Femininity Played Straight

The Significance of Being Lesbian

Biddy Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415916813
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135210151
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Femininity Played Straight, Biddy Martin traces the changing relations of lesbianism and feminist theory from the late 1970s to the present. These sparkling essays argue for accounts of sexuality, gender and subjectivity that make lesbianism intelligible and important, for lesbians and non-lesbians alike.

Moving between theoretical and autobiographical modes, Biddy Martin brings different kinds of writing to bear upon one another. At a theoretical level, her work takes issue with postmodern theory, defending instead the role of psychoanalytic criticism. She argues for the continued validity of critical modes that do not abandon the unconscious in seeking to understand the relation of subjectivity to language. In so doing, she addresses the work of writers, thinkers and activists as varied as Mary Daly, Michel Foucault, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, and Joan Copjec.

PART ONE

THE HOBO, THE FAIRY, AND THE QUARTERBACK*

[1993]

chapter 1

FRANÇOIS ROUSTANG once disparaged the work of Lou Andreas-Salomé by arguing that she had turned psychoanalysis into a Russian novel.¹ For Salomé, childhood fantasies and Russian novels were closely associated, and she did indeed use psychoanalysis to clear a corridor back to childhood, back to the deep psychological processes that she thought of as the soul of both child and adult. One of her own childhood fantasies, one she reworked over and over, was the fantasy of the grandparent, or of what she later called primary narcissism:

We could envision it in the following way, as though we had moved from the parents' lap, from which we inevitably slip, onto the midst of the lap of God, as if onto the lap of a grandfather who spoils us much more and allows everything, who is so generous with gifts that it is as if he had all his pockets full and we could become almost as all-powerful as he, even if not nearly as ‘good’; he signifies both parents combined into one: maternal warmth/nurturance and paternal omnipotence. (To have to separate and distinguish them from each other, into the spheres of power and love, is already a violent break in what we might call a wish-less [desireless] preworld well-being.)²

It is typical of Salomé that she first locates the grandparent as the compensatory fantasy, the defense against the slip off the parents' lap, only to turn around and figure the grandparent as primal or original, as constituting a preworld well-being before loss, division, and sexual difference. She would have said that she was more attached to the fantasy than to the reality of her parents or of her own losses. In her excessive gratitude to Freud, Salomé repeats this fantasy over and over as she imagines him to be the benign grandparent whose pockets are full and who bestows the gifts of psychoanalysis. In the folds of those pockets are surprises, but not necessarily Freud's alone. Salomé can own or acknowledge her own gifts only after projecting them onto a well-endowed grandfather, to whom she is attached, but attached at a distance. For he authorizes her independence, makes it look like dependence, and masks or pretends to mask his own indebtedness to her gifts and surprises, to what's in her pockets. Salomé's fantasy reveals something about her gendered style and the persona she created for herself. But it also says a great deal about her attachments, or her lack of attachment. That the grandparent is neither one gender nor the other seems at one level to expose Salomé's unwillingness to choose or to be one or the other herself. But that unwillingness to decide masks her resistance to the most intimate attachments, to sexual attachments. We could celebrate Salomé's refusal to occupy any fixed position, or we could lament her inability to land. She preferred to write about her idealizations rather than her relationships, even when she was thanking Freud for curing her of her childish tendency toward mystification, false syntheses, and fantasy.

Strangely, the depths of children's souls—the terrors and desires that are associated with issues of attachment and separation—seem far removed from the critical concerns of many of today's feminist and queer literary scholars, particularly those most influenced by Foucault's early work, whose theoretical evacuations of gendered cores have held out the promise of expanding our understanding of the social construction of gender cores and thereby multiplying the genders and sexualities that we imagine and that we are permitted to enact. I applaud the work that challenges assumptions of fixed gender cores of which our desires and behaviors are supposedly mere normal or abnormal expressions. But I also lament that some literary scholarship has gone too far in the direction of a sociology, concerned with mapping multiple and interwoven subject positions to the exclusion of in-teriority. For me, literature has also always engaged my curiosity about the complexities of interiors, the complexities of the very process by which the outside gets folded into an inside, and the distinction gets displaced.³ Given the admittedly salutory emphasis on mobility, fluidity, and constantly reorganized surfaces, I start to wonder again at what point the infoldings of an outside become psychological processes that remain, at least to some extent, characteristics from childhood sustained over a lifetime, despite the subsequent integration and working through. And what does gender have to do with those processes? To what extent do we really want to push the argument that deconstructing gender evacuates interiority in the service of a political analysis of social regulations that masquerade as mere expressions of gender cores? Do deconstructing and expanding gender deconstruct the person? Is the project of resignifying or reconfiguring gender and sexuality really at odds with an interest in what might cohere in the psychological processes that characterize a personality, even a self?

