Femininity Played Straight by Biddy Martin

Author:Biddy Martin [Martin, Biddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Lesbian Studies, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781135210151
Google: kTci6KBSJgYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-12T05:44:08+00:00

LESBIAN IDENTITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DIFFERENCE[S]

[1987]

chapter 6

NO THEORETICAL reading of “lesbian autobiography” can fail to take up the question of the category itself. Under the circumstances, it seems almost obligatory to begin with a set of questions designed to introduce some margin of difference into that apparendy airtight package. To write about lesbian autobiography or even lesbian autobiographies, as if such a totalizable, intelligible object or its multiplication existed, would beg a number of questions, for example, what a lesbian life is, what autobiography is, and what the relation between them could possibly be. There is no singular answer to such questions, however ingenious the attempt to mask partial, provisional, interested responses with claims to generality, universality, or authority. Any attempt to give a definitive or singular answer to these three questions must be rendered suspect.

Much recent lesbian writing is autobiographical, often taking the form of autobiographical essay and coming-out stories, and I will return to that writing. There are full-blown, bound autobiographies by authors who define themselves quite explicitly as lesbians. If we lend credence to the lesbian reader's sensitivity to the ways in which lesbianism is encoded in only apparendy “straight” autobiographical accounts, then there are many more lesbian autobiographies. And if we abandon the obsession with the author's identity, the text's mimetic function, and the reader's necessary identification, and if we instead consider the reader's pleasure, the ways in which she feels addressed, her desire engaged, then the question of what is lesbian about a life or an account of a fife shifts much more dramatically. In 1978 Bertha Harris suggested that lesbian writing engaged a desire and an excess that defied the fixity of identity, the boundaries drawn around individual subjects, around all forms of categorization and normalization. Her lobbying efforts for an avant-garde or modernist writing included the infamous and curious claim that Jaws, in its celebration of unassimilable monstrosity, was a far more lesbian novel than the far more “conventional” fiction written in the 1970s by self-declared lesbians.1 In 1987 there are surely (lesbian) readers who would find, say, a Roland Barthes to be a far more “lesbian” autobiographer than some explicitly lesbian writers. I would not ordinarily go so far, but here, under the weight of that certain identification “lesbian autobiography,” such extreme claims acquire a certain allure. They also constitute a certain danger, given the institutional privileges enjoyed by those who can afford to disavow “identity” and its “limits” over against those for whom such disavowals reproduce their invisibility.

Of course, “lesbian autobiography,” in its bound singularity, could appear to be a match made in a rather conventional heaven, plagued as both terms are historically by “facile assumptions of referentiality.”2 Their combination brings out the most conventional interpretation in each, for the lesbian in front of autobiography reinforces conventional assumptions of the transparency of autobiographical writing. And the autobiography that follows lesbian suggests that sexual identity not only modifies but essentially defines a life, providing it with predictable content and an identity possessing continuity and universality.

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