CONTENTS
Chips, Coke and Rock-’n’-Roll: Children’s Mediation of an Invitation to a First Dance Party Amy B.Rossiter
1
Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson
22
Poems Rhoda Janzen
40
‘A Girton Girl on a Throne’: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906–1933 Sarah Waters
43
The Pervert’s Progress: An Analysis of Story of O and the Beauty Trilogy Amalia Ziv
63
Dis-Graceful Images: Della Grace and Lesbian Sado-masochism Reina Lewis
78
Reviews Cecilia Morgan on Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History
94
Rebecca D’Monté on The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700; Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture; The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914
96
Marsha Rowe on The Feminist Companion to Mythology
100
Tijen Uğuriş on A Matter of Honour: Experiences of Turkish Women Immigrants
102
Marja Anderton on A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala
104
Ann Oakley on Damned If We Do: Contradictions in Women’s Health Care
107
ii
Jenny Bourne Taylor on Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation
108
Sara Dunn on Inversions: Writings by Dykes, Queers and Lesbians; New 111 Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings Christine Griffin on Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America; What a Lesbian Looks Like: Writings by Lesbians on their Lives and Lifestyles
113
Janet Sayers on The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture; Male Subjectivity at the Margins
117
Noticeboard
120
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Feminist Review Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Avtar Brah, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Lola Young, Loretta Loach, Lorraine Gamman, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Sue O’Sullivan. Corresponding editors: Kum-Kum Bhavnani (currently resident in the US), AnnMarie Wolpe (currently resident in South Africa). Correspondence and advertising For contributions, books for review and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Subscriptions Please write to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE. Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY10001, USA. Copyright © 1994 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review. Copyright © 1994 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. PHOTOCOPYING AND REPRINT PERMISSIONS Single and multiple photocopies of extracts from this journal may be made without charge in all public and educational institutions or as part of any non-profit educational activity provided that full acknowledgement is made of the source. Requests to reprint in any publication for public sale should be addressed to the Feminist Review at the address above. ISSN 0141–7789
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CHIPS, COKE AND ROCK-’N’-ROLL: Children’s Mediation of an Invitation to a First Dance Party Amy B.Rossiter
Introduction In my adolescence, I truly believed that because I couldn’t dance, I would never meet a nice man, get married and have children. In other words, I was doomed to no life at all. Most of my contemporaries would go on to real lives because they attended Miss Ford’s Dance School. There, they learned to foxtrot, waltz, and even (at the end of the class only), fast dance. I never asked to go to Miss Ford’s classes because I had attended some dance classes as part of the school gym programme. Those classes were such an experience of humiliation that I chose the no-life option. My mother never suggested Miss Ford’s lessons: I think she thought of dancing as some kind of informal fun and, besides, there was a kind of pretentiousness associated with Miss Ford’s that we were supposed to disdain. Even now, I cannot recount these memories without distancing myself from them by casting them in humour. I do not return easily to those memories of shame, exclusion and humiliation which I felt. I have learned to account for that pain through a mode of memory which describes the feelings as the ‘normal growing pains of adolescence’. Oh how funny I was to take such trivia so seriously. One girl’s pain is dismissed. In contrast to the dismissive mode of individual remembering, empirical studies document pain experienced by many girls. A number of recent studies have described disadvantages that early adolescent girls experience with regard to the development of self-esteem and self-concept (Bush and Simmons, 1987; Gilligan et al., 1990; Hill and Lynch, 1983; Simmons and Blyth, 1987; TobinRichards, Boxer and Petersen, 1983). Hill and Lynch, in their review of gender differences in early adolescence, discuss the finding that, among other differences, ‘early adolescent girls also appear to experience more disruption of the self-concept than boys, as shown in decreased self-esteem, increased selfconsciousness, and instability of the self-concept’ (1983:219). The authors attempt to explain these findings through a ‘Gender-Intensification Hypothesis’.
Feminist Review No 46, Spring 1994
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They argue that adolescence contains pressures to conform to norms of identity which are more strongly associated with gender. Bush and Simmons (1987), who studied girls at the time of entry into junior high school, conclude that girls experience more difficulty coping than boys. They propose an explanation that extends Hill and Lynch’s GenderIntensification Hypothesis by suggesting that the bifurcation of identity through gender is associated with the private sphere for girls, and the public sphere for boys. The social devaluation of the private sphere results in greater difficulty for the female adolescent. A third view comes from Simmons and Blyth’s study of pubertal change and school context: Although the literature is controversial on this point, we find that girls scored lower than boys in global self-esteem. Girls also scored less favorably in terms of stability of the self-picture, self-consciousness, body-image, and attitude towards one’s own sex. At the same time that girls rated their appearance less favorably, they were more likely to care about their looks in line with traditional gender-role values. Ranking low in an area about which one cares a great deal would be expected to have greater global repercussions than ranking low in an area that is not highly valued. In fact, this combination of body image dissatisfaction and high valuation of appearance tended to be particularly detrimental to the overall self-esteem of girls. (1987:95) Simmons and Blyth suggest that girls experience ‘too much too soon’. They speculate that the changes in school context which occur simultaneously with the body changes of puberty and relationship changes (e.g., dating) are overwhelming for girls. Both my personal knowledge of girlhood pain, humiliation and shame, and the knowledge of distanced empirical work documenting girls’ pain, activated my interest in observing and subsequently studying the reactions of a particular group of children to their first invitation to a dance party. This event occurred at my son’s small, private, alternative elementary school, where I spend a great deal of time as a parent volunteer and an informal consultant on curriculum, particularly as it relates to gender issues. The school draws from primarily white, middle-class Canadian families who tend to espouse nonsexist child-rearing values. It is a population of children that could reasonably be said to be among the most protected with regard to the effects of gender stereotypes. The event of the dance party was an unusual one in the school. Most activities were school-based events or private birthday parties. The boy who held the dance party, Ed, had been at the school for a year. Much of his time had been spent consolidating his position as the local arbiter of ‘cool’. He was very powerful at using ‘cool’ values to disparage the values of the school, which included attention to sexism. Ed enjoyed the deviant notoriety he gained when he
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invited the grade five and six children (ages ten to twelve) to a dance party which he encoded with the descriptors ‘chips, coke and rock-’n’-roll’. With his invitation, he added the instruction that ‘girls should not wear sweat pants’. The invited children were quite clear that the code of ‘chips, coke and rock-’n’-roll’ set this party off from the parties of childhood. I became interested in studying the children’s reactions to the party when it became clear that the party was raising apprehension and anxiety, particularly in the girls. I had known many of these children for a long time, some since infancy. The uneasy affect inspired by the party seemed out of the ordinary. It called up in me memories of shame and exclusion and Miss Ford’s dance classes. While overhearing the snatches of conversation between the girls, I could not dismiss my past with the usual humorous recall. I was aware of watching the girls, in whose development I had participated, with a sense of growing anger at the pain they were experiencing. The empirical studies concerning girls’ self-esteem, with their extra-local, abstract explanations did not provide the naming I needed to make my anger political (Scheman, 1980). I therefore began a systematic study of the children’s reactions to the dance party shortly after the party. I interviewed six children: four girls and two boys. Of the four girls, one did not attend the party because she became so anxious about the decision that her parents decided she should not go. Another girl decided to go, but was unable to attend at the last minute due to family circumstances. I interviewed each child once, and asked each child to draw ‘a picture of the party that was good’ and ‘a picture of the party that was bad’. It is difficult to write about the ‘theoretical framework of the analysis’ without distorting the actuality of sense-making in relation to data. I have long been interested in poststructuralism (Weedon, 1987) because of its ability to conceptualize the production of subjectivity in relations of domination. Foucault’s (1979) insights about the positivity of power in producing docile bodies give me invaluable tools for understanding the operation of power in the local, everyday world. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, when combined with poststructuralism’s insistence on the social character of language, helps me approach the complex issue of internalization of power. Psychoanalysis helps explain how ‘investments’ (Henriques et al. 1984:205) in particular discourses are formed. Both poststructuralism and psychoanalysis joined with my personal knowledge, and with my dissatisfaction with the poverty of meaning of empirical studies, to form that complex foreground which Gadamer calls a ‘horizon of interpretation’ (1992:302). I approached the taped and transcribed conversations with children with an attitude of questioning. My questions, by necessity, were always/already grounded in my own historicity as person and scholar. In the dialectical process that is interpretation, two meanings became visible which form the basis of my interpretation. The first, grounded in poststructuralism, suggests that the girls I spoke with experienced, through their participation in the dance party, a shift from the subject position of girl child to
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that of a girl who is the object of the male gaze. The second meaning involves the production of shame that is consequent on the internalization of the sense of self as an object of the male gaze. In the following section, I will elaborate on these meanings and provide illustrations from the data. Interpretation Through immersion in the data and subsequent interpretation, I found that girls experienced the party as a discursive shift (a change in the language and practices which construct identity) from girls as children to girls as objects of the male gaze—or sex objects within heterosexual relations. This shift grounds the experience of actual or threatened shame, an experience which may be implicated in the general disturbance of self-esteem for early adolescent girls. I would first like to describe the construction of the discursive shift and then turn to the experience of shame. Finally, I will compare aspects of girls’ experience to that of the boys in the study. The discursive shift The theoretical ground for the interpretation of the discursive shift comes from poststructuralist work regarding the social construction of identity and power through language organized as discourse. I use the term discourse to mean the ideas, or ‘language cookie cutters’ which organize experience as meaningful. Discursive practices are those actions which are produced in and through meaning given by language. The girls’ transcripts evidence a discursive shift from the identity of a girl child to the identity of a girl as the object of the male gaze. Through the event of the dance party, the girls are reframed from girls whose sexual identity as children is inconspicuous, to girls whose sexual identity is subject to surveillance by cultural standards which have been produced through relations of domination between men and women. Such cultural standards offer heterosexuality as the sole subject position in development. The transition is a shift from girl/subject to girl/object. The girls experience a shift from the subjective experience that ‘I am dancing’, for example, to the experience that ‘I am being watched while I’m dancing’. The moment of the dance party accomplishes the production of girls as, in John Berger’s terms, a ‘sight’: Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (1972:47)
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The male gaze (surveyor) organizes the identity of the girl/object at the dance party through (1) the right way to talk, (2) the right way to dress, and (3) the right way to dance. I would like to present data which illustrates how the discursive shift to becoming a ‘sight’ is constructed. The first category is talk, and we can see the proscriptions on what can be talked about. One girl describes the difference between a birthday party and the dance party with reference to forms of talk. It is interesting to note that vulnerable feelings are not part of the new identity under construction. Well, I guess one way is that at that party, well for me just imagining it, it would be hard. Like at birthday parties, people express their feelings a lot. Like when they go to parties they say I can’t sleep, I’m scared, right? But this kind of party it would be kind of hard because everybody’s going so far they can’t say I don’t want to dance, I don’t want to do stuff. Talk that came from outside the party—in other words, talk that originates in the subject position of childhood—is also prohibited: Let’s say you had something at home that makes you feel happy, like you were going somewhere, or you’re going away for March break, it has to… what you talk about is…you have to talk about, I’m not sure…you just couldn’t talk about the outside world and all that sort of stuff but maybe what is happening right there like who danced with who, what people are wearing and all this kind of stuff. A new identity is being produced—not girl/child, but an identity that is produced through the rules of the party in terms of dress, talk, dance. The identity is strange: Well, everybody is probably joking and laughing and I don’t know, they are just being really silly and well not normal sort of thing. I guess I could probably joke around like they do and try to be funny, but that wouldn’t really be what I felt like at that time, it was sort of just like a show that people put on. The issue of dress becomes a major space in which identity is reformed as an object under scrutiny. The girls do not have the kind of clothes required by the dance party form, yet they have been told not to wear sweat pants—that would wreck the way the host intends the occasion to mark off their collective identity as children. The demands for a certain kind of dress also put pressure on the girls to make a statement about an identity they do not yet have, and one over which they cannot exercise choices based on what feels right for them. For example, one
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child rushed home after being invited to the party and looked frantically through her closet. She was panic stricken that, having been told by Ed not to wear sweat pants, she only had ‘party dresses’ to wear. Since party dresses are not in the repertoire of clothes that constitute a ‘sight’, she could not wear them to the dance. Her only ‘choice’ was to ask her parents for jeans or a miniskirt. She did not want to do this because her parents would think it was ‘weird’. My reading here is that she feared her parents would be disappointed in her for taking up the male gaze in her choice of clothes. This was the child who became so anxious about the party that her parents finally took the decision out of her hands. Part of the anxiety over dress is that it not only represents difference, it is also impossible to get it right. The girls must obey rules of the discourse that are themselves contradictory. The girls must be different from the children they are; they must be objects of desire who achieve the contradictory instruction not to stand out. Watch how this plays out in Sarah’s discussion of sweat pants. I would feel very like an outsider because everybody else is wearing different things and I wouldn’t even be wearing jeans—just sweat pants. Dresses are out because they are associated with standing out and also childhood itself: Strange, it felt like whenever I wear dresses now especially very nice ones like my mom says look pretty on me, I feel like I’m trying to be better and prettier than all the rest of the people, so I don’t like that much. So if I came…so that’s the reason I don’t like to wear them, so I don’t know if I wore a long dress I would feel very weird because everybody was wearing short skirts and jeans. So how does one do it right? First of all, because everybody was wearing, like Kathy wore a miniskirt and Anne wore a short dress, but if I wore pants I would feel really weird and if I come in a dress I would probably feel strange too because I don’t wear dresses often, if we had company sort of I would, and if I did go, I don’t know—it is hard to imagine what it would be like. The issue of dancing is a potent site of the girls’ discursive reorganization as objects. None of the girls were comfortable with the idea of dancing. They felt that dancing was a potential site for evaluation and also that dancing reframed their relationships. Girls became potential critics of each other, and boys could no longer be their friends. According to Mary, if boys and girls dance together it signifies having ‘feelings for each other different from just being friends’. Friends are defined by Mary as:
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I can be a friend. I can sit beside a boy. I can talk to them. I can joke around with them. I can do lots of things because I wouldn’t be feeling like —I don’t know. If she danced with a boy at the party it would mean a loss of that boy as a friend the next day at school. I would probably feel really uptight if I sat beside him—I’m not sure why, but—I don’t think I could talk to him, just like another person talking to somebody. I couldn’t do that. The girls’ distress about dancing was based on a fear of being judged and found wanting. None of the girls saw themselves as knowing how to dance, yet they felt there was no choice. Dancing has carefully been offered as the crucial distinction which marks off this party. It is the only activity other than eating chips and drinking coke. If they go to the party they can either hang around the sidelines being seen not dancing, or they can be seen dancing without knowing how. They are a ‘sight’ in either case. If they decide to avoid these choices by not going to the party, they will feel left out: the party is elided with growing up itself. Not going risks being left behind. The evaluation of the body through dancing evokes Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is an architectural form designed to maximize obedience through individualization and surveillance. Persons were to exist in spaces that were ‘small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault, 1979:200). The constant possibility of being seen produces obedience in subjects. In such a way, the internalized male gaze produces girls’ ‘consent’ to their positioning as objects. Sarah did not want to dance. When asked by me she said: S: No, not exactly, I felt that all the kids there…it would seem very strange to be dancing at this age. A: Why? S: Well dancing to me is sort of showing off in a way, because when you’re dancing you try to do all these neat things and everything, it’s so that people would look at her, look at how she dances good or how you look at her when you’re dancing and stuff like that. That is part of the reason why I feel uncomfortable like up dancing. [A:…] Well, I guess I would feel that they were doing it and if I just sat down and did nothing that maybe that it would be I would feel sort of embarrassed because everybody else was moving around dancing and joking, and if I don’t feel like that, then it well, almost feels like taking me and putting me above everybody else—I mean not above, but beside everybody, and everybody notices me. There is no ground outside evaluation.
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Shame I’ve attempted to describe the discursive shift which is produced in the dance party forms of dress, talk and dance. But this does not adequately capture the regulatory power that cements the object position in place. I would like to suggest that the cement for the shift from subject to object is the emotional experience of shame. Returning a moment to Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon, I would like to stress Foucault’s notion that the success of surveillance depends on shaping the desire of those who are surveilled. After all, Foucault’s point is to examine how subjects come to exercise self-government in the interests of power. What appears to happen is that ‘good behaviour’ as defined in dominant discourses, is installed through the constant possibility of being under scrutiny. While Foucault describes the operation of power, psychoanalysis describes the process through which power is installed in identity through the production of shame. Andrew Morrison describes shame as the result of the ego’s failure to attain an ego ideal. ‘Failure to attain an ideal or goal serves then as a major precipitant of shame, with the concomitant threat of rejection or abandonment by the significant others’ (Morrison, 1989:82). In the case of the girls under discussion, the ego ideal is the ability to talk, dance and dress ‘right’. These forms produce objects of the male gaze. They open up the possibility of being scrutinized. The penalty for failure is shame, with its threat of abandonment and rejection by others. Mary’s picture of the party that is bad for her is a beautiful illustration of this process (see Figure 1). She pictures herself alone, not having danced with a boy, being judged by her friends and rejected. In Mary’s second picture, a picture of the party that is good for her, she is feeling fine because her dress is fine, she doesn’t have to dance with a boy, and because boys’ and girls’ relationships don’t change. Notice that the way out of the shame position is through the destruction of the ‘ideal’ set up through the dance party form (see Figure 2). Mandy’s picture of the party that is bad for her (Figure 3) shows a strobe light, which for her marks a dance party. She is off to one side of the party, feeling nervous, feeling that she wants to go home. Two boys are dancing. Two girls at the other side of the picture are dancing. They are usually good friends, but are ignoring her at the party. They ‘don’t want to have much to do with Mandy’. One girl is pointing and laughing at Mandy. In Mandy’s picture of the party that was good for her (Figure 4), she is dancing with someone of unknown sex—it could be a girl and it could be a boy. A boy and girl are dancing together with no teasing or nervousness. In sum, I am arguing that the discursive shift entailed by the dance party installs the male gaze in girls’ identities as the ego ideal. Girls’ childhood identities do not meet this ideal. Thus, under the scrutiny of the male gaze, girls are threatened with shame. This threat not only exacts their obedience to the
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ideal, but it also repositions their girlfriends as their harshest critics and potential sources of abandonment. Let us look at how this argument is derived from the data. In a discussion of feelings about dancing, I asked Mandy to articulate the difference between not knowing how to dance, and not knowing how to play an instrument. Her answer indicates the sense in which her sense of self is threatened with shame. Well, I guess it is different because playing music, like you can play stupid music but that’s not…with dancing you are moving—it has more to do with you. Mandy does not want to dance. But when she went to the party, she watched the other children. She noticed that the boys could ‘make fools of themselves and still call it dancing’. Since the boys are able to look ridiculous, she feels better. When the host’s mother intervenes to teach the children a dance, Mandy feels that the danger of shame has receded with her ability to do it right. Other girls were not so fortunate, however. All the children in the study described Brenda’s entrance at the party with absolute horror. Brenda had not gotten it right. She had worn a party dress, which Mandy described as ‘a skirt which
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twirled out, white tights, and a blouse with a fancy collar’. Mandy, who by virtue of dancing now feels like an insider, does not want to take the step of asking a boy to dance. Instead, she cements her relief at not being an outsider through altruism. She asks those girls who have not danced to dance. She tries to help Brenda, but it is not possible for an insider to help an outsider: M: I just didn’t have the nerve to ask anybody. Well, I could ask Andrea or Judy and I asked Judy and Brenda. Judy wasn’t dancing but for some reason, I could tell she was not an outsider, but sort of watching everybody, so I asked her to dance. I asked Brenda because I knew how she felt. And when Brenda first walked in the room I sort of tried to make her feel at home by pretending I didn’t notice the skirt. A: So you asked her to dance so she’d feel less like an outsider? L: Well, by that time I felt pretty confident about dancing so I told—at first I didn’t ask her to dance I just told her, I know how you feel about being the outsider and I told her that it didn’t matter, but she never came round to dancing.
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It is hard to overestimate the regulatory function of shame. Mandy has witnessed the humiliation of a girl she knows is adequate from other contexts because of a skirt. For girls, whose development is contingent on relational connexions
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(Gilligan et al. 1990), the threat of rejection and abandonment has extraordinary power. So what do we have that helps us with the larger issue of girls’ self-esteem in early adolescence? My data suggest that one possibility is that the shift into a sexual object position from the subject position of childhood creates actual and potential shame through the installation of the male gaze as the ego ideal. This shame carries threats to connexion with significant others. I am therefore
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suggesting that this process may be related to girls’ self-esteem disruptions beginning in early adolescence. Boys While the focus of this study is on girls’ experience, looking at aspects of the experience of the two boys I interviewed allows for speculation (albeit limited by the small numbers of children in the study) about differences between boys and girls in their mediation of the social form of the dance party. The boys had very little ambivalence about the decision to attend the party. They saw it as exciting—a glimpse into the future and a chance to learn something about ‘cool’ behaviour. I know there are parties like that in high school so I know how exciting… I wanted to be invited to the party to see what it was like because if I was invited to one in high school I would know what it’s like. The categories of dress and talk are not found in the boys’ transcripts. One child, when questioned directly about dress acknowledged that there was such a thing as cool clothes, but there was very little anxiety about what he would wear. What is different is that the sense of being scrutinized is absent. Without scrutiny, the issue of what to wear loses its power: A: What should people wear to Ed’s kind of party? T: Just ordinary clothes. A: Did you think about what you were supposed to wear? T: Umm, yeah, but… A: What did you think? T: Jeans. Short-sleeved shirt. That’s about it. A: Did it need to be short-sleeved? T: No, it didn’t need to be, but… A: Would you have worn a sweatshirt T: No. A: Why not? T: Well, it was very hot in there and so… I brought one but I didn’t really, it wasn’t really… I started off with it but it wasn’t really good. It was too hot. A: Were you worried about Brenda when she came in? T: I felt sort of sorry for her but… Back to clothes—I wore a short-sleeved shirt with a long-sleeved shirt because, well that’s my favourite kind of shirt and I don’t like tight shirts. Notice that without the scrutiny of the male gaze withstood by the girls, boys can assess what to wear in relation to how their bodies feel. There is no discussion about talk in the boys’ transcripts. There are references to dance, however. Both boys described the possibility of being embarrassed by
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not being able to dance. Their descriptions of initial discomfort about dance are similar to those of the girls. In the boys’ case, they fear falling short of the ‘cool’ ego ideal as set forth by their host. However, there is a big difference regarding what happens to this embarrassment when boys are not, as girls are, interpolated into an object position. Basically, boys appear to treat embarrassment as motivation for mastery rather than an occasion for shame. Their job is to learn to do it right. It is possible to do it right by interacting with the other boys in a way that actively establishes the norms for doing it right. As subjects, they create the conditions for success. Tom says: T: Well I saw everyone sort of like how they danced and after about an hour when I came in I was sort of like… Well, I came in and then no one laughed at me so I was just dancing around and an hour later, no a half an hour later, I started getting a little crazy and then I stopped. A: Why did you start getting a little crazy? T: Because it was exciting and then I stopped. A: Could you tell me about that? T: There was lots to do. Everybody was screaming so I couldn’t really be calm or anything. Everybody wasn’t calm. And then some people were so—their ears hurt because there was so much [noise] so they went in the other room and I went in too. I just followed Andy and someone. And then when we calmed down we started—everybody danced with everyone except Pat and Brenda wouldn’t dance with anyone. A: What made you feel excited? T: It was, I don’t know. I’d never been to a party like that. A: If you looked around the party were there people who made you feel excited? T: Yeah. A: Who? T: Ed did. A: Yeah. T: Andy did. Carol made me a bit excited. Dick made me a bit excited. Oh yeah —sorry—and Jerry White. A: What were they doing that made you excited? T: They were dancing like crazy. A: Really? T: Yeah. There was…and everybody was going into the bathroom and wetting their hair. So I did that too. A: Did you? T: Yeah. I slicked it all back. And later: Well, at first I felt that way but about a quarter of the per cent I didn’t feel embarrassed because everybody was dancing, cause lots of boys were
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dancing with girls and I didn’t really feel embarrassed any more. I didn’t really feel embarrassed period. The party is an occasion for mastery for the boys. Their teacher is Ed, who is powerful because he knows how to be cool. But he is also one of them. Boys as subjects who are learning the discursive practices of the party form have a different relationship to each other than girls who are learning an object position. Mandy points this out with great clarity. Here, she is describing the fact that boys asked girls to dance, but not the other way around. M: Why do I think the boys have more nerve? Mainly because they’re closer to Ed. And it was Ed’s party and they’re sort of like a gang. They tease but in a different way. They did once or twice. A: Do you think the boys felt, when you say they were a gang do you think the girls felt like a gang? M: No. Well lots of girls asked girls to dance but I don’t think many boys asked boys to dance. And Mike danced with almost every girl, but you couldn’t really call it dancing and he didn’t ask, he just sort of was running across the room flinging people. A: So if I’m thinking about it, I think about boys having a kind of a gang. Would they have sort of said, okay, let’s ask the girls to dance? Is that how boys give each other encouragement? M: No. It’s sort of like they’re kind of hanging around together, like Ed and Joe. Joe—I’m not sure if he asked but Ed sure did. He danced with everybody except Brenda. A: Do the girls feel like they were part of a gang as well? M: They felt nervous I think. Except Jane. They felt nervous. A: The girls felt nervous? M: Except Jane. Jane asked. I’m not sure. A: I guess what I’m getting at—was there a girls’ gang and a boys’ gang or did the girls feel more by themselves and the boys felt more… M: They felt more nervous so they felt more by themselves. A: I see. Why do girls feel more nervous? M: I guess because it was a boy’s dance party. I’m not sure. I felt a bit nervous because I didn’t know how to dance, but during the party I didn’t feel nervous. A: Can you say why you felt nervous? M: I felt nervous because I didn’t know how to dance. But boys just sort of do whatever. Mandy’s description reminds me of Frank Pittman’s discussion of the male chorus: Masculinity includes the symbols and the uniforms and the chants and the plays that make this the boys’ team rather than the girls’ team. And as a
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guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied and critiqued by an invisible chorus of all the other guys, who hiss and cheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him to sacrifice more and more of his humanity for the sake of his masculinity and who ridicule him when he holds back. (1990:42) Tom’s transcript points to the construction of the masculine ego ideal through the male peer group. This helps us see the girls’ process as more shame-prone, more isolated, and more excluded from the process of creating the norms by which they are judged. I am flagging these elements as possibly implicated in the production of coping difficulties and self-esteem disturbances in girls. Certainly material from the boys points to different concerns. One can speculate, for example, on the relationship between the peer group validation of norms and the intense fears around nonconformity experienced by men. While the small numbers of children interviewed offer no possibility of generalizing even to all children who attended the party, the study hopefully opens up conceptual space around the production of damage through the acquisition of gendered identity. Discussion In this paper, I’ve attempted to show how an invitation to a first co-ed dance party, as a normal event of early adolescence, is a moment of cultural production which we can study as part of an effort to understand declines in self-esteem in early adolescent girls. I have tried to show how the dance party is a place where girls must watch themselves as objects of the male gaze. I have argued that shame, the cement of this object position is produced when the surveyor (the male gaze) is installed as the ego ideal that the surveyed (the female) always falls short of reaching. Shame, with its threatened rejection and abandonment by significant others, has an important regulatory function in the reproduction of girls as objects. I have been interested to note women’s reactions to this study during several seminar presentations. I have noticed a tendency for women listeners to immediately revisit the painful and shameful experiences of their own adolescence. Many times these have been shared with the group. The content of the experience usually revolves around the feeling of having been the ‘only one’ to suffer so. The discussions have frequently been accompanied by laughter and a sense of solidarity. However, the pain evoked by the data is frequently normalized through a discourse about adolescence as naturally painful and embarrassing. I would like this study to rescue the pain and shame from its trivialization within such a discourse of adolescence. I want to insist that the pain, the shame, the disturbance of self-concept, self-esteem, body-image etc., are inevitable responses to the production of feminine identity as subordinate to masculine intention. It hurts not because ‘it’s just part of growing up’ but because the
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harnessing of a girls’ identity to the position of object of the male gaze cannot happen without pain. My data suggest very strongly that the powerful male gaze which informs girls’ imagination regarding their bodies is directly implicated in girls’ selfconcept. Simmons and Blyth (1987) discuss girls’ preoccupation with appearance. I think that this preoccupation exists because it is in adolescence that girls start to be looked at, and start to internalize the male gaze that enforces their looking at themselves. Not only do they look at themselves, but they always fall short of the ideal of the male gaze. Thus, their preoccupation with appearance can only be understood with reference to a social context in which watching invents preoccupation. Further, girls’ preoccupation with appearance can be read as a self-defeating attempt to seize control at a time when bodily control has disappeared with the installation of girl as object. Berger helps us understand girls’ preoccupation with appearance when he says: To be born a woman has been to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split in two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually (Berger, 1972:46). My point in this paper is that the dance party is a site for teaching and persuading girls to survey themselves. It is a potent site in that the persuasion is accomplished through pleasure. The study examines a moment in time when girls are caught by surprise at an invitation they didn’t expect. Their mediation of the event comes before the ‘mental practising’ that is done to prepare for the transition from girl to object of the male gaze. It is in this moment that the discursive shift and the production of shame can be seen. However, this moment, shared as it was by the girls, does not initiate any unitary path in development. As they grow up, some of the girls will undoubtedly identify with the dance party form. They will learn the right forms of dress, talk and dance. Angela McRobbie discusses styles created in youth subcultures as opportunities for resistance. ‘For many of us too, escaping from the family and its pressures to act like a real girl remains the first political experience’ (McRobbie, 1980:49). The dance party form may be a way to resist families’ definitions of girls’ identities. Some girls will invest in the form, where new prescriptions are elided with the pleasure of rejecting the family. But the change enabled by this rejection replaces
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one set of constraints with another: the use of sexuality/pleasure to reject the family places young women squarely within the dictates of femininity. On the other hand, as a girl, I did not share McRobbie’s investment in subculture as escape. For me, the dance party form threatened to decimate my carefully cultivated invisibility. I had learned in my family how to manage a life of pleasure in fantasy by not allowing myself to be seen. The sheer visibility imposed at dance parties, the spectre of being the object of any gaze was unbearable. So I chose to remain cloistered in the family. Angela McRobbie would not have been my friend. I would have seen her as one of those girls who knew how to do it right, whose success ridiculed my failure. In retrospect, I realize that girls who hid within the constraints of femininity imposed by youth subcultures were not that far apart from those of us who hid within the family. My projection of who Angela McRobbie might have been is an illustration of Christine Griffin’s (1985) concerns about the ways girls are separated and divided from each other during their entry into adolescence. My experience, and the experience of the girls in the study show how quickly girls reposition other girls as judges for the male gaze. In both sets of drawings, the accusation of failure came from other girls. Given the ages of the children in the study, I think the girls actually dismissed most of the boys as having no power with relation to the male gaze. These boys were akin to pesky younger brothers—nothing like real boys. However, the party is an occasion for displaying themselves for the first time as objects of a male gaze that has been internalized throughout their entire developmental history. The girls share this cultural history and can therefore stand as projected judges of each other. Christine Griffin writes of the enforcement of heterosexuality in girlhood: ‘it is important to stress that dominant notions of romantic love relate to the system of compulsory heterosexuality, which serves to police the transition to marriage/ motherhood’ (Griffin, 1982:3). The girls’ drawings make this form of regulation very clear. In the pictures of the party that was bad for them, the girls drew other girls laughing at them and excluding them. They drew themselves as failing to dance with boys, which is the correct form. In the pictures of the party that is good for them, Mary is dancing with another girl and feeling that this is acceptable. Mandy dances with someone whose sex is not determined. Both pictures show a heterosexual couple dancing, but in both cases it is not the girl herself. In the party that is good for her, each girl resists compulsory heterosexuality. The difference between good and bad parties represented in the two sets of pictures raises important issues. In the party that is bad, we are allowed to see the forces that propel the production of femininity and compulsory heterosexuality. Avoiding shame by making the right ‘choices’ at the dance party produces a selfregulating girl who, in Valerie Walkerdine’s terms, lives out ‘the illusion of autonomy [which] is central to the travesty of the word “freedom” embodied in a political system that has to have everybody imagining they are free the better to regulate them’ (Walkerdine 1989:29). Yet it is important to recognize that there is ‘a contradiction between the openness of human capacities that we promote in
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a free society and the social forms that are present and set the terms on which much of life is to be lived’ (Simon, 1992:22). The girls’ drawings of the party that is good for them show us that spaces on the outskirts of dominant discourses do exist. Girls can fantasize a party in which compulsory heterosexuality is not enforced. They can imagine that one might dress to suit one’s preference in terms of comfort or style. They demonstrate a desire to be comfortable with their interests and feelings in the public form of the party. The gap between the two pictures is the space for a life-long contest between how they are marked and who they are. This analysis raises questions about educational and parenting practices. Are there teaching and parenting strategies that can help children contest their own redefinition through the forms like the dance party? The problem here is that the power of such form comes from the production of both pleasure and danger. Girls learn to take pleasure in being looked at. Boys take pleasure in the intense pleasure of power. Perhaps the space that we might open up with children would come from learning to speak about both the pleasure and the danger. I am suggesting a practice that does not censor or denigrate children’s pleasure, but that continually questions its coexistence with pain. Specifically, we can talk about feelings that come from being looked at, about watching oneself, about being afraid of the judgement of one’s peers. We can help boys talk about the powerlessness that lies under the surface of power gained through conformity. We can encourage children’s ability to evaluate both pleasure and pain in the social forms within which they must grow up. In short, we can help them explore the gap that was consistently represented in their drawings between ‘the party that was bad for them’ and ‘the party that was good for them’. This requires us to end our own tendency to dismiss the pain as natural and normal. In order to facilitate this exploration it is necessary for parents and educators to tolerate their own critical awareness without giving in to internal pressures for an ‘educational’ solution to the problem of power. With no ready solutions, to watch the gendering of children within toxic social forms is a lot to ask of ourselves. Once we have seen past the discourses that normalize adolescent pain there is nothing to protect and distance us from the pain we are exposed to in children that we care about. Raising questions feels like a poor weapon against the harm inflicted by gender. Yet while we cannot expect that children will escape injury through gender, helping to raise questions empowers the self by validating the existence of experiences which live in the shadows of dominant discourses. When I remind myself that empowerment rather than escape is my goal in education and parenting, I am better able to find a critical practice with children which also insists on broader social change.
