Bar and Dog Collar: Commodity, Subculture, and Narrative in Jane DeLynn

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.