The Femme, the Mother, and the Lesbian Feminist: Rereading Queer Theory's Difficult Family Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Femme, the Mother, and the Lesbian Feminist: Rereading Queer Theory’s Difficult Family Relationships argues that queer theory propels itself forward by abjecting phenomena it frames as the normative, the outdated, and the politically regressive. Queer theory’s methodological paranoia, often articulated by its commitment to antinormativity, creates problems for real-life queer subjects. I examine the implications of this framework for the queer femme, the mother, and the lesbian feminist. By re-evaluating the place of each figure in queer theory, I find a bridge to reintegrate critical considerations of femininities and culturally feminized experiences, including the maternal, into queer theory. Life writing by queer femmes is one site of queer feminist narrative that explores femininity beyond its characterization as a patriarchal imposition. Femme authors Dorothy Allison (1994; 1996), Beth Brant (2019a; 2019b), Joan Nestle (1998; 2003), and Minnie Bruce Pratt (1988; 1990; 2005) vindicate cultural figures and discourses that are associated with the feminine and the normative. These include the family of origin, the mother, the femme, and the lesbian feminist. I read queer theory’s flight away from feminism and femininity in the context of the field’s inaugural framing as the study of sexuality as opposed to a feminist concern with gender. I then explore femme writers’ counternarratives to the coming out story to argue that a return home might repair our relationship to that which has hurt us. Taking a reparative approach to abject mothers offers one way for queer to reconcile itself to its own horrifying mother, the lesbian feminist. Femme writers recuperate the ‘bad’ mother in their life writing to gesture toward a femme theory that finds points of solidarity between queer and straight feminine subjects. This dissertation offers a new orientation to queer theory’s own coming out story and a reparative approach to the ideas queers and feminists find ourselves troubled by, specifically the feminine, the maternal, and outdated feminisms. I weave intellectual genealogies and life writing to investigate the legacies of many families: families of feminist and queer thought; families of origin; chosen families; and created families, and each family’s effect on queer communities and individuals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".