Come As You Are

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.

Columbia University Press

Barbara and George Perkins Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

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 pa

Elizabeth Grosz

In exploring the intrication of narrative and sexuality, Roof charts the ways in which sexual normativity and narrative closure are capable of being undone, and different types of story written and pleasure enjoyed.

JUDITH ROOF is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Columbia University Press