Homosexuality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

"Sexuality is a continuum not a fix and static set of binary oppositions." As Teresa de Lauretis believes " sexuality, commonly thought to be a natural as well as a privet matter, is in fact completely constructed in culture according to the political aims of society's dominant class. (as qtd in Guerin 237).
             Gender studies examine how gender is less determined by nature than it is by culture and as Simone de Beauvoir said in The Second Sex: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one". For both feminists and gender critics, society portrays binary oppositions like masculine/feminine or straight/gay as natural categories, but as David Richter notes, "the rules have little to do with nature and everything to do with culture." The word homosexual has only a short history of one hundred years or so (it was new at the time Oscar Wilde's trial), and heterosexual is even newer (Guerin 236-37).
             In the 1970s and 1980s, after the famous Stonewall riots in New York that brought new focus upon gay, lesbian, and transvestite resistance to police harassment, gender critics studied the history of gay and lesbian writing and how gay and lesbian life is distorted in cultural history (237).
             In the mid-1980s, another school of criticism borrows and develops the gender concerns of the feminist and gender critics: gay and lesbian studies. Whereas feminist and gender critics debate and redefine the man/woman binary and emphasize gender differences, gay and lesbian studies target the heterosexual/homosexual binary, emphasizing sexual differences. Gay studies examine sexual differences applicable to males, and lesbian studies examine sexual differences that are applicable to females (Bressler 258).
             Lesbian critics counter their marginalization by considering lesbianism a privileged stance testifying to the primacy of women. Terms such alterity, women-centered, and difference take on new and modern sharply defined meanings when used by lesbian critics.