Description: Love weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and gay-themed media brings clear benefits, assimilation entails losses hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
Brief description: Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Review Quotes: In supple readings of difficult, sometimes disturbing, yet always fascinating texts and contexts, Heather Love demonstrates that if we are to seriously engage with the queer past we must welcome the shame, fear, loneliness, obstinacy, and indeed backwardness that we encounter there. For all that, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, with its beautiful prose, stunning theoretical sophistication, careful attention to detail, as well as a hard-headed respect for the artists and critics whom it treats, is a stunningly hopeful book. Throughout Love links her critiques of celebratory queer criticism with a passionate concern for the opening up of progressive forms of intellectual and political life.--Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual