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Ugly dykes: pejorative identities and the anti-aesthetics of lesbianism

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Ugly dykes: pejorative identities and the anti-aesthetics of lesbianism

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Content UGLY DYKES: PEJORATIVE IDENTITES AND THE ANTI-AESTHETICS OF LESBIANISM by Yetta Howard A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Yetta Howard ii DEDICATION To the memory of my aunt Lisette Azerraf (1942 – 2009) and my father Robert Howard (1928 – 1994) who each had the ugliest last two years of life. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my committee for their time and patience in seeing this project in its many ugly versions: my chair, Jack Halberstam for being tough on me when I needed it most and for giving me the freedom to write the dissertation that I actually wanted to write. Jack‘s unmatched guidance took this project in the directions that it needed to go. I have learned how to be a better scholar and thinker because of Jack and this project is indebted to her work and her advice; Karen Tongson, for always being encouraging and helping me at all stages of this dissertation process. Karen has been a key figure in my professional development and took the time to care about it genuinely; Tania Modleski, for always being supportive of work that pushed the envelope and reminding me not to compromise my ideas; Susan McCabe, for alternative perspectives and significant comments that lead to necessary inclusions and exclusions; Sarah Banet-Weiser, for perspicacious feedback at the most important stages of the process. Thanks also to Carla Kaplan and Fred Moten for guidance and inspiration when I first began thinking about this project during my coursework at USC. Thanks to the USC Department of English for awarding me a Dissertation Fellowship for the 2007 – 08 academic year and a Research Grant during summer 2008, which allowed me significant time to conduct research and draft portions of this project without having teaching obligations. To my friends and colleagues at USC who have shared my battle fatigue, too many to name, but mostly: Deb Alkamano, Memo Arce, Jennifer Barager, Alice Bardan, Ruth Blandon, Jenny Conary, Mike Cucher, Mary Ann Davis, Laura Fauteaux, Laura iv Fugikawa, Alicia Garnica, Nora Gilbert, Shelly Goodman, Shayna Kessel, Nisha Kunte, Alexis Lothian, Jay Marietta, Marci McMahon, Pashmina Murthy, Jose Navarro, Kevin Pinkham, Saba Razvi, Michael Robinson, Flora Ruiz, Evren Savci, Laura Scheurer, Margarita Smith, Stef Snider, Jeff Solomon, Robert Stefanek, Kathy Strong, Hande Tekdemir, Mariko Dawson Zare. I never felt isolated writing this dissertation knowing that you all were going through or went through similar struggles. Love you guys. Thanks especially to Marci McMahon, Kathy Strong, and Jeff Solomon for their sound advice. Thanks also to Michelle Har Kim for being a lifesaver with formatting help. To friends who provided emotional support and encouragement, I could not have done it without you all: Stacy Banas, Wonda Baugh, Carolyn Blackburn, Julia Bloch, Evan Brandes, Jian Chen, Grace Collier, Laura Dunne, Nikki Eschen, Deanna Gold, Tom Harris, Danielle Montezinos, Sal Shabazz. Thanks to my mother for listening to random elements about my work even when not always understanding what I was saying and for fighting her own battles; my twin sister Nancy, for wisdom, down-to-earth advice, and interest in my work; my ―cousin-in- law‖ Fred Gates who genuinely understood what I was going through during truly difficult moments and pushed me to pull through despite many upsets; my cousins Laurie Fazio, Natalie Gates, Veronica Gekhman, and Roland Pinto for their enthusiasm. Thanks especially to G. Conti for love, discussion, and reading many versions of my materials and incarnations of chapters. This dissertation and my thinking about it improved tremendously because of you. v Last but not least, ―thanks‖ to those people and those situations that have pissed me off, discomforted me, or affected me in some negative way, shape, or form; it is these ugly moments that I have been able to draw on, whether directly and indirectly, in thinking about certain portions of this project. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures viii Abstract ix INTRODUCTION: IS SHE A DYKE OR IS SHE JUST UGLY? 1 ―Dyke‖ versus ―Lesbian‖ 5 Beautiful Gay Men and Queer Negativity 11 Studies of Ugliness and the Anti-Aesthetic 15 Chapter Outlines and Ugly Methodologies 22 Introduction Endnotes 26 CHAPTER ONE: PRIMITIVE PASTS: THE DISAGREEABLE ―FEATURES‖ OF TENDER BUTTONS AND HOME TO HARLEM 29 Sore Clitorises, Damaged Language: Lesbian Sexuality in Tender Buttons 35 ―Them‘s All Ugly Womens‖: The Racialization of Dyke 49 Chapter One Endnotes 62 CHAPTER TWO: INFORMAL CONTENTIONS: DYKE COMIX AND QUEER NIHILISM 65 Queer Nihilism: Funny, Isn‘t It? 74 Bitchy Butch‘s Unapologetic Discrepancies 80 Lap Dancing for Disempowerment 102 Chapter Two Endnotes 120 CHAPTER THREE: RECOLLECTING RAPE, DISAVOWING LESBIANISM, VIOLATING EXPECTATION: SAPPHIRE‘S POETICS OF ABUSE 127 Sexualized Violence and the Black Female Body 135 Narrating the ―Self‖ as Survivor 144 The Aesthetics of Violation 148 Chapter Three Endnotes 165 vii CHAPTER FOUR: ALIEN/ATING LESBIANISM: ADDICTION AND DYSTOPIAN DESIRES IN LIQUID SKY AND HIGH ART 168 Ugly Sex and Postpunk Feminist Dystopia in Liquid Sky 174 Postpunk Aesthetics and the Cult Film/Midnight Movie 177 Female Bodily Space and Disempowering Empowerment 183 Diegetic Alienation and Subcultural Space 191 Unfamiliar Company 200 The Photographic Negative in High Art 202 Chapter Four Endnotes 215 Bibliography 219 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Ideal/Non-Ideal Lesbian Separatism, Bitchy Butch, 1999 92 Figure 2 Frustration with Not Finding the Room, Bitchy Butch, 1999 93 Figure 3 Transgressive Gutter Function, Bitchy Butch, 1999 97 Figure 4 Words as Images, Bitchy Butch, 1999 99 Figure 5 Indecipherable Scribbles, Bitchy Butch, 1999 99 Figure 6 Unchanged Mistakes, Bitchy Butch, 1999 100 Figure 7 Hairy Woman, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 105 Figure 8 Hair and Sexuality, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 105 Figure 9 Clean Lines and Realism, Locas, 2004 107 Figure 10 Cursive and Print Switching, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 114 Figure 11 Generic Face, Understanding Comics, 1994 115 Figure 12 Words as Images, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 116 Figure 13 Speech Bubble Repetitions, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 117 Figure 14 Going Nowhere, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 119 Figure 15 Dick and Jane Epigraphs, The Bluest Eye, 1970 129 Figure 16 Startling Third Repetition, The Bluest Eye, 1970 130 ix ABSTRACT This project investigates the connections between ugliness and lesbian identity in the twentieth century. Ugliness names the disagreeable traits that are attributed to lesbianism as part of its cultural formation and describes putatively racist, misogynistic, and homophobic qualities that this dissertation uses to theorize the stakes of political visibility. Framed by early-twentieth-century characterizations of racially and sexually degenerate female bodies, lesbianism in the late-twentieth century, I argue, comes to signify a renewal rather than a recuperation of such negative qualities, which surface in— and as—experiential, textual, and corporeal forms. Specifically, I establish ugliness as a politics of gendered, racial, and sexual difference that uses oppositional depictions to critically reassess the status of contemporary lesbian identity. Ugliness ultimately develops as a specific indicator of the pejorative frameworks that shape lesbianism and thus raises vital questions about queer identifications and marginal artistic/textual practices. Chapter One explores Gertrude Stein‘s and Claude McKay‘s early-twentieth- century incorporations of primitivism, which capitalized on non-Western art styles, maligned bodily features, and ―unrefined‖ sexual and creative practices. McKay‘s Home to Harlem (1928) strategically conflates blackness and unattractive physical characteristics, but lesbianism, I contend, becomes the figure of blackness in the text‘s vernacular configurations of language and culture; this linguistically specific primitivism extends to Stein‘s Tender Buttons (1914) and suggests a non-ideal, less-romanticized x view of lesbian sexuality than the typically affirmative readings of its radical form. Chapter Two continues with an analysis of comix, a contemporary example of primitive art, which I bring together with nihilism, outlined as the mechanisms that restrict opting out of stigmatizing political and representational logics. Examining political incorrectness alongside visual incorrectness in Roberta Gregory‘s Bitchy Butch (1999) and Erika Lopez‘s Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997), I read visual discrepancies and identificatory impossibilities as specific issues of depicting non-gender-normative and non-white bodies. Chapter Three considers the connections among lesbian sexual identification, black female identity, and surviving sexual abuse in Sapphire‘s poetry collections, American Dreams (1994) and Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999). While lesbianism may be used as a way to heal from sexual abuse, this chapter demonstrates that the disavowal of lesbianism ultimately dictates the terms of healing and ultimately associates lesbianism with abuse. In turn, the poems use the theme of rape to construct the ―self‖ in and through a violating language of the violated body. Chapter Four expands on questions of abuse, and shifts to films that include and represent the tensions between photography‘s ―authenticity‖ and the midnight movie genre‘s ―fakeness‖ in depicting sexual and substance desiring practices. Through what I describe as ugly sex and postpunk feminist dystopia in Slava Tsukerman‘s Liquid Sky (1982), this chapter investigates the ―alienated‖ lesbian body, which, in the film, literally transmits euphoric chemicals from sexual activity, indistinguishable from those of heroin use, to space aliens. Correspondingly, alienation in Lisa Cholodenko‘s High Art (1998) comes through as lesbian desire that is bound up with heroin addiction and photographic documentation; I xi show that lesbianism communicates as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be properly ―developed.