Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers

Switching Desire and Identity

Lesley C Graydon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000054842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

This book analyses twentieth-century writers who traffic in queer, non-normative, and/or fluid gender and sexual identities and subversive practices, revealinghow gender and sexually variant women create, revise, redefine, and play with language, desires, roles, thebody, and identity.

Through the model of the "switch" —someone who shifts between roles, desires, or ways of being in the realms of genderor sexualidentity – Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers: Switching Desire and Identity examines the intersecting locations of gender and sexual identity switching that six prolific, experimental authors and their narratives play with: Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. The theory and identities revealed create and give space to—by their playful, exploratory, and destabilizing nature—diverse openings and possibilities for a great expansion and freedom in gender, sexuality, desires, roles, practices, and identity.

This is a provocative and innovative intervention in gender and sexuality in modern literature and gives us a new vocabulary and conversation by which to expand women's and gender studies, LGBTQ and sexuality studies, identity studies, literature, feminist theory, andqueer theory.

1 “Thinking sex”

Presentation, representation, and manifestation; an unveiling

The broad aim of this book is to expand the horizon and discourse of variant gender and sexual identities and practices through introducing the theoretical model, practice, and typology of the switch and switching; radical new readings, knowledge, understanding, acceptance, and a new sexuality and gender studies, queer, feminist, and identity theory emerge. This emergence has the added impact of immediately and powerfully validating reader’s lives and experiences; by extension, the possibility is established for all people—regardless of gender or sexuality—to live with greater freedom, self-expression, and authenticity in exploring and playing with identity, desires, roles, and practices. My focus is on contemporary and twentieth-century women and/or lesbian writers who dwell in queer, variant identities and subversive sexual practices.

This chapter will map out my focus, present the premises and vocabulary necessary, introduce my key theoretical concepts, subjects, and method, position my work in relation to specifically relevant historical and contemporary conversations, and invite an openness with which to delve into my topics. I bring some attention to the policing of sexual and gender self-expression; however, the main intention of this book is to engage in possibility-based conversations and dialogue (rather than criticism or past-based ones) that demonstrate my theory of switching.

Focus and terminology

My specific focus is to look at, deconstruct, and celebrate variant gender and sexual identities. My specific aim is to reveal where and how gender and sexual variants create, revise, redefine, and play with language, roles, desires, bodies, public and private sex practices, and identity in the action known as “switching.” To switch, and the process of engaging in the action of switching, can most broadly be described as dwelling in, and having the intention of, honouring, exploring, and sharing different, switchable aspects of a state of being, idea or concept, person, persona, or character. These different aspects can be, and very often are, seen or constructed as opposites, or as incongruous, so by its very nature the switch is riddled with complexities and uncertainties that can be both individualistic and changeable; hence the switch is not easily classifiable or conducive to generalization. Identifying and honouring different, switchable aspects and ways of being as equally authentic and valuable is, at heart, one of the important intentions of my theory and this book.

More specifically, a switch is someone who shifts between roles, desires, identities, or ways of being in the realms of gender and/or sexuality. Switching has almost exclusively been referred to in a BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism) context within the loci of subversive sexual desires, roles, and play. My theory proposes a new definition wherein switching reaches far beyond BDSM and the sexual: it is an action and an identity, which may or may not be a pleasure-centred action that moves into the broadness of an identity. A switch incorporates and moves between and betwixt gender and/or sexual identities. This book asserts that switching along a continuum of gender and/or sexual identities is a profound and powerful route by which to re-examine the notion of stable identities and dwell in fluid, destabilized ones. In both the action and the experience of switching, a whole new realm of possibility and freedom arises.

In the area of gender, switching can be located in shifts of experimenting and playing with gender preference and identity, feminine and masculine clothing, appearance, presentation, naming and/or playing with the performative aspects of expected versus unexpected gender expression(s). Physical features, such as switching between masculine and feminine physical features, traits, behaviours, manifestations, and/or body parts, and gender-bending to and from differing gender locations are all gender-switching moments. Any gender, male, female, or non-binary, including genderqueer, two-spirited, bi-gendered, or trans-identified, can switch and move betwixt and between the varied ranges of feminine and masculine facets, roles, and/or identities.

