Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology by Angela Willey

Author:Angela Willey [Willey, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, sociology, Marriage & Family, Feminism & Feminist Theory, LGBTQ+ Studies, Lesbian Studies
ISBN: 9780822361404
Google: gRYcswEACAAJ
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2016-05-13T00:10:11.012523+00:00

Toward a Dyke Ethics

Like Lynne Huffer in Are the Lips a Grave?, I’m convinced that “bringing the term lesbian back into the picture” is vital to theorizing a queer feminist ethics of sex and social belonging.8 The embodied lesbian, fictional or not, forces us to question stories that tell us what feminist and queer desires look like, and circumscribe what a feminist or queer take on monogamy might be. Unsurprisingly, given the richness of Huffer’s archive and the iconic status of DTWOF as a uniquely and distinctly lesbian text, she draws on Bechdel’s autobiographical account of her own coming out to frame the case for reclaiming lesbian.9 Bechdel’s journey, depicted in “Coming Out Story,” begins one “fateful day” at her college’s co-op bookstore and is filled, in classic Bechdelian fashion, with written texts. In between scenes at the co-op and at the library of the gay student union she finally joins, readers are treated to an iconic DTWOF scene of a woman alone in bed with books. Huffer argues that “Bechdel helps us think about queer feminist subjectivity by figuring it visually as the onehanded reading of the masturbating dyke.” In her reading of these frames of Bechdel in bed with her books, Huffer eloquently interprets that dyke figure: “Her quest is both erotic and epistemological: ‘an insatiable hunger’ for ‘knowledge’ that is at once literary, corporeal, and female.”10 Jane Tolmie offers a similar reading of the effect of Bechdel’s masturbating dyke: “A small frame of the narrator masturbating while reading Anaïs Nin titillatingly reminds the reader of the multiple intersections of text and body, constructed identity and experience, art and life.”11 While Huffer tracks a “genealogy of masturbatory queer dyke-love” through which she theorizes “mutuality, reciprocity, and respect for difference” as the ground for a new ethics to inspiring effect, I am most interested here in the “at once” textual and material figuration of the dyke.

I use “dyke” here for its lesbian-feminist signifying power and for its nature-cultural valence. “Feminist” is a deeply denaturalized category, and is in fact often characterized as a philosophy and worldview operating from a foundational myth of willful denial about nature itself.12 And “lesbian” is historically a scientific category. It described the female whose purportedly masculine tastes and/or sexual proclivities toward women evidenced her inversion, whether congenital or acquired. Acquired inversion evokes the specter of feminism, as its history is inextricably bound with anxieties about gender roles.13 At the heart of lesbian-feminism are questions about the contested nature of difference and desire. As Kim Emery so concisely put it: “The question of whether lesbians are born or made may seem new . . . but it is hardly news to lesbians; versions of this debate—from late nineteenth-century distinctions between ‘congenital’ and ‘acquired’ inversion to late twentieth-century disagreements over the difference between sexual ‘orientation’ and sexual ‘preference’—have animated popular as well as professional representations of lesbian possibility from the very beginning. Indeed, the crystallization of this structuring division might be said to mark the beginning of what we now understand as ‘lesbian.

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