‖ 1 INTRODUCTION IS SHE A DYKE OR IS SHE JUST UGLY? Some people try not to think about life‘s ugliness. I‘ve thought about it. I‘ve thought about it quite a lot.—Boyd Rice 1 When Showtime‘s television series The L Word was at the peak of its popularity, my friend Wonda astutely stated, ―I like the show, but I keep waiting for a dyke to be on it.‖ The successful and beautiful characters typified in The L Word prohibited the less- culturally digestible image of ―the dyke‖—usually recognized as a female-bodied person with a mullet haircut and flannel, or as unsuccessfully feminine, overweight, wearing ill- fitting clothes, perhaps with a financial or alcohol problem. The show opted instead for its characters, regardless of their ―diverse‖ gender and racial identities, to align with notions of dominant desirability, all but removing any association of lesbianism with pejorative depictions. Connecting the figure of the lesbian to ugliness is hardly surprising, but images of non-ideal sexual subjectivity historically linked to lesbianism have been replaced with liberation models, which have sought to re-fashion or outright reject negative qualities and styles. For instance, ―lesbian chic‖ in the 1990s ―went public‖ when a glamorized k.d. lang appeared on the cover of a 1993 issue of Vanity Fair with Cindy Crawford, and just a few years later the ―cute, girl-next-door‖ Ellen DeGeneres came out on national television in 1997. 2 Recently, a June 2009 Village Voice piece on the ―poster girl‖ potential of political commentator Rachel Maddow states, ―The new butch is not only not afraid to be pretty, but she‘s equally comfortable with men and straight women‖ (McCroy). At the heart of this project is an understanding of what the 2 above quotation seems to ignore: first, that ugliness is part and parcel of lesbianism‘s construction and, second, that ugliness is not necessarily something to be—or that can be—overcome. In accounting for non-dominant gendered, racial, and sexual contours of identity, this project contends that inhabitations of ugliness underwrite the category ―lesbian‖ in the late-twentieth century, calling into question the comfort described above. While the relationship between sexual identity and the aesthetic has been mostly associated with gay men, beauty, and the ideal, this dissertation explores the links between lesbianism and ugliness. I define ugliness as the disagreeable traits that are attributed to lesbianism as part of its cultural formation. Framed by early-twentieth- century characterizations of sexually and racially degenerate female bodies, lesbianism in the late-twentieth century, I argue, comes to signify a renewal rather than a recuperation of such negative qualities, which surface in—and as—experiential, textual, and corporeal forms. Demonstrating the ways that these expressions expose the conflicts embedded in identifications with the pejorative, I establish ugliness as a politics of gendered, racial, and sexual difference that uses oppositional depictions to critically reassess the status of lesbian identity in the late-twentieth century. Ugliness ultimately develops as a specific indicator of the derogatory racial, sexual, and aesthetic frameworks that shape lesbianism and thus raises vital questions about identification and artistic/textual practices in the contemporary era. Situating lesbianism in terms of ugliness is obviously not unproblematic to narratives of empowerment that have largely come to define critical work on institutionalized forms of discrimination. Foundational anti-racist and feminist 3 scholarship has aggressively argued against negative characterizations of sexual and racial difference or has strategically reclaimed them as a political tool against dominant ideologies; however this project shows where these competing characterizations move dangerously close to being indistinct in asking what the confrontations between the pejorative and sexual identity look like. I contend that what may appear as homophobic, racist, and misogynistic in constructions of lesbian sexuality also functions to uncover liberal orthodoxies about lived experience and its concomitant representations. Contextualizing the illegitimacy associated with minority subjectivities and marginal aesthetic techniques, I structure the project around two historical moments: the early- and late-twentieth century. These influential periods of literary innovation operated in tandem with their eras‘ minority politics, which I align with an original archive of texts that integrate and critique these politics. Modernist and Harlem Renaissance literary production from the beginning of the century provided a particularly visible moment for non-dominant identities to be culturally articulated; yet the feminist, civil rights, and post-Stonewall political movements of the late-twentieth century radically revised the cultural visibility of gender, racial, and sexual difference. Focusing on ugliness as an intervention in theories of gender and sexuality, I reveal the exclusions set up by totalizing accounts of sexuality and the assumptions that underwrite its cultural translations. In doing so, this project ultimately dismantles monolithic beliefs about politically acceptable identities and charts the formal embodiments of such identities in twentieth-century cultural production. 4 Lesbianism is not the only location in which to identify ugliness if beauty is equated with normativity and dominant ideologies about race, gender, and sexuality; however in specifically exploring the role that the pejorative plays in lesbian identification, I show that ―lesbian‖ maintains specific ties to ugliness in how it has been produced as a sexual identity in the contemporary era. The focus of this study, then, is less a rigid equation of lesbianism broadly defined as ugliness, but, instead, it examines the components of lesbianism that are produced via rubrics of ugliness, those that I show are explicitly gendered, raced, and sexed without being exclusive to just one of vector of difference. Nonetheless, this study does not claim to universalize lesbianism or its relationship to ugliness, or even define ―lesbian‖ as anything other than an unstable construction of sexuality that is always already an insufficient way of categorizing identity. Rather, the project looks at examples of the ways that lesbianism has been culturally constructed and aesthetically demarcated as ugliness and tracks where and how lesbianism may stay ugly without emerging as a transgressive version of beauty. 3 Therefore, in isolating lesbianism, this project does not seek to turn ugliness into something productive or empowering, but shows what sexual identity looks like when it resists both oppressive and liberating representational and identificatory spheres. How we think about what constitutes valid identities and ways of expressing those identities hinges on what is at odds with what might be expected in contemporary configurations of sexual identity. 5 “Dyke” versus “Lesbian” Rather than ―lesbian‖ this study uses ―dyke‖ as a symbolic framework for describing the ugly contours of the offensive, vernacular, and marginal that mark lesbian sexuality. 4 As a term of reclamation, ―dyke‖ corresponds to constructions of lesbianism that are organized around ugliness, how they register as negative or render problematic the process of recuperating oppressive formulations of sexual identity. ―Dyke,‖ in contemporary usage by self-identified lesbians, is a resignification of a derogatory category of address and, subsequently, is an example of what Judith Butler has aptly discussed as ―injurious speech.‖ 5 Transformed from an epithet to a mode of identification, ―dyke,‖ like ―queer,‖ is never fully rid of the negative characterizations bound up with it and therefore always retains a part of the pejorative intention that initially constitutes the term. As Butler remarks, ―The political possibility of reworking the force of speech act against the force of injury consists in misappropriating the force of speech from those prior contexts. The language that counters the injuries of speech, however, must repeat those injuries without precisely reenacting them‖ (Excitable 40 – 41). The texts undertaken in this study operate as what I will call ―negative resignifications.‖ That is, symbolically, they not only lose their attachment to the homophobia that the epithet cites but also to the positivity behind the reclamation. In other words, they are examples that do not properly become resignified from their pejorative contexts, but nonetheless do not revert back to an originary position as an epithet. Instead, they partially or erroneously come through as reclamations from derogatory positions only to be reinscribed as paradoxical critiques of the liberatory 6 effects of resignification. These are resignifications that end up looking more like pejorative designations while simultaneously remain at odds with the hatefulness from which such designations stem. As much as recuperation has functioned to undermine oppression, it has also undermined the variability bound up with queer identities. Therefore, I re-frame ―dyke‖ as a specifically ―negative resignification,‖ concentrating my analysis on the forms that identities take when they closely resemble that which they are presumed to oppose. Generally regarded as informal, illegitimate, or inappropriate, vernacular cultural and linguistic classifications almost always assume a blurring of lines between acceptability and unacceptability in social, political, and spoken use. Thought of as such, the vernacular has particular resonances with the ways in which cultural production is conceived as racialized, classed, and gendered. ―Dyke,‖ as also representing the vernacular features of lesbian culture and self-naming, therefore becomes a marker of difference within otherwise totalizing conceptions of identity; yet extended as a theoretical term, ―dyke‖ cannot help but be compared with the more ―respectable‖ categories of ―lesbian‖ and ―queer.