Looking like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity, and: Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (review)

Lisa Walker's and Christopher Nealon's books, although written from within the sometimes shared, sometimes divergent concerns of queer theory and gay and lesbian history, seem at first glance to be entirely dissimilar. Looking like What You Are discusses the endurance of models of visibility as identificatory regimes in an era of poststructuralism and queer politics. Foundlings considers how queer texts and politics imagine a relationship to history that can both provide compensation for the historical exclusion of gay and lesbian subjects and create a sense of temporal unity that extends from a murky past into an even murkier future. But on closer inspection, the texts share two concerns. The first is that the roughly decade-long boom in queer theory and gay and lesbian studies has not fully addressed the issues of exclusion. For Walker, exclusion is local, centering on the figure of the feminine lesbian; for Nealon, it is ambivalently constitutive of a whole field, motivating the desire to find local histories within a total field of History. Second, both studies make a concerted effort to broaden the parameters of conventional work in queer history and theory to analyze—and therefore take seriously—affective responses to structural conditions. For Nealon and Walker, feelings, especially about exclusion, are never simply personal; rather, they are indications of structural conflicts that first manifest themselves to individuals.

This latter insight is the engine of Walker's book. Taking as her subject the ways in which the regimes of visibility and invisibility "are mapped against each other in the construction of minority identities," Walker focuses on the lesbian who does not look like a lesbian. Around this dangerously feminized figure a host of signs of difference converge, and in Walker's argument, racial difference, also implicated in regimes of visibility, becomes central to understanding lesbian texts. Walker analyzes texts ranging from lesbian classics like Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Ann Bannon's pulp novels to unjustly forgotten novels like Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her (with a detour through Jane Eyre). She frames her readings with opening and closing chapters that make fascinating and sharply argued contributions to queer theory's interest in sexual style and sexual politics. The innovations of Walker's study seem to me to lie in two areas. First, she brings a fresh eye to long-standing debates in LGBT history and queer theory by bringing together the insights of postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory in novel and mutually illuminating ways. Second, her theoretical apparatus reveals lesbian literature's tendency to analogize without fully interrogating racial and sexual passing. On both counts, Walker considerably broadens the parameters of literary texts that count as lesbian because she reposes definitions of queerness in texts that understand (often without understanding why) that race and gender are mutually constitutive in a specular field. Walker's analyses of the texts and her final theoretical overview demonstrate an enviable range of knowledge as well as real skill in reading the dense transfer points between analytic categories. Looking like What You Are also has an especially appealing style; it is fresh, forthright, and witty even in its most complex arguments.

Nealon's Foundlings makes similarly innovative analytic moves. While Walker's book argues against analogy—the idea that race and sexuality are "like" one another in any meaningful way—Nealon's book argues that the logic of analogy has been crucial in the formation of gay culture's self-conscious group identity. Gay culture, he argues, might be seen to take shape as people imagine a "foundling" relationship to history, including both a sense of...