In the area of sexuality, switch moments are marked by shifts in the language of desire, sex, and orgasm—language occurring as a key turn to switch—in moving between gentle or loving sex and rough or animalistic-like sex, when moving between vulnerability and strength, submission and dominance, pleasing and being pleased, pleasure making and pleasuring giving, in the locations of sexual taboos, playfulness, and games and, of course, in switching between roles: between top and bottom, receiver and giver, dominant and submissive within an erotic or BDSM context. As with gender switching, there are no constraints to sexual switching: one’s sexual preference is irrelevant.¹

In the overlap that intersects both and/or either sexual and gender switching, shifts in roles, fantasy, desire, time, spirituality, language use, various concepts of identity (such as human and animal), spirituality, point of view, age, playfulness, and a s/witchy magical realism are locations of switching intersection. The locations of certainty and uncertainty, time shifts that accompany gender and sexual shifting, and adhering to, versus overturning, acceptable social conventions are also switch moments that can be sexed or gendered.

My primary focus is thus specific: I am looking at the intersecting practices of non-normative/variant gender, sexual, and identity switching that all of my experimental authors and their characters play with. Gertrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, and Carson’s translation of Sappho all demonstrate and play with the language of desire and switching; also, all of their narratives can be described within a sexually variant and gender-variant reading. While my book is specifically centred in gender and sexually variant writing and reading, I want to stress that this project resists all “strategic essentialism” of gender and sexual variancy (Butler, 146). The identities I deconstruct create and give space to by their playful and exploratory nature, a great deal of gender, sexual, and identity play and masquerade (whether they are stable or in flux); they elicit openings, possibilities, and ambiguities in writing, reading, deconstructing, and recreating gender identifications, sexual identities, sex and gender roles, and subversive and perverse practices, as well as subcultural and personal practices.

This book is concerned with variant, fluid, and non-normative gender and sexual identities, performance, and exploration. I use these terms to illustrate mutable locations, instances, preferences, and choices that are different from or outside the standardized ideologies and points of view that govern socially conventional sex and gender norms. Variant, fluid, and/or non-normative gender imply locating the subject’s gender identification, playfulness, choices, and/or performance outside of the mainstream, male/female, masculine/feminine fixed gender-norm binary; variant, non-normative sex and sexualities imply locating the subjects sexual preferences, desires, and/or practices outside of the mainstream, heterosexual/heteronormative, reproductively based, acceptable societal norm. Simply put, the gender and/or sexual variant is outside mainstream societal structures in their gender and/or sexual preferences, choices, and practices.

The term gender is used to refer to one’s own sense of gendered self, regardless of genitalia.² This implies that gender can be constructed, that we have choice, and that gender is mutable. The term women may feel exclusive to some people who do not identify as female. When I use the words women and woman, it is the broadest sense possible and with all the vastness that can be implied and conjured; thus, women includes both assigned female at birth (cisgendered or non-trans) women, transgendered women, and anyone who identifies as a woman and female—however that looks, has been, and is for her. I use “she” and “her” throughout this book, while occasionally using s/he or they.

While some gender variants may resist and/or dislike the term woman or women and opt to use other words, spellings, and/or gender neutral pronouns, in part because of the words historically, culturally, and socially constructed constraints and assumptions (which is one effective strategy for ushering in a rethinking of gender and identity categories), I find great value in choosing to challenge the assumptions that are evoked by the term woman precisely by using it within a progressive, expansive, and feminist framework and context. Many of the issues that affect women, across race, class, and economics are informed by sexism and gender discrimination. No girl or woman escapes growing up and/or living in patriarchy without being deeply affected—the effects are far-reaching and insidious. It takes tremendous and consistent effort to dismantle the social and cultural conditionings of what it is to be a woman, to survive in a hostile climate, and to thrive.

Using the words people or folk, or changing the spelling of “woman” to “womyn” or “womxn,” is not inclusive or descriptive enough for the purposes of my book’s intention and, while these terms most certainly allow for greater inclusion and openings in gender variancy and possibilities, using them could lessen the importance of this book’s particular focus and intention, which is to apply my theory to looking at a decades-long marginalized, invisible, and understudied segment in the literary, intellectual, academic, social, and political conversation: the writing of gender and sexually variant women who switch.³

By sexually variant I am referring to those who choose to dwell outside of the socially proscribed and sanctioned “normal” heterosexual roles, desires, identities, duties, performances, presentations, and practices generally regarded as acceptable in North American culture and society. This would include looking at those who desire and/or engage in non-mainstream, non-reproductively based sex.

By gender variant or fluid I mean anyone who chooses to live outside of the mainstream socially proscribed, sanctioned gender roles, duties, performances, presentations, and identities in North American culture and society. Some gender variants identify as fluid, androgynous, LGBTQ, or non-binary. While written somewhat obtusely, I find that Judith Roof’s explanation and placement of fluidity amongst binaries, which she says “points towards a polymorphousness,” are helpful. She writes that

the figure of the fluid occupies an eccentric position in relation to the insistent taxonomies of binary gender systems. On the one hand, it would seem to represent a completely alternative economy. On another hand it already frames the binary as its other. On a third hand … it depends on binary categories for its sense—even paradoxically—in order to exceed, outstrip, reform, reorganize, resituate, redeploy, redefine, or reinvent them. The fluid is curiously a “re-”: redemptive perhaps, but also a reiteration, a reflection and a repetition.