‖ 6 While ―lesbian‖ has had obvious problems in terms of the monolithic assumptions that underwrite its use, ―queer‖—though still unclear to what extent it may be thought separate from ―lesbian‖—is that which disrupts the definitional premises of stable identities in both heteronormative and LGBT contexts. 7 Accordingly, the derogatory power from which terms of reclamation operate maintains undeniably specific resonances with the materiality of the words themselves. Like queer, the harshness of insult 8 that the word dyke contains is inextricably linked 7 with the very sound of the term itself when being uttered. In his discussion of the origin of slurs, Leon Rappoport points out such a connection in the example of the word nigger: ―Some authorities suggest that the N-word has been such a powerful, all-purpose term of insult and abuse because it lends itself to a particularly contemptuous tone of voice; it simply sounds especially ugly‖ (48). 9 As Rappoport notes, regardless of whether a term is deployed as an epithet or identified with in order to weaken its capacity to harm, it always retains a biting quality that is first and foremost experienced as auditory. In turn, accessing the antagonism that the auditory brings might also be what functions as a powerful means of overcoming it, since the tangibility of sound‘s ephemerality is one that paradoxically resonates despite—or because of—its ephemerality. As Karina Eileraas describes screams as feminist resistance in girl bands‘ songs, ―the ugly voice [is] a tool for cathartic expression; a means to articulate the ‗self‘ while acknowledging it as a site of fiction, contest, incoherence, social inscription, and performativity. [. . .] Ugly voice delivers an in-your-face body‖ (125). This ―in-your-face body‖ convincingly reconfigures the ugliness of sound as a physical, corporeal ugliness that transgresses the boundaries of a singularly negative or positive oppositional strategy. But ―Ugly Dykes‖ asks, what if such reconfigurations retain more of an affinity for the negative dimensions they seek to overcome? Where do the limits of resistance lie in inhabiting a space too closely associated with the context being opposed? What happens when forms of resistance cannot be fully accounted for as resistance? In 1974, Julia Stanley claimed that the word dyke signifies a specifically political position: ―A dyke is a woman committed to revolution, the most radical position. A 8 lesbian is committed to a more liberal position, and she is more willing to compromise and work within the system‖ (391). Yet the question of which liberal orthodoxies ―dyke‖ positions itself against has everything to do with understanding the vexed relationship between putatively positive and negative images. Although ―dyke‖ has become a term in its own right, it is a clipped form of ―bulldyke,‖ ―bulldyker,‖ and/or ―bulldagger,‖ terms that circulated within racially specific contexts of the early-twentieth century. The racially and, perhaps to a lesser extent, class-specific histories of ―bulldyker‖ and ―bulldagger‖ therefore deserve some substantial definitional analysis. Although I will not offer an exhaustive etymological history, I will emphasize the importance of recognizing the contours of difference embedded in the terms. In her classic lexicon of gay and lesbian terminology, Judy Grahn explains that ―dyke,‖ originating from ―bulldike‖ or ―bulldagger,‖ comes from a Celtic Queen‘s name, Boudica, which translates as ―bull- slayer-priestess‖ (139). 10 SDiane Bogus, on the other hand, connects the figure of Boudica to a specifically African American tradition. Bogus begins by arguing that the black lesbian must be distinguished from the ―black bulldagger.‖ To Bogus, ―lesbian,‖ is an exclusionary category for female homosexuals and coincides with universalizing lesbianism as white and feminine. She explains that because of its linguistic origination from the Greek island of Lesbos and the image of Sappho, ―lesbian‖ problematically de- emphasizes African American culture, which all at once erases female strength and blackness from lesbianism as a sexual identity. For Bogus, the figure of Boudica ―gave to lesbians a character rebellious, armed, masculine, warrior-like, and dangerous‖ (33) and thus fittingly represents an identity marked by struggling with the dominant. 9 Similarly, the term ―dyke‖ has also been rooted in specifically criminal and working-class contexts. In discussing the social origins of the term, Lillian Faderman writes, Much of the slang came originally from women‘s prisons, where lesbianism, which was sometimes situational and sometimes a lifetime commitment, was common. From the correctional institutions the argot seems to have filtered into working-class, and sometime middle-class, lesbian society. An end-of-the-decade study identified many terms used by lesbians during the 1930s, including words such as ‗dyke,‘ ‗bulldyke,‘ ‗bulldagger.‘‖ (105 – 06) Relatedly, a 1972 study of gay and lesbian terminology emphasized the class-specificity of ―dyke.‖ The versions of ―dyke‖ in this study equate it with a lesbian masculinity that is specifically working class, even at times citing specific working-class vocations in defining it. Note its following definition of bulldyke: ―A female homosexual who behaves in an extremely masculine fashion, resembling a working class male‖ (Farrell 99). When relevant, each definition in the argot includes synonyms; bulldyke‘s are diesel dyke and truck driver (99). George Chauncey indicates that the word bulldagger, bound up as it was with moving against white, middle-class ideals, became a marker for being both black and lower-class, which was met with disdain by several in Harlem society because it was seen as a betrayal to racial uplift: ―Many middle-class and churchgoing African-Americans grouped [bulldaggers and faggots] with prostitutes, salacious entertainers, and all-too- visible black ‗lowlife‘ that brought disrepute to the neighborhood and ‗the race‘‖ (253). Chauncey goes on to indicate that sexuality served to mark ―class‖ separation among blacks in Harlem. Hugh Rawson also contends that ―bulldiker and bulldyking [were] both 10 used in the 1920s by American blacks‖ (134), but he goes on to argue that ―[n]o African antecedents have been found for the term‖ (134). These histories of ―bulldagger‖ are, of course, speculative. While African American culture from the 1920s provides one of the most satisfactory ―origins‖ of ―bulldike‖/ ‖bulldagger‖/―dyke,‖ the question of what ―dyke‖ and ―bulldyke‖ actually describes dates back significantly earlier than the Harlem Renaissance era. The earliest citation of ―bulldyke‖ in the context of lesbianism dates back to 1906 from a text on human sexuality by J. Richardson Parke. Parke writes: ―‗In American homosexual argot, female inverts, or lesbian lovers, are known euphemistically as ‗bulldykers,‘ whatever that may mean: at least that is their sobriquet in the ‗Red Light‘ district of Philadelphia‘‖ (qtd. in Shapiro 2; emphasis added). This discovery is quite astounding considering all other citations, including those that appear in the OED, point to the earliest known forms of ―dyke‖ referring to lesbianism, as beginning in the 1920s. Despite the antedating of ―bulldyker‖ to 1906, the verb form, ―bulldyking‖ dates only to 1921, ―before dyke/dike is recorded in the pertinent sense‖ (Wilson 4). 11 Additionally, ―dyke‖ has some determinately corporeal associations: one of the earliest slang definitions of dyke from nineteenth-century Britain is female genitalia: ―the form dyke is listed [in Farmer and Henley] as one of the many terms for the female genitals, similar to crack, slit, and trench‖ (Spears 322). Other definitions of dyke follow suit in equating ―dyke‖ with a ―bad‖ version of penis: ―the possibility [exists] that this is basically just another backcountry, barnyard word, perhaps a combination of BULL and DICK‖ (Rawson 134). Bull, here, has many connotations, but interestingly, all definitions 11 revolve around some notions of falsehood or deceit, for instance, as ―the sense of lies or exaggerated talk‖ (64). Accordingly, another notable slang definition of bull is ―[t]he sexual potency of [an] animal‖ (63) as well as ―the male animal‖ (64). Along the same lines bulldiker has been connected to dick (as clit) and dagger (as a phallic reference) (Krantz 218). This genital specificity of ―dyke‖ anticipates the role that linguistic aesthetics plays in literary history‘s account of sexual difference as the site of racial and non-heterosexual difference, as will be explored in Chapter One. Beautiful Gay Men and Queer Negativity As much as this project conceptually differentiates ―dyke‖ from ―lesbian,‖ it also differentiates ―dyke‖ from gay men. The idealizing of beauty in relationship to queer literary and cultural history has revolved around gay men and sustains the link between queer female embodiment and ugliness. Perhaps no novel crystallizes these associations more than Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The preoccupation with youth and beauty, despite the inability to be maintained by the end of the novel, has come to stand in for gay male culture. 