Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The “gay village,” “gay mecca,” “gai Paris,” the “lesbian flaneur,” the “lesbian bohème”—these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential.

Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to novel practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Glück, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how—and how effectively—queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin’s constellations of Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century.” Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin’s city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress.

If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm’s book we discover how, looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his “dialectics of seeing”; how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history. 

"Queer Constellations sets a new standard and methodological trend in queer studies. A major contribution to the space/place debates." 

---Cindy Patton, author of Globalizing AIDS

"Inspired, eloquent, and compelling. [Queer Constellations] freshly and bravely revisits gay and lesbian culture tropes and questions cultural assumptions from all quarters. The apparent hedonism and frivolity of consumerism is given a tough dressing down through its links to wreckage, displacement, and ruin, while its connection to cultural production and urban economics is underscored. And most significant of all, the powerful concept of "queer constellation" is developed and forged into a real tool for understanding the trans/formations of queer cultures." 

---Journal of the History of Sexuality 

Unhappy at perceiving her culturally assigned role as the mute object of men's sexual fantasies, H.D. entered analysis with Freud in 1933, hoping that it would help her articulate her own desires, dreams, and aspirations. In her subsequent writings, according to Dianne Chisholm , H.D. not only worked through traumatic postwar memories but also went on to create a feminist psychoanalytic poetics. Reading the post-imagist long poems and autobiographical prose in the light of Freud's theories, Chisholm demonstrates that H.D.'s interpretation and revision of those theories engage important questions about women, desire, and language. Chisholm traces the development of such concepts as phantasy, transference, masochism, narcissism , and  melancholia through H.D.'s works, including Nights, The Gift, Her, Tribute to Freud, Trilogy, and Helen in Egypt. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Shoshana Felman, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément, and Leo Bersani, she maintains that H.D.'s interpretation of Freud amounts to critical intertext rather than to faithful translation. Chisholm shows how H.D. reconstitutes in her writing the repressed subject of woman's history and formulates a concept of woman's otherness which Freud's theories about female sexuality had overlooked. H.D.'s Freudian Poetics will be challenging and rewarding reading for scholars and students in the fields of literary criticism, the history of psychoanalysis, and literary theory, and for those with an interest in autobiography and modernist poetry. 

"This is one of the most important of the new books on H.D. Chisholm's readings of H.D. and Freud are fresh, original, and insightful. I have no doubt that this excellent work will be of great interest to a wider audience." 

---Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary is of major interest to those who are aware of the breadth of its two component areas, and wish to explore the common ground between them more intensively. 

The contributors are distinguished international scholars and clinicians with different, sometimes opposed views, who in their entries have documented not only a history of each concept and other interrelated concepts, but also the debate and controversy surrounding it, the theorists and practitioners who have coined or used it, and its political importance for feminism. The discussion ranges around issues such as the construction of an adequate narrative of female sexuality (gender, femininity), the politics of the psyche (fantasy, desire), the reassessment of the maternal (motherhood, mother-daughter relationship), the ideology of representation (feminist cinema, literature)and the symptoms of power relations (pornography, race/imperialism). Hence the dictionary is not only a device for learning, but also an original experiment in lexicographical cartography, mapping conceptual and political intersections in order to extend an urgent and critical debate.

"Not only a work of reference, but an indispensable guide to the territory of feminist argument." --- Parveen Adams, Brunel University

"The entries are written by many of the best writers in the field; the bibliographies are invaluable. . . . Does an excellent job naming and covering the issues at stake." --- Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

"Impeccably researched, as well as lucidly written." --- Madeleine Sprengnether, University of Minnesota