Rereading Heterosexuality

Rachel Carroll is Reader in English at Teesside University, UK. She is author of Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and editor of Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (Continuum, 2009) and Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (with Adam Hansen, Ashgate, 2014). Her research has been published in journals including Adaptation, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textual Practice and Women: a cultural review.

In Rereading Heterosexuality Rachel Carroll steps into provocative and challenging territory. She confronts one of feminisms most thorny dilemmas, namely how to comprehend female heterosexuality which is not simply non-normative but virtually unthinkable to the feminist canon. Written with skill and scholarship in equal measure, there are no easy answers but rather a productive unsettling of expectations.

• Introduction: Feminism, Queer Theory and Heterosexuality; Part One: Revisiting the spinster; 1. 'Becoming my own ghost': spinsterhood and the 'invisibility' of heterosexuality in Sarah Waters's Affinity; 2. Telling tales out of school: spinsters, scandals and intergenerational heterosexuality in Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal; Part Two: Transgressive female heterosexuality; 3. Queering Alice, killing Lolita: feminism, queer theory and the politics of child sexuality in A.M Homes's The End of Alice; 4. Unauthorised reproduction: class, pregnancy and transgressive female heterosexuality in Alan Warner's Morvern Callar; Part Three: Reproducing heterosexuality; 5. 'First one thing and then the other': rewriting the intersexed body in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex; 6. Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go