12 The obsession with Dorian‘s image is central to Wilde‘s text: Basil‘s beautiful portrait of Dorian shows the marks of age and the wretchedness of Dorian‘s ―true soul‖ as Dorian himself continues to look young. Significantly, Dorian hides his portrait away, ―closeting‖ the negative effects that a soiled reputation has on his physical being. Yet the main apparatus for the portrait‘s becoming ugly is not so much aging as it is the ugly experiences that Dorian circumvents throughout the text. This connection between visual and conceptual ugliness comes 12 together in the portrait of Dorian; however I want to suggest that, like Dorian‘s portrait, ―dyke‖ represents the experiential ugliness that specifically comes through as an aesthetic, but without the gay male option to be ―hidden away‖ or resignified to oppose ugliness. While resignification affords considerable ways to dislodge assumptions about the contours of identification, there are some terms that only arbitrarily surface as recuperated compared to classifications of identity that are thought to operate in the same scope. In Larry Kramer‘s 1978 novel Faggots, ―faggots‖ are beautiful gay men, and the novel as a whole describes a sexually utopian New York City and its surrounding boroughs in the post-Stonewall 1970s. 13 There really are no faggots in Faggots; in other words, the gay men move around urban communitarian spaces mostly devoid of any conflict. Even in its depictions of arguably subversive queer sexual practices, the novel never ventures outside its idealizing of youth, pleasure-seeking, and attractiveness. Whereas ―faggot‖ in this context emerges as a desirable category that counters derogation by being stripped of anything negative, some categories—linguistic and otherwise—can only ever be recuperated with great difficulty. For instance, one of the ugliest and most offensive words in the English language is the word cunt. Cunt, much more than its male- anatomical equivalent, cock, sounds as ugly as the putatively misogynistic naming of female genitalia that it connotes. In Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, a personally inflected manifesto of reclaiming the term, Inga Muscio discusses the importance of reorganizing socially prescribed images of the female body; however as much as 13 Muscio‘s text explicitly confronts the term, its overambitious re-assignment does not quite succeed. Unlike the faggots in Kramer‘s text or Muscio‘s attempt to reclaim cunt, the ―dykes‖ in this project are presented as examples of resignification gone awry, so to speak, and put forward lesbian identities that do not translate as properly reclaimed. While politically counterintuitive, this project shows where pejorative characterizations are identified with and thus suggests a critical rethinking of late-twentieth-century lesbian identity. Accordingly, the texts examined in this project are the ―dykes‖ of lesbianism, in a manner of speaking, and of contemporary cultural production more generally. That is, these are texts that are, more often than not, ignored or turned away from since they may have little to offer as far as a reassurance that the given circumstances represented will eventually improve. The betrayal of optimism that runs through each text, then, questions normative understandings of the conditions that shape lesbian identities. The notion of pessimism is far more complicated than merely giving in to the futility of a given circumstance. Joshua Dienstag‘s study of pessimism moves beyond conceiving it as a ―temperament‖; instead, pessimism emerges as a distinctly theoretical concept. According to Dienstag, ―the pessimist expects nothing—thus he or she is more truly open to every possibility as it presents itself‖ (40; emphasis in original). Pessimism, for Dienstag, is a way to manage encounters with the limitations of existence, limitations that more accurately describe the world‘s operations rather than the constant disappointments brought on by an optimistic outlook. 14 Therefore the pessimistic forms that lesbianism takes in this project can be said to have been ―inoculated‖: they are never 14 fully rid of the pejorative in being reinscribed. Put differently, the ―symptoms‖ of resistance to ―the disease‖ of the derogatory resemble ―the disease‖ a bit too indistinguishably so that what is being ―prevented‖ can only be precariously located. Accordingly, ―Ugly Dykes,‖ is in conversation with queer theory that critiques both assimilationist and positive paradigms associated with scholarship on identity politics. Leo Bersani‘s Homos, and more recently, Lee Edelman‘s No Future have taken radical and polemical approaches to both visibility and resignification, but doing so through specifically white gay male notions of queer negativity. For Bersani, striving for visibility through assimilation into the social sphere has the effect of what he calls ―de- gaying gayness‖ (5). In other words, Bersani wants to put sexuality back into queer politics, a sexuality that he argues becomes diffuse or completely removed in what he sees as a faulty privileging of ―community‖ over a non-heteronormative-friendly ―homo- ness.‖ Until recently, this strain of critical thought was mostly a gay male queer negativity that seemed to make irrelevant any other identity category that was not associated with gay men. 15 Regardless of some brief, if reductive, discussions of lesbianism, Bersani‘s formulation rests on linking modes of non-relationality to specifically gay male sexual practices. Lee Edelman‘s theory of ―queerness [that must insist] on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity‖ (31) is perhaps less gay-male specific, but closes itself off from discussions of gender and racial difference. Queer negativity that is particularly influential to this project is Heather Love‘s Feeling Backward, which explores the links between negative affects and queer history. For Love, ―the experience of social refusal and of the denigration of homosexual love has 15 taught us the lessons of solitude and heartbreak‖ (52); in other words, shameful features of experience that are inassimilable within contemporary notions of ―gay pride‖ need to be acknowledged as significant components of queer subjectivity. Lesbianism, in Love‘s study, has a particular history related to ―feeling bad‖ (156), the significance of which is essential to an understanding of homophobic systems that structure queer modes of being. If lesbianism is a twentieth-century construction, which, as Love rightly argues, has never been divorced from the abject dimensions that underwrite its cultural translations, then contemporary understanding of queer identity must always be informed by these dimensions. Studies of Ugliness and the Anti-Aesthetic Several studies have informed my thinking about ugliness and have provided an indispensable critical vocabulary that enabled me to theorize ugliness in its various domains. As a broad category that typically designates the breaking down of ideals, ugliness tends to describe the rupture of beautiful features and of pleasing conditions; yet whereas ugliness is often readily detectable and recognizable in and as a myriad of physical and experiential forms, there has been little scholarship devoted to isolating the connections between ugliness and queer identities. Ugliness in this project indicates a set of counterintuitive identificatory and aesthetic frameworks in which lesbianism registers as negative constructions of sexuality, race, and gender. How lesbianism has been synonymous with ugliness has much to do with how the female subject has historically surfaced in the cultural imaginary. In The Ugly Woman, her study of Italian poetry, 16 Patrizia Bettella‘s traces the literary history of female ugliness in the Medieval period, the Renaissance Era, and the Baroque, providing fascinating critiques and readings of figures such as ―the old hag,‖ ―the prostitute,‖ and ―the peasant.‖ Bettella‘s feminist study connects the physical ugliness and the negative qualities associated with the above archetypes to what she calls transgressive aesthetic models that include ―decay, evil, sexual excess‖ (6) within the context of race, class, and old age. Using twentieth-century literature, Charlotte Wright‘s Plain and Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction also explores female ugliness, broadening the category to encompass ―plain,‖ ―repulsive,‖ and ―deformed‖ (14). Wright historically tracks the figure of the ugly woman to the nineteenth-century, but she contends that the fascination with beauty found in Romantic literature yielded few representations of female ugliness. For Wright, contemporary representations of the ugly woman have the potential to be positive and powerful contestations to twentieth-century ideals of female beauty. 16 Wright‘s survey includes reading ugly women as masculine in texts by authors such as Hemingway and Faulker: ―Sometimes a female character whom the author intends to be seen as ugly will be described in terms ordinarily identified with males—such as those dealing with size or strength—or she will even be called ‗manlike.