Lost Causes - by Valerie Rohy (Paperback)

About the Book

Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology.

Book Synopsis

Causality dominates today's discussions of LGBT rights: anti-gay voices imagine gay proliferation through seduction, influence, and corruption, while queer communities largely embrace biological determinism, saying they are "born gay." Reading popular rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present day, Lost Causes decenters etiology from queer politics, engages abject tropes of "homosexual reproduction," and considers the effects of retroactive, absent, and contingent causality.

Review Quotes

"Belief in causality's legibility is a cause well lost for Valerie Rohy. Her provocative new book, Lost Causes, brings out the queer contingency of things and brilliantly examines the effects-at once social, political, and interpretative-of living with indeterminacy. The result should cause all to take note."-Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

"In Lost Causes, Valerie Rohy brilliantly deconstructs a long tradition of gay etiology, not to ask the usual illogical questions about the causes of homosexuality, but to ask why we ask and how we ask. She offers us a refreshing new way to read those great novels of gay origins-all those pictures of Dorian Gray and those wells of loneliness, which are more elusive than we often think."-Ellis Hanson, author of Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film

"...There is no doubt that Lost Causes will find enthusiastic readers among literary scholars and queer theorists." -- Jana Funke, University of Exeter

About the Author

Valerie Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality.