God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities―a sob in the body or the body itself―has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."

Genres: Queer

300 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1994

About the author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is the author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer,” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies), and Making Out (finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir), among other books.

Reviews

[Mark]

I actually read this almost 15 years ago, when it was first published. I met the author at a reading, and was drawn in to its dense, but substantial, style of writing and thought. I'm excited to see how it holds up with new years of experience.