‘‖ (15). Correspondingly, in ―The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,‖ Judith Halberstam specifically connects ugliness to ―‗bad masculinities—lesbian, female, racialized‖ (351). In addition to filmic examples and in contrast to Wright‘s assertion about the nineteenth century, Halberstam includes an analysis of Wilkie Collins‘s The Woman in White (1861) in 17 which a ―depiction of female ugliness also makes clear the ways in which masculinity and racial otherness tend to be linked with aesthetic displeasure‖ (360). While these previous studies on ugliness have influenced this project tremendously, ―Ugly Dykes‖ locates ugliness across a range of lesbian genders, racial identities, and in a variety of texts not exclusively by men or lesbians; moreover, this project seeks to think about ugliness somewhat in isolation from similar antitheses of beautiful. Ugliness‘s closest cousin is the grotesque, and often, when ugliness is taken as an object of study, it is conflated with the abject or with various incarnations of a hideous otherness. Feminist theory has linked female corporeality with the grotesque and has sought to reconfigure or, at least, re-imagine such characterizations through the lens of opposition. Mary Russo‘s well-known feminist theory of carnivalesque bodies, The Female Grotesque, uses examples of mutation and freakiness to consider female bodies constituted ―in error‖ (13). Russo writes, ―[t]he intensification of the female and the grotesque temporarily reshapes male histories, making them concomitantly irregular. It also makes any transcendent model of femaleness or the female body impossible‖ (106). In her analysis of the female body, Russo establishes ways to think about the exclusions set up by feminist politics through a critique of social conformity. 17 If ―female‖ has been, in theories like Russo‘s, associated with the grotesque other, then this dissertation contends that we think of ―dyke‖ as the cultural incarnation of queer female sexuality‘s ugliness. Ugliness is not the same as the grotesque and this study differentiates the two concepts. Even though both concepts bleed into each other, the grotesque is what is 18 fantastically ugly: it is an unattractiveness that, in being spectacular, functions to draw the viewer in, thus has more in common with the beautiful. Ugliness, on the other hand, corresponds to what is, perhaps, less mesmerizing or less transfixing. Specifically, ugliness in this project describes sites from which we turn away, do not want look at, or do not want to face: in other words, what is ignored, rebuked, neglected in considerations of lesbianism‘s constructions. Looking at specific manifestations of lesbianism‘s cultural formation as ugliness in the twentieth century, I locate the roots of this ugliness in literary histories and in contemporary configurations that have been mostly overlooked as sites that constellate around textual, experiential, and physical qualities; such constellations, I show, connect to questions of bodily difference and aesthetic practice. In addition to being specifically gendered and sexed, ugliness is a distinctly racial category. 18 Sarah Nuttall‘s edited volume on diaspora aesthetics, Beautiful/Ugly, is especially relevant for thinking about how blackness and ugliness become imagined, reinscribed, and critiqued in specific cultural and artistic contexts. Nuttall acknowledges the importance of understanding ―the inscription of Africa in dominant Western aesthetic discourses as the figure of the ugly‖ (9). In the context of advertisements for hair and beauty products in Brazil, Patricia Pinho‘s essay in the volume addresses the tensions between beauty and ugliness in her cross-disciplinary analysis of the negotiations between ―repulsive‖ black corporeality and idealizations of Africa/the African body. 19 Such relationships to the ideal and/or the dominant extend to non-physical, yet still ―bodily‖ notions of ugliness. In her important work, Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai examines the ways in which particular minor sentiments become key sites for reassessing 19 the links between emotions and aesthetics. In specifying the negative affects that the book takes as its subject as ones that are ―[marginal] to the philosophical canon of emotions‖ (13), Ngai analyzes how these emotions serve as inquiries into modes of suspended and/or obstructed agency and, accordingly, reads textual moments of indecipherable emotional expression and passivity, what she calls ―affective illegibility‖ (175), in order investigate how these affects intersect with questions of race and gender. Although ―Ugly Dykes‖ does not specifically take affect as a point of departure for investigation, it is in conversation with theoretical work on the ways that queer sexualities and identities are articulated in minor forms and expressions, which Ngai‘s work, even though not exclusively queer, offers by way of a meticulous attention to contours of difference. Analyzing ugliness as difference—racial, gender, sexual—must, then, also include disabled bodies within the category of ugliness. Through the lens of class, Susan Schweik‘s recent legal history of disability, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, explores late-nineteenth through early-twentieth-century American laws that legislated ―Unsightliness [as] a status offense, illegal only for people without means‖ (16). In discussing figures such as ―the unsightly beggar,‖ Schweik examines how such laws were, in some cases, effects of segregation and operated within dominant understandings of the ethnic, sexual, and immigrant other. Hence, ugliness, first and foremost, describes what is visual and visible: in using representations of lesbianism, I emphasize gender and race as specifically visual markers of bodily difference, the cultural manifestations of which increasingly move toward the visual in the late-twentieth century. Not until this era does LGBT visibility become more 20 prominent, often confirming political positions by inverting the derogatory and the celebratory. In theorizing the stakes of this visibility in a range of genres by a diverse group of writers, artists, and filmmakers, I develop definitions of ugliness that include non-visual dimensions such as circumstances and dispositions. While ugliness is nonetheless highly contingent upon how, where, and when it is contextualized, Umberto Eco, in his On Ugliness, writes, ―No knowledge of the relativity of aesthetic values can eliminate the fact that in [some] cases we unhesitatingly recognize ugliness and we cannot transform it into an object of pleasure‖ (436). In other words, there are features and experiences—and features of experience—that cannot be denied as looking and being ugly. Eco‘s survey of ugliness in art history associates ugliness with evil and/or Hell in the early modern era, then moves to ugliness as the obscene in Renaissance painting, and eventually arrives at modern avant-garde art practices, calling such practices ―The Triumph of Ugliness‖ (365). Exploring at length the role that the avant-garde played in ushering in ugliness, Arthur Danto‘s The Abuse of Beauty discusses twentieth-century avant-garde art practices as a response to equating aesthetics with the sublime, as initiated by Kant in the eighteenth century. Danto writes, ―And yet beauty had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications‖ (7). He goes on to describe Dadaism and, later, Pop Art whose goals included ―[ironizing] the distinction between high and vernacular art‖ (20). While he eventually argues for a re-incorporation of what is putatively beautiful in contemporary art, Danto‘s philosophy of art suggests that in the late-twentieth century, 21 the binary beautiful/ugly can no longer be sustained in contemporary designations of aesthetic value and taste. If Danto is right, then the very question of designating what is ugly must extend beyond the merely aesthetic and filter through the experiential. A category all at once physical, material, psychic, and textual, ugliness, in ―Ugly Dykes,‖ refers to what is non-recuperable in constructions of lesbian sexual identity and therefore establishes ugliness as largely experiential in reassessing the politics of queer visibility and its related aesthetic practices. Rather than identifying stylistic devices, the anti-aesthetic, defined in Hal Foster‘s preface to the 1983 anthology of the same name, is a method of examining cultural practices through theoretical lenses. 20 Calling it a ―resistant postmodernism,‖ Foster contends that the anti-aesthetic functions ―to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations‖ (xii). Foster goes on to explain that the anti-aesthetic is not a negative aesthetic that purportedly claims to lie outside of representation. Instead, it describes a multiplicity of approaches to culture that acknowledges its inherent contradictions, what Linda Kauffman, in her multi-layered definition of the anti-aesthetic, states as ―[confronting] the paradoxes of transgression and assimilation in a culture of consumption‖ (11). Thus, in thinking about what constitutes the anti-aesthetics of lesbianism, it is necessary to ask what a lesbian aesthetics is. The question of whether sexuality has an aesthetics has been answered by poststructuralist feminist critics who sought to formally intervene in textual practices that were thought to correspond to hegemonic structures of male dominance. These writings came out of a ―tradition‖ of l’écriture feminine, or French feminist theory and critical textual aesthetics 22 usually associated with the work of Hélene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, whose theories have been both celebrated and rendered problematic. 21 The notion of a lesbian aesthetics has followed this tradition, 22 but with specific attention to rhetorically reproducing lesbian sexuality on the page, beginning with Monique Wittig‘s 1973 Le Corps Lesbien and culminating in texts such as Elizabeth Meese‘s 1992 (Sem)Erotics: theorizing lesbian: writing. In attempting to illustrate a lesbian sexual aesthetics, both Wittig‘s and Meese‘s experimental texts dismantle genre distinctions such as narrative, poetry, theory, and biography; especially in Wittig, the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling are undermined in order to write ―the lesbian body‖ as a utopian text that uses fragmented accounts of sexuality and a split ‗I‘ [j/e] to mark the disruption of dominant systems. 