About Associate Professor Lee Wallace
Within the expanded field of gender and cultural studies, Lee welcomes supervisions in the following areas: queer theory, lesbian and gay studies, feminist theory, colonial and postcolonial discourse, cultural studies and cinema studies. She has experience supervising both traditional literary and film topics and more interdisciplinary projects.
My current research project investigates relations between homosexuality, cinema and the architectures of everyday life. Following on from Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments, I am now interested in the relation of homosexuality and cultural space more generally. In order to engage with current theoretical accounts of the social and political geography of gay and lesbian life, I am interested in a number of homosexual sites and architectures, some fictional, some material. The first of these is the collaboration between lesbian director Dorothy Arzner and gay interior designer William Haines on the domestic melodrama Craig’s Wife (1936), which concerns an obsessional housewife, played by Rosalind Russell, who loves her house more than she does her husband. Other related inquiries into gay domesticity include analyses of the Auckland and Sydney residences of gay authors Frank Sargeson and Patrick White, as well as work on homosexual architecture, interior design and Mad Men and the retro-fitted closet.
Selected publications
Wallace, L. M. Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments. New York: Routledge, 2009. 202 pages.
Wallace, L. M. Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 175 pages.
Refereed articles
Wallace, L. M. "Dorothy Arzner's Wife: Heterosexual Set, Homosexual Scene," Screen 49.4 (2008): 391-409.
Wallace, L. M. “A House is not a Home: Marquesan Encounter, Gender and Everyday Life, 1833-4.” Journal of Pacific History 40.3 (2005): 265-288.
Wallace, L. M. “Continuous Sex: the Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope.” Screen 41.4 (2000): 369-87. Reprinted as Wallace, L. M. “Continuous Sex: the Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope.” Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, ed. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street. London: Routledge, 2007. 106–22.
Wallace, L. M. “Academic Recognition: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Sexual Secrecy.” History and Anthropology 11.4 (1999): 417-435.
Wallace, L. M. “Fa’afafine: Queens of Samoa and the Elision of Homosexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.1 (1999): 25-39.
Wallace, L. M. “Tropical Rearwindow: Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau and Primitivist Ambivalence.” Genders 28 (1998): www.genders.org
Wallace, L. M. “Too Darn Hot: Sexual Contact in the Sandwich Islands on Cook’s Third Voyage.” Eighteenth-Century Life 18.3 (1994): 198-211. Best Special Issue Prize 1995 awarded by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals
Chapters in books
Wallace, L. M. “Discovering Homosexuality: Cross-Cultural Comparison and the History of Sexuality.” Gay Life and Culture, ed. Robert Aldrich. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.
Wallace, L.M. “Queer, Here: Sexuality and Space.” Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. C. Bell and S. Matthewman. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004. 66-83. Reprinted 2005.