‘The “I” inside “her”’: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace's Misfortune

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Notes

¹The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1922 as the date of the first recorded use of the word ‘queer’ to denote homosexuality.

²Stace, it should be noted, is also a singer-songwriter, performing under the name John Wesley Harding.

³In a pleasing parallel, Tipping itself has become, as Waters puts it, ‘a major reference point in the lesbian community’: ‘There's a Dublin lesbian club called Velvet’, she observes (Dominic Lutyens, 2003, p. 32).

⁴Butler writes warningly, in connection with gay ‘marriage’, that: ‘efforts to establish bonds of kinship that are not based on a marriage tie become nearly illegible and unviable when marriage sets the terms for kinship, and kinship itself is collapsed into “family”’ (Butler 2004: 5).