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Note Amy Rossiter is a feminist social worker who teaches social work from a critical perspective at York University in Toronto. She is interested in the formation of gendered subjectivity and has published a book called From Private to Public: A Feminist Exploration of Early Mothering. She is also interested in feminist pedagogy, and is experimenting with ways to explore subjectivity in classroom settings. References BARNETT, R.C., BEENER, L. and BARUCH, G.K. (1987) editors, Gender and Stress New York: The Free Press. BERGER, John (1972) Ways of Seeing London: British Broadcasting Corporation. BROOKS-GUNN, Jeanne and PETERSEN, Anne (1983) editors, Girls at Puberty: Biological and Psychosocial Perspectives New York: Plenum. BUSH, Diane and SIMMONS, Roberta (1987) ‘Gender and coping with the entry into early adolescence’ in BARNETT, BIENER and BARUCH. FOUCAULT, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Middlesex: Peregrine Books. GADAMER, Hans-Georg (1992) Truth and Method New York: Crossroads. GILLIGAN, Carol, LYONS, Nona P. and HANMER, Trudy J. (1990) Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. GRIFFIN, Christine (1982) ‘Cultures of femininity: romance revisited’ SP No. 69, March 1982, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. ——(1985) Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. HENRIQUES, J., HOLLWAY, W., URWIN, C., VENN, C. and WALKERDINE, V. (1984) Changing the Subject London: Methuen. HILL, John and LYNCH, Mary Ellen (1983) ‘The intensification of gender-related role expectations during early adolescence’ in BROOKS-GUNN and PETERSEN. McCONNELL, R., BORKER, N. and FURMAN, N. (1980) editors, Women and Language in Literature and Society New York: Praeger. McROBBlE, Angela (1980) ‘Settling accounts with subcultures’ Screen Education Vol. 34: pp: 37–49. MORRISON, Andrew (1989) Shame: The Underside of Narcissism Hillsdale, N.J.; The Analytic Press. PITTMAN, Frank (1990) ‘The masculine mystique’ The Family Therapy Networker May-June: pp. 40–52. SCHEMAN, Naomi (1980) ‘Anger and the politics of naming’ in McCONNELL, BORKER and FURMAN (1980). SIMMONS, Roberta and BLYTH, D.A. (1987) Moving into Adolescence: The Impact of Pubertal Change and School Context Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter. SIMON, Roger (1992) Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility Toronto: OISE Press.
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TOBIN-RICHARDS, M.H., BOXER, A.M. and PETERSEN, A.C. (1983) ‘The psychological significance of pubertal change: sex differences in perception of self during early adolescence’ in BROOKS-GUNN and PETERSEN (1983). WALKERDINE, Valerie and LUCEY, Helen (1989) Democracy in the Kitchen London: Virago. WEEDON, Chris (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
POWER AND DESIRE: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality1 Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson
In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone et al. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the bodies which engage in sexual activities as socially constructed has been a very productive way of thinking about how femininity and masculinity can be inscribed on the body. It has seemed to offer an escape from the trap of seeing sex as essentially biological. Feminists, however, have disagreed quite profoundly on how to take account of the physicality or embodiedness of social encounters (Ramazanoglu, 1993). There has been a tendency to associate any sense of bodies as material with a naive biological essentialism. This has pushed feminist theorists away from thinking about sex as both a gendered and an embodied experience, in which female embodiment differs from male embodiment (Bartky, 1990:65). The perceived opposition between essentialism and poststructuralism perpetuates a conceptual dualism between a natural, essential, stable, material body and a shifting, plural, socially constructed body with multiple potentialities. We do not have space to explore the debates over essentialism, but Fuss usefully points out that theories of the social construction of female sexuality do not escape the pull of essentialism: one can talk of the body as matter without assuming that matter has a fixed essence (1989:5, 50). In this paper we argue that there is no simple conceptual dualism which allows us to distinguish the material, biological, female body from the social meanings, symbolism and social management of the socially constructed feminine body. The material body and its social construction are entwined in complex and contradictory ways which are extremely difficult to disentangle in practice. This complexity can make it difficult for young women to manage heterosexual encounters and to practise safer sex. Sexual encounters are clearly bodily
Feminist Review No 46, Spring 1994
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experiences as well as social relationships. We cannot though simply lift the veil of patriarchal ideology to discover an essential truth of female sexuality beneath, so we have a problem both in knowing how best to think about the social management of bodies and in managing them. Foucault (1980:120) has suggested dissolving the appearance of two separate sides to sexuality—an essential versus socially constructed sexuality, but this should not be taken as meaning that the physical body can simply be dissolved into the social. Women live with the physicality of bodily encounters, and often with physical violence, in ways which Foucault did not examine. Practices of feminine heterosexuality embody the power relations through which masculinity and femininity are constructed. When women are able to take control of their sexuality in an active femininity, they can bring the social shaping of their material bodies into consciousness, and govern their own sensuality. The problem we explore here is why young women do not generally do this. The Women, Risk and AIDS Project This paper is based on reflections on research carried out by the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) and, specifically, on interpretations of interviews in which young women gave accounts of their sexual encounters.2 With a few exceptions (which we do not discuss here) these were heterosexual encounters with a single partner. The WRAP team interviewed 150 young women aged 16–21, between 1988 and 1990. A pre-selection questionnaire (completed by 500 young women) provided a statistical profile of a (non-random) sample from which we generated two purposive samples (one in London, one in Manchester, UK). The defining variables gave a sample (which roughly approximated to the national characteristics of young women in this age group) stratified by social class, power (based on level of educational attainment and/or type of work experience), ethnic origin and type of sexual experience. The main technique used was an unstructured interview, which was taperecorded, transcribed and analysed using the Ethnograph program. The interviews were informal and intensive, covering sensitive areas about sexual experience.3 In this paper we consider how the embodiment of sexuality is experienced by young women.4 The broad findings of the WRAP research indicate high levels of sexual activity among the young women, but limited perceptions that they are putting their bodies at risk. Of these young women, 62 per cent were sexually active by their sixteenth year and 96 per cent by or at age 21. Seventy per cent of the sample had had sexual intercourse unprotected against HIV or sexually transmitted diseases, and 45 per cent had had sexual intercourse unprotected against pregnancy. This level of risk-taking was associated with very general inequalities of gendered power in their accounts of their sexual relationships.5
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Although women can negotiate the terms of such encounters, their negotiations are subject to social constraints which legitimate sexual pressure from men, including violence, and provide a model of sexual behaviour for young women which can be described as passive femininity. We have identified this dominant version of femininity as an unsafe sexual strategy since first, it makes women responsible for male sexuality without being able to control it; second, it has no concept of the autonomy of women’s bodies or of female sexual desire; third, it makes it difficult for young women to practice safer sex. Young people’s variable responses to these pressures make their sexual practices contradictory and unpredictable (Holland et al., 1991), but very generally dominated by a social construction of men’s sexual needs.6 We have assumed that after infancy our material bodies cannot be experienced independently of ideas about them. It is more problematic, however, to assume that these ideas and our desires are always and wholly independent of our biology. The consequent problem of how we can think about the body runs divisively through feminism. Lois McNay usefully summarizes the problems feminists face in adopting Foucault’s theory of bodies as effects of power. She argues that this does not allow ‘the libidinous force of the body’ to oppose sexual power. ‘In this respect, there is a tension in Foucault’s work between his explicit statements about not wishing to deny the materiality of the body and his failure to show in what way such materiality manifests itself (1992:40). We have explored ‘manifest materiality’ through trying to make sense of young women’s accounts of managing embodied sexuality. We draw on both feminist theory and women’s experience to consider the ways in which the disembodiment of feminine sexuality regulates women’s bodies and reproduces conventional gender relations, while at the same time the materiality of bodies can disrupt these relations. This possibility of disruption can offer some space for women’s resistance to men’s sexual power. Disembodied f emininity It was striking, if not surprising, that in spite of the focus on sexuality and sexual encounters, reference to and discussion of the body is almost absent from the interview transcripts; female sexuality is present in the interviews but is largely disembodied. The young women’s accounts, however, do indicate points of tension in which physical bodies interrupt idealized relationships in ways which may be violent, disappointing, sensual, surprising, boring, lovely, disgusting. The subject body, in the sense of an active but hidden, secret, unexpected, female sexuality, confronts the romantic object, in the sense of the overt, highly skilled social construction and disembodiment of femininity. Young women are under pressure to construct their material bodies into a particular model of femininity which is both inscribed on the surface of their bodies, through such skills as dress, make-up and dietary regimes, and disembodied in the sense of detachment from their sensuality and alienation from
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their material bodies. Exploring the connexion between embodiment and disembodiment through talk is particularly difficult. The topic of sexual activity set both the young women and the interviewers limits on how they could talk about sex, since the dominant culture has no acceptable language for discussing sex in ways which are not clinical, obscene or childish. The available language is one couched in terms of relationships: ‘making love’, ‘sleeping with’, or in euphemisms and obscurities: ‘going to bed’, ‘down there’, ‘you know’, in which bodily sexual activities become veiled. Talking about what women do with their bodies, and what is done to their bodies, exposes and threatens the careful social construction of disembodied sexuality. Sex talk is itself sexy, so accounts of sexual activity, or discussions of bodily states, can in themselves be physically arousing, erotic, titillating, voyeuristic. This can shift the definition of an interview—or an article—from a social to a potentially sexual context.7 The interviewers and the young women were involved in maintaining precarious boundaries between the social and the sexual (see also Emerson, 1970). The extracts from transcripts which we draw on in this paper indicate something of the oblique and disconnected talk used by young women about their bodies. This lack of explicit language is connected to the social pressures on young women to keep their sexual knowledge and sexual prowess concealed in order to be decent, just as all evidence of menstruation must be completely hidden, even by young girls (Prendergast, 1989). To reveal sexual knowledge and express physical sexual desires (as opposed to wanting a relationship with a boyfriend) threatens a girl’s reputation. Socially constructed femininity, for young women in the UK, must combine the allure necessary for attracting and holding a male partner, with concern for sexual reputation. A: With girls you’re brought up to be ladylike, because if you start being rampant you’re called a slag or a slut or whatever, but with the boys they can get away with anything, like they won’t really get called no major names, they just get called Casanova and things like that, but that’s not really going to hurt them, like if a girl gets called a slag. (Aged 16, Afro-Caribbean, working class, London) A modest, feminine reputation requires a young woman to construct a disembodied sexuality. The woman becomes a passive body, rather than actively embodied. Something of this is indicated in the following extract where explicit acknowledgement of physical sexuality is expressed as ‘all that business’. A: …when anyone ever said sex before, all I ever thought was sexual intercourse. That’s what it is isn’t it? Q: Well, do you think of anything else as being sex? A: No, I never thought of—I didn’t think foreplay or anything was sex. But it is, isn’t it, in some way. Oral sex— Q: Oral sex can be part of it as well.
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A: Yeah, it’s like, like that, and I didn’t know—I never ever connected sex with the touching and—all that business. (Aged 16, Asian, working class, London) Here the conception of sex is explicitly disembodied in the disconnexion between sex and touching. While explicit accounts of sexual activity are largely missing, the interviews can be read as implying complex interconnexions of power and resistance, in which young women experience social pressures to construct their bodies as passive and fragmented sexual objects. These can become eroticized, but this is within a ‘masculine appropriation of desire in a society that renders desire as power’ (Goldstein, 1990). Emily Martin has shown that women do tend to see their bodies as separated from themselves, as needing to be controlled. She reported a ‘fair amount of fragmentation and alienation in women’s general conceptions of body and self of which they did not seem to be aware (1989:89). The detachment of many young women from the possibilities of their bodies meant that they simply did not know, or even wish to know initially, about some sexual activities. Questions in the interviews, for example, about oral sex did get responses, but often came up against the boundaries of disembodied femininity. Q: Is there a risk with oral sex? A: What’s that? Q: When a woman goes down on a man or a man goes down on a woman. A: Oh yeah. I wouldn’t do that, nothing like that…disgusting. Q: Would you have oral sex? A: I don’t think so, no. Q: Have you thought about it? A: Yes I have thought about it but I don’t think so, I don’t fancy the idea. (Aged 16, Afro-Caribbean, working class, Manchester) Where young women did enjoy oral sex they found it difficult to do more than hint at this in an interview, but their accounts did indicate a contradiction. Although young women might find cunnilingus more pleasurable than vaginal penetration it could be difficult to get men to accept this as ‘proper sex’, or to share their feelings about it. Q: And if he still—if he thinks it’s dirty down there, does that mean that he doesn’t kind of have oral sex…? A: Well, he—he said—he has, we have, yeah, we have, you know like, but he said—like once he said that he didn’t like doing it. But when he said that, you know, I thought, well, I’m not going to ask you to go down there if you think —you know, you don’t like it, you know. ‘Cos I suppose if I didn’t like doing it to him then maybe I wouldn’t want him saying, ‘I want you to give me a blow job’, or something, if I didn’t want to do it; so I wasn’t going to press it. But he has since then. And I was thinking, you know, ‘you said you didn’t like it’, you know—you know, I thought maybe, you know, maybe he’s doing
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it ‘cos he thinks he has to or something. But I suppose—saying you talk about things, I suppose you—even though you might think you talk about things you don’t talk about them that much really. (Aged 19, ESW8, working class, London) Where oral sex was pleasurable and permissible in a sexual relationship, this permission came from the man, and usually a man who was older or more sexually experienced than the young woman. This was a difficult area for women to negotiate with men because of the need for recognition of their bodies, and the level of communication with a partner required for shared pleasure. Lynne Segal (1992) has pointed out that even when women know how to experience pleasure, they are still constrained by the social construction of heterosexuality. Power, control and desire Feminist studies of heterosexuality can be interpreted as having identified the physical body as a social site where Foucault’s conception of the ‘micro physics’ of power (Foucault, 1979) can be applied to male domination (Coveney et al, 1984; Thompson, 1990; Hite, 1987; Jackson, 1982). This identification of power as gendered, links the disciplining of bodily activity to institutionalized heterosexuality, the ‘beauty system’, and women’s consent and resistance to male hegemony (Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 1990: Martin, 1989: Lesko, 1988; MacCannell and MacCannell, 1987). The WRAP research provides support for Foucault’s theory that the body is the site where the larger scale organization of power is connected to the most minute and local practices, but Foucault fails to explain the link between male domination of sexual encounters and male power (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 1993). Foucault does not distinguish between men’s and women’s bodily experiences (Bartky, 1990), nor did he investigate the reasons for the creation and persistence of male domination. Sexual practices can be seen as linked to the large-scale organization of gendered power, but identifying this link still leaves problems of explanation: first, whether the body is in any sense fixed, how far, for example, women are able to take control of their bodies and desires; second, how men’s sexual domination is reproduced both in large-scale and in intimate institutionalized practices. Susan Bordo (1990:66) has pointed out that Foucault’s conception of power (unlike that of some of his followers) does not mean that there are no dominant social positions, social structures or ideologies, but that power is not held; rather people are differently positioned within it. The problem for feminists is that it is not clear what this means in relation to gendered power. Bordo suggests that it is the everyday habits of masculinity and femininity which socially constitute male dominance. Male hegemony may be technically precarious but since resistance either by women or men is an effort and struggle, it remains strong.9
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To understand men’s power to appropriate female desire, and the part women play in accepting or resisting this power, we need to understand issues of control in relation to the body. The embodiment of heterosexuality is paradoxical in that it entails both exercising control and losing control. This issue of control when two bodies meet cannot be disconnected from gendered power relations. A young woman who had reflected a great deal on sexuality after being violently raped said that she was now conscious of control in ways that she had not experienced before: A: I mean, because sex can be quite violent so I mean, it can be quite scary— scary or painful. Whereas, I mean, touching people and oral sex and whatever, I mean, that’s quite intimate. I mean, it’s a lot more intimate and you can talk and—I don’t know. Q: And do you have it? A: Yeah, and I prefer it now because I feel like I’ve got more control over the situation whereas with sex, I mean, especially if you’re on your back, I really do feel sometimes like I’m going to lose control. Not as in going to have an orgasm but actually like, ‘could I stop this right now if I wanted to?’ Because, I mean, that’s really important for me now. All the time I’ve got to be aware that I’m not necessarily in control as being dominant but just that if I get scared, you know, can I stop it? (Aged 21, ESW, middle class, London) Accounts of sexual violence or pressured sex were given by about a quarter of the young women interviewed, and clearly indicate power and force in sexual encounters. But it is too simple to argue that men in general directly and deliberately control women in patriarchal relationships. This can be the case, but even where violence or pressure is used, control is a complex and contested process (Holland et al., 1992b). While men may benefit from male domination in sexual encounters, they are also constrained by the social construction of heterosexuality (Holland et al., 1993). Women are both sexually subordinated by men, and drawn into the constitution of heterosexuality as male dominated in part through the efforts they put into the construction of passive femininity, which effectively silences their own desires. One young woman claimed to be in control in sexual relationships and to like to choose when and how to end relationships. The way she asserts her claim, however, illustrates some of the problems she faces. A: I think I always make sure I’m in control. The person that I was going out with, I went out with my last boyfriend’s best friend before I went out with my boyfriend, and he said to me that I was totally in control and that I had all the power in the world really. I do believe that in general women have more power in relationships than men do. Q: You do? A: Yeah, I believe they’re got more power to manipulate. Q: Mm. How?
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A: I just think that women in general are more cunning than men, I think we can —I don’t know—it’s just we can use—it sounds awful, feminine wiles to make people do things. Or I think—I think that’s what I’ve done in a way. I think a lot of the time I use sex in that way. Q: Yeah. And you haven’t felt that they’re put pressure on you to do things that you don’t want to do in the relationship? A: That has happened, yeah, I mean this last relationship’s dragged out longer than I would have wanted it to. It’s been quite painful for me which doesn’t— I don’t normally get so affected…but maybe I didn’t have quite as much control as what I would have liked. This person was a lot more independent of me than I would have liked, that’s why I got very frustrated in the end. So— he didn’t seem to need me, that was clear, he didn’t seem to need me as much as I’d been needed before. (Aged 21, ESW, middle class, London) In the course of this extract her claim to be in control is transformed into a claim to be needed. Elsewhere in her interview she revealed that she was receiving treatment for depression and had an eating problem: A: I don’t think I’ve ever found anything completely sexually satisfying, I think my main reason for actually having physical relationships is the cuddling and the affection and everything, I don’t really get a great deal out of the sex, because I think I cut myself off a lot of the time. I don’t seem capable of actually closing my mind and I always, sometimes—well, most of the time I start thinking this is really dirty, I think probably from what I was brought up with as a child, I just think—it just always seems wrong to me, although I’m probably sort of very liberal and I don’t feel anything like that is wrong, it just seems to come into my mind all the time, it makes me feel guilty so—it’s mostly for the affectionate side of it… In interpreting her account we draw, first, on her own words, the meanings she offers to us; second, on the interviewer’s notes and reflections on the interview; third, on discussion within the research team in the light of feminist theory. Through these levels of analysis we show her version of control as a feminine strategy of survival in social situations in which her efforts to lose control of her body fail her. Her conception of her sexual needs has to be kept secret. According to the dominant discourses of sexuality, masculine and feminine sexualities are natural essences, and sexual encounters are rational negotiations between responsible and equal individuals. The central paradox is, then, that sex is supposed to be a biological urge, but sexual encounters are supposed to be rational decision-making processes (see contributions to Aggleton and Homans, 1988). In medical and common-sense thought, men have uncontrollable sexual urges which are not shared by women. ‘Normal sex’ then entails active men satisfying passive women in the satisfaction of their own ‘natural’ desires. Women’s sexuality is defined as finding fulfilment in meeting men’s needs
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(Coveney et al., 1984; Jackson, 1982). As the following extract suggests, women are then socially constrained to control their own bodily appetites and suppress their own desires, since these are deemed ‘unnatural’ or at least unseemly. Q: Would you say that you enjoyed sex, the physical part? A: I wouldn’t say—well, sometimes its nice and other times I would say no. I do like sex, I think I have a higher sex drive that—he’s like that—‘behave!’—He’s embarrassed. (Aged 19, ESW, middle class, Manchester) Women lose control of sexual encounters to men through self-surveillance of their own bodies and desires. Male power constrains and controls, like a corset, but in accepting this constraint, in tightening the laces to enhance femininity, women lose the power of their muscles—the power of expressing their desire. Tension is located at the point at which women are supposed to stay in control, for example by taking responsibility for contraception, while losing control through orgasm. This tension is one factor contributing to unsafe sex (Holland et al., 1991). The social construction of male sexual arousal means men are supposedly in control at a rational level, but also physically out of control, while women must respond to male arousal, but also control the rational man. A: It was like as soon as he got an erection, that was all right no matter how I was feeling, whether I was aroused or not, you had to do things because that was the point when things happened, when he was aroused, not when I was aroused. (Aged 19, Asian, middle class, Manchester) For sex to be ‘normal’, the woman must lose control of the encounter so that the man can stay rational (Waldby, et al., 1991). Female desire is then both in the body, and socially constructed. A young woman is under social pressure (which she may or may not resist) to present male sexual partners with her idealized but material body for his pleasure. Any discourse which legitimates her pleasure, acknowledges her sexual knowledge, values her performance and places it under her control, is potentially threatening to his masculinity. The young women clearly indicated that they defined heterosexuality in terms of ‘proper intercourse’ which starts with penetration and ends when the male achieves his orgasm—with the man losing bodily control, but still in control. This male-centred heterosexuality requires that the woman also ought to have an orgasm to make it proper sex and to demonstrate his power. Faking orgasms is one way in which women use their bodies sexually in order to meet this aspect of social construction. A: I did fake a few orgasms, just to make him happy, ’Cos—’cos it—it—he was very considerate, I know, it’s like he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t have an orgasm until I had, so I thought—I thought, go ‘ooh, ooh, ooh’ a bit, then he might hurry up and finish.
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(Aged 18, EWS, working class, London) One young woman who had been sexually abused as a child and had never had an orgasm regularly faked orgasms to satisfy her partners: A: But I can remember one guy, I went to bed with, turned and said to me—Did you have an orgasm?—And I was just not in the mood, and I said—‘No’. Just… —‘You must have had an orgasm, nobody goes to bed with me and doesn’t have an orgasm!’, I said… Q: Oh yeah? That’s what they tell you. A: I said—‘Oh well there’s a first time for everything’. I really did used to think that there’s something wrong with me. (Aged 20, ESW, working class, Manchester) Deconstructing these tensions between control/loss of control/giving up control, shows the complexity of managing the sexual encounters into which the material body intrudes. Empirical study here begins to open up questions about the fixity/ stability of male hegemony. When women fake orgasms they are defining the sexual encounter as one which is defined by men’s physical sexual needs. The woman’s own bodily state then has to be concealed. One young woman was caught out by her body when she unexpectedly had her first orgasm in a relationship in which she was accustomed to fake orgasms, and regarded this faking as part of ‘normal sex’. A: …everyone I know does that, you know, you—you know, sort of like, there they are, you know, and if you…sort of like, they go, ‘you didn’t come, did you?’ and if you say, ‘no’, they go, ‘ohh’ [sigh], and they sort of feel like they’re so—not a man, you know. You know, you might enjoy sex but just ‘cos you didn’t have an orgasm it’s not the end of the world, but to them it is, you know, and they—I mean I suppose they equate it to them, you know, if they didn’t— Q: Yeah. A: –if every time they had sex, you know like, for five years, and they never ever come, you know, they’d sort of like be out killing themselves, wouldn’t they? But, you know, women do it for years and years, you know, it doesn’t bother us, you know—well, as much as it might bother them, and—you know, like so when I did… I couldn’t say to him ‘oh, that’s the first time I’ve had an orgasm’ [laugh], you know, so—but I was a bit surprised. I thought, ‘oh, my God’. Q: Yeah. But was that with actual intercourse or was that with other things? A: No, that was—but it was—it was ’cos I was on—I was on top, you know, so I suppose I got more stimulated that way, you know. But it’s surprising actually, how much they don’t—that’s why they’re so—why maybe they might not be able to please a woman. It’s because they don’t know nothing about our bodies. Like I don’t know if it’s ‘cos they don’t read or they didn’t take any notice of the biology lessons, but I mean it’s like quite easy to learn
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about what makes—you know, what a bloke’s private parts, you know, do and everything. (Aged 19, ESW, working class, London) These extracts signal a very clear definition of sex as penetrative sex for men’s pleasure in which women find fulfilment primarily in the relationship, in giving pleasure, and only secondarily in their own bodily desires or in communicating with their partner about shared pleasure. Foucault (1980:57) has argued that ‘nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power’, but that the ponderous forms of nineteenthcentury control are no longer necessary since industrial societies can manage with much looser forms of power: ‘one needs to study what kind of body the current society needs…’ (58). If we ask what kind of female body is required for the reproduction of male domination in intimate social relations, then the disembodied, disciplined female body implicit in the young women’s accounts of their sexuality is one socially appropriate response. Q: Have the men that you’ve been involved with, have they actually given you pleasure? A: No. No, actually I haven’t had an orgasm through, you know, through intercourse… Q: Have you had it through other ways? A: Yeah. I think. Q: What, through yourself doing it or sort of someone— A: Well through myself doing it or somebody else doing it, but not through inter —sexual intercourse. I haven’t tried actually. Q: Do you see pleasure as having to come through intercourse? A: No, not at all. I mean intercourse is just, you know, it’s something that— men’s sexual—having sex—but it’s not the most important thing. I don’t think it’s the centre of the pleasure in a sexual relationship. (Aged 19, ESW, middle class, London) The question of how men exercise power does not then require that men are conscious of women disciplining their own desires. Procedures for subordinating women in sexual encounters are complex and subtle, but a key factor is the extent to which young women expect men to define both the type of encounter and the boundaries of what is sexually pleasurable, clean, permissible. One young woman contrasted two of her relationships, neither of which was wholly fulfilling. In the first, although the sex was wonderful (‘lust with potential’) she said she had hated her partner. In the second she had settled for a more loving relationship in which ‘normal sex’ lacked passion so she had to dampen down the expression of her desires and try to value other aspects of the relationship. Tension is indicated when she says both that it is brilliant to be able to sleep at night, and also that she lies awake wondering when or if he is going to make a sexual advance.
