Right now I’m working on a book-length project entitled Insane Passions: Psychosis and Female Same-Sex Desire. An expansion of my dissertation, the book examines the way in which early twentieth-century discourses about “narcissism” and “the feminine” condense in the ostensibly primitive figure of the psychotic lesbian. Reading psychoanalytic writings by Jacques Lacan and Modernist literary texts by André Breton (Nadja), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood), and H.D. (HERmione and Asphodel), I trace the production of the psychotic lesbian as the limit of the social at the beginning of the twentieth century. I then proceed to analyze the significance of her stunning reappearance at the turn of the millennium in such films as Murderous Maids, Sister my Sister, Heavenly Creatures, Basic Instinct, and Single White Female. Structured through the emergence in the 1930’s and the return in the 1990’s of representations of Christine and Léa Papin, the sisters presumed to be lovers who inexplicably murdered their employers in the rural French town of Le Mans, the book continues the work of two pieces I have already written on recent films about the sisters: an analysis of Lacan and Sister my Sister that was published in GLQ 5.3 (1999) and a review of Murderous Maids that is scheduled to appear in GLQ 9.3 (2003). Insane Passions will conclude with an epilogue on the implications for queer theory of recent debates about psychosis and the Lacanian Real; this piece will also appear under the title of “Queering Zizek” in a collection entitled Cultures of Desire: Zizek, Politics, and Theory (The Other Press).
My other published work in Modernist literature includes an essay on homophobic paranoia in Franz Kafka’s The Trial and an article on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am also at work on a study of Gertrude Stein’s disavowed engagement with psychoanalytically informed theories of automatic writing.
Fall 2002: LTEO 130A: James Joyce
Winter 2003: LIT 61F: Introduction to Fiction
