Come as You Are

Ranging through films, television, lesbian novels, and narrative theory from Victor/Victoria to Star Trek: The Next Generation, from Barnes's Nightwood to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, Judith Roof charts how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast.

Linking narrative theory, theories of sexuality, and gay and lesbian theory, this text explores the place of homosexuality, in particular the lesbian, in the tradition of the Western narrative. The author shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices.Roof's ambitious, wide-ranging book links narrative theory, theories of sexuality, and gay and lesbian theory to explore the place of homosexuality, and specifically the lesbian, in the tradition of western narrative. According to Freud, perversions are the necessary obstacles in a heroic plot of normal heterosexual development; and homosexuality is the nineteenth century's classic case of perversion. Roof builds on Freud to illustrate that a structural understanding of narrative enforces a heterosexual paradigm, a sense of meaning that provides psychological stability for the reader. Looking at film, television, and lesbian novels, Roof explores how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast. Understanding identification as a narrative practice, and narrative as typically heterosexual and reproductive, Roof shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices.Come As You Are marks a significant contribution to lesbian and gay studies, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism.