Forgetting and Remembering Lesbian Pulp: Shame, Recuperation and Queer History

Chapter 1 begins with Michael Warner’s question, ‘What will we do with our shame?’, and proceeds to consider, and to critique, the revisiting of shame in much recent queer theory – a revisiting that generally seeks to mine that affect for its positive political potential. The chapter assesses the uses and limitations of ‘queer shame’, via a consideration, first, of contemporary queer theory, and second, of the recent republication – and implied ‘recuperation’ – of the formerly shameful sub-genre of mid-century lesbian pulp fiction. Through readings of Ann Bannon’s Women in the Shadows (1959/2002) and Della Martin’s Twilight Girl (1961/2006), the chapter focuses particularly on questions concerning the (in)visibility and (un)intelligibility of gender and race, and matters of performance and ‘passing’. It shows how, in both novels, non-whiteness becomes a site of both fascination and shame, functioning indeed as both an intensifier of queer shame and a mirror of/analogy for that shame, in what might be viewed as a troubling case of shame appropriation.