Two friends and I sat down to talk about literature and about what we do. We got completely involved in a discussion of the books that most preoccupied us when we were growing up, favorite childhood books. All three of us described these books as the books that generated the desire to read, the books in which we most thoroughly lost ourselves or found ourselves in that process through which the losing becomes the finding, or vice versa. We all also remembered these books as producing the fantasies into which we escaped or imagined escaping the painful effects of the rules governing sexuality, gender, and maturity in the specifically racialized and class-specific immediate environments in which we grew up. Of course, what our stories reveal is how ensconced our fantasies of Neverland were in the very environments we sought to flee. They also clearly challenge the extent to which we like to imagine, even now, that the pressures we sought to manage came exclusively from the outside. Clearly, what had already folded in and become an inside exerted its own pressure on our fantas-matic positionings, even at the age of eight.

What engaged us over the course of an evening were the issues that our stories seemed both to stimulate and to manifest for each of us and the power of our attachment to these books even now, as the sort of ur-Erlebnis of what it can mean to lose and find oneself in a book. The boundaries between fiction and reality are so much more fragile for children than they are for adults; we were so much more capable then, at least apparently, of mixing ourselves up with the characters or with the stories: to believe ourselves into the stories and to understand ex-traliterary experiences in their terms. And it was clear that all three of us value the moments that offer a clear corridor back into those childhood fantasies and the experience there of only the frailest line between fact and fiction, the experience of a kind of play without which there would be nothing interesting to say about gender or sexuality.

Afterward, it occurred to me to wonder which particular aspects of those childhood selves we were anxious to reexperience and which ones we would block; where fragile boundaries between fact and fiction, between self and other, between terror and desire would be pleasurable and where they would become intolerable. One way of approaching those questions would be to list the literature we cannot bear to read, the literature we hate to read or that we love to hate to read, that comes too close or feels too much like rupture. But that's a task for another paper. We were into pleasure, or so we thought until we started to find one another—aspects of our personalities, our interactive styles, and even our behaviors at political meetings—in the stories we told.

For the other woman at the table, an avowed lesbian femme, Peter Pan had been the object of love, fantasmatic involvement, and preoccupation. And her most obvious identification was with Wendy. The one man's most influential, preoccupying, and to this day most vivid reading experience involved the story of a hobo who was shot, dropped off a steep precipice into a canyon, and left for dead.The bulk of the first part of The Hobo of Devil's Gulch was taken up with the day-to-day struggle of the victim to recover from the wound, survive, and ultimately to make it out of the canyon to the top of the cliff again to seek revenge. When he finally reached the top of the cliff, he found that the experience of struggle and longing so far outstripped what revenge could do for him that avenging the wound was no longer appealing. At the most manifest level, David had identified with the lone victim-hero, with survival.

The stories I remember living in for a great part of my youth were the stories of Chip Hilton, star athlete, whose achievements on the football field and the baseball diamond often involved injuries that threatened to remove him from a particular game, if not to end his career. But to the amazement of his worried, yet disappointed onlookers, Chip always returned at the last minute to help his team avoid what seemed like certain loss. At the most manifest level, I wanted to be Chip, and thus begins the story of my participation in the myth and practice of the wounded lesbian butch. But such obvious identifications—Carol's with Wendy, David's with the survivor, and mine with Chip Hilton—are not the end but the beginning of our understanding of what can never be fully understood: the twists and turns and surprises of the psyche. And perhaps I should anticipate the end and say here that the issues raised by the stories and by our analysis of them could never be aligned in any simple way with gender differences or with sexual object choice, with the differences between apparently straight and apparently queer sexualities.