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A: I couldn’t believe I’d gone from this really hot, sizzling relationship, to you know like, I mean, if I ever played about in stockings or anything he just went, ‘tut’, you know like,—passion—you know I can’t believe it, and I’m like awake all night thinking any minute now, you know, it’s just the difference but it’s—I mean, I know it sounds daft saying well how you can have a purely sexual relationship, which is like lust with potential, and I prefer to go out with Dave and be able to talk to him and like, just have a normal sex life, which you… Q: But not that quick to have sex and that, and not that enjoyable— A: To be able to go to sleep, I think it’s brilliant to be able to go to sleep. Q: Yeah right, I mean do you think you get a lot of enjoyment out of sex, or has sex, or as much as your partner is getting out of it, as a woman—I mean do you think that you know the difference? A: I know what you’re saying—um—well I think that I don’t enjoy sex for what it is right, when a fella is like going away, I’m not enjoying that, the actual intercourse, I like enjoyment from, I know it sounds like a typical woman statement, but them actually doing it and them enjoying themselves, and— Q: What, you, you enjoy him enjoying himself, right, you get pleasure from his pleasure… A: And also, like eh, oral sex, right. Q: Right, so things that, that usually, that are sort of called foreplay that’s what you get your pleasure out of? A: Yeah, the actual, I mean not a lot of women, I don’t think—I mean they’re got to be very lucky to give you an orgasm, ’cos they’re got to hit something quite a few times. (Aged 21, ESW, working class, Manchester) We take this extract to be an account of the silencing of female desire without the man being aware that this is happening. He determines the level and type of sexual activity in the relationship. She helps to reproduce dominant masculinity by her acceptance of ‘normal sex’ as primarily men’s pleasure, and the initial sexual advances as his rather than hers. Although she is plainly aware of her own sexual pleasure, she has disciplined her body to fit her expectations of what it is to have a boyfriend. This provides a connexion between the ‘micro physics’ of power at the level of bodily sexual intimacy and the social construction of masculinity and femininity which underpins male dominance more generally. Gendered disembodiment and the material body Women have to spend a good deal of time and effort in the skilled management of their bodies in order to make them socially presentable. Dorothy Smith (1988) comments on the artful and skilled work that has to go into learning and creating the presentation of self as feminine. These skills are necessary for the successful inscription of disembodied femininity on an idealized, desirable body, but these
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efforts do not simply constitute the corporeal as the social in an easy way. Bartky (1990:72) argues that ideal femininity requires such ‘radical bodily transformation’ that virtually every woman is bound to fail, adding shame to her deficiency. Letting particular aspects of the body emerge, as in ‘letting oneself go’, with lank hair, chipped nails, blemished skin, visible body hair in the ‘wrong’ places, ‘fat’, evidence of menstruation, body odour, is to be unfeminine. Women’s material (e.g., hairy, discharging) bodies are taken socially to be unnatural. In sexual situations there can be a particularly complex and unstable tension between the material body and what is socially inscribed on the body, rather than either unity or a balanced dualism. Although the body which engages in sexual activity is always socially constituted and managed, it is also always material, susceptible to pleasure and pain at different levels. It is this materiality, that in an idealized femininity should not exist, which is in danger of erupting on to the social scene in young women’s sexual encounters. The physical manifestation of material bodies disrupts the disciplined disembodiment of femininity—it connects the disconnexion between the ideal and physical—between what Adrienne Rich has called ‘the body’ and ‘my body’ (Fuss, 1989). It puts ‘my body’ at risk, opens it to the gaze of the other, makes it vulnerable to feelings, arousal and disease. Sexual activity with a partner, whether as penetrative sex or not, brings two physical bodies together in a social relationship, which is also material, corporeal. Young women’s reported reactions varied from the pleasurable, as in the case of the young woman quoted above who was surprised by her first orgasm, to the unpleasant, as in many experiences of first sex: A: …it wasn’t anything romantic, with no clothes on or anything like that, it was just sort of skirt up, know what I mean, and then you know by the time he did it, it was all over and done with. Q: You didn’t get much out of it? A: No, I didn’t get anything out of it actually. Although I remember he really really did hurt me, you know what I mean, that’s what I do remember. (Aged 21, Afro-Caribbean, middle class, Manchester) A sexual relationship, however physical, is always a social experience. We do not intend to imply that physical bodies are clearly distinct from ideas about the body, but that sexual encounters can bring material bodies directly into consciousness, and directly into social situations, in ways for which young women were not always prepared. Conclusion The extent of the absence of ‘my body’ from young women’s accounts of sexual encounters suggests a strain between the idealized, controlled disembodiment of the interviews and the conscious and potentially uncontrolled interaction of his and her material bodies. This strain can provide political space for the disruption
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of the everyday practices of femininity, in which women’s bodies are cared for, covered, cleaned, deodorized, depilated, made up, decorated, fed, slimmed, starved, shaped, remodelled or punished for their lack of perfection.10 The manifestation of material bodies is an intrusion into the romantic ideal of something that is smelly, hairy, bloody; prone to spots, discharges, seepage, hormonal changes; it is arousable, pleasurable, with erogenous zones. This body is the seat of the physicality of pleasure and pain; the material of pregnancy, orgasm, violence, abortion, HIV, disease, as well as of the social images and meanings of these. Young people embarking on sexual encounters have to make decisions about the physical place, time and positions; what degree of lighting and nakedness are appropriate; how to manage bodily fluids and noises; what is normal, permitted, pleasurable; what is deviant, dirty, unfeminine, unmasculine or otherwise not decent, and what is taken to be the start and end or climax of a sexual encounter. There is a tension here between the order of socially constituted, gendered identities, and the potential disorder of the uncontrolled body. The constant reproduction of women’s subordination to men is made possible because, as Waldby et al. (1991) comment, ‘women live out rather than disavow the consequences of their embodiment’. Where young women were able to discuss their sexual preferences with their partners, they gave accounts of very positive experiences, but these were a tiny minority. Underlying the ability to communicate desire to sexual partners is not an equal femininity which grants women knowledge and agency, but the complicated ways in which gendered power is constituted and reproduced in relationships. Sex connects bodies and this connexion gives women an intimate space within which men’s power can be subverted and resisted. If women can recognize and capture this space, they can negotiate relationships with men which upset the gender hierarchy and so are potentially socially destabilizing (Holland et al., 1992a). We suggest that few young women recognize and capture this space because they lack a critical consciousness that they are living a disembodied femininity. Where women do have a critical consciousness of the embodiment of their sexuality, and are comfortable with desires of their own, men’s power can be directly threatened. The intrusion of her body into his desires (rather than his desire into her body) can contribute to the pressure to tighten or reinforce men’s control which might help explain the prevalence of male violence in sexual encounters. The extent of male violence, as feminists have long argued, indicates connexions between personal relationships and the wider institutionalization of men’s power. We have taken the accounts given by these young women to indicate that struggles to control women’s bodies, and the silencing by women of women’s desires are points at which male power is constituted, reproduced and resisted. Young women construct their self-identities through the specific practices of gendered sexuality. Their own sense of self is deeply embedded in the ways in which they live their femininity. We have used our data to show how male
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power is exercised in the way young women manage the connexions between material bodies and gendered disembodiment. Bordo (1990) argues that Foucault insists on the instability of power relations since resistance is perpetual and unpredictable. In this theory, male hegemony can exist but is precarious. This view (which is increasingly being adopted by poststructuralist feminists) raises real political problems for feminism because it fails to account for the success and durability of this precarious male dominance. It does not explain the extent to which women strive to support rather than resist their subordination. Both men’s power and women’s resistance are contested and unstable, but the successful construction of femininity in relation to masculinity requires women to enable the exercise of men’s power. Women’s empowerment in confronting men’s dominance begins with their ability to reclaim their own experience and claim their bodies as the site of their own desires. This changes the meaning of sexual encounters and female sexuality. The embodiment of female sexuality is necessary for the subversion of men’s dominance at the level of the microphysical, but is not sufficient to dismantle institutionalized male power. Notes The authors have worked together as members of the Women, Risk and AIDS Project and Men, Risk and AIDS Project: Janet Holland is Senior Research Officer at the Department of Policy Studies, Institute of Education, University of London, and lecturer in education at the Open University; Caroline Ramazanoglu is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London; Sue Sharpe is a freelance writer and researcher, whose main interests are the lives and experiences of young women; Rachel Thomson is Senior Development Officer for the Sex Education Forum at the National Children’s Bureau. 1 A version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Alice in Wonderland First International Conference on Girls and Girlhood: Transitions and Dilemmas’, Amsterdam, June 1992. 2 The Women, Risk and AIDS Project is staffed by the authors and Sue Scott, University of Stirling, working collectively, and has been financed by a two-year grant from the ESRC. It has also received grants from Goldsmiths’ College Research Fund and the Department of Health. The Leverhulme Trust gave a further one-year grant for a comparable study of young men 1991–2, and for comparison of the two studies. Tim Rhodes was a team member on this project. 3 The problems of interviewing on such a sensitive topic, and of interpreting accounts are complex issues which we have discussed elsewhere (Holland and Ramazanoglu, forthcoming). 4 We have deliberately focused on gender relations rather than other social divisions, as these are central to intimate heterosexual relations. But this does not mean that we take gender to be isolated from other social divisions (e.g., class, sexual
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5
6
7
8 9
10
orientation, ethnicity (Holland, 1993)); nor does it mean that we take men’s power over women to be undifferentiated (Holland et al., 1993). We do not have space here to discuss this research in any detail. Further analysis is available as WRAP papers, obtainable from the Tufnell Press, 47 Dalmeny Rd, London N1 0DY. Prices on request. Since neither sexuality nor the body can be taken as fixed and universal, our generalizations are limited. They should apply fairly generally to English-speaking cultures and to much of Europe, but the nature and extent of variation, across time, cultures and social divisions is not established. The potential sexualizing of the interview through willingness to talk about the body was more evident in the interviews where women interviewed young men. Among the young women, a few who had had sexual experiences with women were more open in talking explicitly about sex, in one case leading to what the interviewer describes as a ‘steamy interview’. ‘ESW’ indicates ‘English/Scottish/Welsh’ which was used in our purposive sample as a category of ethnic origin. We have discussed elsewhere the possibilities of the empowerment of young women in sexual encounters with men, and the potency of the obstacles to this empowerment (Holland et al., 1992a). The WRAP research is providing empirical evidence on how male power is exercised and how extensively women contribute to the maintenance or resistance of male domination. Men’s bodies are also subject to social pressures, but Mandy McCarthy suggests that women’s self-esteem is tied to appearance more clearly than for men, while men are less concerned about their own bodies deviating from the ideal (1990: 206). Our initial evidence from interviewing young men supports this view.
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FEATHERSTONE, Mike, HEPWORTH, Mike and TURNER, Bryan S. (1991) editors, The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory London: Sage. FOUCAULT, Michel (1979) Discipline and and Punish New York: Vintage Books. ——(1980) ‘Body/Power’ in Gordon, C. (1980) editor, Michel Foucault: Power/ Knowledge Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. FUSS, Diana (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference London: Routledge. GOLDSTEIN, Laurence (1990) ‘Introduction’ Michigan Quarterly Review Fall: 485–9. HITE, Shere (1987) Women and Love London: Penguin. HOLLAND, Janet (1993) Sexuality and Ethnicity: Variations in Young Women’s Sexual Knowledge and Practice London: Tufnell Press. HOLLAND, Janet and RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline (forthcoming) ‘Coming to conclusions: power and interpretation in researching young women’s sexuality’ in Purvis, June and Maynard, Mary, editors, Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective Falmer Press. HOLLAND, Janet, RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline, SCOTT, Sue, SHARPE, Sue and THOMSON, Rachel (1991) ‘Between embarrassment and trust: young women and the diversity of condom use’ in AGGLETON, HART and DAVIES (1992). ——(1992a) ‘Pressure, resistance, empowerment: young women and the negotiation of safer sex’ in AGGLETON, HART and DAVIES (1991). ——(1992b) ‘Pleasure, pressure and power: some contradictions of gendered sexuality’ Sociological Review 40(4): 645–74. HOLLAND, Janet, RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline and SHARPE, Sue (1993) Wimp or Gladiator: Contradictions in Acquiring Masculine Sexuality WRAP/MRAP paper 9, London: Tufnell Press JACKSON, Stevi (1982) Childhood and Sexuality Oxford: Blackwell. LESKO, Nancy (1988) ‘The curriculum of the body: lessons from a Catholic high school’ in ROMAN and CHRISTIAN-SMITH with ELLSWORTH (1988). MACCANNELL, Dean and MACCANNELL, Juliet Flower (1987) ‘The beauty system’ in Armstrong, N. and Tennhouse, L. (1987) editors, The Ideology of Conduct London: Methuen. McCARTHY, Mandy (1990) ‘The thin ideal, depression and eating disorders in women’ Behav. Res. Ther. 28(3): 205–15. McNAY, Lois (1992) Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self Cambridge: Polity. MARTIN, Emily (1989) The Woman in the Body Milton Keynes: Open University Press. PRENDERGAST, Shirley (1989) ‘Girls’ experience of menstruation in schools’ in Holly, L. (1989) editor, Girls and Sexuality Teaching and Learning Milton Keynes: Open University Press. RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline (1993) editor, Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism London: Routledge. RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline and HOLLAND, Janet (1993) ‘Women’s sexuality and men’s appropriation of desire’ in RAMAZANOGLU (1993). ROMAN, L.G., CHRISTIAN-SMITH, L.K. with ELLSWORTH, E. (1988) Becoming Feminine London: Falmer Press. SAWICKI, Jana (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body London: Routledge.
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SCOTT, Sue and MORGAN, David (1993) ‘Bodies in a social landscape’ in Scott, S. and Morgan, D. (1993) editors, Body matters: Essays in the Sociology of the Body Lewes: Falmer. SEGAL, Lynne (1992) ‘Sexual uncertainty, or why the clitoris is not enough’ in Crowley, H. and Himmelweit, S. (1992) Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge Cambridge: Polity Press in association with the Open University. SHILLING, Chris (1991) ‘Educating the body: physical capital and the production of social inequalities’ Sociology 25(4): 653–72. SMITH, Dorothy (1988) ‘Femininity as discourse’ in ROMAN and CHRISTIANSMITH With ELLSWORTH (1988). THOMPSON, Sharon (1990) ‘Putting a big thing into a little hole: teenage girls’ accounts of sexual initiation’ The Journal of Sex Research 27(3): 341–61. TURNER, Bryan (1984) The Body and Society Oxford: Blackwell. WALDBY, Cathy, KIPPAX, Susan and CRAWFORD, June (1991) ‘Equality and eroticism: AIDS and the active/passive distinction’ Social Semiotics 1(2).
POEMS Rhoda Janzen
One Thing Needed Down the hall the davenport looms toward her, an uncharted shoal. One thing’s needed and he’s not it—
arm a plank she’s forced to walk, hand a rudder to push her into shallows where a woman depends from a partner’s arm.
where her right foot is his left. But the only feet are hers, She swerves the medio corte
between bed and bureau, inches missed. She would not insist, ‘Let’s try that step again’. Nor sense the current change, the rhythm
subtly alter, nor would she align her sights with the shoulder of Gibraltar. In the mirror her form waves back, a little older:
her nightgown loose, a cotton sail, her face scrubbed clean and plain as salt. She considers the wreck of the narcissists
lost on some aisle of form; shoots
41
the rapids down the stairs to turn the Latin up and tango on the lawn.
Two Huntington Sonnets …(Adorno’s) material aesthetic reflects its own historicity and admits that even the most important work depends on the work of its predecessors, which is stored in its material. (Peter Burger, ‘The Problem of Aesthetic Value’) Huntington’s purified by manuscripts moldering delicately under glass. The penmanship of Pope or Swift equips us with material too dense to pass for continuity; the loopingj’s the showy l’s, bracket reality with words, and ply with faintly static praise those curators who tend fatality. The guard’s immobile chin insists values have trans-historical validity. Books pressed like asters by humidity, the scripts dissolve to sluggish curly-cues. Lavender clusters of wisteria assault the sills, a massed hysteria. The Zen and Desert Gardens are so groomed one prefers a bench between gardens, where the meaning of an afternoon affair allows historicity unsubsumed by form. For this exchange, the meaning comes from your wife, sipping tea with Portland aunts, and from the men I’ve known whose needs or wants do not resemble yours. That last kiss sums it up—don’t speak for fear the utterance will script calligraphy with ornament. The motion that we saved, those lovers spent—
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in the Jungle Garden, a consequence of desire that seeks scones and Perrier. They’ll shoot like bamboo, six inches a day.
‘A GIRTON GIRL ON A THRONE’: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906–1933 Sarah Waters
The extraordinary life of Christina Vasa, the seventeenth-century cross-dressing Queen of Sweden who resigned her crown, her country and her faith, has intrigued and inspired biographers and historians for three hundred years. In the nineteenth century, and in the early part of this one, biographies of Christina, offering a vast range of interpretations of her puzzling career, proliferated. Today, in contrast, few people have even heard of her; if they have, it is probably thanks to Rouben Mamoulian’s film of 1933, Queen Christina, in which Greta Garbo played the title role. Possibly the film, and thus Christina, is better-known to lesbian audiences—though this perhaps owes more to Garbo’s lesbian appeal than Christina’s. Nevertheless, it is specifically with the issue of her sexuality that the Queen’s biographers have often found themselves engaged: as we shall see later, Garbo’s film itself was only one of a series of texts that were produced when discussion of Christina’s sexual identity was at its most intense. It is that particular moment in the long and varied history of representations of the Queen that I want to look at in this paper. First, though, to show what her unusual career offered her biographers, and the particular issues it raises, I’d like to give my own, small, biography of Queen Christina. Christina was born in 1626 and, as the only surviving child of the Swedish King Gustavus and his wife Marie Eleonore, it was upon her that hopes for the succession of the royal line, and the maintenance of Sweden’s substantial political status within Europe, were pinned. She received the education of a prince, and was regarded as something of a child prodigy; after being proclaimed King at eighteen (rather than Queen: in Sweden, as in Hungary, a queen was merely the wife of a monarch, rather than a regent in her own right), she was hailed throughout Europe as the ‘Swedish Pallas Athena’, one of the marvels of the age. And her fame was compounded by her unusual habits: she rode and hunted and handled arms, she kept a valet rather than a personal maid, she dressed sometimes in men’s clothes, sometimes in women’s, often in a careless mixture of the two—pulling on a short skirt over her breeches, for example, when
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sartorial propriety demanded. ‘She hath nothing feminine about her but the sex’, wrote the Jesuit priest Mannerschied of her in 1653.1 By her mid-twenties, Christina was coming under increasing pressure to marry and produce an heir; her determination to retain her independence, however, together with her growing, secret, attraction to Catholicism, prompted her to take drastic action. In 1654 she abdicated. She handed over the rights of succession and, disguised as a man, she left Sweden. Travelling south, Christina was converted to the Catholic faith and received by the Pope, thus irrevocably alienating herself from Protestant Northern Europe; however, she infuriated the Catholics who sought to hail her a hero or a saint with her often cavalier attitude to Romish convention. By Europe in general she was received as something of a curiosity—a status upon which she never failed to trade, as she was continually short of money. She settled in Rome, but visited France, Italy and Germany, alternately scandalizing and enchanting her various hosts. She enjoyed the intellectual company of learned men, and though she was evidently something of a misogynist—she claimed she liked men not because they were men, but because they weren’t women—she spent time with women who, like her, had a reputation for cleverness. (She corresponded with Madeleine de Scudéry, for example, who gave her the role of Cleobuline in her roman a clef, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53).) In Italy she was introduced to Cardinal Azzolino, to whom she was to remain fiercely, and apparently romantically, attached until the end of her life: it was to him that she bequeathed her various collections and extensive library. She spent her last years in Rome, an outspoken patron of the Italian arts, engaged mainly in writing (she produced, amongst other things, an unfinished autobiography), and quarrelling with Pope Innocent XI. She died in 1689, and is buried in St Peter’s basilica.2 One constant note in Christina’s rather turbulent career was her affection for Ebba Sparre, her lady-in-waiting. Corresponding with Ebba from Europe in 1656, she wrote: How happy I should be if only I could see you, Beautiful One. But I am condemned by Destiny to love and cherish you always without seeing you; and […]! cannot be completely happy when I am separated from you. Never doubt this fact, and believe that, wherever I may be, I shall always be entirely devoted to you, as I always have been. […] Good-bye, Beautiful One, good-bye. I embrace you a million times. (Goldsmith, 1933:192) We will never know the extent of the intimacy of Christina’s and Ebba’s embraces; Bulstrode Whitelocke, English Ambassador to Sweden in the 1650s, reported that the Queen introduced her lady-in-waiting to him as ‘my bedfellow’, and invited him to enthuse with her about Ebba’s charms (1772:420). But it’s difficult to imagine just how Christina understood her own feelings for Ebba, and for the other women, like the Comtesse de Suze, on whom she is said
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to have been keen. There was certainly gossip about Christina’s relations with women in her own day, identifying her as the aristocratic ‘tribade’ who, as Ros Ballaster (1994) suggests, was providing a model for female same-sex desire in satirical representation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such gossip mainly emanated, however, from Christina’s French enemies who used accusations of lesbianism—along with allegations of heterosexual profligacy—in a general attempt to undermine her intellectual and political standing. A forged volume entitled Lettres Secrètes de Christine, Reine de Suède, for example, appeared in 1761; this contained suggestive letters to Ebba and a French noblewoman: the latter begins ‘Adorable Marquise’ (Lacombe, 1761:90). More damaging were the series of slanderous pamphlets that appeared in Paris in the 1660s, one of which claims that respectable women refused to take their daughters to visit Christina, because she’d been seen putting her hand up ladies’ skirts. ‘She is’, affirms the anonymous author of the pamphlet, ‘one of the most ribald tribades ever heard of.3 These slanderous texts were to influence Christina’s biographers for the next three hundred years: when they weren’t citing or quoting the gossip directly, they were certainly taking Christina’s reputation as lesbian or sexual libertine seriously. What I hope I have suggested with this brief summary of her career is Christina’s liminality: her resistance to categorization, her tendency, in fact, to cross category, whether national, religious, sexual or sartorial. Hers was, after all, an era of sumptuary legislation and the judicial restriction of cross-dressing. Lillian Faderman points out that Christina’s status elevated her beyond the laws with which the transvestite gestures of poorer women of seventeenth-century Europe were being heavily penalized (1985:55). We might think of Christina, however, as exploiting the privileges of one category—class—to challenge the prescriptions of another—gender. Following Marjorie Garber’s (1992) formulation of the implications of cross-dressing in Vested Interests, I want to suggest that Christina challenged the authority of category itself, instigated a category crisis. Garber points out that the cross-dresser flouts conventions which seek to make individuals legible within a particular cultural semantic system; Queen Christina, whose adoption of male attire was only one aspect of her audacious arrogation of masculine privilege, confounded attempts to assert her legibility in the seventeenth century, and has continued to do so. Nevertheless, she has been assimilated into an extraordinary variety of narratives, constructed and reconstructed in the service of diverse and often conflicting interests, not least since her entry into the modern biographical tradition, in the last century. I want to present Christina’s biographies as a series of palimpsests: the narratives of femininity they foreground, constructed in the context of drastic changes in women’s sexual and political status, work to limit the implications of Christina’s own transgressive career; but these texts are haunted by the very illegibility they are designed to contain, an illegibility that throws their authority—and that of the sexual models they invoke—into question. In particular, I want to focus on a group of commentaries that appeared in the early part of this century, texts which
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share features that had not been anticipated by earlier biographies, and that would not recur in later ones. I want to use these commentaries to illustrate the ways in which the evolution of the biographies of someone like Christina, implicated in lesbian scandals and gender-crossing activities, has been inflected by the changing conceptualization of sex, gender and lesbianism itself. Despite the candour of her seventeenth-century detractors, Christina’s erotic interest in women is, perhaps predictably, not a feature of the literary portraits of her that appeared in the nineteenth century. Her Victorian commentators were, however, anxious about her masculinity: as in her own day, she continued to be regarded as occupying a disturbing space between genders. She was commonly presented as a single unhappy instance of a woman metaphorically ‘unwomanized’ by an inappropriate education, although some commentators interpreted her liminal status literally: Arvède Barine, for example, writing in 1890, calls Christina a ‘sort of boy in petticoats’, and presents her, effectively, as an androgyne or hermaphrodite (Barine, 1906:93). On the whole, though, Victorian biographers dealt with the confusing Queen without reference to type, whether sexual or otherwise. They emphasized, rather, her unusualness: presenting her, as F.W.Bain did in 1890, as ‘one of the most original and extraordinary women in her own or any age’ (Bain, 1890: v). Indeed, the primary medium through which Victorian readers were made familiar with her story was the collections of sketches of the lives of notable females, volumes with titles like Extraordinary Women and Some Historic Women (Russell, 1870; Davenport Adams, 1891). As I’ve hinted, however, around the turn of the century Christina became subject to a new, rather different kind of reading. Lesbianism was reinscribed into her story; or, rather, she was inscribed into the story of lesbianism’, the category of female homosexuality that had begun to be constructed by medical debate from the late nineteenth century on. The moment of this inscription in British sexological thought was the appearance, in 1906, of an enlarged edition of Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (first published 1896), which contained a new chapter on The Intermediate Sex’. This chapter would itself be enlarged and published separately two years later; contained within Love’s Coming-of-Age, which was to be reissued twelve times over the next seventeen years, it presented the congenital theory of homosexuality to a wide audience. In the chapter, Carpenter discusses the ‘characteristics of the Intermediate race’, beginning with the ‘extreme specimens’. Maintaining the tone of the natural historian, he describes the male and the female of the species: the former ‘distinctly effeminate’ in habits and appearance, ‘sentimental, lackadaisical, mincing’, with a tidy, ‘natty’ and perfumed ‘dwelling-room’; the latter a rather markedly aggressive person, of strong passions, masculine manners and movements, practical in the conduct of life, sensuous rather than sentimental in love, often untidy, and outré in attire; her figure muscular, her voice rather low in pitch; her dwelling-room decorated
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with sporting-scenes, pistols, etc., and not without a suspicion of the fragrant weed in the atmosphere; while her love (generally to rather soft
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and feminine specimens of her own sex) is often a sort of furor, similar to the ordinary masculine love, and at times almost uncontrollable. These are types’, he concludes, ‘which, on account of their salience, everyone will recognize more or less’. Now, to these portraits Carpenter appends two footnotes. In the first he notes that a ‘good deal’ in his description of the homogenic male ‘may remind readers of history of the habits and character of Henry III of France’; in the second, with reference to his portrait of the homogenic female, he muses, Perhaps, like Queen Christine of Sweden, who rode across Europe, on her visit to Italy, in jack-boots and sitting astride of her horse. It is said that she shook the Pope’s hand, on seeing him, so heartily that the doctor had to attend to it afterwards! (Carpenter, 1906:126–8) What I want to draw attention to is the way in which his identification of the Queen as homogenic proceeds from his description of the homogenic ‘type’. As we saw earlier, from the pamphlets that claimed her as a predatory tribade, the identification of Christina with a model of female same-sex desire was not new. But between ‘tribade’—a term which imagines its subject in a specific act with a partner—and ‘homogenic type’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘invert’—labels of sexual identity —there is a considerable conceptual gap. The advent of a pathologized model of inverted or intermediate sexual identity had implications for a new understanding of history by both sexologists and homosexuals themselves. Homosexual campaigners claimed prestigious predecessors; sexologists attempted to demonstrate the pertinence of their theories to historical, as well as contemporary, cases: let us not forget that the new taxonomical approach to sexuality often took its very vocabulary from history, establishing the sexual identity of the figures it invoked at the same time as it constructed their desires into syndromes. (This is most apparent in the Sapphic/Lesbian label; consider also Havelock Ellis’s term for transvestism, ‘eonism’, with which he recalls— and, as Marjorie Garber points out, incidentally categorizes—the eighteenthcentury cross-dressing Chevalier d’Eon (Garber, 1992:265).) In what will become a familiar syndrome of the Queen’s modern biographies, Carpenter here recognizes Christina, a recognition that involves assimilating her into an established sexual paradigm which both explains her and demonstrates its own (transhistorical) authority. After Carpenter’s casual labelling of her as a lesbian, Christina’s biographies were never quite the same. I shall be looking at a few interpretations of the Queen, in broadly chronological order, but I do not want to suggest that readings of Christina proceeded, in a linear development, from Carpenter’s. We have come to think of the inversion model as dominating ideas about lesbianism at this time, but if Christina’s early twentieth-century biographies reveal anything, it is that the conceptualization of homosexuality was at this time in a state of flux.
