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Palko offers a comparative reading of Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Emma Donoghue’s Hood that explores how Irish and Caribbean literatures focus on the lesbian daughter first prior to considering maternal subjectivities. She contextualizes this reading by considering Irish and Caribbean cultural attitudes toward lesbianism. Cliff and Donoghue write the lesbian into their respective canons, in a fraught entry that requires the daughter to name and accept her own daughterless status. Palko draws on the work of Nancy Chodorow to understand how, by positioning the new lesbian protagonist as daughter, these novels create an erotic triangle between daughter–mother–lover; in this narrative formulation, the lesbian love relationship facilitates the daughter’s reconciliation with the mother at the price of the renunciation of her own (potential) maternity.

The author of five novels (the first of which was published in 1978) and numerous stories, essays, and articles, Jane DeLynn has had a respectable, if not prolific, literary career. She has attracted little critical interest, however, even in the specialized field of queer literary scholarship: three of her novels, namely In Thrall (1982), a narrative of adolescent love, as well as the two I turn my attention to in this chapter, Don Juan in the Village (1990) and Leash (2002), are lesbian-themed. The dearth of scholarly attention is worth thinking about, particularly if one considers that Don Juan caused quite a stir in lesbian and feminist literary circles when it was first published. One reason why DeLynn has been more or less ignored, perhaps, is that her representations of lesbian culture and lesbian identity don’t fit easily into the paradigm of lesbianism as heroic subversion of the regime of compulsory heterosexuality. Her novels are stubbornly unavailable for readings of lesbian identity and community as utopian, resistant, or future-oriented. As discussed in chapter 1, in many respects her work would seem to offer promising material for the recent tendency in queer criticism that explores negative affect, abjection, and antisociality; and in this respect, as I argued earlier, her work may be thought of as presenting a counterweight to the utopian optimism of Delany’s The Mad Man.

Julia Kristeva describes the abject as that which “draws me towards the place where meaning collapses” (Powers of Horror 2). In African American letters, one of the ontological and epistemological places where many African American writers and thinkers, such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Leroi Jones, Amiri Baraka, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have theoretically tried to define meaning and failed is the notion of black masculinity. In many regards, too, they have failed to understand the oppressive nature of compulsory heterosexuality in the black community. Fortunately, the advent and aftermath of the black feminist movement in the early 1970s and recent interests in African American queer theory has made it abundantly clear that heterosexist ideas about black masculinities and sexualities need to be challenged.