23 What has defined a lesbian aesthetics, then, is the idealizing of what is considered non- ideal within male- and heterosexual-specific literary and cultural perspectives, translated within/as the structure of a text and often blurring the lines between the creative and the critical. An anti-aesthetics of lesbianism, I contend, critiques the possibilities of such utopian goals, questioning the liberatory gains afforded by oppositional textual practices. Chapter Outlines and Ugly Methodologies Concentrating on ugly ways of being and representing, I organize the dissertation‘s chapters via rubrics of ugliness. Following the first chapter‘s genealogy of sexual and racial ugliness as rooted in primitivism, each chapter‘s rubric encompasses conceptual and physical elements of ugliness, expressed in texts that materially reflect the situations they depict: nihilism and comix in Roberta Gregory‘s Bitchy Butch and Erika 23 Lopez‘s Lap Dancing for Mommy; rape and poetry in Sapphire‘s American Dreams and Black Wings & Blind Angels; addiction and film in Slava Tsukerman‘s Liquid Sky and Lisa Cholodenko‘s High Art. Going to such ugly places allows—even forces—a reconsideration of sexuality‘s boundaries and spheres of representation, putting pressure on how identities and art practices are validated in the twentieth century. Along the same lines, this dissertation attempts to reconsider methodological ―validity‖ by departing from a singular methodology within each chapter and from chapter to chapter, and thus itself becomes an ―ugly object‖: ―the ugly object is felt to be both disturbingly similar and utterly foreign‖ (Hagman 121). Chapter One, ―Primitive Pasts: The Disagreeable ‗Features‘ of Tender Buttons and Home to Harlem‖ explores Gertrude Stein‘s and Claude McKay‘s early-twentieth- century incorporations of primitivism, which capitalized on non-Western art styles, maligned bodily features, and ―unrefined‖ sexual and creative practices. By investigating the historical rationales behind why blackness and lesbianism have become emblems of ugliness, this chapter explores McKay‘s use of primitivist discourse in Home to Harlem (1928). Home strategically conflates blackness and putatively unattractive physical characteristics, but lesbianism, I argue, becomes the figure of blackness in the text‘s vernacular configurations of language and culture. The text also serves as a key genealogical example of ―dyke‖ as racialized through the use of ―bulldyker‖ in the context of Harlem culture. This linguistic specificity extends to Stein‘s primitivist Tender Buttons (1914) and suggests a non-ideal, less-romanticized view of lesbian sexuality than the typically affirmative readings of its radical form. This chapter uses literary history, 24 close textual analysis, and various responses to Stein and McKay when their respective texts were published. Chapter Two, ―Informal Contentions: Dyke Comix and Queer Nihilism,‖ continues with an analysis of comix, a contemporary example of primitive art, which I bring together with nihilism, outlined as the mechanisms that restrict opting out of stigmatizing political and representational logics. Illustrating that ―queer nihilism‖ more accurately characterizes the response to such restrictions, this chapter shows the limitations of allowable and expressible lesbian identities. Examining political incorrectness alongside visual incorrectness in Roberta Gregory‘s Bitchy Butch (1999) and Erika Lopez‘s Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997), I read visual discrepancies and identificatory impossibilities as specific issues of depicting non-gender-normative and non-white bodies. This chapter uses word/image studies, comix history, theories of nihilism, and Latino/a studies. Chapter Three, ―Recollecting Rape, Disavowing Lesbianism, Violating Expectation: Sapphire‘s Poetics of Abuse,‖ explores the connections between lesbian sexual identification and surviving sexual abuse. While lesbianism may be used as a way to heal from abuse, this chapter demonstrates that the true terms of healing come through heterosexuality in disavowing lesbianism and ultimately associates lesbianism with abuse rather than healing. I explore poems from Sapphire‘s collections, American Dreams (1994) and Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999), which follow a counterintuitive trajectory of lesbian sexual identification and healing from sexual abuse. In turn, the poems use the theme of rape to construct the ―self‖ in and through a violating language of 25 the violated body. This chapter also briefly traces the historical, material, and social abuses of the black female body, the consequences of which obliquely connect to the poems and subjectivities in question. Here, I use feminist theories of race, Sapphire‘s biographical information in relationship to the formal features of the poems in each collection, and theories of survivor narratives. Chapter Four, ―Alien/ating Lesbianism: Addiction and Dystopian Desires in Liquid Sky and High Art,‖ expands on questions of abuse, and shifts to films that include and represent the tensions between photography‘s ―authenticity‖ and the midnight movie genre‘s ―fakeness‖ in depicting sexual and substance desiring practices. In bringing together lesbianism, alienation, and addiction, this chapter contends that lesbian sexual identity is constituted via dystopian desires. Through what I describe as ugly sex and postpunk feminist dystopia in Slava Tsukerman‘s Liquid Sky (1982), alienation surfaces as the ―alienated‖ lesbian body, which, in the film, literally transmits euphoric chemicals from sexual activity, indistinguishable from those of heroin use, to space aliens. Correspondingly, alienation in Lisa Cholodenko‘s High Art (1998) comes through as lesbian desire that is bound up with heroin addiction and photographic documentation; I show that lesbianism communicates as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be properly ―developed.‖ This chapter uses film theories specific to analyses of the diegetic, postpunk music history, and cultural studies of photography. 26 INTRODUCTION ENDNOTES 1 Boyd Rice and Friends, ―People.‖ 2 See O‘Sullivan for a reading of the historical and political circumstances that informed the transformation of lesbianism from an image of the ugly 1970s lesbian-feminist into an image of mainstream glamour in popular cultural imaginaries of the 1980s and 1990s. 3 See Banet-Weiser for an alternative analysis of beauty in her study of the role that beauty pageants play in contesting dominant notions of feminism that simply and reductively claim the pageants as exploitative and as effects of patriarchy. Qualified by the experiences of pageant participants, Banet-Weiser‘s counterintuitive approach to the relationship between feminism and beauty significantly intervenes ―by considering the pageants‘ and contestants‘ claim that beauty pageants are important sites for the construction of national feminine identity, and that constructing national identity in the United States means not only being a particular kind of woman, but also embracing a specific definition of diversity‖ (23). 4 In her brilliant essays on linguistic affect and self-description, Riley asks, ―Is there a syntax of potential hostility?‖ and goes on to describe the antagonism that noun forms of classification carry versus adjectival forms: ―‗He is a Jew‘‖ versus ―‗He is Jewish.‘‖ Although she stops short of including ―dyke,‖ Riley does point out that ―the noun form ‗she is a lesbian‘ doesn‘t seem to carry quite the same strains, which pass instead to its contemptuous shorthand, ‗she‘s a les‘‖ (170 – 171). Interestingly, ―lesbian‖ is primarily used as a noun rather than an adjective when describing a person, which speaks to the unconscious features of hostility embedded in the use of ―lesbian,‖ regardless of any resonances with or differences from ―dyke.‖ 5 See Butler, ―Critically Queer,‖ 223 – 242, in Bodies That Matter for a questioning of the counterintuitive principles that encompass identifying with a derogatory category of address. In it, she asks, ―How is it that the apparently injurious effects of a discourse become the painful resources by which a signifying practice is wrought?‖ (Bodies 224). 6 Although there is very little scholarship that focuses on ―dyke‖ as separate theoretical terminology, the term has been used in critical work that specifically takes lesbianism as a subject of analysis. It is interesting to note when and where ―dyke‖ is employed and when it is substituted or stands in for other concepts. For instance see Modleski, ―The White Negress and the Heavy-Duty Dyke,‖ 80 – 100, for a reading of Sandra Bernhard‘s closeted public persona and problematic relationship to ―dykeyness.‖ See Halberstam‘s use of ―dyke‖ as a more fluid marker of queer female identity: ―queer dyke desire‖ (Female 121); ―non-role-playing dykes‖ (Female 133). In her otherwise excellent analysis, Villarejo problematically conflates ―dyke‖ and ―butch,‖ see ―Straight to Video,‖ 191 – 207. See Tongson‘s notion of ―dykeaspora‖ as a way to discuss dyke of color suburban subjectivities. For a reading of Judy Grahn‘s poetic use of ―dyke,‖ see Garber, ―Putting the Word Dyke on the Map: Judy Grahn,‖ 31 – 62. 7 See Butler, ―Critically Queer,‖ 223 – 242, in Bodies That Matter. 8 See Eribon for an exploration of how insult constitutes gay subjectivity and how the threat of insult regulates public behavior. 9 For an extended analysis on the social significance, effects, and ambivalence surrounding the use of the word nigger, see Kennedy. 10 Wilson also links the origins of the word ―bulldyker‖ to Boudica (also spelled Boadicea), ―a legendary warrior queen of ancient (Celtic) Britain who led a temporarily successful uprising of local tribes against 27 the Romans‖ (3). Wilson continues by noting that the ―bulldyker‖ perhaps comes from pronouncing Boudica as ―‗bo-dica‘ (rhyming with ‗mica‘)‖ (4). 11 See also Halberstam for the use of ―dyke‖ as a verb: ―tribadism (also known as ‗friction‘ or ‗dyking‘)‖ (Female 124 – 25). 