012). In an otherwise excellent piece, Freidman distorts Valeries death to be
a commentary on Irish-Catholic racism; Brian L. Ott, The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta:
On Political Affect in Cinema, Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (March
2010): 39-54, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed June 11, 2012). While focusing
on the film version, the telling of Valeries story is similar enough that Otts lack of discussion
on LGBTQIA oppression is a glaring omission when he is discussing both Valerie and
oppression.
3. Alan Sinfield, Cultural PoliticsQueer Reading (Pennsylvania: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 82.
4. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 80.
5. Todd A. Comer, Body Politics: Unearthing an Embodied Ethics in V for Vendetta, in
Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore, edited by Todd A. Comer and Joseph Michael
Sommers, 100-110 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012), 107.
6. Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (New York: DC Comics, 2005), 156.
7. Ibid.
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 163-4.
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of
California Press, 1990), 41.
10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 4.
11. Moore, V for Vendetta, 156.
12. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 4.
13. Moore, V for Vendetta, 158-59.
14. Emily F. Rothman, Deinera Exner, and Allyson L. Baughman, "The Prevalence of
Sexual Assault Against People Who Identify as Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual in the United States:
A Systematic Review," Trauma, Violence & Abuse 12, no. 2 (April 2011): 55-66; Academic
Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012). Elizabeth E. Bartle, "Lesbians and
Hate Crimes," Journal of Poverty 4, no. 4 (December 2000): 23-43, Academic Search Premier,
EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012); Susan Hawthorne, "Ancient Hatred and Its
Contemporary Manifestation: The Torture of Lesbians," Journal of Hate Studies 4, no. 1
(December 2005): 33-58, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012),
37-40.
15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2
nd
ed. (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 13.

Derek Frasure 11

16. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 43.
17. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 25.
18. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 9.
19. Moore, V for Vendetta, 158-59.
20. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 7-9.
21. John J. Winkler, "Double Consciousness in Sapphos Lyrics" In The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michle A. Barale, and David M. Halperin, 577-94,
(London: Routledge, 1993), 587.
22. Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Hoboken: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 177.
23. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 65.
24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1.
25. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 244.
26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1, Translated by
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 27.
27. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, edited by
Henry Abelove, Michle A. Barale, and David M. Halperin, 397-415 (London: Routledge,
1993), 402.
28. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194; Gary Gutting, Introduction: Michel Foucault:
A Users Guide In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 1-28, 2
nd

ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
29. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 121.
30. Moore, V for Vendetta, 148-161, 174-75.
31. Ibid., 168.
32. Ibid., 24, 63, 177.
33. Ibid., 160.
34. Ibid., 179.
35. Ibid., 202, 200.
36. Ibid., 260.
37. Butler, Gender Trouble, 59-62; Butler The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
Imaginary, Bodies That Matter, 57-91; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, Translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 39-87.
38. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on
Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990), 149.
39. Comer, Body Politics, 106.
40. Ellen Crowell, "Scarlet Carsons, Men in Masks: The Wildean Contexts of V for
Vendetta," Neo-Victorian Studies 2, no. 1 (2008-2009 Winter 2008): 17-45, MLA International
Bibliography, EBSCOhost (accessed June 22, 2012).

Derek Frasure 12

41. Sinfield, The Wilde Century.
42. Ibid., 118-20.
43. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 223.
44. Moore, V for Vendetta, 13.
45. Ibid., 170.
46. Ibid., 171.
47. Ibid., 216.






































Derek Frasure 13

Works Cited

Bartle, Elizabeth E. "Lesbians and Hate Crimes." Journal of Poverty 4, no. 4 (December 2000):
23-43. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012).

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge,
1993.

. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.

. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2
nd
ed. New York:
Routledge, 1990.

Comer, Todd A. Body Politics: Unearthing an Embodied Ethics in V for Vendetta. In Sexual
Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore, edited by Todd A. Comer and Joseph Michael
Sommers, 100-110. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012.

Crowell, Ellen. "Scarlet Carsons, Men in Masks: The Wildean Contexts of V for Vendetta." Neo-
Victorian Studies 2, no. 1 (2008-2009 Winter 2008): 17-45. MLA International
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Davidson, Rjurik. Vagaries & Violence in V for Vendetta. Screen Education no. 46: 157-162.
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De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Vintage Books, 1995, 194.

Friedman, Michael D. Shakespeare and the Catholic Revenger: V for Vendetta.
Literature and Film Quarterly 38, no. 2: 117-133. Academic Search Premier,
EBSCOhost (accessed June 11, 2012).

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated and edited by James
Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Gutting, Gary. Introduction: Michel Foucault: A Users Guide. In The Cambridge Companion
to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 1-28. 2
nd
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Press, 2005.


Derek Frasure 14

Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love.
London: Routledge, 1990.

. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997.

Hawthorne, Susan. "Ancient Hatred and Its Contemporary Manifestation: The Torture of
Lesbians." Journal of Hate Studies 4, no. 1 (December 2005): 33-58. Academic Search
Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012).

Lent, John A. Constructing the Readers Perspective in V for Vendetta. International Journal
of Comic Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 182-202. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost
(accessed June 11, 2012).

Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics, 2005.

Ott, Brian L. The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema. Critical
Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (March 2010): 39-54. Academic Search
Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed June 11, 2012).

Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Rothman, Emily F., Deinera Exner, and Allyson L. Baughman. "The Prevalence of Sexual
Assault Against People Who Identify as Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual in the United States:
A Systematic Review." Trauma, Violence & Abuse 12, no. 2 (April 2011): 55-66.
Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed August 24, 2012).

Scott, Joan W. "The Evidence of Experience." In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by
Henry Abelove, Michle A. Barale, and David M. Halperin, 397-415. London:
Routledge, 1993.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990.

. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Sinfield, Alan. Cultural PoliticsQueer Reading. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1994.

. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.

Derek Frasure 15


Winkler, John J. "Double Consciousness in Sapphos Lyrics." In The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michle A. Barale, and David M. Halperin, 577-94.
London: Routledge, 1993.