Carol identified with a Wendy who wanted to be carried away by Peter Pan, carried away emotionally, but not necessarily with him. At the most obvious level, Carol remembered wanting a Peter who would take all the risks, a magical protector who would slay all the pirates and then be happy to return home to a good pot roast. Carol's Wendy assumed the domestic role, the position of the real girl in relation to her rivals Tinkerbell (the bad girl) and Tiger Lily (the exotic other). Carol's Wendy felt her superiority when she compared the di-aphonous, pale nightgown in which she flew through the window to Tink's little skeleton leaves and Tiger Lily's boylike buckskin. These particular investments in Wendy are clearly class- and race-specific: whiteness and middle-classness defining what a real girl is. The real girl would make a home and be a mother to the Lost Boys, who, as Carol's fantasy had it then, needed a mother, not an activist like Tiger Lily. In fact, Peter did keep returning home to the supposedly real girl, but by the time he settled on Wendy, she was too old, so he took her daughter instead. Not an unfamiliar narrative.

But Wendy's passivity masks other levels that are more surprising—or not so surprising, given what we know of Carol. In relation to Peter, Carol's Wendy not only adores and admires Peter, but requires that Peter need her admiration. In other words, she shores up his self-sufficiency by rendering him needy, of her. Her admiration of Peter barely masks her desire to be admired herself but, as Carol put it, not too much. She would never desire so much admiration from Peter as to unsettle the distance between them. In relation to her rivals,Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily, Carol's Wendy can also begin to look a little less like the only real girl. After all, like so many butch girls, Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily, in defense of Peter, participate actively in what Judith Butler calls orthodox feminine sacrifice, while Wendy remains home alone.⁴ David and I tried to make this a sign of Wendy's actual autonomy, but Carol suggested that it was more a sign of her privilege, that she got to stay home, alone, playing house and sewing pockets for the boys who had to appear to possess the gifts.

Carol's Wendy emphatically wanted to marry a boy who wouldn't be married, who wouldn't grow up, who was never played by a boy, and who lived in a neverland with other boys. She desired a boy who would leave her alone. What does it mean to want a Peter who can never be had and still be Peter—a safe object, blind to girls' desires for kisses, oblivious enough to mix up their kisses with thimbles? Perhaps Carol wanted to be Peter in her own way as much as she wanted to have him. When Carol's Wendy flies out a window to join Peter, she not only exhibits a form of attachment and a nomination of herself as mother of the Lost Boys, but also escapes her own family and then lives in a fantasy of being mother that is a reality of aloneness and play. When she flies out the window to join Peter, is she more like a mother or a lost boy? Perhaps she reveals the similarities between them.

Carol's identification with Wendy seems at one level to disown autonomy, daring, and aggression, projected as they are onto Peter. His independence is supported by her allowing him to depend on her; her apparent dependence is made possible by his never coming too close. How autonomous and powerful is Peter for Wendy? Peter appears as a lost boy, a wounded butch figure. When Wendy first sees him, he's crying because he can't get his shadow to stick to him, and his need elicits Wendy's desire not only to make a home but also to leave her own home and join, or perhaps be, him.

At this point in our discussion, Carol wondered aloud whether she had really identified with Wendy, Tinkerbell, or Peter, and she laughingly reviewed a lifetime of assuming Peter's rather than Wendy's position.The girl, Wendy or Carol, who fell in love with the girl-boy Peter seems to have fallen in love with a mother as well as a Peter. If that seems like a surprising claim, remember that Peter Pan is described as “very like Mrs. Darling's kiss,”⁵ very like that inaccessible kiss in the corner of Mrs. Darling's mouth, and also as the one figure who might have been able to get that kiss. What does Carol-Wendy love, then, when she loves Peter Pan, the boy-girl who is very like Mrs. Darling's kiss?⁶ She loves and identifies with the image of an inaccessible kiss. The displacement, then, from boy-girl to mother might seem like an end, of sorts, but what do mothers, fathers, or selves have to do with inaccessible kisses?

