Henson, Leslie June. 「From Abjection to Coalition: Sexual Subjectivities and Identity Politics in Twentieth-century Lesbian and Gay Novels.」 P.h.D diss., University of Florida, 1996.

Abstract:
This study reads the sexual subjectivities represented in novels by gay and lesbian writers Radclyffe Hall, David Leavitt, James Baldwin, and Leslie Feinberg within the context of current debates on identity politics. A lesbian and gay identity politics based on the notion that all lesbians and gays share a singular identity has justifiably come under fire for privileging the needs of white, middle-class lesbians and gays. However, when deconstructive, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic critics reject identity politics completely, they efface both the material peril under which most lesbian and gay subjects live, and the dependence of lesbian and gay critics on institutional spaces created by identity politics.

Through a materialist application of Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic notion of abjection, this study examines both hegemonic and oppositional representations of identity that maintain their homogeneity by abjecting various others--femme lesbians, working-class people, gays, blacks, and transgendered subjects--who stand in for the unacceptable, unacknowledged, or heterogeneous aspects of the identity in question. These constructions obscure the material conditions necessary for their existence. They do so by reducing social relations to the axis of sexual orientation, as do the protagonists of Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes, and by denying their own dependence on threatening bodily products, parts, and traits, as do the racist white and homophobic black characters in Baldwin's Just Above My Head.

In place of such exclusionary representations of identity, this study locates the more inclusive, tactical forms of subjectivity depicted in Baldwin's novel and in Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. These tactical forms of subjectivity, based on an acknowledgement of their own historical and material limitations, lay the groundwork for a politics of coalition which avoids the dangers of identity politics. By bringing a materialist reading practice that highlights such forms of subjectivity into the classroom, we can enable our students to acknowledge the material bases of their own subjectivities, hence creating the conditions that foster a transformative coalition politics.