12 Obviously, there are exceptions to this if in the oppositional films of Bruce LaBruce, and queer male filmmakers of color such as Marlon Riggs and Issac Julien. Literary examples include the oeuvre of Dennis Cooper, whose recent collection of short stories, Ugly Man (2009), depicts gay male sexuality in terms of humiliation, disease, and death. The narrator in the story ―Ugly Man‖ from the collection describes gay male sexuality in non-ideal terms: ―You don‘t know what it means to feel my chapped, disfigured lips and cock and hands saw away at something so downy‖ (30). Humor-writer David Sedaris‘s ―Me Talk Pretty One Day‖ from his collection of stories of the same name positions the gay male figure as one of failure; here, the inability to do well in a French class is nonetheless endearing. 13 See Kramer. Although there are few, if any, novels named Dykes of which I am aware, see Kathy Acker‘s chapter ―Dykes,‖ 173 – 84, for an interesting contrast to Kramer‘s Faggots in both form and content. 14 See also Bennett for a primarily cultural analysis of pessimism that moves away from philosophical discourse on the subject; see Heinegg for a somewhat informal argument for pessimism in the context of a wide variety of psychoanalytic, philosophical, and quotidian examples. 15 See ―The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,‖ a cluster of conference debates that includes Lee Edelman‘s and Judith Halberstam‘s approaches to queer negativity. Halberstam criticizes the specifically gay male archives that characterize Edelman‘s and Bersani‘s theories. 16 See also Halprin and Wolf for arguments about the damaging connections between and myths about women and beauty. 17 See Kristeva‘s classic theory of abjection in relationship to the female body. Her formulation pertains to the transgressions of boundaries between interiority and exteriority and of the ambiguities between self and Other. Russo‘s work draws heavily on Kristeva‘s. 18 For a reading of black bodies as ugly within the context of white supremacist ideology, see West, ―Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,‖ 81 – 91. 19 See also Gilbert for an examination of how the fantastical, ugly depictions in ―concert paintings‖— billboard-style outdoor poster art that accompanies performances—simultaneously adopt and transgress religious, traditional, and folkloric images in Ghana. 20 See also Morgan who similarly defines the anti-aesthetic as ―not a style so much as a method of critique‖ (203). Morgan suggests that the anti-aesthetic, as it understood in the contemporary era, ―begins‖ in the late 1970s. 21 For instance, see Felski for critiques of a shared embodied female experience that this writing is thought to reflect, questioning the problems of essentialism. For a somewhat similar critique of French feminist aesthetics, which focuses less on the ―the biological‖ grounding of this tradition and more on its elitism in being primarily configured through the literary, see Kipnis, ―Looks Good on Paper,‖ 101 – 116. 28 22 Much of these connections relate to thinking about ―negativity‖ or a ―negative aesthetics‖ that speaks to questions of marginality and invisibility within dominant frameworks, but these frameworks have different emphases. Feminist theoretical interventions into equations of negativity, especially those advanced by Luce Irigaray, mark negativity (and multiplicity) in gendered terms, which posit ―the feminine‖ position as always only constituted by a negative position within the (male) dominant: ―To claim that the feminine can be expressed in the form of a concept is to allow oneself to be caught up again in a system of ‗masculine‘ representations‖ (Irigaray 122). In much contemporary queer and feminist intellectual thought, thinking through how lesbianism should be positioned in accordance with or separate from ―the feminine‖ has prompted debate not just about the relationship between these gendered categories but about the very categories themselves; these inquiries have tended to focus on the instability and inadequacy of signifiers such as ―lesbian‖ and ―woman.‖ Monique Wittig, one of the first contemporary feminist theorists to situate lesbianism in terms of the rejection of established categories, hence, as a negation, writes that ―‗woman‘ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems,‖ and follows with the oft-quoted, ―Lesbians are not women‖ (Wittig 32). In separating ―lesbian‖ from ―woman,‖ Wittig places ―woman‖ in relation to heterosexual male paradigms of oppression, assigning to ―lesbian‖ an idealism that falls outside structures of domination. Although this designation of lesbianism is arguably intractable, Wittig sets up a way to think about lesbianism in the context of negativity (as that which ―woman‖/heterosexuality negates), one that paradoxically emerges as a utopian one. Following Wittig, Cheshire Calhoun examines the circumstances under which feminist theory is inadequate for lesbian issues, but, in doing so, deepens the contradictory, negative space in which she argues lesbianism resides. Her claim, like Wittig‘s, is that lesbians are indeed not-women, ―not-women‖ being the operative category itself. Yet while Wittig sees the separation as opening up a new set of meanings under ―lesbian,‖ Calhoun is skeptical about the effects of that separation being necessarily liberating. Instead, Calhoun points to the social disadvantages that come along with exclusionary status and maintains that feminist relations to ―woman‖ operate much differently than do lesbian relations to the category: ―Unlike the heterosexual feminist, the lesbian has no socially supported private sphere, not even an oppressed one‖ (215). Calhoun outlines a negative space (―not-woman‖) in which lesbianism operates, but rather than disavow that negation, Calhoun sees this assignment as a politically necessary place from which to question dominant heteronormative feminisms that misunderstand the distinct goals that differentiating lesbianism from feminism necessarily requires. Both Calhoun and Wittig succeed, albeit differently, in destabilizing the given assumptions that link ―feminism,‖ ―woman,‖ and ―lesbian‖; however both theorists‘ imaginations of alternative ―solutions‖ to the problems they propose (for Wittig, a rejection of ―woman‖ as the ideal location inhabited by lesbians, for Calhoun, embracing the category ―not-woman‖ as a recognition of the non-ideal location where lesbians must socially function) surrounds either a reinvention of categories through rejection or a rejection of categories through reinvention. 23 See Wittig, Le Corps Lesbien. 29 CHAPTER ONE PRIMITIVE PASTS: THE DISAGREEABLE “FEATURES” OF TENDER BUTTONS AND HOME TO HARLEM I myself think [writing] is much more interesting when it seems ugly, because in it you see the element of the fight.—Gertrude Stein 24 [I]n the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation.—Theodor W. Adorno 25 Early-twentieth-century literary contexts are vital focal points for tracing where ugliness emerges as a central component of cultural production and subsequently raises questions about the extent to which ugliness is read as specifically gendered, sexed, and raced. Literary and artistic practices falling under the categories of Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance are best known for breaking with convention at the level of form, but more importantly have provided a way to visualize the role of textual aesthetics in constructions of bodily difference. Lesley Higgins describes Modernist aesthetics as an aesthetics that is devoted to ugliness and asks, ―[s]hould one wonder that the concrete embodiment of this new ugliness [. . .] is a distorted or dangerous female body?‖ (2). In using work by canonical male writers of the era, Higgins explores how the modern formation of artistic integrity operates via an affinity for ugliness, which established fundamental notions about the (gendered) criteria for participation in the literary culture of the period. He writes, ―acknowledging the ugliness that constitutes modern life, working with ugly words and images (plastic and verbal), was [. . .] a coveted mark of distinction for the Men of 1914; it confirmed their places and privileges within a self- 30 selected coterie‖ (132). This coterie, or ―cult of ugliness,‖ Higgins argues, was characterized as much by its misogyny as by its elevation of ugliness to the status of the elite. While solely using male Modernists as examples perhaps makes sense in Higgins‘s feminist study of modernist aesthetics, using such authors restricts a full examination of questions about sexual and racial identities illegible within the narrow context of canonical Modernism. Though non-male, non-heterosexual modernists, such as Gertrude Stein and H.D., have been incorporated, of late, into the Modernist canon, features of Sapphic Modernism have only begun to be extensively delineated. Susan McCabe writes, ―A lesbian version of modernism has always existed; constructions of masculinist modernism include it through their very act of exclusion‖ (―‗A Queer Lot‘‖ 63). Calling these writers ―the Lesbians of 1914,‖ McCabe strategically re-names and refocuses Modernist textual aesthetics as one associated with female corporeality and homoeroticism. Sapphic Modernism also contains aesthetic qualities closely associated with disgust and repulsion, as work by Djuna Barnes—who eschewed the label ‗lesbian‘ for herself despite her ten- year, dysfunctional, alcohol-inflicted relationship with artist Thelma Wood— considerably demonstrates. Barnes‘s 1915 pamphlet of poems and drawings, The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, formulates a de-idealized account of same-sex female desire. 26 Focusing on the macabre, the ―rhythms,‖ or poems, concentrate on the female body in its most debased forms, as ―ghastly,‖ as ―illicit,‖ as ―corpse.