David and I were preoccupied with stories in which a boy or man operates as a lone or relatively independent survivor. But his story, on the manifest level, is far more empty of attachment than mine. His story began with victimization and isolation, with a wound and a separation from what could retroactively be imagined as a primal connection, and then became a lone struggle against incredible odds. But David remembered that his attacker had not completely disappeared from the story. As the hobo worked his way back out of the canyon, step by step, level by level, that now-paternal figure periodically peered down, creating the sense in our hobo that he was being watched. David also interrupted his account of the struggle by noting that he wasn't sure whether he was the survivor, the narrator, or the murderer. He had been aware, even as a child, of watching himself heal. Playing all the parts moves the injury and the survival around; it may also, as he pointed out, make the story safer, for he appears to be climbing without a safety net but protects himself in the way that fantasies are often protective, by playing all the parts. What would he need to be protected from if he identifies most with the healing survivor? Perhaps from the realization of the importance of the attachment and the vulnerability in that attachment, because the lone struggle masks the connection and defends against loss and connection.

David described his return to that powerful, murderous figure who had dropped him off the cliff into the canyon as a disappointment, for that figure had lost its power not only to kill, but also to satisfy. The disappointment made it unsatisfying even to take revenge. Then David added another twist. It's possible, he said, that he never got to the top of the cliff. He was interested only in the first half of the story, in the struggle, in the process, in the passion associated with healing and climbing and being on the way. The arrival was bound to be a disappointment. And that attachment to the process over the arrival seemed to mask a kind of clinging, a clinging to the fantasized original figure or relationship for which there could never be a satisfying replacement. The clinging to the desire made both attachment to and withdrawal from that original figure impossible. Now we seemed to be talking about mothers with a capital M—but also, of course, about fathers, and the importance of their recognition. In the story, the hobo not only reaches the top of the cliff but has a confrontation -with the figure who wounded him and left him for dead. But David reported that he had a hard time remembering that part of the story and as a child had hated it for its disappointments. The actual Vatertnord in his experience had been equally unsatisyfing.

I have never met anyone who read or heard of the Chip Hilton series. Perhaps the Chip Hilton stories are a specifically southern form—I hesitate to say art form—characteristic of the obsession in small Southern towns with high school sports, and with football in particular, as a venue for the vicarious and direct acting-out of class resentments, racisms, misogynies, and rabid anti-intellectualisms. In Virginia high schools and in the Chip Hilton stories, quarterbacks are supposed to be white, blond, good-looking, gentlemanly on the surface, and manly, but less vulgar in their manliness than the linemen or the running backs. Being a Southern quarterback requires a controlled and semi-intelligent masculinity. Given my family's obsession with football, my mother's brief stint as a football coach, the value of stoicism in the community, and my favored brother's heroics on the field, it is not surprising that I identified with Chip in my fantasies. Outside the book and the fantasies, I was forced, as a girl, to occupy the position of the adoring fan, in particular the fan of my brother, to love rather than to be him. As it turned out, he was an offensive tackle, not a quarterback. That disappointed me, and I felt the superiority of my fantasized quarterback position. But my secret privileging of that position of greater intelligence over brute force also operated as a defense against my own aggression and against my fear that I was, in fact, the offensive tackle myself.

The recurrent injuries undercut my apparent ambition, competitiveness, aggression, and self-sufficiency. Lesbian butchness always seems to emerge in the form of a wound or woundedness. Like the Lost Boys, the wounded quarterback is inhibited from making it completely alone; he expresses a need and a longing, a loss that primarily other men—the coach, the other players, followed then at more remove by the pompom girls in the stands—can help heal, by sympathizing, admiring, and worrying. Chip's wound accounts for his dependence on others without jeopardizing his capacity for independence and heroics. To survive and flourish, he must, after all, return to the game and prevail—prevail not only over his opponents but also over his own vulnerabilities and his dependence on others. What's less apparent is the passive aggression with which he manages and prevails o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• NOTES
• INDEX