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Despite Carpenter’s early affiliation of her to the congenital model, Christina emerged in these years at the centre of a tussle between competing stories of gender and sexuality. Her biographers are allianced with each other only in as much as they are all post-sexological, foregrounding, as they do, Christina’s sexuality, and attempting to categorize it, in a way that her Victorian biographers, on the whole, did not. They lend Christina a new pertinence, identifying what they see as the modernity of her story, its apparent co-incidence with contemporary sexual models, but ‘recognizing’ in her a variety of identities: Francis Gribble presents her as a New Woman and sexual neurotic in a biography of 1913; a series of studies in the late twenties and early thirties resurrect the old rumours, culminating in Margaret Goldsmith’s ‘Psychological Biography’ of 1933, Christina of Sweden, that constructs an exclusively lesbian Queen. In the same year, however, Rouben Mamoulian released his film version of Christina’s early life, which subsumes her story to the imperatives of historical romance. This debate over Christina’s sex life was provoked by sexology but not fought by sexologists. Although popular literary forms like historical fiction and biography seldom foreground their capacity for intervention in highly-charged discussions of issues like sexuality, these biographers’ endorsements of specific sexual models was not, I want to suggest, naive: they sought, rather, to inflect their readers’ understanding both of Christina herself, and of lesbian identity. Indeed, with Margaret Goldsmith’s biography of Christina we have what I shall be posing as a text consciously in dialogue with the congenital model of lesbianism as Radclyffe Hall demonstrates it in The Well of Loneliness: Goldsmith, herself a lesbian, presents Christina as a revised Stephen Gordon in an attempt to reopen a space for the articulation of lesbian desire in the wake of the British banning of Hall’s novel five years earlier. In Francis Gribble’s The Court of Queen Christina of Sweden (1913) Christina is once again identified as a type, but of something rather different to what Carpenter had in mind in 1906. Here, the Queen is both modernized and newly feminized: she was, claims Gribble, more feminine [than ‘controversialists’ have allowed] and, if the word may pass, more modern: a woman, in short, who would, in many ways, have found herself in touch with many of the modern women whom one meets in modern drawing-rooms. (Gribble, 1913:7) Gribble has a particular kind of modern woman in mind, the emancipated woman challenging the limitations of the category ‘feminine’, to whom anti-feminist discourse had lent a new kind of body: not, here, the congenitally inverted body of the mannish lesbian, but the neurotic one of the New Woman. ‘It is’, he writes,
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[…] as the first conspicuous case of the neurosis of the North—that mysterious malady with which Ibsen’s dramas have familiarised the modern world—that Christina’s career arrests and enchains our interest. (8) This stance posits feminist protest as a symptom of illness, and involves a revision of Barine’s Christina’s hermaphroditical body.4 Gribble invokes a rather different medical model: There are not wanting those who have inferred from the boyishness of the girl and the subsequent mannishness of the woman that Christina was, in actual physioiogical fact, a boy in petticoats; but that is nonsense which may safely be ignored. […Her] autobiography is, throughout, feminine, if not womanly; and there are medical proofs […] which remove all possible doubt. The doubt, indeed, could only have been entertained in an age in which exceptional as well as normal women acquiesced, as a matter of course, in the well-defined, old-fashioned limitations of womanly activity. […] From the point of view of later ages,—from the point of view, in particular, of a Girton-going, suffrage-seeking, hockey-playing, hunger-striking generation,—Christina is intelligible enough. […] It can understand her temperament […] as well as her tastes; and it may be supposed to know something also of those avenging nerves through which sex is apt to reassert its claim to a consideration which it has not received. (36–7) The final, ambiguous, emphasis upon sex is significant. At a time when sexologists and liberal campaigners were constructing a new model of psychosexual health prioritizing expression over continence, Gribble presents his New Woman as dangerously repressing her (hetero)sexual impulses. But he is also invoking the authority of category, over the very gestures with which both Christina and modern women challenged it: the more women struggle to free themselves from the confines of ‘femininity’, he implies, the more they will be thwarted by their own femaleness, in the form of that particularly womanly ailment, neurosis. For Gribble’s portrait of Christina is informed by a nineteenthcentury medical scaremongering that placed the thinking woman in a losing battle with the limitations of her own biology. Anxiety about challenging the proper subordination of the brain to the womb was fostered by both American and British physicians in response to advances in women’s education. Henry Maudsley, for example, warned in 1874 that higher education would make women physiologically unfit for childbearing and nursing, and intellectual competition ‘derange’ them; his implicit target was Girton College, which had admitted fifteen women students to its Cambridge premises the previous year (Maudsley, 1874:466–83). And it is specifically this model of the educated woman that Gribble invokes. He is preoccupied with presenting Christina as a
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college girl—and any college will do. Her enthusiasm for philosophy and the arts, he claims, transformed her court ‘into something resembling an Oxford Common Room’ (72); at another moment he compares her to a student at ‘Bedford College for Women’ (71); elsewhere he calls her a ‘Girton Girl on a throne’ (61). In Christina’s story he finds evidence to corroborate ‘expert’ warnings that to educate a woman is to place her femininity in jeopardy; and the wider her academic repertoire, the greater her distance from a female norm: One is compelled sometimes to think of [Christina] as the Mrs. Jellyby of the North, as well as its Minerva,—mistaking movement for life, and persuaded that time spent fussily was time spent well. Though nothing was to come of all her labours, her hands were full of work, and her head was full of projects. (233) The implications of Gribble’s overlaying of the traditional comparison between Christina and the Roman goddess of learning and warfare with one presenting the Queen as Dickens’s model of impotent philanthropy and maternal neglect, is clear: Christina’s hands and head were full, but her womb, the proper object of female interest, was left to atrophy. Instead of life’ she created only ‘movement’; her ‘labours’, cerebral rather than cervical, could, in such a scheme, only be interpreted as fruitless. The image of the fruitless—the sterile—woman was, in the early twentieth century, acquiring a specific connotation: Gribble does not explain Christina’s biological estrangement from the heterosexual economy in terms of the new deviance model of invert or intermediate; nevertheless, I want to suggest that the Queen’s ‘lesbianism’ forms the subtext to his presentation of her as a New Woman. There was, after all, something rather belated about his identification of the transgressive Christina as neurotic bluestocking: women had been enjoying (albeit limited) access to higher education, and physicians had been predicting the awful revenges Nature would wreak upon them, since the 1870s. By 1913, the over-educated woman who was insisting on her right to the all-female environment that encouraged professional ambition and fostered female bonds when ‘progressive’ educationalists were calling for mixed-sex colleges and schools, was increasingly understood to be implicated in the ‘spread’ of lesbianism. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out that turn-of-the-century American physicians had already begun describing female schools and colleges as ‘great breeding grounds of artificial homosexuality’ (1989:271); Ellis hints at as much in Sexual Inversion (1897:100). The link between women’s education and lesbianism began to be played out in the arena of popular culture, too: the image of the predatory spinster teacher was to be vividly evoked in Clemence Dane’s hugely successful Regiment of Women (1917), only four years after the appearance of Gribble’s biography; in 1927 Rosamond Lehmann would use Girton College itself as the setting for the lesbian attachments of Dusty Answer.
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Telling Christina’s story via the narrative of the New Woman in 1913, Gribble invokes a suggestive paradigm of female deviance that has sterility as its threat and lesbianism as its frightful implication. His was the last biography of Christina for some time; when interest in her was revived, it was in the context of an increasingly consolidated homosexual subculture and a new lesbian visibility, and coincided with the explosion of literary representations of lesbianism in the late 1920s. In all of the biographies that appeared at this time, Christina’s unorthodox interest in other women is acknowledged, though most of them stress her romantic attachment to Cardinal Azzolino. The texts I want to concentrate on here, however, are the two most—apparently—incompatible. Appearing as they did in the same year, Margaret Goldsmith’s portrait of an exclusively lesbian Queen, Christina of Sweden, and Rouben Mamoulian’s film romance, Queen Christina, suggest that Christina was inhabiting very different sexual narratives at once. Indeed, we might see the film as enacting the struggle between competing readings of Christina. Critics have pointed out the particular affinity Greta Garbe—herself Swedish and bisexual—may have felt with the character she played for MGM in 1933. She certainly exerted more influence than was usual for a Hollywood leading lady over the shaping of her role; and her close friend (and rumoured lover) Salka Viertel worked on the film’s script. Gay and lesbian critics in particular have suggested that both Garbo and Viertel may have been attracted by the homoerotic possibilities of the story of the cross-dressing Queen. Andrea Weiss argues that lesbian meanings, perhaps consciously inserted by Garbo and Viertel, pervade the film ‘even though the lesbianism of the real-life Queen is not overtly depicted’ (1992:36). Both she and Vito Russo (1981:65) agree that Garbo’s personification of Christina would have had a special resonance for lesbian and gay viewers of the film in the 1930s. The effect of the film, however, which initially invites the spectator to revel in the androgynous posturing of both the actress and the Queen, is to enforce a closure of Christina’s sexually ambiguous career. It gives us a boyish Christina, dressed in fetching buckskin breeches and doublet and over-the-knee boots, frustrated by the intellectual limitations of her Court. Early on we are presented with a pretty Ebba Sparre, whom Christina greets with a kiss on the lips and the promise of ‘two or three days in the country’ together sometime soon. Ebba, however, looks troubled: later we see her in the arms of her fiancé, who entreats her to ask the Queen for permission to marry. Ebba anticipates Christina’s displeasure: The trouble is the Queen is so dominating’, she explains. Christina, however, has overheard, and is angry and upset. She reproves Ebba: ‘You pretended to be interested in me and my problems. Your sympathy, your concern: all pretence.’ Donning hunting clothes, Christina and her valet go out for a gallop. They meet the Spanish ambassador Don Antonio, on his way to the Court. He mistakes Christina for a youth; when, later, they are both snowbound at an inn, they are obliged to spend the night together in the same bed. After a certain amount of
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comic misunderstanding, Christina reveals her true sex. She and Don Antonio retire to bed and stay there for three days (much to the consternation of the Ambassador’s servants, who still believe Christina to be a boy). Christina has fallen in love: it is ‘so enchanting to be a woman’, she tells Don Antonio later, ‘— not a queen, just a woman in a man’s arms’. Returning to Court, she adopts more feminine attire (she will continue to wear a dress, now, until the film’s closing scenes), and gaily gives Ebba’s wedding plans her blessing. Christina’s intimacy with a mere envoy, and a Catholic one at that, infuriates her subjects and her Court, who pressure her to settle down with her cousin and produce an heir. The Queen, regretfully, chooses love over duty, and abdicates. She prepares to flee to Spain with her lover; at the last moment, however, he is fatally wounded in a duel. Christina embarks on the journey alone. The film ends, famously, with Christina at the prow of the departing ship, her face impassive, her expression inscrutable. Mamoulian gave Garbo very precise instructions on how to play this scene. Wanting to satisfy the expectations of every possible spectator, he encouraged her to absent herself from the scene: Think of nothing’, he told her (quoted by Walker, 1980:137); ‘I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience’ (quoted by Haining, 1990:199). Clearly, the film’s relationship with the actual details of Christina’s early life is rather tenuous. Rather, it employs the impressive authority of a visually encoded ‘history’ to demonstrate the inexorability of the heterosexual denouement: retaining actual events and real characters, but redefining them semantically, the film’s commitment to historical fidelity is as spurious as its flirtation with the possibility of a filmic portrayal of lesbian desire is fleeting. Garbo herself felt that her vision had been betrayed by Hollywood. ‘It is impossible to try and achieve anything out of the ordinary here’, she complained in a letter to friends in Sweden while Queen Christina was being filmed; and, after its release: ‘just imagine Christina abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard’ (quoted by Broman, 1991:119). As with Christina’s literary biographies, however, which, like Mamoulian’s ideal spectators, inscribe their own narratives on to her inscrutable figure, we need to ask not how the text diverges from history, but why it might do so. In thinking about the film I want to take my lead from Mary Hamer’s recent reading of Cecil B.de Mille’s Cleopatra, which was made the year after Queen Christina was released, 1934. Hamer suggests that we place de Mille’s Cleopatra in the context of an international response to women’s changing political status following enfranchisement. The film gives us a Cleopatra at the centre of a tension between political responsibilities and ‘self-realization in true love’. Hamer points out how efforts were made, both within the film and, via various advertising campaigns (for example, for ‘Cleopatra Bangs’), beyond it, to establish a rapport between the Queen of Egypt and her female audience. Encouraged to identify with Cleopatra in her duty/love dilemma, women were thus invited ‘to understand the economy of their own lives in similar terms. Any
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political rights and responsibilities they might be saddled with must be treated as a threat to personal fulfilment’ (Hamer, 1993:123–4).
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This construction of Queen as Everywoman was a feature of all kinds of historical fictions that were being newly addressed to the female consumer at this time. The women who were being encouraged to emulate Cleopatra’s hairstyle in 1934 had been tempted with fashions inspired by Garbo’s film the year before; McCreery’s New York store, for example, introduced a new neckwear range copying styles from various recent costume dramas: ‘MARY OF SCOTLAND’…after that winsome yet tragic little Queen. Scalloped mousseline, collarbone high…prim, demure. 1.95 ‘HENRY THE EIGHTH’…a regal plastron of embroidered organdy and lace—any one of his six wives might have worn it royally! 2.95 ‘QUEEN CHRISTINA’…inspired by the great Garbo’s latest triumph. Embroidered mousseline—boyish yet feminine. 2.95 (New York Herald Tribune, 2.1.1934:4) The preoccupation with queens, which emphasizes their availability for cooptation by ordinary women, is crucial. When Garbo’s Christina decides to abdicate for the love of the Spanish Ambassador she is fulfilling an emerging historical romance tradition which seeks to expose the woman within the monarch, rendering her, as we have seen, ‘not a queen—just a woman in a man’s arms’. Mamoulian presents the abdication of political responsibility as a precondition of feminine self-fulfilment: in his version of Christina’s life her career ends when she resigns her crown; the woman who lived another thirty years, who influenced the Arts of Europe and intervened in the public affairs of powerful countries, is effaced. And, like de Mille’s Cleopatra, Queen Christina not only enacts the incompatibility of femininity and politics, it locates the feminine beyond politics, ending with a blank female face and an evacuated brain, transferring historical agency to the masculine subject so that, as Mamoulian desired, the ‘spectator was able to write his own ending, his own feelings’ (quoted by Haining, 1990:200). Now, I realize that it is possible to give a rather different reading of Queen Christina’s final scene; it is in the very openness of the film’s ending, in fact, that critics have located its availability for lesbian and gay appropriation. Andrea Weiss, for example, argues that, while the film’s resolution offered an ‘affirmation of heterosexuality’ to some viewers, to lesbians it presented Christina as moving ‘outside of the culture in which the heterosexual contract is constructed and maintained’; she sees in Christina’s ‘inscrutable Garbo face’ a contradiction of ‘the aims of narrative closure’ (1992:46) Continuing my presentation of Christina’s biographies as a series of palimpsests, then, we might like to think of this moment as the triumph of Christina’s illegibility over the romantic narrative with which she has here been over-written. To find in this openness a way into the film for lesbians is merely to impose upon it—and upon Christina herself—another kind of closure, and one that, I would suggest, places the lesbian viewer in collusion with, rather than in opposition to, the processes of
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the romance genre. For Weiss, the fact that Mamoulian’s Christina ‘relinquishes her power and status for love’ gives the film ‘a theme that could have resonance for gay male and lesbian spectators despite its heterosexual cast’ (1992:45); in other words, she finds scope for lesbian identification with the film in the very elements of the romance genre—the prioritization of personal fulfilment over ‘duty’, the location of fulfilment beyond ‘culture’—with which, I have argued, women’s political agency was being denied. I’m not suggesting that Weiss is endorsing an apolitical model of lesbian identity; rather, her construction of a gay spectator of Queen Christina demonstrates how very compelling this kind of narrative of privatized sexual desire has been, and can be, for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Both the pleasures, and the perils, of attempting a lesbian reading of Christina are suggested by Margaret Goldsmith’s study, Christina of Sweden. Goldsmith was an American expatriate working in Europe in the twenties and thirties as a journalist, a novelist and a translator. Though she had married in 1926, in the following year she met Vita Sackville-West in Berlin and embarked upon a brief affair with her. Her letters to Sackville-West reveal the depth of her investment in their relationship; Belated Adventure, the novel which she published in 1929— which, like Woolf’s Orlando, is both dedicated to, and inspired by, SackvilleWest—suggests the extent of her preoccupation with her lover (Glendinning, 1983). But we can only speculate on the extent to which Goldsmith identified with the category ‘lesbian’: she may, like Sackville-West, have had intermittent lesbian experiences and only a casual involvement in the gay subculture of Berlin and London. From the biographies into which she channelled her literary energies in the twenties and thirties, however, it is clear that, as a writer, she was consistently attracted to historical figures, like Christina and Sappho, who had been implicated in homosexual intrigues; and she seems to have been particularly committed to reinscribing homosexuality into the narratives of characters whose lives had been bowdlerized or distorted by previous biographers. Her study of Frederick the Great (1929), for example, aroused the disdain of a TLS reviewer who felt that she seemed ‘to insist unnecessarily’ upon Frederick’s ‘sexual perversion’ (TLS, 1929:151). Her ‘Psychological Reconstruction’ of the life of Sappho, published in 1938, is an extraordinary elaboration upon a few scraps of poetry and historical fact that presents the poet as exclusively lesbian and discredits both the myth in which an ageing Sappho commits suicide for the unrequited love of the sailor Phaon, and the modern commentators who have maintained it: These historians were all men, and they naturally preferred to believe that, at the close of her life, at least, this great woman found a man necessary to her happiness. (Goldsmith, 1938:272) This approach is anticipated in her ‘Psychological Biography’ of Christina. Like Gribble, she presents her interpretation of the Queen as a revision of earlier ones:
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but it is explicitly over the issue of Christina’s sexuality that she struggles for authority with her previous biographers. ‘None of them,’ she writes, […] even serious modern writers, venture to discuss the delicate reasons prompting [Christina] to remain unmarried. They have shrunk from admitting her sexual abnormality, even though many contemporary documents, and Christina’s own letters, make it quite clear that she was attracted by her own sex. Christina herself, when she was old enough to understand herself and human behaviour generally, was far more modern than even her recent biographers. ‘Love’, she once wrote, ‘is the essentially Protean element of Nature, an element which conceals itself behind many guises’. (Goldsmith, 1933:67) However, reading Christina via a modern, post-sexological lesbian model involves allying her to a sexual identity that is far from protean. As with Sappho’s controversial ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’, in which the word determining the gender of the object of Sappho’s erotic interest is, in all surviving copies, tantalizingly obscure, and which has consequently been translated at various times with both a feminine and a masculine pronoun, it is precisely Christina’s illegibility that has facilitated the variety of her readings (de Jean, 1989). Her very status as ambiguous sexual agent has allowed biographers to construct for her a whole string of sexual identities: transsexual, asexual, bisexual, heterosexual—celibate and profligate. Goldsmith, however, has an evident critical—and, as I have suggested, perhaps personal—investment in constructing an exclusively lesbian Christina. She gives details of the Queen’s relationship with Ebba Sparre, and quotations from her passionate letters, left out of earlier biographies; she resurrects scandals about Christina’s lesbian flings other commentators play down; but her references are selective, and her sources unreliable—she makes unqualified use of allegations from the slanderous French pamphlets, for example. In short, her conclusions have a specious authority. She claims that rumours about Christina’s courtly romances are ‘quite unfounded on fact’ (138); she assures us that historians have been ‘misled’ into believing that Christina and Azzolino were lovers (273). Just as Gribble, to whom Christina’s assumption of masculine prerogatives was intelligible only in terms of a familiar model of female insubordination, placed her at the heart of a narrative about Girton girls and avenging nerves, Goldsmith’s identification of Christina’s lesbianism requires her assimilation into an established lesbian paradigm. In the seventeenth century, she writes, the very ‘words’ had not been invented in which she could have described her inferiority complex at being born a woman, who yet did not feel towards other women as a woman should. (133)
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Once again, Christina has been recognized; her story is re-told in the ‘words’ with which gender and sexuality were, in European and American culture, being increasingly reconceptualized: those of a popularized psychoanalysis that had inherited a Freudian discourse with none of Freud’s subtlety, and which, crucially, rejected many of his most radical conclusions. In Goldsmith’s re-telling of them, the details of Christina’s early life form a cohesive pattern. So masculine when she is born that she is mistaken for a boy, Christina’s birth is celebrated as that of the heir her parents and the court astrologers had predicted. Enlightened as to her true sex, but deciding to make the best of it, Gustavus orders her to be raised as a prince; he is delighted by Christina’s apparently natural predilection for masculine pursuits. Christina herself, however, grows up haunted by a feeling of inferiority and guilt which her mother, unenchanted by and increasingly alienated from her graceless daughter, does nothing to allay. She constantly upbraids her both for not having been born a boy, and for her boyishness. ‘No wonder,’ writes Goldsmith, that Christina was a disappointment to her mother, nor that the Queen’s tactless insistence on more feminine behaviour brought about the opposite results in her daughter. Unfortunately for both of them, modern psychology had not been discovered when they were alive. With a little psychological insight Marie Eleonore might have used other methods to achieve her ends, and Christina, as she matured, might have realised that, to some extent at least, her exaggerated mannishness was due to her mother’s influence (1933:35). Christina’s father dies; she becomes more absorbed in her studies. Bewildered by her growing physical repugnance of the men whose intellectual company she so enjoys, she falls in love with her attendant, Ebba Sparre. Ebba, however, is beautiful but faithless, ‘a passive woman with no initiative’ (69) who ultimately opts for the conventional securities of heterosexuality. But the affair awakens Christina to the reality of her own nature: she ‘now understood her aversion to marriage’ (72). Estranged from her mother and increasingly depressed and disaffected, determined not to marry and conscious of the absurdity of her place at the head of a ruling system requiring the production of heirs, Christina puts herself in voluntary exile from Sweden. ‘Maladjusted people,’ Goldsmith informs us, whether their inner disharmony is based on a sexual conflict or some other form of ambivalence, often become expatriates. […] they run away to some foreign country, where the symptoms of their personal maladjustment are often put down merely to the natural eccentricities of a foreigner. Montparnasse is full of human tragedies of this kind. (125–6)
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Berlin, too, was full of lesbian expatriates in the early thirties, and Goldsmith was one of them. Her adoption of the voice of the homosexual apologist, soliciting heterosexual sympathy for the tragic invert, alerts us to the terms on which lesbianism is here being allowed an airing. Goldsmith’s reconstruction of the Queen’s body—locating her ‘disharmony’ in her mind rather than in her genitals or womb—made her recognizable to readers already familiar with the paradigmatic scenarios of psychoanalysis. ‘It would be difficult to imagine circumstances more nicely calculated to produce an inferiority complex and an abnormal sexual psychology’, wrote the TLS (1933: 341). But though we might lament Goldsmith’s limiting of Christina to a lesbian identity with a cohesion borrowed from the discourse of popular psychoanalysis in which that identity is implicitly coded as deviant, and—a more serious threat to homosexual organization—posited as curable, we must acknowledge that it is precisely her construction of her text as a ‘Psychological Biography’ that allows her to extend the implications of her project. Stretching the scope of her genre into the realm of desire and the unconscious, she sanctions her own liberation from the demands of historical fidelity, allowing herself to structure Christina’s story around another, quite different, modern homosexual paradigm. Overinfluential father, distant mother, inappropriate education, boyishness, selfdiscovery and exile…as I hope my summary of her biography reveals, the story Goldsmith re-tells is the one that had been labelled ‘an intolerable outrage’ and banned in Britain five years earlier: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Weeks, 1990:108). The fact that Goldsmith reproduces the plot of the most famous literary defence of homosexuality in an historical biography suggests that Hall’s novel had become established as something of a lesbian masternarrative, to which even non-fictional representations of lesbianism were susceptible; alternatively, as I’ve suggested, we might read Goldsmith’s presentation of Christina as Stephen Gordon as an attempt to reopen a space for the articulation of lesbian desire and an implicit protest against its closure. This seems to be the implication of those moments when, as she would in her biography of Sappho, Goldsmith extends her discussion beyond the limits of her text. Claiming that Christina’s Swedish guardians would have been shocked had they realized the extent of her intimacy with Ebba, she explains: For, like most puritans, they were more concerned with the two human poles, connected by a mutual devotion, than they were with the quality of this emotion itself. Had Christina pursued a rather objectionable young man with unlovely persistence, her puritan guardians would have been less incensed than they would have been had they known about her unconventional but thoroughly fine attachment to Ebba Sparre. (71) There is clearly more at stake here than Christina’s lesbianism. Readers who had been satisfied with Goldsmith’s picture of Christina’s deviant upbringing were less happy with her defence of the adult Queen’s affection for her lady-in-
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waiting as ‘thoroughly fine’, interpreting it—quite rightly, as I’m suggesting—as a breach of biographical propriety: ‘we see no justification for [it]’, wrote her TLS reviewer. And if such blatant special pleading seems to sit uncomfortably alongside Goldsmith’s description of homosexuals as ‘human tragedies’, then we might remember that The Well of Loneliness, her ur-text, is similarly shot through with contradiction and inconsistency. Indeed, it is the inconsistencies within versions of sexual identity, as well as the contention between them, to which these portraits of Queen Christina must, ultimately, direct us. Carolyn Steedman, in an essay examining the issues and problems confronting the thoughtful biographer, speculates that what makes biography popular is also what makes it reassuring: the ‘confirmation’ it offers that life-stories can be told, that the inchoate experience of living and feeling can be marshalled into a chronology’ (Steedman, 1989:103). All the versions of Christina I have been looking at maintain, indeed depend upon, this illusion, even though—or perhaps because—Christina herself so vigorously resisted categorization. Even when her indeterminacy is acknowledged, it is made meaningful: we might see Mamoulian’s film, for example, with its ambiguous denouement, as exploiting Christina’s illegibility to construct a model of female subjectivity in which femininity and political responsibility are incompatible; in other texts, her illegibility exposes in its very absence the processes of elision, coercion, fabrication and denial via which biography operates. And, telling stories about Queen Christina, these texts have also told stories of lesbian identity, stories which, like biographies, enforce chronology, unity and closure on to their subjects. I have tried to suggest ways in which homosexuals themselves have worked with, as well as within, such stories; but what the example of Christina’s biographies must reveal is the inevitable inadequacy of accounts of sexual desire, to desire itself. Notes I should like to thank Suzanne Raitt and Laura Gowing for their helpful comments while I was writing this article. Sarah Waters is a postgraduate student at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. She is currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on lesbian and gay historical fiction. 1 Father Mannerschied’s description is included in the prefatory notes to the first English translation of Christina’s writings, The Works of Christina Queen of Sweden London: D.Wilson and T.Durham, 1753: xiii. 2 The most reliable accounts of Christina and her career are probably the ones written by her contemporaries, particularly those to be found in Whitelocke (1772), Chanut (1675) and Montpensier (1848). See also Christina’s own ‘La Vie de la Reine Christina faite par elle-même’, published in Vol. 3 of Johann Arckenholtz’s massive Mémoires (1751–60). Modern biographies, even very recent ones, are full
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of distortions, fantasy and sometimes errors. The least infuriating is probably Weibull (1966). Masson (1968) is also useful. 3 ’Car elle est une des plus ribaudes triballes dont on ait jamais ouy parler. Et pendant qu’elle a fait icy son residence, on luy a vu mettre la main sous la Juppe des femmes, & leur prendre les cas reservez ordinairement aux maris, de sorte que les dames avoient peine a se resoudre de mener leur filles chez elle’: Histoire de la vie de la Reine de Suède (1667:12). I am assuming that ‘triballes’, which makes no sense in this context, is a misprint for ‘tribades’, which clearly does; Neumann substitutes ‘tribades’ for ‘triballes’ without 4 comment (1935:161). There was indeed a tradition of interpreting Ibsen’s heroines pathologically: The Times in 1891 read Hedda Gabler as ‘a demonstration of the pathology of the mind, such as may be found in the pages of the Journal of Mental Science or in the reports of the medical superintendents of lunatic asylums’ (quoted in Showalter, 1987:146).
References ARCKENHOLTZ, Johann (1751–60) Mémoires concernat Christine, reine de Suède Amsterdam and Leipzig: Pierre Mortier. BAIN, F.W. (1890) Christina, Queen of Sweden London: W.W.Allen. BALLASTER, Ros (1994 forthcoming) “The vices of old Rome revived”: representations of female same-sex desire in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England’, in Raitt, Suzanne (1993) editor, Volcanoes and Pearl-Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies London: Onlywomen Press. BARINE, Arvède (pseud. Cécile Vincens) (1906) Princesses and Court Ladies New York and London: G.Putman’s Sons. BROMAN, Sven (1991) Garbo on Garbo London: Bloomsbury. CARPENTER, Edward (1906) Love’s Coming-of-Age London: Swan Sonnenschein. CHANUT, Pierre (1675) Mémoires de ce qui s’est passé en Suède Paris: C.Barbin. DAVENPORT ADAMS, W.H. (1891) Some Historic Women or, Biographical Studies of Women Who Have Made History London: John Hogg. de JEAN, Joan (1989) Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ELLIS, Havelock (1897) Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 1: Sexual Inversion London: Wilson & MacMillan. FADERMAN, Lillian (1985) Surpassing the Love of Men London: Women’s Press. GARBER, Marjorie (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety New York and London: Routledge. GLENDINNING, Victoria (1983) Vita: a Life of Vita Sackville-West London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. GOLDSMITH, Margaret (1933) Christina of Sweden: A Psychological Biography London: Arthur Barker. ——(1938) Sappho of Lesbos: A Psychological Reconstruction of Her Life London: Rich & Cowan. GRIBBLE, Francis (1913) The Court of Christina of Sweden, and the Later Adventures of the Queen in Exile London: Eveleigh Nash. HAINING, Peter (1990) The Legend of Garbo London: W.H.Allen.
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HAMER, Mary (1993) Signs of Cleopatra London and New York: Routledge. Histoire de la vie de la Reine de Suède (l667) Fribourg. LACOMBE, François (1761) Lettres Secrètes de Christine, Reine de Suède Geneva: Les Frères Cramer. MASSON, Georgina (1968) Queen Christina London: Secker & Warburg. MAUDSLEY, Henry (1874) ‘Sex in mind and education’ The Fortnightly Press 1 April. MONTPENSIER, Mlle. de (1848) Memoirs London: Henry Colburn. NEUMANN, Alfred (1935) The Life of Christina of Sweden London: Hutchinson. RUSSELL, William (1870) Extraordinary Women: Their Girlhood and Early Life London: Routledge. RUSSO, Vito (1981) The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies New York: Harper & Row. SHOWALTER, Elaine (1987) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 London: Virago. SMITH-ROSENBERG, Carroll (1989) ‘Discourses of sexuality and the New Woman, 1870–1936’ in Duberman, Vicinus and Chauncey (1989) editors, Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past New York: New American Library. STEEDMAN, Carolyn (1989) ‘Women’s biography and autobiography: forms of history, histories of form’ in Carr, Helen (1989) editor, From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World London: Pandora. Times Literary Supplement (1929) review of Margaret Goldsmith’s Frederick the Great (London: Gollancz, 1929) 28 February. ——(1933) review of Christina of Sweden 18 May. WALKER, Alexander (1980) Garbo London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. WEEKS, Jeffrey (1977) Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present London: Quartet. WEIBULL, Curt (1966) Christina of Sweden trans. Alan Tapsell, Stockholm: Bonniers. WEISS, Andrea (1992) Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema London: Jonathan Cape. WHTTELOCKE, Bulstrode (1772) A Journal of the Swedish Embassy London: T. Becket & P.A.de Hondt.
