The Lesbian Daughter

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.