Smith, Patricia Juliana

views updated

Smith, Patricia Juliana

PERSONAL: Female. Education: California State University, Dominguez Hills, B.A., 1986; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1991, Ph.D., 1995.

ADDRESSES: Office—Hofstra University, 0312D Calkins Hall, Hampstead, NY 11549-1000. E-mail—Patricia.J.Smith@hofstra.edu.

CAREER: University of California, Los Angeles, English department, postdoctoral lecturer in Englis; Hofstra University, Hampstead, NY, assistant professor of English.

WRITINGS:

(Editor with Corinne Blackmer) En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor) The Queer Sixties, Routledge (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor) The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations, Three Rivers Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Contributor to journals, including Review of Contemporary Fiction, Gay & Lesbian Review, Victorian Studies, Signs, and Explicator. Member of editorial board and contributor, GLBTQ.com (online journal).

SIDELIGHTS: Patricia Juliana Smith is a scholar focusing on homosexuality and gay and lesbian culture. A frequent contributor to journals, Smith has edited several volumes dealing with gay and lesbian themes, and wrote Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction, a 1999 release that traces the emotions caused by a loss of personal identity in the works of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, among others.

Smith's first book, which she coedited with Corinne Blackmer, is En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, a "collection of twelve essays [that] listens for and reveals the subversive female voices barely concealed in opera's polyphonic texts," according to Martha Mockus in the Women's Review of Books. The book focuses on the use of so-called "trouser roles" or "pants parts" in classical opera: women portraying male characters, dressed en travesti, or in drag. Smith and Blackmer gathered the writings of musicologists and literary critics to explore this phenomena, and create an "ebullient and carefully researched" introduction, according to Mockus, who stated: "En Travesti tries to bridge a disciplinary gap between musicology and literary studies; it doesn't quite achieve its lofty goals, but it's well worth the effort." For Mockus, "Lesbian opera criticism has arrived with unprecedented panache in En Travesti." Mockus also reviewed En Travesti in Notes, where she praised Smith's "imaginative and savvy essay," "Gli enigmi sono tre: The [D]evolution of Turandot, Lesbian Monster," which "uncovers the historical construction of Turandot's lesbian traits as well as Puccini's efforts to erase them." Bruce W. Holsinger, writing in Signs, commended the editors for gathering "some of the very best writing on music." Holsinger noted "The introduction alone is a tour de force, resisting the standard editorial practice of summarizing the essays and tying them together thematically, opting instead for an overview of opera's colorfully transgendered history that uses the essays themselves to document the historical narrative it crafts."

Other editing efforts from Smith include The Queer Sixties, a gathering of fourteen essays by scholarly critics on various forms of literature, music, and film that describe the culture of the 1960s through a homosexual lens. These essays focus on topics and people including singer Dusty Springfield, lesbian pulp novels, British playwright Joe Orton, the gender-bending of singer Jim Morrison, the implied homoeroticism in the Beatle's film, A Hard Day's Night, and a homosexual reading of the western novels Shane and The Virginian. The major contention of the book's editors is that gay and lesbian culture began earlier than the 1969 Stonewall Riots; that in fact the early 1960s were the seedbed for the movement. Reviewing the work in Library Journal, Jeffrey Ingram called it "eye-opening," while a reviewer for Publishers Weekly described The Queer Sixties as a "notable collection of essays." However, the Publishers Weekly contributor worried, the book's impact might be lessened by the "jargon of postmodern critical theory" informing many of the essays.

In Lesbian Panic, Smith examines lesbian elements of various writings by British female authors, including Woolf, Lessing, Maureen Duffy, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant, and Jeanette Winterson. Representative texts include The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, King of a Rainy Country, The Golden Notebook, The Heart of the Country, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Smith focuses on female characters who are unable to deal with their sexual desires for other women. In her analysis, Smith also provides the political and cultural context of each work.

The "lesbian panic" of the title refers to the fear certain gay women experience of losing their identity in a heterosexual world. Smith looks at such panic and the characters' responses to it in different periods of British literature. She also goes on to explain that the authors of romantic pieces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unknowingly presented this lesbian panic, while more recent writers employed innuendo to show their protagonists' struggle with their sexual identity. Postmodernists, on the other hand, left no doubt about the fact that their characters were dealing with sexual issues, according to Smith.

Reviewing Lesbian Panic in Choice, L. Winters found that it "is a genuine addition to lesbian and narrative studies and a balancing vision to politically motivated criticism by those unwilling to look at the cultural pressures on gay women." Laura Doan, writing in Signs, likewise called Lesbian Panic an "incisive examination." Doan went on to comment that Smith "defines her own project so crisply and with such control that lesbian panic never forecloses interpretive possibilities or lapses in an overdetermined and reified shorthand for lesbophobia on the part of the novelist or the culture at large." Doan further praised Smith for her "fresh approach" to the more contemporary work of Bainbridge, Tennant, and Winterson.