THE PERVERT’S PROGRESS: An Analysis of Story of O and the Beauty Trilogy Amalia Ziv
The pornography debate in the feminist movement is now about a decade old, and the arguments on both sides have been stated and re-stated many times. The debate has often focused on and has gained particular poignancy in relation to the nascent lesbian pornography. It has also become entwined with the lesbian sado-masochism1 debate in such a way that the two seem almost to designate two aspects of the same debate: a pro-SM stance is usually regarded as the natural counterpart of an anti-anti-pornography stance, and vice versa. The arguments in defence of lesbian pornography have often centred around the legitimacy of any form and any expression of lesbian sexuality (either because lesbian sexuality in itself subverts patriarchy, or because any expression of women’s sexuality counters women’s oppression, or because sexual freedom in general subverts heterosexism which is inherently linked to the patriarchy). The challenge offered by the anti-pornography-anti-SM stance in its repudiation of the very structures of sexuality in our civilization, the most elemental and deeply embedded themes, images, motifs, as reflected in lesbian sexuality as well —this challenge is usually answered with the magic word ‘subversion’. ‘Subversion’ stresses the significance of context—whether that of female sexual agency or of female authorship, of consent or of fantasy. It asserts that structures of desire change their meaning when transposed to a different social relation or a different subject position. However, while lesbian pornography offers a particularly favourable ground for the debate since it imports patriarchal structures to the least oppressive context (a woman author and a fictional world without men and beyond heterosexism), for this very reason its discussion may not promote any resolution: in a fictional world without gender relations there is no way to test the claims of the two positions and they remain in stalemate. For this reason, I would like in this essay to examine two non-lesbian-identified erotic works2 by women, where, since heterosexual sex either predominates or figures centrally, the power-gender nexus is closer to the surface of the work, and the work’s treatment of it easier to establish. Under these conditions, the significance of the works’ female authorship may be more clearly assessed since
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their engagement with dominative discourse is direct and not displaced as in lesbian pornography. In addition, fantasy in these works is not constrained by the attempt to provide myths and standards of exemplariness for a specific community (as, for example, in Pat Califia’s fiction). The two works that we will look at are Story of O and the Beauty trilogy. Histoire d’O was published in France, in 1954, under the pseudonym Pauline Réage, and its author remained for many years completely anonymous and an object of much speculation. The work was received warmly in France by the avant-guard circles of the literary establishment and has acquired world-wide notoriety as a pornographic classic. The three volumes of the Beauty trilogy: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release, appeared in the United States in 1983, 1984 and 1985 respectively, under the pseudonym A.N.Roquelaure, and several years later were acknowledged by the novelist Ann Rice as her work. Their readership appears to be both gay and straight and mostly young. Unlike Story of O, which enjoys the precious label of literary pornography’ (Susan Sontag has situated it next to the work of Sade and of Georges Bataille), the Beauty trilogy belongs to the realm of popular culture like the rest of its author’s work. The two works, separated by thirty years, have many features in common: both are SM fantasies composed by women3 and published under a pseudonym. In both works the main protagonists are women, forcibly coerced by men into sexual slavery and gradually moulded into a consensual masochistic role, and the story is told primarily from their point of view. Moreover, both works are total fantasies, meaning that in both, the situation of sexual subjugation depicted is a total existence for the protagonists, rather than a game or a circumscribed situation within ordinary existence.4 However, there are also significant differences between the two works, and it is my claim that these differences can be positively traced back to the major political and theoretical developments of the thirty years’ lapse between them: the so-called sexual revolution, the Women’s Liberation movement, the Gay Liberation movement, the current SM liberation trend, and correspondingly, the emergence of feminist theory, gay and lesbian theory, and post-structuralist theory—particularly social construction theory as applied to the field of sex. It is also important to consider the enormous proliferation and increase in availability of discourses on sex and of pornographic discourse during those years, especially the proliferation and heightened visibility of gay-male pornographic discourse (SM and non-SM), and the nascent lesbian SM pornographic and theoretical discourse of the eighties, the influence of all of which is registered in the Beauty trilogy. While there are fundamental SM themes which remain constant in both works, the latter, both thematically and structurally, reflects contemporary gay visibility, the contemporary SM subculture and, most importantly, the concept of the social construction of sexual roles and of desire itself. To what extent are these two works inscribed by or subvertive of dominant ideology? What is the significance of their female
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authorship? These are intriguing questions which I will try to take up. Finally, I do not intend directly to address either the SM debate or the pornography debate, but the examination of the texts in question will inevitably bring up some of their political and theoretical concerns. The most glaring difference between the two works is in their degree of fictionality and the type of fictional world they construct. Story of O is situated in twentieth-century Paris and provides frequent references to real place names and to fashion items (which help situate the narrative temporally). The three main characters: O, René, her lover, and Sir Stephen, in to whose possession René gives O, are all anchored in the world of work, and of O we even know her profession—fashion photographer. This is not to imply that their professional obligations impede them in any way from functioning in the narrative in an exclusively sexual context. O’s job, in particular, seems to be so flexible as to allow for month-long absences, and towards the end disappears from the narrative horizon altogether. This is congruent with what Susan Sontag in The pornographic imagination’ defines as the ‘total’ and ‘economical’ nature of the pornographic fictional world: ‘the universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything to the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative’ (1969:66). However, SM fantasy is distinguished from regular pornography by the rigidity and intricacy of the rules that govern the sexual interaction: whereas in regular pornography the dominant principle is, as Sontag remarks, the optimal multiplication of sexual exchange, in SM fantasy the ultimate goal is not only a totally sexualized existence, but also a totally regimented existence. In Story of O this is achieved through enclosure, and as both Sontag and Kaja Silverman note, Réage follows in this a Sadean tradition. Roissy, with its own class system of masters, valets and female slaves— and its extension in Samois and, to a lesser extent in Sir Stephen’s and O’s apartments—forms a closed society with regulations, customs and values all of its own. And the enclosure is a prerequisite not only for the ‘absolute regimentation both of bodily and mental activities’, but also ‘for the meaning it carries’ (Silverman, 1984:333). Although one cannot deny that Roissy represents, as Silverman claims, the privileged male ‘discursive fellowship’, still within the fictional world itself it is a circumscribed social system and to a significant degree transgressive, in so far that its rules and modes of interaction counter those prescribed in outer society— even though they may symbolically represent them. The fictional world of the Beauty trilogy is in this respect very different. The plot is situated at an indefinite point in time and space, and its world is from the outset completely distanced from the actual world by being posited as the world of the tale of Sleeping Beauty. This classic fairy-tale is provided with an alternative ending, which makes an ironic and provocative comment on the ideology of romantic love epitomized in it: the Prince does not wake Sleeping Beauty with a kiss and hurry to marry her, but rips off her clothes, rapes her (at which stage she wakes up) and
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carries her off to his kingdom where he turns her into his sexual slave. Only she is not the only one there—the Court is furnished with hundreds of other slaves, all princes and princesses from neighbouring kingdoms, so that the system of erotic domination not only overlaps with the whole fictional world, but forms an organic part of the social and political system. Whereas in Story of O there are often indications of rupture with outer society (rooms need to be sound-proofed or whipping victims gagged, and O speculates on the social censure she might attract if the marks of beating on her body are ever revealed), in the world of the Beauty story there is no such rupture: the sadomasochistic practices are not restricted to the Court but extend also to the neighbouring village, i.e., to all social strata. And although the neighbouring kingdoms do not maintain analogous institutions, they are obliged to take part in this one by supplying young representatives of their royal families for a period of several years’ servitude. While this arrangement is presented as enforced through the power supremacy of Queen Elenor’s kingdom (the Prince’s mother), it also has an undeniable contractual aspect and is apparently upheld by a long-standing tradition: Beauty’s parents have served at the Court of the Prince’s greatgrandfather (do not forget they have all been asleep for a hundred years). This period of servitude is also supposed to fulfil an educational, formative role for the young royalty who return to their homes ‘greatly enhanced’ (Roquelaure, 1983:16). As we see, on the surface level at least, the system of erotic domination projected in the text is not discordant with the social and moral system of the text at large. However, a formulation like that poses obvious problems. As Susan Sontag points out, a sense of transgression is vital for a representation of sex to enter into the category of ‘the obscene’, a category which she defines as related to the death instinct: ‘death is the only end to the odyssey of the pornographic imagination when it becomes focused on the pleasures of transgression rather than mere pleasure itself (1969:62). Sontag distinguishes between sensuality— the quest for pleasure, and the obscene—the systematic exploration of the boundaries of transgression which is to a great extent of an intellectual nature. The sexual domination represented in the Beauty story, then, both is and is not transgressive. It is not transgressive in the sense that it is institutionalized and incorporated into the general social structure, yet it remains transgressive in the sense that its interactions are such as would not be acceptable in any other social context in the fictional world itself and are unacceptable in the social world of the readers. Its transgressiveness is heightened by the fact that the sexual slavery institution disrupts and reverses the power hierarchy: the slaves belong precisely to that class that is endowed with the utmost power and is otherwise exempt from any kind of subjugation; and they are subordinated not only to their peers but also to their social inferiors. It is precisely the fact that erotic domination is institutionalized and sanctioned in the text’s world that affords its large-scale systematic deployment, its elaboration and refinement as a total existence and the exploration of its full psychological and erotic potentials. While in O’s
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consciousness her subjugation is total, still most of her social interactions most of the time (those which the narrative does not represent but enables us to reconstruct) are probably devoid of sexual meaning, whereas with Beauty, no part of her life can structurally elude the category of the obscene. We may therefore conclude that in SM fictions there is an inevitable payoff between the totality of the system of erotic domination and the fiction’s distance from the actual world. These are the two defining axes of transgression, since a text’s transgressiveness is measured both by the extent to which it manages to envelop the fictional subject in a system which appropriates her from herself, and by the extent to which it manages to ‘pollute’ the actual world—an effect which depends on its verisimilitude. Beyond these distinctions there is, according to Sontag’s definitions, a fundamental difference in the mode of the two works. Sontag observes two major patterns in pornography as a literary form: ‘one equivalent to tragedy (as in Story of O) in which the erotic subject-victim heads inexorably toward death, and the other equivalent to comedy… in which the obsessional pursuit of sexual exercise is rewarded by a terminal gratification’ (1969:59). In comparison to Story of O the Beauty trilogy is definitely more of a comedy, and like all comedies it ends in marriage. While Story of O’s ambiguous ending does not oblige us to assume O’s death as most critics do, it certainly suggests it as a plausible resolution, and the gradual aggravation of the practices to which O is subjected, culminating in the permanent marking of her body, seems to trace a tragic trajectory. In contrast, Beauty’s slavery is underscored by the knowledge of its temporariness and reversibility, no permanent mark is left on her body, and it is expected that at the end of the period she will re-assume her former social role. Furthermore, while both works stress the emotional-spiritual component of sexual slavery and describe the gradual initiation into true submission as a process of learning and ascendance, in the Beauty trilogy the sensual aspect is much more emphasized. In Story of O there are only few references to O’s own sexual pleasure or arousal—the idea of her humiliation and vulnerability seems to be of more importance to her. Her masters too do not seem to be very concerned with her pleasure, and her sexual responsiveness is condemned by Sir Stephen as ‘wantonness’, as ‘easy virtue’ (1973:86). In the Beauty story, on the other hand, sexual responsiveness is cultivated and valued, and not for any practical purpose: the male slaves too are expected to maintain a constant erection merely to signify their active involvement in the interaction. Sexual responsiveness in general, and to pain and humiliation in particular, is so highly valued that it is taught by special training to those unable to achieve it by themselves. It is also significant that while O is already a mature woman with a considerable sexual history by the time she is taken to Roissy, Beauty is fifteen years old without any former sexual experience. For her, then, SM functions merely as an ultimate sexuality, the maximal enhancement of desire and pleasure, while for O the passage into this type of sexuality has chiefly emotional and
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spiritual significance: the shattering of the boundaries of personality, the flight from individual freedom. And this difference in the meaning of SM for the two protagonists, and in the two texts in general, makes for the ‘tragic’ mode of Story of O and the ‘comic’ mode of the Beauty trilogy. One of the most conspicuous differences between the two works concerns their representation of the relation between gender and power. Whereas in Story of O there is a clear alignment of the master-slave divide along the genderdivision line,5 in the Beauty books there is no such evident correlation between the two factors. Story of O has consistently been analysed in terms of this alignment; so much so that feminist critics like Susan Griffin and Kaja Silverman regard it as a fundamentally male fantasy albeit spoken through a woman author. Griffin views the text as reflecting ‘pornographic culture’s denial of the female self’ (1982:188), in fact, as an ‘emblem of pornographic culture’ (199). She regards the process that O undergoes in the course of the plot as one of gradual physical and spiritual self-alienation and annihilation, and condemns sadomasochism in general for attempting to divorce body and consciousness, thus reflecting male culture’s attempt to divorce culture and nature and to conquer nature, symbolized by the woman who is ‘animalized and separated from cultural power’ (191). According to her formulation, then, SM is by definition a misogynist practice and is aimed against the female self. Kaja Silverman does not engage such an essentialist concept of a ‘female self, but she, in turn, regards the text as an allegory of the social construction of female subjectivity through the inscription of meaning on the female body: ‘Histoire d’O is more than O’s story. It is the history of the female subject—of the territorialization and inscription of a body whose involuntary internalization of a corresponding set of desires facilitates its complex exploitation’ (1984:346). Silverman offers an interesting interpretation of the rules and practices to which O is subjected. She groups them into three types of operations: territorialization—the division of O’s body into functional zones ‘in terms of phallic meaning’ (336); colonization—her subjection to a network of rules and prohibitions which mediate her relation to her body, exclude her from the production of meaning (through her imposed silence), and establish her subservience to the phallus and to the enunciating gaze of the male subject; and inscription—the whipping marks on her body as signifiers for the power imposed upon her, which also make her readable as a masochistic subject. All these devices represent the process by which the female subject is eventually brought ‘to oppress herself by internalizing the external structure within which her body is organized’ (339). Silverman points out O’s necessary function for her masters’ participation in the network of power and in the ‘discursive fellowship’ represented by Roissy. She also notes her mediating role in René and Sir Stephen’s relationship, thus implicitly questioning the boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual. The trouble with Silverman’s compelling analysis is that it is coupled with an assumption of a unitary pornographic discursive fellowship which encompasses both the male characters of the text and the text itself as a discursive product.
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The confusion of these two ontological levels enables Silverman to conclude that the effect of the pornographic representation is analogous to the process of construction represented in the text itself, and to warn that this process will continue to epitomize the history of the female subject—‘until she succeeds not only in exercising discursive power, but in exercising it differently’ (1984:346, emphasis added). This last remark can be understood to express Silverman’s position in the pornography debate: a denial of special status to female-authored pornography and a view of pornography as an inherently oppressive arena of social construction. While it is true that Story of O provides a symbolic representation of the construction of the female subject, and that this representation is eroticized, it is not necessary to assume that the effect on the reader is oppressive—not even when one ‘collaborates’ with the text and internalizes its eroticism. In a sense, since the text exposes and dramatizes the hidden assumptions of patriarchal ideology, it facilitates their identification and even compels the reader to confront them. More importantly, I believe that feminist theorizations of pornography need to re-examine the issue of female masochism. The hypothesis that I would like to propose is that female masochistic fantasy should be understood not as a product of construction, but as a reaction to construction. Masochism is the trace of the gap between the female subject and the construct ‘woman’ which she assimilates.6 The masochistic fantasy functions as an attempt to resolve the tension between the subject’s identification with patriarchal culture and her frustration and humiliation at being objectified by that same culture. Fantasy enables the subject to relegate the insupportable ideas7 to a realm that is kept apart from the ordinary self, and in that way to affirm them and reject them simultaneously. The unpleasant tension which these ideas arouse is translated to sexual arousal, yet this does not mean that they are thereby unproblematically assimilated. The masochistic component of the fantasy attests to the contrary: the pain and humiliation scripted by the fantasy are a transposition of the psychic pain caused by these ideas and indicate the ongoing resistance to them. As a form of representation, female masochistic fantasy retains the tension at its base, and hence cannot be reasonably said to ‘promote’ the objectification it depicts. This, of course, is not to say that we should advocate masochism as a form of resistance, but that works like Story of O should not be regarded as complicit in the patriarchal construction of womanhood since, mixed in with the poison, they already contain a dose of antidote. The Beauty story does not from the outset pose the same problems or lend itself to analysis along the same lines, since it offers a far more flexible and pluralistic vision of sexuality. Indeed, taken at face value, it seems almost to offer the impossible: a politically correct SM fantasy. In particular, the work does not problematize gender relations: its main erotic force does not hinge on the power differential between women and men. The slaves in the Queen’s Court are both female and male, and so are their masters. Yet if we examine the genderpower correlation more closely, we find that it is neither completely negligible
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nor that different from the traditional one. The kingdom is indeed run by a woman, but that is only due to the late king’s decease; the women of the Court possess male pleasure-slaves, but among the laity women seem to take only a secondary, accessory role in regard to the slaves: when Prince Alexi is sent to the kitchen as punishment, those are primarily the men who torment and abuse him, and when a woman does partake of these amusements, it is through the mediation of a man. Unlike Story of O, then, where we have a simple relation between gender and power, here the gender factor interacts with the class factor to produce a more complex pattern. One commoner who does possess slaves and interact with them directly is Mistress Lockley, the village innkeeper in Beauty’s Punishment. Yet, though she has complete authority over her slaves, the nature of her relation to them is ambiguous since she keeps them not only for her own pleasure and as a subsidiary labour force, but, perhaps chiefly, for commercial puposes, as erotic entertainment for her guests (mostly men). Even though she enjoys her slaves sexually, she has no exclusive sexual possession of them, and their function as status and power markers is compromised by this fact. Since she employs her slaves as a commodity in a commercial exchange, she does not have unlimited access to them, and therefore does not enjoy the authority and ownership of a true proprietor. In this, we find the traces of the familiar norms linking gender and class: since women are deemed unable to ‘possess’ others sexually and capable only of being possessed, their own sexuality and that of others has no use value for them—only exchange value. Therefore, if they wish to rise above the status of commodity, they may do so only by becoming sexual traders— sexual proprietors they can never be. A related issue which a closer examination of the text reveals as problematic is the issue of female desire. Even when women in the text do practice erotic domination, as the Court ladies do, the scenes which they conduct differ significantly from those conducted by men. When the Queen and Lady Juliana engage Beauty in a session of spanking, whipping and fetching games, these practices, though accompanied by manifestations of desire on both sides, strangely lack sexual consummation, which always follows in similar scenes where men are the dominants—although it is considered part of the torture to leave the slaves unsatisfied, the masters do not place any value on their own abstinence. A similar pattern emerges also with male slaves: the queen is more prone to have Prince Alexi fellate other slaves than to use him for her own pleasure, and Lady Elvira is usually satisfied simply to watch Laurent chase and mount female slaves in the garden. Both women are described as ‘cold’. It seems, then, that the text finds it hard to portray a combination of female sadism and female sexual responsiveness, that in its underlying female psychology the two more plausible female types are the voluptuous masochist and the cold sadist. An exception to this rule we find, once more, in Mistress Lockley, who does take Beauty and another male slave to her bed and allow them to gratify her. Yet, this exception is attributable to her class: as a commoner, she falls under the type of
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the ‘natural’ countrywoman whose voluptuousness is part of her lower nature. Moreover, the scene still differs from the analogous male-dominated ones in two respects: it does not incorporate or immediately follow torture or abuse (in the reading sequence, three chapters separate ‘Mistress Lockley’s Discipline’ from ‘Mistress Lockley’s Affections’), and the sexual interaction itself is surprisingly egalitarian and almost devoid of any manifestations of power. All in all, it is hard to avoid the sense that according to the work’s implicit assumptions, while female sadism is sexy, female sexuality is not quite reconcilable with sexual dominance and sexual aggression. One of the seemingly most progressive aspects of the Beauty trilogy is its total assimilation of same-sex desire. The text abounds with male-male desire, and does not at any point problematize same-sex desire in general. There is nowhere a question of the legitimacy of same-sex desire, and nowhere are same-sex and cross-sex desire seen as mutually exclusive or conflicting. The sexual ideology which the text projects proposes that different people may indeed have different preferences in terms of their sexual objects and the type of role and of acts they incline toward, but these preferences do not carry any significative weight and are, at any rate, quite fluid and liable to change. This ideology is immanently linked to the structural requirements of the text as an SM narrative, since the movement of the plot is that of the gradual enhancement of the scope of desire, at least for the slaves, who are initiated not only into ever-new practices but into ever-new desires. However, there is a significant gap between the fiction’s ideology (as it may be extrapolated from the text along the lines of what it does not proscribe or label) and its social reality (the actual assignation of desires to individuals), since female-female desire is far less prevalent than either male-female or male-male desire. Furthermore, there is no instance in the text of a woman possessing a female slave on a long-term (non-commercial) basis, and the one major instance of female-female desire, Beauty’s affair with Inanna, the Sultan’s wife, in the third volume, is totally egalitarian and devoid of power play.8 As such, it so completely stands out in the text that it almost illustrates the claim of the lesbianfeminist opponents of SM about the inherent incompatibility of lesbian relationships and erotic domination. Interestingly too, this affair is given an exceptionally political context. In Inanna, Beauty first encounters and is horrified by the fact of clitoridectomy, which arouses in her feelings that in contemporary feminist language could be defined as ‘rage’ and ‘sisterhood’. This is the only point in the text where any one at all experiences a political reaction to socio-sexual arrangements, and it certainly opens up a new dimension in the text by situating Beauty in a conflict between her sexuality as it has been constructed, founded on total unquestioning obedience and love for the master qua master, and her nascent political awareness which takes the form of hatred for the Sultan as the embodiment of the patriarchy, and of a singular outburst of generalized hatred for men: ‘nothing left but the portal that the man might enjoy. The filthy, selfish beast, the animal’ (Roquelaure, 1985:99). For Beauty in this situation, giving
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another woman an orgasm is a political act, and it is interesting how her halfformed understanding of it echoes similar formulations by lesbian-feminists like Joan Nestle.9 Disappointingly, this new dimension of the text is not explored but very quickly deserted, as Beauty and three other slaves are kidnapped by the Queen’s men and carried back to her kingdom. Beauty grieves over her friend for a while, but then, as her former lover re-accustoms her to the pleasures of submission and heterosexuality, she resigns herself to merely wishing that Inanna would find another woman with whom to practice this subversive sexuality. This is hardly a satisfactory resolution, and it sends us right back to the question at the heart of the SM debate: are feminist politics and erotic domination reconcilable? As as a full-time slave, Beauty is not a free agent and cannot act as a political person. Had she decided to act politically and been able to do so, she would have had to give up her former sexuality. She would also have left the realm of pornography, since she would have ceased to exist as a primarily sexual being. By creating this conflict for Beauty and leaving it unresolved, the text exposes its own limits. It brings into contact a pornographic construction and a feminist construction of the same social institution, the harem, causing their inevitable clash, only to show that eroticizing oppression and politicizing it are two distinct reactions that may not co-exist on the same psychological or artistic plane.10 However, the resolution of returning the slaves from the Sultan’s palace to the Queen’s country indicates the author’s turning back from the experimentation with a situation of irreversible subjugation in favour of a more reciprocal and less authoritarian fictional reality where such a conflict could not arise. On the whole, then, despite the general impression of a far more pluralistic and progressive sexual politics which the Beauty text conveys in relation to Story of O, it turns out that its foremost achievement is the assimilation of male-male desire into the sexual scheme, while it fails to envision a radical change in female power or in the construction of female desire. However, one significant point in which its ideology clearly differs from that of O is its treatment of desire as a construct rather than as a natural essence. As we have noted, in SM fantasy the modification of the masochistic subject’s desire is an essential component, since the constant breaking beyond the boundaries of this desire is vital for his/ her sense of transgression and loss of control. However, this modification can be viewed either as the creation of new desires or as the excavation of deeply rooted tendencies. Story of O is inscribed by an essentialist ideology which apparently assigns all women masochistic tendencies in relation to men, and all men sadistic tendencies in relation to women. O’s sadistic tendencies toward women are ascribed a secondary, imitative, status. Unlike this view which regards women as essential bottoms, the Beauty trilogy stresses the arbitrariness of the master-slave roles, suggesting that every person (though, again, there is room for personal inclination) is capable of both. This arbitrariness is highlighted by the equal social class of the masters and slaves, the limited period of servitude, and the
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fact that its termination, for both Beauty and Laurent, comes unannounced. The radical instantaneous change in social status and social role resulting from and symbolized by the act of donning one’s clothes manifests the entirely constructed nature of these roles. The text sees not only roles as constructed but also individual desire itself, which to a great extent is treated as the extension of the role: the slaves undergo a process of what can best be described as behavioural conditioning, linking sexual arousal with physical pain and humiliation. This process takes place in the course of their daily ‘education’, but there exists also a special institution, the Training Hall, dedicated to this particular purpose. The two works display in this point a clear affiliation to the social theory of their time, and the difference in their conceptualization of desire reflects the development in social theory in the three decades separating them, a development attributable mainly to the combined influence of feminism and poststructuralism, as well as to the creation of social alternatives to conventional gender arrangements. Finally, I believe that the Beauty trilogy, as compared to Story of O, bears the traces of contemporary SM discourse founded on actual SM practice. The preoccupation with the question of what makes a good slave (a good bottom), and what sort of submission is fuller or more demanding, is one that seems to arise from ‘the field’ itself. So does the questioning of the nature of love in this type of relationship: the weighing of love for the master as the replaceable incarnation of an abstract principle against a concrete, personal type of love. Another major ‘practical’ concern is the extent to which SM may be incorporated into a ‘normal’ functioning life. The text provides an optimistic answer to this question, ending with the marriage of Beauty and Laurent—the latter conveniently turned into a top—who are now free to practice erotic domination happily ever after. But this resolution is inevitably disappointing, since it replaces the sexual pluralism of the rest of the work with what is merely an assimilation of erotic domination into the institution of heterosexual monogamous marriage. Furthermore, it fixates the male and female in their traditional roles as sadist and masochist respectively, thus preserving the traditional gender-power alignment. The closing chapter of the work, which glosses over the weighty issues involved in integrating erotic domination into a long-term monogamous relationship—issues made even more complex when dealing with the marriage institution, already founded on notions of ownership— resounds with a clichéd and inauthentic ring. And this ring seems to imply that, as with Beauty’s political conflict, the subject is one that the work is unable to treat, and the closure should be understood merely in terms of technical adherence to the rules of the genre, be it that of fairy-tale or of pornographic ‘comedy’. While we have no room for a full discussion of the differences in narrative technique between Story of O and the Beauty trilogy, one point has important thematic implications. Whereas in Story of O there is only one protagonist, in the second and third volumes of the Beauty trilogy the narrative, which begins with
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Beauty as its sole protagonist, expands to encompass first Tristan and then Laurent; and while Beauty’s voice, like O’s voice, is given in the third person, the two men’s story is rendered in the first person. This, first of all, has the effect that in Beauty as compared to O we seem to get more of the subjectivity of the masochistic subject,11 and that this subject is represented as independently reflexive, less open than O to the accusation of having a merely responsive interiority—an effect which seems to testify again to the influence of SM practice and particularly to that of the self-interrogation of the lesbian SM discourse. Yet, from a different angle, the fact that in Beauty we get the men’s story more directly, and, in addition, that it is Laurent’s voice that ends the narrative, telling of his reunion with Beauty (a reunion in which he assumes full command over the relationship)—these facts raise the question of what we should make of Beauty’s woman-author’s choice of a cross-sex identification with the male characters.12 This question is complicated by the fact that these characters function in the text mostly in a receptive and submissive capacity, as objects of penetration and violation for other men. I believe that the author’s choice fulfills two interrelated functions. First, it enables her to identify with a masochistic position without doing so qua woman, that is, it enables her to circumvent the essentialistic equation of femaleness and masochism. Second, identifying with men whose masculinity is humiliated by the celebrated masculinity of other men, enables her to pay tribute to phallic power and exploit its erotic potential while at the same time transgressing it and turning it against itself. While the subversive value of this strategy is unquestioned it is, nevertheless, not absolute, since it is a strategy that relies on an underlying symbolic scheme which posits the phallus as the indispensable agent of sexual domination. Hence, the ‘feminization’ of the male characters does not entail any significant empowerment of the female characters, since while men may be penetrated, women cannot be envisioned as penetrating: the novel abounds with leather, wooden and stone phalluses, but they are never usurped by a woman as tools for performing actual coition. Here, where the Beauty trilogy finds an insurmountable difficulty, contemporary lesbian pornography may have more to offer. On the other hand, the abundance of inanimate incarnations of the phallus still indicates a degree of abstraction which marks a notable progression from Story of O, where the gaze of the female slaves is constantly directed to the actual male sex. To sum up, then, measuring Story of O and the Beauty trilogy against each other, we see that pornography, even within the bounds of its supposedly most malignant sub-genre, sado-masochism, is not an immutable entity grounded in a stable ideology—that it can and does accommodate changes in our understanding of sexuality, and that it provides a reflection of social processes. On the other hand, we see in Beauty that certain sexual myths—such as the link between powerlessness and sexual responsiveness in women—are harder to dislodge than
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others, and that a progressive sexual ideology on some fronts (e.g., the assimilation of homoeroticism) does not entail a progressive stance on others. From this state of affairs we can draw, I believe, two major conclusions. First, that it is naive to expect female-authored pornography to function as a locus of pure subversion, since such an expectation ignores its historical positioning within a network of larger discourses from which it cannot simply extricate itself. Further, subversion, by definition, cannot be comprehensive since it relies on the discourse it subverts, a reliance which is also the source of its power. (It seems that out of the appreciation of the political power of subversion has sprung a new confusion between subversive art and enlisted art.) Second, that, on the other hand, it is also erroneous to regard such texts as discursively determined and fail to take into account their female authorship, since, if we discount the agency of the subject and regard her merely as a passive medium, we will have no ground from which to theorize change. Further, only when we take full cognizance of the fact that these texts are written from the subject position of a woman, and a woman in a particular historical positioning—only then can we evaluate them properly as the products of a female subject’s negotiation of dominative ideology under specific material conditions and a specific discursive regime. The notion of ‘negotiation’ gives us a broader and more accurate analytical framework for the political evaluation of pornographic texts than the binary criterion of subversion versus complicity. In other words, it is necessary to historicize female-authored pornography— not only in order to excuse it and understand why it cannot surmount certain assumptions, and not only in order to support hopes for the future by tracing a pattern of gradual progress—but in order to appreciate what it does achieve. Thus, in Story of O, masochism as the internalization of the victim status allows women to gain sexual subjectivity, and the work’s essentialist notions of gender consolidate this subjectivity into a logically distinct and stable sexual identity. The significance of this move can be appreciated if we realize that there existed no previous model for female sexual subjectivity since, in the subject/object divide, ‘woman’ was equated with ‘object’, and desire was regarded as inherently male. The achievement of the Beauty trilogy in its own historical context is precisely in dismantling the very notion of an essential sexual identity, that on which Story of O relies. By representing the roles of sexual agent/sexual patient as constructed and unstable, and by increasing the complexity of the system that determines their construction, adding to it axes other than gender (e.g., class), the work gnaws at the very ideological foundation of gender oppression. The cost of this move comes, however, on the aesthetic plane. Since the existence of the pornographic subject is exclusively sexual, the destabilization of sexual identity causes this subject to lose its specificity and depth, and therefore makes it unable to elicit full identification from the reader. The consequence is that the work fails to attain the literary’ quality that we find in Story of O, and is relegated to the realm of the comic, of popular culture. Thus we face the problem of finding
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political evaluation and aesthetic judgement in collision, and I believe that while we need to question the ideological functions of aesthetic hierarchies, this contradiction is one that we need to learn to live with rather than deny—our attachment to essentialism is simply far too deep, far too comprehensive, to be rooted out completely in response to political exigencies. Notes Amalia Ziv is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Brown University, currently writing an MA thesis on sado-masochistic pornography and the fashioning of female sexual subjectivity. She is also currently co-editing an anthology of Gay Studies in Hebrew translation. She lives in Tel-Aviv. 1 Hereafter ‘SM’. 2 I am not going to take up the polemics of the distinction between erotica and pornography. My use here of the former term is intended as a kind of quality marker, but it is in no way exclusive, and it is certainly not my intention to deny that a major aim of these works is to produce sexual arousal in the reader. 3 The long debate concerning the gender of the author of Story of O—many outraged feminists have ardently denied that this piece could have been written by a woman —seems to be resolved by Regine Deforges’ interview with Réage, published in English in 1979. 4 This totality is, of course, to a great extent an effect of the representational strategy: both narratives open immediately with the protagonist’s initiation into sexual slavery, and thence do not provide any information unrelated to this condition, and do not describe any aspect of their lives that is not regimented and hence eroticized. 5 An exception to that rule is Ann-Marie, the mistress of Samois, but she, as Kaja Silverman explains, is only in the status of the ‘unusual woman’ who ‘is not a club member’ but ‘enjoys certain discursive rights’ (1984:327). It is also significant that the main function of the establishment she keeps is as a service to the male masters of its female inmates. 6 I am not positing here a pre-construction essential self, but I do regard construction as a complex and gradual process which involves the active mental participation of the subject, and hence leaves room for resistance and for variation. 7 I am employing the term ‘idea’ here in its broad sense which comprehends nonverbal and unconscious psychic contents as well. 8 In this volume Beauty and five other slaves are kidnapped and brought to an Arab sultanate where the institution of sexual slavery is practiced on an even larger scale. 9 The equality and the political dimension of this relationship stand out against the backdrop of O’s relationship with women. O has an avowed sexual attraction to women, but her ssxual interaction with them assumes and is modelled after the gender-role polarized pattern of male-female relations; it is in fact a mirror image of her relationships with men. O behaves very much like her contemporary, the ‘stone butch’ of the fifties: she enjoys the sense of the hunt, dominating the situation, and
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making other women come, but she ‘almost never allowed the girl with whom she was caressing to return her caresses’ (Réage, 1973:99). 10 This is not to say, of course, that they may not co-exist within one person’s psyche, or that one reaction may not lead to the other. 11 Even with Beauty herself, the narrative is more consistently from her point of view than in O’s case. 12 In trying to determine the thematic implications of differences in point of view, we should bear in mind that so far no definitive answer has been given to the question of the ‘significance’ or the ‘effect’ of first-person versus third-person narration, and that these seem to be very much context-dependent. However, I would venture to propose that, in the genre of pornographic fantasy, first-person narration may be regarded as signalling an identification of the author with the speaker (rather than as a distancing technique), while third-person narration involves to some extent an objectifying gaze.