(What Gender Is, What Gender Does, 175)

Gender variancy and gender switching constitute a location of reinvention, one which is still bookmarked by notions of gender that are based on binaries our society is quite entrenched with. While we have made great strides in LGBTQ theory and activism, I hope to demonstrate that switching is a powerful term and concept to add to the redefining and reinvention, reforming and reorganizing, of gender and sexual identities and categories. Another popular term used to describe gender and sexual variants is queer, genderqueer, fluid, or non-conforming.

I use the term genderqueer as an umbrella term for a gender identity that is outside the heteronormative, patriarchal, gender binary system. It is a term used to situate an internal, self-identified, and self-constructed sense of gender and gender identity. Depending on the circumstances, some genderqueer and gender fluid folks may choose to alter or “switch” their preferred use of pronouns or descriptors depending on their current preference and/or circumstances. Some genderqueers may use one or multiple pronouns such as she, he, s/he, her or him while others prefer they, ze, and/or hir. Still others may prefer to use only their given or chosen names for all self-references, thus circumnavigating the issue of gender assumptions and designations altogether.⁴

A gender variant may stay in their born female or male body or choose to morph, alter, or transition their gender in some way to better reflect their gender identity. A gender-fluid person may consistently, or mercurially, appear to exhibit androgynous, masculine, and/or butch traits, behaviours, presentations, preferences, identities, and so forth and may shift along a spectrum. The gender and/or sexually variant woman or person may identify as a lesbian, dyke, queer, androgynous, genderqueer, trans, trans-identified, transgendered, intergendered, ambigendered, non-gendered, non-binary, two-spirit, bisexual, pansexual, gay, a fag or however else she or they may want to refer to themselves. Choice, self-agency, and the ability to revise one’s identity association(s) and description(s) are deeply valued, respected, and expected. Further, the language of sexual and gender variancy is one that morphs and changes, sometimes quite quickly, with new terms and words added by each new wave of LGBTQ activism, theory, youth culture emergence, sociopolitical climate, and/or pop or subculture wave.⁵

Certainly, while some genderqueers may identify with some of the identities and subcultural communities noted above (such as woman, trans, trans-identified, androgynous, non-binary, lesbian, and queer), genderqueers may also embrace and/or reject a wide range of feminine and masculine sensibilities or traits, ebb and flow on a gender continuum, and/or create, seek to live within, and be sustained by a third, fourth, or fifth gender identity. While for some there may be a degree of fluidity and movement on the gender spectrum, other genderqueers choose androgyny or trans as a location. Genderqueers use the term to blur one, some, and/or all lines of gender associations and, additionally, those of sexuality.

The fragility of society

To consider and be comfortable with authentic displays of variant genders and sexualities seems such a basic, healthy, productive, powerful, potentially opening and enlivening premise; yet, sometimes, when switching presentations or ways of being occur, conflict, questioning, confusion, doubt, judgement, invisibility, and shame arise—both within the text/narrative or personal, interior life and in the external reading or outside within the external group, community and/or society.

One question to ask is, why dwell/consider variancy? But much more empowering is to ask, why not? In his groundbreaking two-volume The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault asks readers to begin to look at their individual and societal beliefs and values and to be open and willing to reconsider their positions and points of view regarding sexuality.⁶ He encourages us to consider the following: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is going to go on looking and reflecting at all.” I invite us to deliberate and examine what Foucault is asking us to do in regard to sexuality and gender: consider giving up the ways we perceive, and think we know as the truth; choose to be willing, to consider thinking and perceiving, gender, sexuality, and identity differently than we do. In the areas of sex and gender, which are two areas of our life and society that are heavily culturally and emotionally laden with “truths” and knowing, this is a fundamental step in opening up what is possible for both individuals and larger society.

An important first step is to reflect on the conscious and unconscious moral rightness that is deeply embedded and accepted in our culture vis à vis heteronormativity. Western society is infused with an ethics-constructed (made up) history of proper sexual and gender conduct. Sexual and gender conduct is regulated by ideologies that have found their way into our laws, administrative, governmental, legal, social and family codes, procedures, and foundations; and these avenues of socialization, religion, education, and institutions of mainstream ideology, expression, and thought are powerfully influential, heavily guarded, and maintained. Our society does not view the revisionary creating of sexual and moral norms as very valuable; rather, variant and experimental creative contributions are often highly sus...