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Willa Cather: Queering America Marilee Lindemann. Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. xvii + 185pp.
Marilee Lindemann's book contributes to the agenda of cultural work set by the editors of Columbia University Press's Lesbian and Gay Studies series, "Between Men-Between Women." Pointing out that in recent studies of Willa Cather "sexuality has been relegated to the background," Lindemann foregrounds the lesbian identity Cather has recently acquired and reads her fiction through a self-consciously queer lens. Lindemann's thesis is that Cather "'queered' America by examining axes of difference-psychosexual, racial/ethnic, economic, and literary-that made the nation a space of vast energy and profound instability." Scholarship here rests on the slippery term "queer," itself a queerly indefinable category. In the statement above, it resembles the Russian formalist notion of defamiliarization, a term from Cather's own era. However, Lindemann employs it as well to refer to the unmasking of homosexuality (in a brilliant presentation of Cather's epistolary use of the word "queer"), and also to label deviant, non-monogamous, or cross-ethnic heterosexuality, departures from realist modes of narrative, defiance, recognition of social constructivism, racial and sexual ambiguity, the creation...