References BENJAMIN, Jessica (1983) ‘Master and slave: the fantasy of erotic domination’ in Snitow, Stansell and Thompson (1983) editors, Powers of Desire New York: Monthly Review Press. DEFORGES, Regine (1979) Confessions of O: Conversations with Pauline Réage Trans. Sabine d’Estree, New York: Viking. GRIFFIN, Susan (1982) ‘Sadomasochism and the erosion of the self: a critical reading of Story of O’ in Linden, Robin R. et al. (1982) editors, Against Sadomasochism Palo Alto: Frog In the Well. RÉAGE, Pauline (1973) Story of O Trans. S.d’Estree, New York: Ballantine. ROQUELAURE, A.N. (1983) The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty London: Futura. ——(1984) Beauty’s Punishment New York: E.P.Dutton. ——(1985) Beauty’s Release New York: E.P.Dutton. SAMOIS (1981) editor, Coming to Power: Writing and Graphics on Lesbian S/M Boston: Alyson Publications. SILVERMAN, Kaja (1984) ‘Histoire d’O: The construction of a female subject’ in Vance, Carole S. (1984) editor, Pleasure and Danger Boston: Routledge & Keagan Paul. SONTAG, Susan (1969) ‘The pornographic imagination’ Styles of Radical Will New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
DIS-GRACEFUL IMAGES: Della Grace and Lesbian Sado-masochism1 Reina Lewis
In 1991 GMP published a book of Della Grace’s lesbian erotic photographs called Love Bites that became instantly controversial when some feminist bookstores refused to stock it because of its explicit sexual and sado-masochistic content. Since 1991, Della Grace has gone on to achieve a prominent profile in lesbian and gay culture (with photographs regularly appearing in the pink press and exhibitions in trendy London venues). In this article I am going to return to the moment of Love Bites in order to assess how its content and reception fit into a wider cultural formation concerned with the representation of SM and lesbian sex. As a book that came out some months before Madonna’s Sex —which in contrast had no problems with censorship legislation—Love Bites provides a good focus for an exploration of the changing boundaries of internal (lesbian and gay) and external censorship: it raises questions about the diverse, but not always unrelated, reasons behind lesbian feminist or state legislative censorship; the role of representation in the formation and articulation of socio-sexual identities; and the impact of SM on the understanding and representation of lesbian and gay issues in the cultural sphere. Della Grace is an American photographer now living in London who has been photographing the Anglo-American lesbian scene for some years. Love Bites is ostensibly about sex, but also about community. Very few of the images are specifically to do with sex acts (some are staged sex scenes and others are of clubs, demonstrations and meetings), mostly they relate to a lesbian existence within a particular urban milieu distinguished by its self-conscious lesbian identity, youth, glamour and an affiliation to SM practices or identities. The book was published by Gay Men’s Press as part of their imprint ‘editions Aubrey Walters’ and retailed at £16.95. As such, by price and by format, it is in the mode of both the visual erotica usually associated with this imprint and the coffee-table art book. This marks a new departure for lesbian publications where there previously had not been a widely available equivalent of the artistic erotica that has long been produced for heterosexuals and gay men (Merck, 1991). The other notable lesbian photography publication of 1991 was the excellent volume
Feminist Review No 46, Spring 1994
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Stolen Glances by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser, in which Grace also has a contribution. But that collection, and the accompanying exhibition, is not a coffee-table sex book. Rather, it is a collection of images and writings that engages with cultural criticism and politics. Whereas, for example, Stolen Glances would have no problem finding its way on to reading lists, Love Bites, which is selfconsciously illicit and transgresses the boundaries of taste and acceptability, not only would be harder to incorporate into teaching syllabi but is also profoundly ambivalent about whether it would want to be there. The book is brash, brave and banned—literally re-enacting the SM dyke’s favoured persona as social outcast by being refused entry to two London feminist bookstores. Sisterwrite banned it for ideological reasons, and Silver Moon declined to stock it for fear of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. As Silver Moon made clear, this internal censorship was not a sign of their disapproval of the images (as was the case with Sisterwrite) but an indicator of the uneven practices and impact of the Obscene Publications Squad who, if they raided a small independent bookseller were likely to remove enough stock and undertake costly lawsuits sufficient to precipitate closure or bankruptcy (Smyth, 1991). These distribution problems made the news, and the anti-censorship guardians of lesbian free speech, PUSSY, leapt to the fore, selling the book in the street in full SM gear as a protest. The book thus became a sign of the boundaries of acceptability within the lesbian and feminist communities. The defence of Grace’s book is predicated on the assertion of freedom of speech in relation to state law, but the subtext, which for the gay community is arguably more significant than state legislation, is concerned with the internal legislation imposed by community codes of conduct and respectability. It is very significant that this book, despite selling restrictions, was on sale in mainstream and alternative bookshops in 1991: ten years ago it would have been far more illicit and available probably only through mail order or very limited stockists. So, what do I think about these images? To some extent I was disappointed by Love Bites: some of the pictures are good, some erotic, some shocking, but some are boring—typically, this was both the last thing I expected from a book that had caused such a furore and the first thing—it confirmed my suspicions that erotica from an SM position was bound to repeat the same tired old deviant dildo scenarios. Grace has become an influential image-maker of contemporary lesbian society and on one hand I say the more the better, we suffer from such a scarcity of images. On the other, I worry that the effects of scarcity will lend an inflated credibility or authority to her particular range of images.2 And, like everyone, I shall be writing mainly about the sex scenes. The mixed response I have heard from lesbians indicates that Love Bites’ failure to fulfil our inflated expectations is a sign of both the hype about the book and the scarcity of lesbian images. Even Sarah Shulman, the doyen of up-front pro-sex lesbian fiction, does not seem sure what to make of
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Fig.1 Della Grace, ‘Ruff Sex: Romantic Bone’ 1988
them. In her introduction to the book she says of the ‘Ruff Sex’ sequence (figures 1–4):
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Fig. 2 Della Grace, ‘Ruff Sex’ 1988
I felt some confusion as to the authenticity of the event I was voyeuring… Is it a ‘real’ scene or a fabricated one… Are these girls wet, or what? (Schulman in Grace, 1991:6) What is interesting, is not just the book’s notoriety but the attendant glamour of its defence. The willingness to champion the bad and the banned is in keeping with a sexual identity that is predicated on a status as transgressive outlaw. Julia Creet, in an analysis of Pat Califia’s book Macho Sluts, suggests that lesbian SM is in perpetual rebellion against an authority figure that is maternal rather than the paternal parent typified by psychoanalytic (notably Lacanian) theory. That is, that the authority that both the top and the bottom parody, embrace and challenge (through the liberating experience of domination and subjugation) is not the father, but the mother—an internalized authority that represents the feminine interdictor rather than only the masculine of Lacan’s symbolic Father. For lesbian SM the interiorized prohibitions of the superego include not only the paternal Law but also a maternal authority, played out in the construction of lesbian feminism, or feminism in general, as the repressive exterior power. It is my view that we regard SM in a subcultural paradigm wherein the place of the dominant or parent culture (against which subcultures are traditionally seen to rebel) is taken by feminism or mainstream/ vanilla lesbianism. Like Creet, I think that the most useful way to understand the currency of lesbian SM is in its relationship to that which it defines itself against. Moreover, I think that in its
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Fig. 3 Della Grace, ‘Ruff Sex’ 1988
dialectic relationship to these groupings, SM actually constructs an identity for the ‘dominant’ feminist cultural formations as it poses itself against them. Therefore, as does Creet, we can begin to speculate on the dynamics of a rivalry
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Fig. 4 Della Grace, Ruff Sex: ‘Be My Bitch’ 1988
between women in which, for SM, it is other lesbians and other feminists who are the opposition not the patriarchal heterosexual world. The undeniable concern of some sectors of the non-SM lesbian community to present ‘a clean’, respectable public and self-image plays directly into the SM camp’s desire to be
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dirty, deviant and unruly. Thus the opposition to the banning of Love Bites was aimed with particular ferocity at the pejoratively labelled lesbian sex police’ (Grace in Smyth, 1991:10) as well as at the prohibitions of the state. The rhetorical flourish of phrases like ‘lesbian sex police’ or ‘Lesbian Puritans’ (Grace in Kent, 1991:19) not only pictures SM dykes as fugitives from an (unjust) law (and hence provides a point of empathy for all homosexuals who find themselves generically criminalized) but also demonizes and diminishes the vanilla opposition as agents of the Nanny state—the ultimate put-down of a feminized power as over-anxious, outdated and doomed to be superseded as her charges come of age. This reinforces the role of the SM dyke as the sexual outcast, the ultimate deviant and transgressor of up-tight moralities, and also allows for the development of elective affinities with gay men and heterosexual SM practitioners who likewise suffer under the repressions of the law—from both the state and their respective communities. So how transgressive are they? It would be misguided to see Grace’s work only in terms of its transgressions, even if these are the terms in which the work poses itself. The problem with adopting the space of transgression is that the boundaries of acceptability keep shifting. Creet argues that SM lesbians who try to keep on the wrong side of feminism—bucking the maternal authority’s boundaries—have a problem because the rapid changes of feminist practice and politics produce much faster shifts in boundaries than those of patriarchal structures which stay relatively stable. But I would disagree. Grace’s work constructs itself against feminist sensibilities, true, but the increasingly rapid pace of change in the post-modern era can also leave her work standing on the wrong side of the divide. The culture industry recycles images and moods too fast for anything transgressive to be assured of its status. Take for example ‘Soho Sister’ (Figure 5) from 1989. This may have been shocking then, and I can remember going to a lesbian night-club in that year and being incredibly shocked by seeing women wearing nothing but a bra under their jackets, but by 1991 it looked like last year’s Top Shop. Since 1989 we have had Madonna (but not yet, in 1991, Sex) and, though her underwear and fishnets used to be shocking and caused problems for some feminists, we are now used to her ever-changing personas and accustomed to accepting them as postmodern parodies of essentialist identities. Fashion changes too fast for clothes to be fixed signs of sexual or social identities. In an era marked by mainstream fashion’s incorporation of lesbian styles (remember when Dr Marten’s shoes ceased to function as a lesbian code because everyone was wearing them) and lesbian style in turn incorporated the mainstream (now its OK to be a lipstick lesbian) the Soho Sister loses her power to shock. SM has been outrun by fashion and now that the sparkly bra is not only mainstream but outmoded such displays (even on Soho rooftops) lose their sense of deviancy and outrage.3
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Fig. 5 Della Grace, ‘Soho Sister’ 1989
But this does not mean that we have no censorship or sense of the impermissible. Try the same model in a sex pose with another woman (‘Lesbarados’, Figure 6) and you have another kettle of fish. What in ‘Soho Sister’ was a fashionable assemblage of clothing, now, with the addition of armbands, neck collar and chain and a leather jacket, becomes a highly sexualized state of sex-dress—not
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Fig. 6 Della Grace, ‘Lesbarados’ 1989
undress, with its implications of naturalness—but sex-dress with all its associations of active self-constructed sexual pleasure. The playful assertiveness of ‘Soho Sister’ is re-presented in ‘Lesbarados’ as a tough ‘top’ in a static freeze frame of an SM tableau where the pose and greater nudity of the other woman
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positions the first figure as the dominant partner. These images are not in a continuous sequence in the book and the reappearance of the hatted figure in a different mode after several pages can unsettle previous conceptions. The viewer This is where the images are not Madonna or fashion adverts and we need to consider if there is a specifically lesbian meaning or coding to any of these images, and what sort of viewing positions they construct? How does this relate to the continuing debate about the female gaze? Although I have related them to fashion photography, these images do seem to me to be explicitly lesbian in content. Unlike, for example, the same-sex pairings of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photography that have prompted homoerotic readings, these are more significantly, and often explicitly, sexual (see Clark 1991). Most of the images in the book are overtly lesbian in that they are obviously concerned with same-sex object choice. (And here I might pre-empt some responses by saying that sex with a woman wearing a dildo is sex with a woman and a dildo not sex with a man.) But is there anything about the production, circulation and interpretation of these photographs that is qualitatively different from heterosexual porn? They often repeat the traditional tropes of straight pornography and echo the objectification of women that feminists have criticized in porn and in high art. As well as images where the subjects look back assertively at the viewer we see highlighted lips and sultry, downcast eyes (as in ‘Ruff Sex’ and, not illustrated, ‘Jess’). Considering that many feminists argue that porn is defined by its methods of production, several questions arise for Love Bites. Are these professional models? Is this passion real or simulated? We don’t know if the women we see were paid for their labour; whether they had model release contracts (i.e., control over the circulation and reproduction of the images); or whether the act of being photographed was part of their sex play. Grace in one interview describes the ‘Ruff Sex’ shoot as taking place at home in what became like a sex party’ but refuses to specify whether it was real sex or not. But it is the one thing that everyone wants to know, attesting to the significance of the conditions of production for our reading of the text. Presumably if we ‘know’ that these were produced under consensual non-exploitative conditions then we can rest easy in our pleasure of them. But of course this knowledge can never fully control our reading of the image and there will be many viewers for whom the thought of non-consensual production is part of, not impediment to, their pleasure. Is the camera there as a documentalist or dominatrix?4 Additionally, lesbian viewers have traditionally made do with subverting the meanings of heterosexual images, a reading that like the camp aesthetic, derives pleasure by reading against the grain; for example, Deborah Bright’s ‘Dream Girls’ in Stolen Glances where the fantasized relationship to the heroine of heterosexual romance is inserted into the image in a delightful reworking of
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great film moments. But Grace’s images are presented as ersatz porn: they do not subvert traditional voyeurism. Instead, in a guise that post-Madonna sometimes looks hackneyed, they use the traditional paraphernalia of porn to create lesbian sexual personas. Being looked at There is an element of being looked at in this collection that does not simply relate to the stereotypical gaze of the (male) voyeur. Lesbian images force us to theorize a lesbian gaze, and SM prioritizes an analysis of female fetishism, both of which have been dramatically underexplored in feminism’s deployment of psychoanalysis. (Recent exceptions include work by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Grosz.) The book in general and the images in the ‘Ruff Sex’ sequence in particular include a level of self-conscious to-be-looked-at-ness (on the part of both top and bottom, butch and femme) that is about asserting an identity rather than being desubjectified. Being looked at is part and parcel of subcultural activity. The use of dress in the formation of a specular identity is not just for the self or a means of self-recognition for the in-crowd. It is also there to be seen by the out-crowd, the squares. Subcultures use dress to signify their transgression of existing dominant codes. Whether it is mods or hippies, or SM dykes parading at Lesbian and Gay Pride in dog-collars and leather, the subculture’s style is their public personification of difference and deviancy; a registration of difference that for SM lesbians has a double audience—both other dykes and the heterosexual world. The book’s association with a group identity (SM) that is about public display gives another angle on why Grace welcomes rather than avoids voyeurism. SM dykes are the paradigmatic club set; they endlessly establish new venues in which one goes to see and be seen, and be seen looking, in a celebration of self-conscious voyeurism. In viewing Grace’s pictures it is hard to be unaware of the overlap of gazes from within and without the frame. The addressed But showing women looking back could not be said to be a consistent strategy in line with other feminist artists’ attempts to de-objectivize the female image. In fact, the objectification of the female body is in itself an aim of the images in keeping with the SM theory of liberation through the embrace of objectification and subordination. The pictures give us a wilful diversity, a refusal to be pinned down to one thing that, by refusing either a pornographic or feminist orthodoxy of representation, displays the pastiche and parody of postmodernism that some have suggested are so liberating for subjectivities silenced by the closed narrative of modernism. Taken as a collection, Love Bites offers a multiplicity of positionings which has, in the end, convinced me of its liberating potential. But the images, for all their diversity of address, are overwhelmingly coded with
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sado-masochistic referents and this still troubles me. They display precisely the lack of a clear morality that so troubles some feminists about postmodernism’s celebration of diversity and contradiction. In the ‘Ruff Sex’ sequence, the bottom who stares assertively out at the viewer in the before shot ‘Romantic Bone’, where the face and gaze of the top is obscured, is depicted in the sex scenes in a prone and passive position reminiscent of the best of het porn. One can argue that the combination of the before and after shots frames the sex scenes and undercuts the will to mastery of the top, and that, given the much vaunted ethos of consent in SM sex, the bottom is clearly understood to be in charge of her own subjugation (by the use of a code word to end any activity) which therefore subverts a traditional reading of female submission. On the other hand, to a viewer not versed in the morals of SM, this reads as a simple and traditional objectification of, and domination over, a female subject—particularly when both lesbian and gay SM buys into a heterosexual order of differentiation (calling submissive partners by pejorative female diminutive labels, and so on). The result of such open-ended reading positions (and would it be possible for SM images to legislate against any viewing position without replicating the forms of repression they seek to transgress?) is that anyone can get off on them. Despite their same-sex pairings (or trippings) the images do not militate against a male viewer. In fact, as far as gay male viewers go, their pleasure in the images is, for Grace, a welcome outcome. Grace’s subsequent collection, Lesbian Boys, represented cross-dressing and emphasized the androgyny of the lesbian figures to construct a pleasure in viewing that foregrounds a homoerotic reading and a Queer, rather than lesbian or gay, identity. One image (‘Robyn’, Figure 7) from Love Bites, originally appeared on the cover of Rouge and was given pride of place in a gay male bar until they realized that the model was a woman. The significance of these images in relation to the revived credibility of bisexual identifications remains to be seen, but if her 1993 exhibition Undressing the Forbidden is anything to go by, the saleability of SM imagery seems likely to override the specificity of a gendered positionality. But what about the straight viewer? When the first issue of the British lesbian sex magazine Quim was mentioned in the Observer in 1989 the editors, some to their dismay, were besieged with requests from heterosexual couples.5 Contextualizing spectatorship While one cannot but applaud the increased variety and availability of lesbian images, of which the publication of Love Bites is a part, there is a question to be asked about the prominence of SM. When the debate about lesbian and gay culture is often still at the positive images level do we run the risk of presenting SM as the only vital part of lesbian sexuality? The transgressions that Grace documents or constructs are those of a particularly visual set of SM lesbians: not all SM practitioners identify publicly as SM, or even as lesbian. But the scarcity of images and the publicity of the book gives them a rarefied status beyond their
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Fig. 7 Della Grace, ‘Robyn’ 1989
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ability to be representative of the community as a whole—even though it is as such that they are often taken. If lesbian SM sets up feminism as its other, what about readers who do not know about feminist campaigns against rape, violence, pornography and so on, who read SM in a different context? Feminists have been talking for some time (and I see this also in teaching) of a generation (political or historical) of women (and men) who will not call themselves feminist—a generation who take for granted feminist demands about equal pay and child care and so on, but who see feminists as angry, excessive and repressive. For many women feminism is a bad word signifying the worst of the ball-breaking humourless feminist or lesbian stereotype with which they fear to be associated. This is also true for lesbians and gays—they too see feminists as angry, up-tight, repressive and deeply un-hip. Unlike Joan Nestle and Pat Califia, who know and have fought alongside the other feminists that they now construct as the opposition, for the younger generation the spectre of feminism really does reside with the authority associated with their mothers or their mothers’ generation. For young lesbians it was lesbians of their mothers’ generation who propounded the ethos of politically correct sex against which they now feel themselves to be rebelling. I think that it’s important to look at the role of generational difference in the SM debate. At one time it was common to worry about young naive lesbians being led astray by the sophisticated subversiveness of SM dykes. Whatever the reality of this concern it is also symptomatic of an anxiety about being the parent, being the authority. Feminism’s ambiguous attitude to having power is never as simple as SM’s depiction of it as a maternal prohibitive force would suggest. We are never sure we have got it and endlessly agonize over what to do with it. In many ways the anxiety about centring SM images (setting the agenda and so on) betrays a discomfort with the very authority that SM fantasizes is the raison d’être of lesbian feminism. Whereas focusing on lesbian images or lesbian readings offers a challenge to traditional canons of culture, using work like Grace’s also challenges the political agenda of the feminist canon. SM is not politically correct in many circles (and indeed SM sees its job as being to challenge the hegemony of feminist moralities) and is often opposed to the critical activity of feminist theorists. Again this is a difference between Grace’s book and Stolen Glances which, though not unprovocative, is critically informed and certainly does not pander to the glamorized philistinism and anti-theoreticism propounded at times by both Califia and Nestle. Conclusion The relatively public distribution of Love Bites marked a sea change in lesbian cultural politics which, along with the growth of lesbian and gay studies in the academy and the revitalization of bisexual identities, offers a chance for the ‘mainstream’ to diversify its range of referents and really tease out what might
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be at stake in the populist multiplication of postmodern identities. Since 1991 we have seen Madonna’s Sex, which references a wide range of possible sexualities (significantly without associating Madonna exclusively with any one of them, although she remains coded as primarily heterosexual); debates about ‘outing’ prominent lesbians and gays; and journalistic interest in what seems to be an increased, if opportunistic, identification as lesbian among the international glitterati. But we have also seen the prosecution of consensual gay SM sex in the ‘Operation Spanner’ trial, as well as a broad-based mobilization in support of the defendants that replicates the very tropes of civil rights rhetoric and politicking for which the SM lobby has periodically criticized feminism. What we find, is that for all the increased visibility of SM and the postmodern stress on play and parody, the cultural scene has not been emptied of its dangers. Rather, we find ourselves treading a tightrope of personal, political (and, for some, pedagogic) quandaries, between the interconnecting but contradictory codes of acceptability and censorship of dominant, subcultural and deviant moralities. Notes Reina Lewis lectures in Literature and Cultural Studies at University of East London. She is co-editing a book on lesbian and gay sexualities and visual culture with Peter Horne for Routledge, due out 1994/5. 1 A version of this article was delivered at the 1992 Association of Art Historians Conference and at the Queory Seminar, organized by the MA Sexual Dissidence, at Sussex University. I am grateful to everyone who responded to the paper at both those venues and to Sue Hamilton, Karen Adler, Chris Pegg and Katrina Rolley for reading and commenting on early drafts. 2 On scarcity see Grover (1991). 3 On the changing pace of style and postmodernism’s assimilation of countercultural style into mainstream fashion see Wilson (1991). 4 The double bind of lesbian SM as both unruly daughter and assertive identity is that it must simultaneously adopt the sang-froid of the truculent teenager and explain itself to the grown-ups in order to assert the hegemony of its new order— Grace’s images do the provoking and the reviews provide the rationale. (Although none I saw asked about model releases, etc.) See also Lewis and Adler (forthcoming). 5 See Lewis and Adler (forthcoming).
References ADAMS, Parveen (1989) ‘Of female bondage’ in BRENNAN (1989). BOFFIN, Tessa and FRASER, Jean (1991) Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs London: Pandora. BRENNAN, Teresa (1989) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis London: Routledge. BRIGHT, Deborah (1991) Dream Girls in BOFFIN and FRASER (1991).
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CLARK, Danae (1991) ‘Commodity lesbianism’ Camera Obscura 25/26(Jan/May): 180–201. CREET, Julia (1991) ‘Daughter of the movement: the psychodynamics of lesbian SM Fantasy’ Differences 3(2) Summer: 135–59. GRACE, Della (1991) Loue J Bites London: GMP. GROSZ, Elizabeth (1991) ‘Lesbian fetishism? Differences 3(2) Summer: 39–54. GROVER, Jan Zita (1991) ‘Framing the questions: positive imaging and scarcity in lesbian photographs’ in BOFFIN and FRASER (1991). KENT, Sarah (1991) ‘Photo sensitive’ Time Out 25 June: 18–19. LEWIS, Reina and ADLER, Karen (forthcoming) ‘What’s wrong with lesbian sm’ Women’s Studies International Forum. MERCK, Mandy (1991) ‘Unmediated lust? The improbable space of lesbian desires’ in BOFFIN and FRASER (1991). SCHULMAN, Sarah (1991) Introduction’ in GRACE (1991). SMYTH, Cherry (1991) ‘Grace and favours’ City Limits 13–20 June: 10–12. WILSON, Elizabeth (1991) ‘Making an appearance’ in BOFFIN and FRASER (1991).
