Kathryn Kent Writes About Women's Homoerotic Relationships

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 7, 2003–Duke University Press has announced publication of “Making Girls Into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity” by Kathryn R. Kent, assistant professor of English at Williams College. The book adds to the study of female-female sexualities prior to the twentieth century, a subject often overshadowed by discourse on male-male sexualities.

Kent begins her book by proposing that “modern lesbian identity has its roots in the United States not just or even primarily in sexology and medicalization, but in white, middle-class ‘women’s culture,’ distinguished in part by its central focus on the mother.”

Through the study of women’s literature, Kent presents lesbianism as an outgrowth of history, part of the rise of the categories “homosexual and heterosexual.” She writes that female relations in the 19th century, perceived under a haze of tender friendship, were more intimate and erotic than acknowledged.

“In the pages of American women’s literature, lesbians are made, not born”, said Diana Fuss, author of “Identification Papers.” “Kent expertly surveys the many creative acts of instruction, imitation, and invention among women that ultimately make modern lesbian identity more than just a project of medical discourse.”

Kent argues that in the late 19th century, when women stepped into the public realm, the distinction between public and private and the separation between the mother figure and other female models became blurred. Kent discusses girls’ desire to identify with female role models. She argues that where there is a desire to be, there is a desire to have; she terms this “identificatory erotics.” In such semipublic, semiprivate spaces as the school of the Girl Scout troop, girls began not only to want to emulate, but to desire, their role models. It was in these spaces that lesbian as an identity could emerge.

Kent examines both theory and literature. Choosing for her study Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emma Dunham Kelley, the early Girl Scout Handbooks and Djuna Barnes’ “Ladies Almanack,” Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, Kent writes that these authors and works not only captured and critiqued female-female relations, they helped develop a queer female identity.

“These models are then promulgated through the use of commodity forms such as the serial novel, the handbook, and the accessories of identity,” she writes. “Literally then, commodity capitalism helps to promulgate particular models of subject formation through marketing particular commodities.”

Kent has taught at Williams since 1997. She received her B.A. from Williams in 1988 and completed her Ph.D. at Duke University in 1996.

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Williams College is consistently ranked one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their undergraduate teaching. The achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in research. Admission decisions are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted. Founded in 1793, it is the second oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college is located in Williamstown, Mass. To visit the college on the Internet: www.williams.edu

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Published April 7, 2003