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Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History Edited by Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde University of Toronto Press: Toronto 1992, ISBN 08020 2734 2 $40.00 Hbk; ISBN 08020 6773 5 $16.95 Pbk One of the most striking developments in Canadian history over the past twenty years has been the growth of material focused on the position and experience of women in the Canadian past. Sexuality and reproduction, marriage and the family, work, education, political participation, voluntary activism, and religion are but a few of the most significant areas that have been explored and analysed by Canadian women’s historians (as well as those who work in related fields such as sociology). And in this process of historical retrieval and revision, Canadian historians have been informed that a whole raft of significant social and economic developments (major demographic shifts, urbanization and industrialization, the spread of state-supported education, the growth of various social and political movements, and Canadian participation in World Wars I and especially II) have not only included women but often have affected them in different ways and have had different meanings for them than for their male counterparts. Furthermore, Canadian historians have been informed that women’s presence and agency have been important influences on many historical processes and events. Yet while Canadian women’s history has become an increasingly rich and diverse field, it also has been marked by a certain degree of isolation from other fields, especially that of political history. Moreover, especially in its earliest stages, the subjects of such research were often white, middle- or upper-class, Anglo-phone women from central Canada whose activities were often celebrated rather than being subjected to critical analysis. And even though the field has expanded to examine the experiences of working-class, immigrant and (arguably to a lesser degree) native women, gender is often perceived as having been the most crucial factor in shaping women’s experiences and identities. Gender Conflicts
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sets out to challenge such conceptual and methodological frameworks and to provide alternative methods of investigating the past; its authors wish to demonstrate the importance of considering not only women’s experiences but the many ways in which gender relations have shaped Canadian society, acting both as ‘objective structural factors and as subjective meanings’ (xvi). They propose that Canadian feminist historians eschew the search for what was more ‘fundamental’ to women’s experience—their gender, or race, or class—and instead examine the complicated, shifting and historically constructed relationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity. As well, they suggest that historians should not only take as their subjects of study non-élite women (and many of these essays in this collection focus on just such women) but also must rethink their treatments of white bourgeois women, acknowledging that ‘class and race or ethnicity inform the lives of all women, including those of the relatively privileged’ (xvi). They caution their readers not to expect heroines, nor to search the book for examples of ‘glorious resistance’ (although there are times when individual contributors seem unwilling to relinquish the latter); power, they remind us, ‘does not flow from a single source, and it is not the exclusive domain of those who are “powerful” (xix). Conflict, they argue, has occurred not only between men and women but also has shaped relations between women ‘or different racial, class, and cultural backgrounds’ (xii). A fairly ambitious programme, then, for a collection of essays on topics that are quite diverse and wide-ranging. For the most part the articles live up to the introduction’s promises and employ a variety of methodologies in order to do so. They range from Karen Dubinsky’s study of sexuality which uses late nineteenthcentury Ontario court records and Franca Iacovetta’s analysis of client files of a social welfare organization in Toronto during the post-World War II period, to Mariana Valverde’s examination of the discourses of race, sexuality and reproduction in first-wave feminism and Cynthia Wright’s reflections on the relationship between gender and consumerism at Toronto’s Eaton’s department store in the 1920s. Lynne Marks’ analysis of the meaning of religion for workingclass women, specifically those in the Salvation Army, sheds some muchappreciated light on a topic that has received only cursory and relatively unsophisticated treatment in the Canadian literature. And Carolyn Strange’s discussion of the acquittal of two working-class women (one black and Canadianborn, the other a white British immigrant) in separate murder trials is one of the collection’s most sophisticated and successful attempts to pry loose from the mould of heroic yet victimized womanhood faced with patriarchal oppression. The book’s intent to speak to both past and contemporary political issues is most explicit in Ruth Frager’s discussions of Jewish women’s experiences in the Toronto garment trades and labour movements and in Janice Newton’s article on women in the Canadian left. Both authors point to the particular pitfalls and
Feminist Review No 46, Spring 1994
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limitations faced by women from very different ethnic and class backgrounds in their struggles for socialist-feminist goals. Gender Conflicts’ claim to represent ‘new’ directions, as its subtitle and introduction indicate, is perhaps a touch exaggerated; others in the Canadian field have begun to ask similar questions and employ similar approaches (admittedly, such historians are far from numerous). Ironically, at least four of the contributors to this volume can now be counted amongst this group, having now published monographs that expand upon the collection’s themes. What many of the articles do quite well is to balance empirical material taken from specific Canadian contexts with broader theoretical questions, ones derived from international debates over the social construction of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality. The authors are candid about those areas that are missing from Gender Conflicts, pointing out that the book is focused on central Canada, most specifically the province of Ontario, and that its lack of material ‘by and about women of colour’ means that it cannot be considered (nor is it intended to be) a ‘“representative” anthology’ (xxi). No one collection can cover everything, of course, and the way in which this book came about (as the product of a likeminded socialist-feminist study group that met, mostly in Toronto, throughout the 1980s) has shaped the book in certain ways. Such a process is both the source of its strengths and its limitations. What isn’t acknowledged, though, is the collection’s coverage of a particular period from the 1880s to the 1960s; it has been the chronological ‘framework of choice’ for the majority of Canadian women’s and gender historians and is thus by no means a new one. However, I hope that the collection’s many insights into Canadian labour, political, religious, immigration and business history will not be overlooked by those who work in those fields, that the methodological and conceptual shifts proposed in Gender Conflicts will indeed help end the relegation of ‘women’s topics’ to a separate corner of Canadian history. Cecilia Morgan The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660– 1700 Elizabeth Howe Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0 521 38444 3 £35.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 521 42210 8 £12.95 Pbk Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture Tracy C.Davis Routledge, Chapman & Hall Ltd: London 1991, ISBN 0 415 05652 7 £37.50
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Hbk; ISBN 0 415 06353 1 £9.99 Pbk The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914 Edited by Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hemel Hempstead 1992, ISBN 0 7108 1379 1 £42.50 Hbk; ISBN 0 7108 180 5 £12.50 Pbk The recovery of women’s involvement in the development of English drama has been slow to come to fruition. Apart from the usual theatrical memoirs and biographies, only a few scattered books over the last century have charted the social and cultural significance of the actress. Books like Rosamond Gilder’s Enter the Actress (1931), John Harold Wilson’s All the King’s Men (1958) and Richard Findlater’s The Player Queens (1976) have provided useful introductions to a fascinating subject but, as this rush of newly published books show, it is only recent developments within the area of women’s studies which have allowed theatrical history to be reexamined in the light of feminist theory. How women have been perceived as performers has obviously changed according to the prevailing cultural ideology but, from the Restoration period through the Victorian age and beyond, their presence in the public institution of the theatre can be seen as both a symptom of and a panacea for their position within a society divided along class and gender lines. Elizabeth Howe’s book begins at the beginning of the story, or at least in 1660, when women appeared for the first time on the English stage as professional actresses. By examining the underlying political and theatrical reasons for this remarkable overturning of tradition—the influence of the Continental theatrical scene on exiled Cavaliers, the lack of suitably trained boy-actresses, the ascendancy of royal patronage and the Court—Howe positions women centrally within this symbiotic relationship between the theatre and the state. Surprisingly, though, only brief mention is made of the importance of the seventeenth-century discourse which questioned and challenged traditional expectations of malefemale gender roles. Because this sexual debate is not placed within any kind of social and cultural context, there is often only a superficial reading of events and so, for example, although Howe states that women’s sexuality was relished during the Restoration, she does not mention that this was also the period when home-grown pornography emerged for the first time and women were increasingly attacked for daring to speak out at all. Where the book’s strength lies is in its awareness of the dichotomy involved in the emergence of women into a male-dominated sphere. Their appearance is simultaneously ‘radical’, in that they have a voice and a presence for the first time, and ‘conservative’ because they were viewed as the sexual playthings of a small
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coterie of privileged people. Obviously, actresses raised the erotic temperature of the theatre and this was reflected in both their working conditions, where members of the audience were free to watch them (un)dress backstage, and in the drama itself, with an increase in voyeuristic displays of sexual violence, teasing bedroom scenes and breeches roles designed to show off the female body. Howe puts forward a persuasive argument for the profound influence actresses had on the development of Restoration drama, and focuses particularly on the careers of women like Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle and Nell Gwyn. Yet this concentration on actresses as ‘public’ beings automatically leads to speculation about their lives offstage, and I found myself asking how one impinged on the other, how these women’s lives as actresses were affected by their lives as wives and mothers, especially as they had to leave the stage at frequent intervals to produce, often illegitimate, children. Although entitled Actresses as Working Women, Davis’s book refuses to allow that any separation can be made between an actress’s personal and professional life. Conceived of as ‘a social history of women’s employment in the Victorian theatre’, Davis provides a sound socio-economic basis to her study through the employment of Marxist and feminist theory and the ideas of New Historicism. By using different methodological approaches, roughly corresponding to the chapter divisions, a complete picture of the Victorian actress as a member of a group rather than an individual begins to appear. In this way, the view of the acting profession as being upwardly mobile during the Victorian period and of providing fame and fortune for women such as Ellen Terry and Lillie Langry, is put into perspective. Indeed, the majority of female performers worked in the socially less respectable (and therefore less well paid) forms of theatre such as burlesque, extravaganza, ballet, pantomime and music hall. Unlike the Restoration period, when many actresses worked as prostitutes to augment their wages, Davis shows that there is very little statistical evidence to prove the Victorian equation of actress=prostitute and that this idea stemmed from a deep mistrust of women who performed in public for money, thus threatening the structure of the family, the balance of economic power and traditional expectations about the role of women in society. As in The First English Actresses, Davis is interested in the relationship between female acting and male voyeurism. Indeed, our present-day ‘peepshow’ has its genesis in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tableaux vivants, where theatre managers, by borrowing from the respectability of paintings by Royal Academicians (in itself yet another form of voyeurism), were able to present women on stage in classical semi-naked poses. Theatrical costume as well as gesture, Davis claims, were used to reveal and draw attention to what is only partially concealed. In this way, the diaphanous dresses of ballerinas, the underclothing of cancan dancers, and especially the nude-like pink tights ubiquitous to all female performers, act as erotic signifiers to the audience, aware of their fetishistic nature through pornography readily available in shops close to the theatre houses. Yet the tendency to read ‘audience’ as male and middle class
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presupposes that all men read pornography in the same way while excluding the responses of women, particularly those of the working class, who may not have been as ignorant of pornography as Davis seems to suggest. In many ways, the pursuit of this argument leads the reader to think of the Victorian actress as a victim, exploited by her employers, the men who came to watch her, and society at large. Davis only makes passing reference to the appearance of that strong and, indeed, political figure of the late nineteenth century, the ‘New Woman’. Gardner and Rutherford, on the other hand, have amassed a splendid collection of essays in which the actress or, more specifically, the female performer, is seen as less a passive recipient of the male gaze than a manipulator of her own image. From her inception in the 1890s, the New Woman became synonymous with the feminist and suffragist movements of that period and part of the thrust towards the modern age. In popular iconography, she was shown as rejecting accepted notions of femininity and assuming a masculine role. In reality, she was financially independent and sought freedom from, and equality with, men. Although the New Woman label arose out of a historically specific moment and was used inevitably to describe the female characters in the New Drama of writers like Ibsen, Shaw and Pinero, these essays widen the concept to examine the ways in which women have used the stage to challenge and subvert both the prevailing images of womanhood and the institution of the theatre itself. Thus, the carefully organized chapters steer us through a diverse range of topics, from Yvette Guilbert’s La Femme Moderne to ‘the female Blondin’, from ‘Princess’ Hamlet to the Pioneer Players. There are many interesting comparisons to be made with Actresses as Working Women. For example, J.S.Bratton shows that female performers in male attire can often, when read as a metaphor for the New Woman, be used as a means to empower women rather than a merely titillatory device for attracting the male audience. Similarly, Jill Edmonds looks at how the distinguished actresses who took on the role of Hamlet were able to use this, albeit atypical ‘breeches’ role as a sign of their equality with men, and Susan Rutherford, in her essay on prima donnas, analyses how traditional male readings of the female voice, where the male is led to his destruction by the dangerous sexuality of the ‘syren’, came to be replaced by positive images of women in control of their voices, their bodies and their sexuality. With the founding of the Actresses’ Franchise League in 1908 to support the suffragist movement, women brought a sharp new political focus to the stage. As Christine Dymkowski shows in her essay on Edy Craig and the Pioneer Players, women were beginning to take up positions of power previously denied to them. Yet the dismissive reaction of the male establishment to their opening presentation in 1911, a one-act play celebrating the history, ambitions and successes of the actress from the first pioneers onwards, shows how women can so easily be redefined and thus written out of history altogether. As well as charting the progress of the actress through three formative periods, therefore,
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these well-researched and entertaining books can be seen as part of the necessary recovery of the whole of women’s history which will continue to redress the balance by providing a solid foundation on which to build for the future. Rebecca D’Monté The Feminist Companion to Mythology Edited by Carolyne Larrington Pandora Press: London 1992, ISBN 0 04 4408501 £12.99 Pbk Where do stories come from? The abundance of stories in The Feminist Companion to Mythology bedazzles and delights. The power of the story to shape the characters of its listeners, and the power of the listeners to reshape the story in the retelling, is at the hub of it. Women, in this case, are the characters and re-tellers, and the myths they examine are from the Near East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, America. Myth is defined by the anthology’s editor, Carolyne Larrington, as the stock of stories that feature the divine, but since contributors survey folk-tale and ceremony featuring symbolism as real to the story-tellers as their own voices—in addition to legend and texts known to be historical—she concludes that myth’s definition has to stretch. Myth is, rather, a continuum, a collection ‘of a web of meanings’. This is not a book that seeks to constellate the many into one—it is not looking to mould together all the various aspects of female mythic figures into a single ‘great goddess’. Although Emily Kearns’ writing on Indian Hindu myths does look in detail at this phenomenon, since, in the words of one villager, the ‘worship of a goddess is considered to be worship of the goddess’. Female divinities powerful in their own right did not emerge in the Vedic texts until about the eighth century, and now, in contrast to the literally millions of local deities, there are three supreme divinities of pan-Indian Hinduism, one of whom is the Goddess. Paradoxically, she is understood to be both lower in the hierarchy than the other two male gods and, on another, theological level, to be the highest of all, the ‘ultimate reality’. Kearns shows that many of the goddesses are fierce and aggressive and portray values that are traditionally seen as masculine, assertive and active, including the Goddess herself. Without her, the great god Siva would be ‘inert’. It is only because of the Goddess, who embodies the abstract value of śakti, or ‘power of action, of differentiation’, that Siva, the male god who represents ‘undifferentiated, inactive, Existence’, is empowered to give shape to the world. Yet the result, our actual, manifold, particularized world, the world of many things, is also yet another manifestation of the Goddess, in one of her incarnations, this time as illusion or maya. Kearns unfolds these intricacies carefully and clearly, laying out the mysteries of a mythology that to me, anyway, were previously locked away.
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Contributors do not follow a single analytical framework—impossible, apparently, with their diverse material and theoretical backgrounds—but do focus on letting us know what feminist scholars can say now about the female figures that appear in the myths of many countries, and what was and is the relationship of those figures to the societies that produced the myths. From this interchange, a suggestive range of questions emerges. Among these is the question of whether Western gender-inscribed categories can be applied carte blanche. Does feminist ethnography itself run the risk of misunderstanding even as it seeks to transcribe and reinterpret? Some of the writers, particularly those on Mexican and South American myth, suggest this possibility. The Aztecs had been in power for less than a century when the Spanish arrived and while the Aztecs altered local mythic figures (Xochiquetzal, for example, was the ‘most female of the Aztec goddesses’ and from her vulva flowers and their scent were created) to suit their own belligerent, expansionist, sun-worshipping purposes—the Spanish impose upon them, in turn, their own Christian value system. Thus Xochiquetzal’s femininity is ‘contaminated’ by the Christian ethics of good and evil. The South American goddess Pachamamma is similarly reduced, not only when she is turned into the ‘bad’ pagan goddess (as opposed to the ‘good’ Virgin), but also, in contemporary versions, when she is converted into an ‘Earth Mother’ figure. Her fertility is vastly more complex, compounded less of biological associations than of those of time and space, geography and history. The writers describing the Australian Aboriginal women’s ceremonial stories, have vowed to keep the details secret. To the women concerned, the sacredness of the myth is essential, defining their relationship to the landscape and to each other. Identity and landscape are mapped together. Anecdotal information—such as the fact that 20 per cent of Eskimo children might be brought up by their families to identify with a gender different from their physiological sex, and thus to carry out the opposite gender-specific role (a girl might be trained to become a hunter, for instance)—or that Maori men looked after male children, but not female—or that the grandmother’s power in China within the family belied the subservience of her place in society— fascinating in itself, is here placed against the myths that formulate and display the meaning of gender difference, and the way this is used to designate the antinomy between nature/culture. On the other hand, history is re-examined to find out whether the actual lives of the queens of ancient Egypt reflected the autonomy and sexual equality of the goddesses of mythology. The persistence of local deities conveying different stories of women’s needs, work, dreams—such as the pagan spinner goddess whose ordinance, which lasted until the nineteenth century in Russia despite the introduction of Christianity some nine centuries earlier, justified women’s continuing refusal to labour on Fridays—is contrasted with the myths of national high culture. Female figures of great age, such as those in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, pieced together only last century from the cuneiform script on clay tables
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unearthed all over the Middle East, are reinterpreted, minus the previous patriarchal bias of the original translators, to stand forth in their greater power and glory. Whilst another as familiar and famous as the great patriarch himself, the Hebrew Yhwh, is reintroduced with ‘His Female Complements’. Athalya Brenner discovers the female and feminine aspects of the God in the Biblical text, as well as evidence for casting the patriarch in the role of Failed Father. Twentieth-century feminist re-sourcing of myth—by the new goddess religion, Wicca (which has been evolving in the West since the Second World War), by writers’ coining new words, by poets’ rewriting of myth, is discussed in the final section. Much of the retelling of myths is juicy and rich, such as the story of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, who was recently re-sighted by a mural painter—and no wonder, given her fiery exploits, her ‘uncomfortable combination of the female, the sexual, the powerful and the old’. The attempt to create something out of nothing (Juliette Wood hunts down the lacuna and false trails transformed into evidence for a Celtic mythology, showing they lead instead to a mythology about the Celts) is itself, of course, a fantasy, a myth. So, to those who would tell stories, and present new myths, the final eontributor, Diane Purkiss, warns: ‘it’s more important to be wary and even ironic about the strategies available when none are foolproof. Let the imagination fly, she suggests, we need all the stories we can get, but don’t pretend that the string to the past can be completely cut free. Marsha Rowe A Matter of Honour: Experiences of Turkish Women Immigrants Tahire Kocturk Zed Books Ltd: London and New Jersey 1992, ISBN 1 85649 075 0 £29.95 Hbk; ISBN 1 85649 076 9 £11.95 Pbk Tahire Kocturk explains that her book is the result of an attempt to make the voices of immigrant Turkish women living in Western Europe heard in the face of ‘well-meaning generalizations’ and ‘less friendly prejudices’—in other words, racism. Muslim communities, like many other communities living in Western European societies, face individual and institutional racism. This book comes out at a time when fascist attacks on immigrants and refugees are on the increase and Western governments are facilitating further attacks by preparing the legislative ground. While refugee camps and the homes of Turkish immigrants are set on fire by fascists in Germany, the Young Conservatives of Britain distribute stickers on the Continent bearing slogans such as ‘No Drugs, Islam and Turkey in the EEC’. Kocturk’s book arose out of a study she conducted between 1986 and 1989 on ‘Family and gender relations among Muslim immigrants in Sweden’. She
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conducted interviews in the Stockholm and Upsala regions of Sweden, a country not necessarily typical of Western Europe. The information in the study is interesting and as implied by its title it is about a very specific section of immigrant women. She interviewed 49 women and 10 men and the interviewees are Turkish speaking adults from Anatolia with at least one marriage or engagement experience’. Single women, for instance, are not included in the survey. It is, therefore, arguable how representative her sample study is of the ‘experiences of Turkish women immigrants’ as suggested in the title of the book. Out of 130 pages, only 30 are devoted to the description and analysis of the study; the remaining 100 contain historical background information. Historical documents, however, as described below are very much male-oriented and need to be re-studied from a woman’s perspective. The scope of her historical account is also too wide and her analysis is flawed by generalizations. The issues of immigrant women with Middle Eastern and Muslim backgrounds are quite difficult to discuss and such discussions are ‘often ideologically charged’ (Keddie, 1991). Anyone who wishes to discuss these issues will soon realise that while there are widespread prejudices that need to be overcome the problems of Muslim women should not be ignored. The book provides interesting information on Islam and the honour ethic. Kocturk points out that many ‘Islamic’ customs, such as veiling and seclusion, pre-date Islam in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. As in other areas, Islam generally follows the Judaeo-Christian tradition. All three religions profess that man is superior to woman. The honour ethic as it applies to women’s sexuality is not unique to Islam, but exists in most Mediterranean societies, Muslim and Christian alike, where there is the same idea of the centrality of a man’s honour. This honour concerns the sexuality of all women in the extended family. ‘Even when people distance themselves from formal religiosity, the honour ethic persists’. The effect of the advent of Islam on the position of women is controversial. There is evidence to suggest that Islam initially brought improvements to the status of women on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. In certain societies, however, women suffered a reduction in freedom under Islam. This was the case for Turkish women. Describing the prohibitions to which Turkish women were subjected after the advent of Islam, Kocturk asks the following questions: ‘How did women feel? Did they yearn for more freedom? Did they accept their situation with resignation or take it for granted without question? Did they ever wish to rebel?’ She then points out, ‘It is, unfortunately, difficult to find documents which reveal how Turkish women felt during this period.’ Indeed, this is the major problem in writing such a book. Pointing out that it is only with historical perspective that cultural differences can be satisfactorily explained, Kocturk devotes the first chapter to the different periods of Turkish history in order to provide an understanding of the status of women. The book gives a substantial amount of historical background information.
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But providing a historical perspective is in itself a difficult task, since, as Kocturk points out, ‘history generally tells the story of men. Accounts about women are few, if not impossible to find. In the case of Turkey it is very difficult to find anything directly said or done by ordinary women.’ Although she says she does not ‘consider this a great hinderance as women can learn much about themselves by studying their men’, it does pose a problem which the book fails to resolve. The most interesting part of the book is the last chapter in which the immigrant women relate their experiences of such matters as the breakdown of the traditional extended family structure, marriage patterns, women’s employment and its effect on the ‘family honour’, changing attitudes between generations, and domestic violence and divorce. In her historical account, Kocturk looks at Turkish society in general and Turkish women in particular, ‘regardless of any similarities with Armenian, Assyrian and Kurdish people that may or may not exist’. As a result of the assimilationist policies of successive Turkish governments, the identity of the Kurds has been denied in Turkey. She has been unable to differentiate between peoples of different ethnic background which results in serious mistakes in her observations and interpretations. For instance, she states that ‘Official figures are difficult to find but it is estimated that there are about 60,000 Turks in the UK, of which about two-thirds are Cypriots’, while there is no mention of the large Kurdish population living in Britain. Although containing interesting background information, the book is quite eclectic and suffers from three major flaws: firstly the case study is limited to a small sample of women living in Sweden and does not reflect the experiences of Turkish immigrant women in general as the title suggests; secondly, her historical account does not provide an in-depth study and analysis of the existing written sources and historical documents from women’s perspective; thirdly, the book does not help challenge the prejudices that Turkish people may have towards the Kurdish people, on the contrary, it perpetuates them by its generalizations. Tijen Uguriş Reference 1 KEDDIE, Nicky (1991) ‘Introduction’ in Keddie, Nicky and Baron, Beth (1991) editors, Women in Middle Eastern History, Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala David Phillip: Cape Town 1992; University of California Press: Berkeley 1993, ISBN 0 520 08171 4 £17.00 Hbk;
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ISBN 0 520 08172 2 £9.00 Pbk The Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa has been established at the University of the Western Cape specifically to document the struggle against apartheid. A Life’s Mosaic is the latest addition to the series of books published by this centre, following in the wake of such titles as Women under Apartheid: In Photographs and Text. In South Africa feminism, although gathering momentum, is very much in its embryonic stage and women are rarely accorded a public say. For this reason alone it is laudable that the Mayibuye Centre makes a point of including women’s experiences of apartheid in their publications. It is, furthermore, important that this book has been published in South Africa as well as abroad. Hopefully, it will play a consciousness-raising role in South Africa similar to Ellen Kuzwayo’s autobiography Call Me Woman. A Life’s Mosaic will also be an eye-opener to non-South African readers, because it dispels many of the prejudices and stereotypes Western women still tend to have vis-à-vis their African sisters: Phyllis Ntantala is neither uneducated nor downtrodden. Ntantala’s autobiography resembles Kuzwayo’s in many respects. Both women were born into a traditional African family which belonged to the landed gentry. In both books this early period of the women’s lives is portrayed in idyllic terms. Ntantala (born 7 January 1920) stresses the central role her parents performed in the community and strikingly portrays the wealth of traditions and customs which formed the basis of her happy early childhood in Idutywa in the Transkei. Her dreamworld was shattered when she was four years old, when her mother died. Her mother’s replacement by an unsympathetic and uncaring stepmother denotes the first of many episodes in her life which separate her from her traditional roots. Her father’s role is a curious one from a non-African perspective. She obviously feels a close bond with her father. She still refers to him in the traditional way as ‘tata’ (Xhosa for Daddy), and he did most of the day-to-day caring for his daughters after their mother’s death. However, he did not make any effort to persuade his second wife, Edwina, to pay more attention to the children. Traditionally, the children were the woman’s realm and officially he did not know of their neglect, so that he could not openly tell his wife to do more. Even the children themselves abided by this golden rule and never openly complained about Edwina to their father. This was taken to such extremes that when the stepmother’s children started arriving, Ntantala and her sisters looked after them, rather than let their father know of their predicament. Yet Ntantala’s father took a great interest in her education and from an early age impressed upon her that she was just as good as any man at anything she might care to undertake. The author’s later life shows an equally curious combination of adherance to tradition and a feminist desire to express herself professionally and politically. Ntantala received the best education available to African women at the time when she attended Fort Hare University College. She left Fort Hare to teach at a
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secondary school in Kroonstad, Orange Free State. It was during this time that she became involved in politics for the first time. She was active in the African Teachers’ Association. In A Life’s Mosaic she gives a good impression of the tumultuous politics of the time. She attended political rallies for the elections in 1943, when Africans still had the vote, but could only vote for white candidates. When she moved to Cape Town, Ntantala became more and more politically active, taking her young children to meetings and teaching them how to distribute leaflets. In Cape Town she became a prominent member of the Cape African Teachers’ Association and campaigned against, among other things, the introduction of ‘Bantu Education’ by the Nationalist government in 1954. She also worked for the Institute of Race Relations, which helped people in trouble with the apartheid laws. Thus, publicly she led an active and seemingly independent life. Yet her private life was in many ways very traditional. It is as if there are two conflicting personalities: Phyllis Ntantala, the activist, writer and lecturer, and Mrs A.C.Jordan, who is in many ways a traditional wife. While at Fort Hare, Ntantala fell in love with her stepmother’s cousin, Halley, who was also a student there. They had a passionate love affair, but A.C.Jordan, fourteen years her senior and also from an aristocratic family, took an interest in her. He and his closest male relatives went to see her father to propose marriage in the traditional way. Ntantala found it difficult to go against her culture and she married him. She writes that she came to respect Jordan, a pioneering expert in African languages and oral history, but never loved him. Ntantala gave birth to four children, one of whom is Z.Pallo Jordan, currently head of the ANC’s Information and Publicity Department and a well-known public figure (he was injured by the parcel bomb which killed Ruth First in Maputo in 1982). In spite of having a successful husband and son Ntantala has made sure that she is not only known as ‘the wife of…’ or ‘the mother of…’. In the early sixties the family moved first to Britain and then to America, where A.C.Jordan became a professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin. During her stay in America she became increasingly in demand as a speaker and writer in her own right, particularly on issues such as apartheid and African women. One of the most revealing sections of the book deals with her life in Britain and America, and particularly with the racism she encountered. The author left South Africa for Britain in 1962 to escape from apartheid laws which had begun to restrict her life more and more. However, when she came to England (Hull) she was regarded as somewhat of an oddity and she felt totally unaccepted and unable to find work. A year later she followed her husband who had already moved to America in 1961. She did find a community of like-minded people there, but also encountered much racism (an arson attack on their home, harassment by the Immigration Department) and condescending behaviour (people asking of this highly educated and versatile woman, ‘where did you learn
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English?’). She has to conclude that life in America is in many ways similar to life in South Africa, because she is Black. Ntantala has never been back to South Africa and thus some of the passages on, particularly, her life in Cape Town sound rather dated because of the fifties terminology which she uses in her analysis. Words like ‘Bantu’ and ‘location’ have become taboo words in present-day South Africa, but Ntantala uses them without indicating or being aware of their anachronistic meaning. This is unfortunate as it gives the impression of endorsement of the views inherent in the use of these words, which surely is not intended. The author is aware that she is privileged by her family’s position and her education, and that this has shielded her from the worst excesses of both racism and sexism. One telling example is the story of how she managed to reduce one of the adverse effects of her traditional marriage. Her husband, as tradition demanded, controlled the purse strings, and was very tight-fisted. Ntantala decided early on in her married life that she would always keep working and use the money she earned for herself and her children to buy goods which her husband considered unnecessary luxuries (e.g., toothpaste!). Thus she was able to minimize some of the restrictions of her traditional marriage through her own initiative. Throughout her life Ntantala has shown this kind of determination not to be suppressed and one of the main attractions of A Life’s Mosaic is that it is the rather touchingly optimistic life-story of a woman who has suffered through politically tumultuous times but who has overcome—as Phyllis Ntantala herself says in the final chapter, ‘I have survived’. Marja Anderton Damned If We Do: Contradictions in Women’s Health Care Dorothy H.Broom Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd: North Sydney, Australia 1991, ISBN 1 86373 0540 0 £13.95 Pbk One of the fundamental contradictions in women’s health care is that, while it is women, world-wide, who provide the bulk of everyone’s health care, it is men who have colonized and medicalized the particular field of women’s health ‘problems’. The women’s health movement—an amorphous polyphony of groups and initiatives that began to emerge in Europe and North America from the early 1970s on—has provided, and continues to provide, an ideological challenge to this patriarchal control of women’s bodies. One practical manifestation of the challenge is women’s health centres, the focus of this book, which tells the story of their development and functioning in Australia. Dorothy Broom’s narrative fastens on the conflicts at the heart of the business of translating feminist initiatives into practical action within the institutional politics and power structures of patriarchy.The central question is: how can you
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bring about radical change without changing everything? Broom’s book and the research on which it was based demonstrates and illustrates the uneasy relationship that exists between women and the state; as the masculinist power structure, the state must be monolithically oppressive to women, and yet, at the same time, the notion of the state as impersonal provider of much-needed health, education and welfare services is seen as preferable to women’s vulnerability to the vagaries and injustices of relationships with individual men. Women’s health centres in Australia developed out of feminist critiques of society and the social production of women’s ill health, but depended for their funding largely on the state as the political structure representing that very ‘society’ that was under stood to be the cause of women’s ills. The resulting situation throws up a cycle of establishment, crisis and reformation deriving from the clash between radical vision and institutional opportunity. The beginning of the crisis for an individual centre is, as Broom shows, likely to be the point at which some women say that the centre is no longer fulfilling the objectives which led to its establishment. In the ensuing debate between ‘radicals’ and ‘reformists’, two issues emerge as central: the constituency of women such a centre is designed to serve, and how to ensure accountability to this constituency. It is hard to escape the conclusion that it is the process of achieving success within the system—becoming institutionalized—that deradicalizes; it is even harder to work out how this depressing fate can be avoided, and there is little in Broom’s book that provides anything in the way of clues. Broom’s data come from the forty or so existing women’s health centres around the country, interviews with more than 120 women involved in the provision of women’s health care, and numerous files, archives and personal documents. The book is part history, part sociology, part auto/biography, part feminist ‘tract’. In this sense it fits well the non-disciplinary model of women’s writing according to which there is nothing improper about doing all of these things at the same time. But, while Broom’s sociological insights—her sharpwitted analysis of just what happens to radical understandings of women’s health needs when confined within mainstream institutional power structures—serve as a sensible framework within which to fit her narrative; in the end it is the historical task the book accomplishes that is most valuable. Feminism itself goes through cycles of establishment, crisis and reformation or apparent disappearance. Thus, while feminism still exists (and so, even more, do feminisms) we have now passed into the era in which writing the history of ‘second wave’ feminism has become an important way of holding on to it. Ann Oakley Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation Edited by Helen Birch Virago: London 1993,
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ISBN 1 85381 198 x £8.99 Pbk Like many others I was caught up in two macabre stories of murderous women during the end of May 1993. The first was the case of Mandy Jordache, the abused wife in Brook-side who finally snapped and killed her crazy husband. The second, more prominently and chillingly, was the case of Beverley Allitt, convicted of murdering four children consigned to her care in a Lincolnshire hospital. These figures each seem to exemplify very different aspects of women, of representation and of murder: the first a victim who suddenly turns nasty to protect her children, the who can only be defined by an exotic second an incomprehensible figure and bizarre condition—‘Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy’—and whose deeds are the more terrifying for exploiting and overturning that ultimate image of maternal, caring femininity—the children’s nurse. Yet both have been portrayed with a kind of gothic intensity. In Brook-side, the complex of events leading up to the murder was overtaken by the melodramatic problem of how to dispose of the body, pungently occupying ‘the extension’, and the suspense of waiting to see whether all will be revealed. The Allitt case plays on a more fundamental fear, as the hospital, the supposed place of safety, is transformed into a theatre of horror, not simply through the actions of one pathological individual, but through the negligence, carelessness and lack of resources that allowed this to go so long undetected by the health authorities. Moving Targets, Helen Birch’s ambitious collection, provides an important framework to think about these cases and the complex set of often difficult questions they raise for feminists. The book itself draws on a range of different paradigms and modes of analysis (it is not only the target which moves but also the means of spotting it) all of which circle round a set of key questions, while defining them very differently. What are the interconnexions between ideologies of murder and of femininity? Are women becoming more violent, and does this violence manifest itself as a breaking-down of gender roles, or is women’s pathology always constructed as a sign of their femininity? What is the significance of the recent spate of films featuring different forms of female murderers and serial killers: Basic Instinct, Black Widow, Thelma and Louise and Fatal Attraction among them? In different ways these essays each reject the notion that violence is fundamentally male and that women are always its victims, instead exploring the intricate ways in which violence can be reproduced within and by subordinate groups as ways of resisting or gaining power. Some tread carefully around the vexed issues of agency and responsibility. Definitions and perceptions of women killers might always be bound up with their gender, and might always be woven into some moral fable that is extended to women in general, but does this mean that we shouldn’t accord women the ‘right’ to be seen as responsible for their deeds? Or are perceptions already so loaded that this would become yet another kind of privatization of dominant values? ‘Because women have traditionally internalized their feelings of anger or injustice, does
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this mean that we have to pathologize those who do not?’ asks Helen Birch in her Introduction. The essays are written from different national perspectives (though they are all taken from Europe, North America and Australia) as well as contrasting intellectual standpoints, and this adds to the scope of the collection. For example, Nicole Ward Jouve’s fascinating account of the Papin sisters, incestuous lovers, two servant girls of Le Mans who brutally murdered their women employers, explores the iconic role that the case played in French intellectual life in the 1930s and after (it was discussed by de Beauvoir, by Lacan, and was transformed in Genet’s The Maids) and reads the narrative through and beyond these accounts. She critically deconstructs the interpretative frameworks through which the case has been rendered by investigating the crucial role which metaphors of vision play throughout—the sisters put out the eyes of their employers and, in so doing, distort the vision of those who would explain them, would try to turn them into existential heroines. Helen Birch, too, looks at a notorious female criminal—Myra Hindley—as renarrativized cultural icon, drawing on Kristeva’s conception of abjection to analyse the persistence of the tropes through which she is portrayed. Briar Wood and Deb Verhoeven each analyse notorious Australian cases—that of Lindy Chamberlain and the ‘dingo baby murder’ case that reverberated through Australia throughout the 1980s, and that of Tracey Wigginton, the infamous ‘lesbian vampire killer’ whose trial coincided with the Gulf War. The analysis of the Wigginton case was fascinating but the attempt to link it with ‘Operation Desert Storm’ was rather strained and unconvincing, I felt. The second half of the volume draws more extensively on work in feminist social policy, psychiatry and criminology. Melissa Benn’s excellent piece on the sexual politics of PMT, like Nicole Ward Jouve’s essay, draws on de Beauvoir’s existentialist notion of ‘bad faith’ to explain the way in which the concept of PMT is used to rationalize and marginalize anger or desperation. PMT, Benn argues, ‘represents the ultimate denial of agency’, disempowering women by confronting them with a split, Jekyll and Hyde image of themselves. Lorraine Radford’s research on the position of ‘battered women who kill’ could have been used directly to construct the fictional Jordache case and argues for fundamental shifts in legal definitions—of ‘provocation’, ‘self-defence’, etc., if the law is not to be skewed—as it has been in the case of Sarah Thornton—for women who become convinced that murder is their only refuge. The volume concludes with a study of the Lainz hospital murders in Austria, where, as in the Beverley Allitt case, underpaid and underqualified nurses found themselves in positions of power through the inadequate resources of the health service, and an analysis of female serial killers. The obvious trap awaiting a volume of this kind is that it will reproduce the very exoticism and sensationalism of the representations it is analysing. On the whole Moving Targets avoids this—though I felt that some of the essays were rather repetitive and could have spent more time contextualizing their discussions. With
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the exception of the Papin sisters, the essays were all on contemporary cases, giving a rather misleading impression that crimes of violence by women and the scandalized media response to them is a modern phenomenon. An analysis of, for example, nineteenth-century causes célèbres (such as the case of Madelaine Smith, accused of poisoning her lover in 1857, the case eventually being found ‘not proven’), or other historical cases would have given weight to this book, but as it stands it is still a vital mapping of a complicated and difficult terrain. Jenny Bourne Taylor Inversions: Writings by Dykes, Queers and Lesbians Edited by Betsy Warland Open Letters: London 1992, ISBN 1 85789 020 5 £11.99 New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings Edited by Sally Munt Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hemel Hempstead 1992, ISBN 0 7450 1166 7 £40.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 7450 1167 5 £10.95 Pbk Lesbian writing is the base of both these collections; Inversions from the producers’ perspective, New Lesbian Criticism from the consumers’. The consumers’ perspective has more postmodern mileage, but the authors in Inversions—poets and novelists in the main—sound a concerted riposte against their supposed postmodern demise, and a totalizing theme for both collections is what lesbian writing means to and for the ‘lesbian community’. Unsurprisingly, since the Inversions authors are concerned with subjective experience as the validation of their authorial voice, this collection tends towards what Gillian Spragg calls ‘expressive realism’—literature as a means of communicating truths about life. As Minnie Bruce Pratt says: The first time I read my poetry publicly and as a lesbian, the woman who said to me “Write more. I want to know what happens next. ”’ Many of the Inversions authors describe the profound impact they have seen their work have on lesbian readers and listeners. At the same time, many bemoan the lack of acknowledgement from the world at large. Adam Mars-Jones, in his review in the Independent on Sunday (10.1.93) interprets this as part of lesbian feminism’s ‘double vision’, veering between seeing itself as both Trail and almost apocalyptically powerful’, a guttering candle and a lit fuse. There certainly are contradictory impulses at play: Elana Dykewoman: ‘By the time I was in my twenties, I was grieved by my doubt that a Jewish lesbian could ever be taken seriously by the New York Times Book Review…my novel Riverfinger Women was published by Daughters, Inc…who took a full-page ad in the New
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York Times Book Review… I decided if I could make it into the Times that way it was too easy…’ Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman—A map of seven poems’ is riven with contradictions, as she describes her joy at her Common Woman poems spreading out into the world, influencing—by her reckoning—millions, and her subsequent attempts to control the spread. Mars-Jones sees this as the ‘lit fuse’ end of lesbian feminism turned megalomaniac ‘as she claims to have more or less invented lesbian feminism with her poems and then recounts her efforts to establish copyright in a work that was originally a gift to the community’. This is a little ungenerous perhaps—after all who among us gives without wanting acknowledgement of the giving—but Grahn’s inconsistency does crystallize the ambivalence of many of Inversions’ contributors, who want the support of their lesbian communities but resent its expectations, decry the bias of the mainstream literary machine but desire its approval none the less. At times the feminist milieu in which the writers operate seems distinctly antithetical to the creative process; Marg Yeo’s piece—a vignette that could act as a coda to identity politics —is an appeal in letter form to prospective collaborators in a writers’ group to allow the space to discuss both the issues ‘which often threaten to split our community’ to ‘ask each other the questions that need to be asked’. The group falls apart before it ever meets. Jane Rule is a strong presence in both these books. Her essay ‘Lesbian and writer’ (Inversions) though written over a decade ago, still shows much insight into the issue of positive images (this one will run and run) detailing her attempts to distinguish between what she wants to write and propaganda, also a major theme in Rule’s ground-breaking book Lesbian Images. (In New Lesbian Criticism Reina Lewis’s The death of the author and the resurrection of the dyke’ gives a succinct analysis of the positive image conundrum.) In ‘Hell and the mirror’ Gillian Spraggs acknowledges the deeply affirming influence of Rule’s critical work on her own sense of herself as lesbian. Rule may be easy to critique as thoroughly traditionalist in ‘confidently…distinguishing between the supposedly accurate perception and the inauthentic’ in fiction, but, as Spraggs points out, it is perverse to deny the value of specifically literary texts as a means of illuminating the formulation of lesbian identity. The fact that most other public discourses have historically maintained a virtual silence on female homosexual desire means literary texts have had an extraordinarily strong influence on perceptions of lesbianism. The regularity with which The Well of Loneliness appears in coming-out stories—and not just those of older lesbians— stands as testament to this. New Lesbian Criticism reflects the slightly tortuous path which Bonnie Zimmerman (‘Lesbians like this and that’) sees all current lesbian criticism negotiating between lesbian separatism and deconstruction’. This comes up most clearly in Sally Munt’s ‘Postmodernism and the fiction of Sarah Schulman’, a nuanced reading of some of the most popular contemporary lesbian novels which none the less recognizes that postmodernism cannot do justice to Schulman’s
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work. The disjuncture between feminism—a political force desirous of material change—and postmodernism—a critique with no theory of political resistance— is certainly the chasm around which this collection picks its way, albeit for the most part elegantly and with self-awareness. There is a fine line between such selfawareness and self-consciousness, though, with the one leading to subtle and critical analysis and the other to a kind of trendy intellectual anxiety (as evidenced by those ubiquitous (parenthetical) qualifiers) which can seem, ultimately, to imply wilful disengagement. New Lesbian Criticism gathers pace through the book; Katie King’s ‘Audre Lorde’s lacquered layerings’ is a powerful engagement with both literary ideology and feminist practice which perhaps points a way beyond the postmodernism-versus-feminism impasse. Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson’s highly readable The Greyhound bus station and the evolution of lesbian popular culture’ posits lesbian romantic fiction (by Ann Bannon, Reed Marr, March Hastings, Taylor Frances among others) as a potent symbol of the ‘Janus-faced fifties’, radical and startling in their exposition of an entirely new phenomenon— a vibrant lesbian and gay culture—but conformist in their insistence that sexuality represents the kernel of the self. Their analysis of the potency and poignancy of the 1950s butch ‘[combining] the vulnerable with the invulnerable simultaneously’ has strong resonances with the ‘true-life’ stories in Joan Nestle’s recent A Persistent Desire—a femme-butch reader (Alyson, 1992). Why is it that butch and femme has elicited so much more insightful and humane lesbian cultural analysis than any other aspect of lesbian sexual expression? Gillian Spragg’s delightful ‘Hell and the mirror’ charts Jane Rule’s use of metaphor in Desert of the Heart through close analysis of her ‘polemical reconstruction’ of various hells as conceived in the Divine Comedy, the Book of Genesis and The Well of Loneliness. The following through of this analysis with regard to the subsequent film Desert Hearts, in a similar vein to Hilary Hinds’s analysis of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’s journey from lesbian cult to BBC drama via literary plaudit, would make for doubly interesting reading. In a sense Inversions and New Lesbian Criticism represent the Janus-face of nineties lesbian politics and theory; the one looking back to identity politics, the other looking forward, albeit tentatively at times, to a ‘rich and rewarding world at the intersection of postmodern criticism and feminist politics’. Sara Dunn Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America Lillian Faderman Penguin Books: New York 1992
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ISBN 0 14 017122 3 £9.99 Pbk What a Lesbian Looks Like: Writings by Lesbians on their Lives and Lifestyles National Lesbian and Gay Survey Routledge: London 1992 ISBN 0 415 08100 9 £9.99 Pbk In 1981, Lillian Faderman’s book Surpassing the Love of Men (Junction Books) was published, and I bought it for the title alone. Having come out as a lesbian in the context of British feminist politics the previous year, I found Surpassing the Love of Men an important book. Big, detailed and scholarly, it took lesbians and lesbianism seriously as subjects for historical study. Here was one of an increasing number of lesbian feminists who were doing research work on our own terms, trying to find out what those terms were, and who ‘we’ were. Both of the books reviewed here are still addressing similar questions: what is the nature of lesbian life in the twentieth century, and what is a lesbian anyway? The main message of both texts is that lesbian experience is extremely diverse, always set in historical and political context, and that there is no ‘one’ unitary lesbian subject. The strategies adopted for lesbian survival have varied in embattled conjunction with the forms of oppression we face. Central to both lesbian oppression and lesbian resistance/survival is the construction of lesbianism and the lesbian: both books document different histories (in Britain and in North America) of this battle over lesbian identity. This is not just a matter of how lesbianism should or could be defined, but a struggle over who (i.e., which social forces and social groups) will control that process of definition, of naming and of explanation. As a ‘deviant’ status, lesbianism always appears to require an explanation in a way that heterosexuality does not. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers examines women’s experiences of love for other women in the USA, drawing on various historical texts and interviews with 186 women about their lives. Lillian Faderman emphasizes that since the category of lesbian (or ‘female sexual invert’) was only formulated during the second half of the nineteenth century, women who loved other women in the twentieth century were compelled for the first time to understand their experiences in relation to the notion of lesbianism. Much of the book deals with the diversity of women’s responses to their situation, both individually and culturally, and the importance of ‘race’, class, age and historical/political context in shaping women’s perspectives. Faderman points to the central contradiction of lesbian identification: the dilemma involved in naming oneself in terms of a concept which emerged from a deeply oppressive set of institutions. Odd Girls examines the shift from the prevalence of ‘romantic friendships’ between women in the early twentieth century to the growing use of the medicalized terminology of ‘sexual inversion’ following the work of early sexologists. Faderman considers the rise of ‘lesbian chic’ in the 1920s, looking
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at the lives of working- and middle-class lesbians, and Black (i.e., AfricanAmerican) lesbians in Harlem. She traces the practice of bisexuality as a form of experimentation and compromise into the 1930s and looks at the impact of World War II in helping to forge a lesbian subculture. Following the witch-hunts of the McCarthy years, Faderman argues that lesbian subculture(s) began to expand during the 1950s and 1960s, focused around the bar scene for working-class and young lesbians. She presents the prevalence of butch/femme roles as a consequence of that particular historical context, prior to the period of gay, lesbian and feminist revolutionary activity during the 1960s and 1970s, It is here that the book becomes more controversial, as Faderman considers the lives of radical and revolutionary lesbian feminists in the 1970s, forging a Lesbian Nation and lesbian communities, and fragmenting in factional battles by the 1980s. I found myself reading the book differently from this point onwards. Until the chapters on the growing connexions between lesbianism and feminism, I read as a sympathetic and enthralled ‘outsider’; this was riveting stuff, but it had few resonances with my own experiences. Although I was not in the USA during the 1970s, and I did not identify as lesbian at that time, the chapters on that period are more familiar. I had read some of the books and been involved in some (similar) arguments in Britain during the early 1980s. I began to read as an ‘insider’, but a perplexed one. The book presents ‘radical lesbian-feminists’ as ‘extremists’ whose main contribution to lesbian and gay politics appeared to be to allow the demands of more ‘moderate’ activists to appear ‘tame’ by comparison. In political terms, this could be seen as one function of radical lesbian feminism, but it is Faderman’s analysis of the conflicts which she presents as inherent in lesbian feminism and as tearing the movement and the culture apart where my greatest difficulties occurred. Faderman states that ‘the (lesbian feminist) community opened itself to criticsm from all minority voices’ (236, my insertion and emphasis). There is another possible perspective here though. Lesbians of colour, working-class lesbians, lesbians with disabilities, older and younger lesbians all continued to make the arguments they had been making for some years about exclusion, ethnocentrism, racism, élitism and so on. Anglo, middle-class, able-bodied lesbian feminists, who had tended to dominate the movement in a similar way to the pattern in the ‘straight’ feminist movement, had to listen: they could no longer manage to ignore or suppress these ‘minority voices’, and the movement changed radically as a consequence of this. For Faderman, the subsequent attempts to ‘reconcile differences’ meant that ‘vast amounts of energy were wasted on conflicts’ (236, my emphasis). If such debates (which were undeniably heated, and which Faderman refers to using the metaphors of battle) involved serious attempts to recognize differences between lesbians and to challenge some of the inequalities within the movement, then such energies need not be seen as totally ‘wasted’.
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Odd Girls has been castigated (by E.Miller in a Trouble and Strife review, No. 25, 1992) for the way in which Faderman treats the increasing diversity and moderation of 1990s lesbian life, and especially SM sex, with relative enthusiasm. Understanding where glamour dykes, lipstick lesbians and the rise of SM come from in political and historical terms is just as vital a project as understanding the emergence of radical lesbian feminism. What I found most perplexing about Odd Girls was its ambivalence on the politics of the research process. Faderman does write herself in to the text on occasions, but she implicitly adopts a relatively distanced and ‘impartial’ perspective. Most feminist researchers would argue that any attempt at impartiality is misguided. Her treatment of radical lesbian feminism and lesbian life in the 1980s and 1990s make it clear that Faderman is not impartial. This is not necessarily a problem. What is confusing is her relative reluctance to deal with this issue in the text, or to acknowledge more clearly that her version is one of many. The use of the third person throughout most of the text only reinforces the sense that ‘this is how things really were!’. What a Lesbian Looks Like is a less obviously controversial book, but it also presents a detailed and readable account of a diverse range of lesbians’ experiences in contemporary British society. The book is a continuation of the Mass Observation Surveys that were first conducted in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. Anonymous contributors (or ‘observers’) submitted material to the National Lesbian and Gay Survey from 1985, and the book presents a selection of extracts from this archive, with a pseudonym above each piece. Chapters are entitled ‘Beginnings’, ‘Kin’, ‘Becoming’, ‘Uniforms’, ‘Out’, ‘Mind and body’, Together’, ‘Power and community’, and there is minimal editorial text between each extract. Reading What a Lesbian Looks Like emphasizes the authenticity and diversity of lesbian voices in Britain. The lack of any editorial comment or context to the extracts has particular effects. The extracts were presumably selected and organized into chapters by the NLGS team, but very little information is available on how this process occurred. Was it simply on the basis of the most common themes in the Survey submissions, or were particular themes given special priority, and if so, why? Presenting the extracts in this way means the lack of any historical or political context outside of the extracts themselves, which can produce a sense of listening to a set of dislocated voices. So what do these books tell us about lesbians’ lives in Britain and the USA? They present an enormous diversity of stories and experiences in a readable and detailed form. They also imply that as Lillian Faderman argues: The criterion for identifying oneself as a lesbian has come to resemble the liberal criterion for identifying oneself as a Jew: you are one only if you consider yourself one’ (5). The political implications of this definition of (post-1920s) lesbianism and of the diversity of lesbians’ lives are complex and the focus for continuing debate in lesbian-feminist groups in Britain, the USA and around the world. Christine Griffin
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The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture Peter Middleton Routledge: London 1992 ISBN 0 415 07328 6 £35.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 415 07327 8 £11.99 Pbk Male Subjectivity at the Margins Kaja Silverman Routledge: London 1992 ISBN 0 415 90418 8 £40.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 415 90419 6 £12.99 Pbk Given the current ascendancy of appearance and political correctness over radical action it is perhaps no surprise that what most distinguishes these two books is the confidence of Silverman’s attention to absence compared to the diffidence of Middleton’s account of the presence of the marks of masculinity. It is, as Middleton observes, no longer acceptable for men confidently to affirm ‘I think, therefore I am’. Self-reflection cannot authenticate itself. To think otherwise, as modernism and feminism expose, is mere male conceit. Hence Middleton’s wariness about his sex’s tendency to universalize the results of their introspection, especially given its scant regard for emotion. Hence too his apologetic reminiscences of his own boyhood train-spotting, of another youth’s pocketful of male insignia, of the perilous path steered by Marvel Comic heroes between beast and robot so much is bodily contact between them brutalized and all other feeling masked or expelled in inarticulate neologism— the fodder, Middleton says, boys are fed to fill the gap left by men’s absence from the home. How he deplores his sex for quitting the vulnerabilities of childhood for an impersonal version of adulthood as described in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. How he objects to the canonization of Yeats’s male flight from the commonplace into the sublime, D.H.Lawrence’s heroes’ inability to express love except viscerally (through sex or aggression), Freud’s neglect of emotion in favour of attention to impulse and violence in the ‘Rat Man’ case, and the imbalance between brute sexuality and inward rationality typified by Saul in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. How anxious he is about men’s numbness to any feeling but aggression. Nor, he claims, can it be put right by the theories of feminist psychoanalysis, Foucault, Habermas, male feminism, or by an aesthetic that attends to the way poetry moves us. For it too is yet another gloss on male fantasy. Poetry itself (that of T.S.Eliot) and philosophy (that of Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein), he says, likewise elude emotion by translating it into impersonal rationality or by relegating it to the body. As for postmodernism, he adds, it risks doing away with self-reflection altogether as nothing but illusion.
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What a gloomy conclusion. And how shame-faced Middleton is both in telling it and in eschewing ordering the selection and recounting of his material. The result is something of a jumble, not unlike the pocket of male bric-à-brac with which he begins. How different from Kaja Silverman’s disciplined martialling of examples to prove, contra Lacan, that the law-of-the-father is not the only means by which the individuation of self from other necessary to artistic production can come about. Not that this law’s fictional equation of penis and phallus is not writ large —say in war. But this does not mean its collapse cannot also be addressed, as Silverman illustrates with three 1940s Hollywood movies: the first depicting returning veterans whose male absence, signified by their being maimed, is confronted and embraced by both their women and themselves: the second showing a man taking on the emasculation of his uncle’s business debts; and the third presenting a woman who, having found the men for whom her husband gave his life, keeps them intact by taking into herself responsibility for their lack. Silverman then demonstrates exceptions to Lacan’s claim that we more commonly defend against such absence through projecting it into the objects of our gaze to make them not us its looked-at subject. She shows how this defence was refused by Fassbinder in putting on screen lack in both observer and observed. So too Henry James, Silverman argues, who in his novels also brings it into focus, as in the case of the boy spectator in The Turn of the Screw who no sooner seeks, as it were, to elude lack through uttering the name of the man he observes with Miss Jessel than his heart stops beating. Nor, insists Silverman, do men necessarily flinch from the lack involved in castration and masochism. Again she cites Fassbinder—the sex-change operation to which one of his characters submits to become the woman his lover wants, and the arousal of another’s desire by a woman identified with her one-armed lover. Another instance is Lawrence of Arabia’s identification as both object and idealized master of his own masochistic subjection that Silverman claims fuelled his leadership of the Arab cause. Lastly she cites the homosexual desire of Proust, as narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, in which the father and his penis are negated in favour of orality involving invention of an intrusive but nonphallic kissing machine, and cultivation of a Leda-and-the-swan image of his lover’s lesbian coupling. Silverman’s masterful teasing out of such intricacies can be as mind-bendingly pleasurable as resolving a crossword clue. Why therefore opt, she concludes, for the straight and narrow of conventional masculinity? Yet she too opts for it— at least for the strait-jacketing dogmatic obscurantism of Lacan. Ironically it makes her exegesis at times so turgid it is virtually impenetrable. Quite opposite to the limp nervousness of Middleton’s account of men’s defence against feeling and femininity. Otherwise, however, and it is sadly a sign of the times, Middleton is no different from Silverman in indicating no other action beyond representation as counter to the all-too-real privileges and inequalities signified by masculinity
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—whether present or absent—that both explore—with varying degrees of confidence. Janet Sayers
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New Journal GLO: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies intends to provide a forum for work in this rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field. Its goal is to publish scholarship, criticism and commentary that will bring a queer perspective to bear on any and all topics touching sex and sexuality. It seeks to be a place where those working in gay and lesbian studies can publish new and risky work. The editors are: Carolyn Dinshaw, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; and David Halperin, 14N–432, M.I.T., 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139. The Sixth International Feminist Book Fair The Sixth International Feminist Book Fair takes place in Melbourne from 27–31 July 1994. It is the first time the event has taken place in the Southern hemisphere and appropriately the theme of the Book Fair is ‘Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Writing & Publishing’. An expected 250 publishers and 200 international and Australian writers will take part with an overall attendance of 20,000, including 3,000 international visitors. The first two days are trade only and the subsequent three days are open to the public. Call for Papers The Fifth IFIP Conference on Women, Work and Computerization ‘Breaking Old Boundaries: Building New Forms’, 2–5 July 1994, Manchester Conference Centre, UMIST, Manchester, UK. This will be the fifth International Conference on Women, Work and Computerization organized under the auspices of the IFIP Working Group 9.1 (Computers and Work). Papers are invited on the following themes:
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1 Community, Communications and Information Technology; 2 Information Technology, Flexibility and Restructuring; 3 Information Systems Design and User-Centred Perspectives; 4 Education, Training and Learning; 5 Feminist Theoretical Perspectives on Power, Knowledge and Technology. For more information contact: Alison Adam, IFIP WWC 5, Department of Computation, P.O. Box 88, UMIST, Manchester M60 IQD, UK. Tel: +44 (0)61 200 3330; Fax: +44 (0)61 200 3324; email: a—
[email protected] Conference on Lillian Smith On 7, 8 & 9 October 1994, Georgetown University Women’s Studies Program will be sponsoring a three-day conference on the work and legacy of Lillian Smith. Papers are being considered for but not limited to the following topics: Myth and Metaphor, the literary landscape of the South; Race and Racism, the movement toward equality in the segregated South; Gender and Sexuality, breaking the construct of the ‘Southern Woman’. Papers should be submitted by 1 March 1994 to: Lillian Smith Conference c/o Leona Fisher, English Department, 306 New North, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057–1048. Radclyffe Hall Memorial Fund Appeal A fund has been set up for the repair and refurbishment of the decaying vault in Highgate Cemetery of the lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall, who died in 1943. Details can be obtained from: Monica Still, Ham Green Cottage, Wittersham, Kent TN30 7EG. ‘Women and Poetry’: a conference/festival to be held at Oxford Brookes University, 8–10 April 1994 Enquiries or requests for more information should be sent to Vicki Bertram, School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP, Telephone: (0865) 483570. Crimes Against Women in Tibet Yangchen Kikhang writes to let us know about the policy of forced abortion and sterilization imposed on women in Tibet by the Chinese occupying power. Even
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if China itself has a problem of overpopulation that explains (but does not justify) such stringent measures. They make little sense in Tibet, a country the size of Western Europe with a population of 6 million. Other explanations have been offered: China’s Population News (22.12.89) argues the necessity of continuing the birth-control programme among so-called minority nationalities because there is a tendency among these peoples to be ‘mentally retarded, short of stature, dwarfs or insane’. Indeed, some believe that the Chinese are embarked on a policy of cultural genocide. According to the detailed testimony of Tibetan women, an unsanctioned pregnancy is regarded as a political crime, punishable by fines, savage wage cuts, and the treatment of the resultant child as a ‘non-person’, without a ration card or a school place. There are also reports of forcible sterilizations of all the women of child-bearing age during the visits of mobile birth-control teams to Tibetan villages, often conducted with great brutality. There are eye-witness accounts of women being arrested for having too many children. Many such stories have been scrupulously checked before publication by Campaign Free Tibet. Such crimes against women in Tibet are a flagrant violation of human rights, and should be denounced more widely by human rights organizations. They should also be publicized by feminists in the West fighting for the right to choose, which must also include protection against forcible abortion or sterilization. For further information: Women’s Section, Campaign Free Tibet, 12 Stoughton Close, London SE11. Research Request Lisa Harrod is a student at East London University doing research on lesbian identities in the 1960s and is looking for lesbians to interview about this period. Interviews would be confidential and she is willing to travel. From the interviews she wants to gain an idea of lesbian lifestyles and identities at this time; to discover if there was a lesbian community and how people reacted to lesbian sexuality. She is also interested to see whether the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s made people more accepting to different sexualities. If anyone would like to be interviewed or wants to know more about her research, please contact her at 56 Knox Road, London E7 9HP. National Women’s Studies Association Conf erence The fifteenth annual conference will be held at Iowa State University on 15–19 June 1994. NWSA invites feminist scholars and activists to reconceive their work in a global context and to challenge current understandings of ‘global’. Plenary topics: Human Rights/Women’s Rights; Politics of Women’s Work;
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Feminist Theories in a Global Context; Conceptualizing the Body: Comparative Perspectives. Information: Kris Anderson, NWSA Conference Office, 105 Landscape Architecture, Iowa State University, Ames, IA50011, USA.
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Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh OUT OF PRINT. Summer Reading, O’Rourke Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay. Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson. Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble.
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Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh. Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womans laughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906– 1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and The Family’, Caldwell. MANY VOICES, ONE CHAOT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection. CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn.
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The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir. WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips. Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Rereading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt & Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards
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a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA: Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey. CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y. Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ‘88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The ‘Dark Continent’: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick.
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Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. PERVERSE POLITICS: LESBIAN ISSUES Pat Parker: Attribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the Issue: Lesbian fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian Tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Toth, Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter. THEME ISSUE: WOMEN, RELIGION AND DISSENT Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?, Tang Nain. Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves, McMahon. The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh, Kabeer. Born Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement, McCrickard. Washing our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism, Connolly. Siddiqui on Letter to Christendom, Bard on Generations of Memories, Patel on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman.. The Moderaist Style of Susan Sontag, McRobbie. Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, Fraser and Boffin. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in Trinidad, Mohammed. Fashion, Representation and
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SHIFTING TERRITORIES: FEMINISM & EUROPE Between Hope and Helplessness: Women in the GDR, Dolling. Where Have All the Women Gone? Women and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe, Einhorn. The End of Socialism in Europe—A New Challenge For Socialist Feminism? Haug. The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary, Kiss. The Citizenship Debate: Women, the State and Ethnic Processes, Yuval-Davis. Fortress Europe and Migrant Women, Morokvasic. Racial Equality and 1992, Dummett. Questioning Perestroika: A Socialist Feminist Interrogation, Pearson. Postmodernism and its Discontents, Soper. Feminists and Socialism: After the Cold War, Kaldor. Socialism Out of the Common Pots, Mitter. 1989 and All That, Campbell. In Listening Mode, Cockburn. Women in Action: Country by Country: The Soviet Union; Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Poland. Reports: International Gay and Lesbian Association: Black Women and Europe 1992. Fleurs du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Elliott & Wallace. Poem, Tyler-Bennett. Feminism and Motherhood: An American ‘Reading, Snitow. Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the ‘Other’ and Empowerment, Opie. Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda, Begum. Postcard From the Edge: Thoughts on the ‘Feminist Theory: An International Debate’ Conference at Glasgow University, July 1991, Radstone. Review Essay, Munt. Editorial. The Selling of HRT: Playing on the Fear Factor, Worcester & Whatley. The Cancer Drawings of Catherine Arthur, Sebastyen. Ten Years of Women’s Health 1982–92, James. AIDS Activism: Women and AIDS Activism in Victoria, Australia, Mitchell. A Woman’s Subject, Friedli. HIV and the Invisibility of Women: Is there a Need to Redefine AIDS?, Scharf & Toole. Lesbians Evolving Health Care: Cancer and AIDS, Winnow. Now is the Time for Feminist Criticism: A Review of Asinimali!, Steinberg. Ibu or the Beast: Gender Interests in Two Indonesian Women’s Organizations, Wieringa. Reports on Motherlands: Symposium on African, Carribean and Asian Women’s Writing, Smart. The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, Bruegel. Review Essay, Gamman. FEMINIST FICTIONS: Editorial. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality, Makinen. Feminist Writing: Working with Women’s Experience, Haug. Three Aspects of Sex in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home, Hauser. Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction, Bard. Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction, Hermes. A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism, Castendyk. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery, Ferguson. Reviews. ISSUES FOR FEMINISM: Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: The Politics of the Inkatha Women’s Brigade, Hassim. Postcolonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference, Abu Odeh. Feminism, the Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy, Lewis. Feminism and Disability, Morris. ‘What is Pornography?’: An Analysis of the Policy Statement of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship, Smith. Reviews. NATIONALISMS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES Women, Nationalism and Islam in Contemporary Political Discourse in Iran, Yeganeh. Feminism,
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Citizenship and National Identity, Curthoys. Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland, Nash. Rap Poem: Easter 1991, Medbh. Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family, McClintock. Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement, Thapar. Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities: Bellagio Symposium Report, Hall. Culture or Citizenship? Notes from the Gender and Colonialism Conference, Galway, Ireland, May 1992, Connolly. Reviews. 45
THINKING THROUGH ETHNICITIES Audre Lorde: Reflections. Re-framing Europe: Engendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe, Brah. Towards a Multicultural Europe? ‘Race’ Nation and Identity in 1992 and Beyond, Bhavnani. Another View: Photo Essay, Pollard. Growing Up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood, Frankenberg. Poem, Kay. Looking Beyond the Violent Break-up of Yugoslavia, Coulson. Personal Reactions of a Bosnian Woman to the War in Bosnia, Harper. Serbian Nationalism: Nationalism of My Own People, Korac. Belgrade Feminists 1992: Separation, Guilt and Identity Crisis, Mladjenovic. Litricin. Report on a Council of Europe Minority Youth Committee Seminar on Sexism and Racism in Western Europe, Walker. Reviews.