‖ In the poem ―Seen from the ‗L,‘‖ lips—signifying locations both oral and genital—are singled out as crude images of withered flowers: 31 Though her lips are vague and fancy In her youth – They bloom vivid and repulsive As the truth. Even vases in the making Are uncouth. (Barnes 17) Accordingly, Barnes‘s line drawings that accompany the poems include images of women in contorted positions. These images lend a literally visual component to the poems‘ imagery. Hence the ―repulsive women‖ are the ―8 rhythms and 5 drawings‖ that make up the text, which becomes a non-traditional lesbian poetics emphasizing abhorrence rather than adoration. Another poem, the anti-romantic ―Love Song,‖ not in Repulsive, but published just a year later, features a speaker who articulates desire in terms of ―insufficient agony‖ and by ―[growing]/Into the woman whom you hate‖ (33). While Sapphic Modernism may not be universally characterized as such, the importance of locating where competing characterizations emerge in the shaping of sexual identity is tantamount to fully understanding the conflicts embedded in early-twentieth-century formulations of lesbian aesthetics. In Thinking Fascism, Erin Carlston takes the aesthetic incorporation of conflicting ideologies a step further in reading Sapphic Modernism for the ways that female authors, such as Barnes and Woolf, were ―seduced‖ by and employed fascist rhetoric in anti-colonial, feminist, and lesbian textual practices. Carlston‘s study foregrounds the political inconsistencies that inform the representation of sexuality and, significantly, allows for the assumptions behind specific reading practices to break down, ultimately interrogating a necessary divide between negative and affirmative depictions. 32 Correspondingly, the Harlem Renaissance, what Houston Baker, Jr. calls ―Afro- American modernism,‖ (xvi), is linked to similar concerns about the function of pejorative representational contexts. While ―primitive‖ is thought to be the opposite of ―modern,‖ claiming a distinction between these concepts established racially specific questions about the ―standards‖ set by canonical Modernism‘s heavily white Western, Anglo-centered authors and references. Marianna Torgovnick‘s now-classic Gone Primitive contends that twentieth-century Euro-American conceptions of primitivism have shaped it as a varied receptacle of otherness: ―Our culture‘s generalized notion of the primitive is by nature and in effect inexact or composite: it conforms to no single social or geographical entity and, indeed, habitually and sometimes willfully confuses the attributes of different societies‖ (22). Capitalizing on dominant configurations of visible, audible, and behavioral markers of racial difference, primitivism for cultural producers of the Harlem Renaissance included the use of vernacular dialects and the exposure of raw sexuality, as, for instance, the literary aesthetics of Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates. For many artists and writers classified as belonging to the Harlem Renaissance, the material conditions of American black experience needed to be negotiated at the level of the aesthetic, which, for Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman, to name a few, meant a contentious relationship with primitivism in the context of larger questions about assimilation into white society and/or misusing the representation of black subjectivities for financial gain. Hurston, for instance, eventually wanted to write without having to take into account white readers of her work, despite its cross-racial popularity. 27 Such negotiations sometimes manifested in terms of what Baker, Jr. describes as a ―denigration 33 of form‖: ―one would have to present recognizably standard forms and get what black mileage one could out of subtle, or, by contrast, straining [. . .] variations and deepenings of these forms‖ (85 – 86). While the use of primitivist aesthetics in Harlem Renaissance writing maintained a critique of putatively white artistic practices, primitivism became a standard feature of Modernism. Robin Hackett‘s notion of ―Sapphic Primitivism‖ describes the incorporation of primitivism through readings of white, female-authored texts that expose female same- sex desire by exploiting class and ethnic identities. Drawing on the work of scholars including Lucy Bland and Siobhan Somerville, Hackett explains that the classification of primitive referred to ―deviant‖ (non-heterosexual) practices and ―degenerative‖ (non- white) bodies. 28 Clitoris size and shape was, in these classifications, a primary indicator of racially and sexually specific physical ―abnormalities‖; without necessarily conflating race and sex, the particular attention to genitals in characterizations of blackness and lesbianism intersected within early-twentieth-century anxieties about female bodies. Judith Halberstam‘s influential work on female masculinity and Gay Wachman‘s study of early-twentieth-century lesbian writing both address the centrality of the clitoris in biomedical and cultural designations of female embodiment. Wachman points out that ―lesbians (and nymphomaniacs and women of color) were believed to have a monstrously enlarged clitoris. This was the hidden sign of masculinity in outwardly feminine lesbians‖ (16 – 17). She goes on to connect the degeneracy and inversion of ―primitive‖ subjects to several arbitrary criteria that were thought to explain ―regressive‖ sexuality and ―evolutionarily delayed‖ races. Mainly, female-bodied individuals who displayed 34 masculine forms of desire, that is, those regarded as naturally inclined toward sexual activity rather than passivity were correspondingly linked to a perception of having masculinized and hypersexualized sexual organs, as constructed in the figures of the ―savage‖ and the tribade. According to Halberstam, the act of tribadism, historically thought of as threat to heteronormative ideas about sexuality, in modern contexts, becomes less about the physical quality of the clitoris itself and more about a specific gendering of queer sexual practices: ―[tribadism] may retain the sense of a masculine sex act even without the belief that it is motivated by the possession of a giant clitoris‖ (Female 61). Moreover, the mere association with such sexual practices, rather than the practices themselves, was grounds for defamation. Lucy Bland reads an infamous 1918 court case that involved the ―Cult of the Clitoris,‖ a newspaper heading that resulted in threatening the social statuses of several individuals by simply connecting them to the word clitoris. 29 Constituted as a determinately sexed feature of primitivized racialization, the clitoris has become a vehicle for understanding how historical stratifications of race and sex continue to authorize the ways that specific female subjects have become embodiments of corporeal ugliness. I begin with these early-twentieth-century frameworks in which the attention to language, the emphasis on sexuality, and the incorporation of primitivism come together as key factors in delineating where ugliness is bound up with cultural constructions of lesbianism. I use Gertrude Stein‘s Tender Buttons and Claude McKay‘s Home to Harlem to show that lesbianism‘s historical formation corresponds to racially and sexually explicit designations of unattractive and non-ideal features—both textual and physical. 35 Despite being categorized with other American writers, Stein lived in Paris and McKay was born in Jamaica. And whereas McKay intentionally affiliated himself and his work with primitivism, Stein opposed the categorization of primitive for her work, which was nonetheless explicitly influenced by it. Accordingly, both writers‘ respective relationships to Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance have been definitionally problematic and despite being grouped in such literary traditions, the works in question by McKay and Stein also question the validity of classificatory models for recognizing specific texts, genres, and representations of difference. Sore Clitorises, Damaged Language: Lesbian Sexuality in Tender Buttons A mainstay of Modernist aesthetics, Gertrude Stein‘s 1914 Tender Buttons has become an exemplary text that demarcates a radical deviation from the textual practices of its contemporaries: Stein as literary figure and the position of Tender Buttons remain in a precarious place within the Modernist canon, putting pressure on the simultaneous prominence and marginality that describes Stein and her work. As Marianne DeKoven states, ―when we think of Stein whole, and not ‗in pieces,‘ we immediately see that she fits neatly nowhere‖ (14). As a result, critics often place Stein‘s work in relationship to more ―definable‖ figures of Modernism, particularly Picasso because of their professional friendship. Influenced by Iberian sculptures, Picasso‘s famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905 – 06) incorporates a mask-like face with semi-angular-shaped eyes, readily recognizable in the faces of Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), one of his best-known pieces; however Stein‘s ―Portraits,‖ a series of prose poems that strive to linguistically 36 represent various painters and their signature styles are often ignored. In her ―If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,‖ Stein writes, ―Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because‖ (Stein 22). 30 Stein‘s emphasis on resemblance here, much like in Picasso‘s Portrait, all at once defamiliarizes and caricatures the figure of Picasso as it breaks down the very concept of resemblance in the repetition of ―exact‖ to suggest approximation. This pairing of Stein‘s textual aesthetic with that of Picasso points to an investment in defining the ―modernity‖ of their subjects (each other, in this case) as primitive. While unsettling readers‘ expectations about the relationship between artistic abstraction and representation, Stein‘s texts rhetorically reproduce primitivism in visual and auditory forms, which I show resists affirmative conceptions of lesbian sexuality. In discussing Stein‘s friendship with Picasso, Susanna Pavloska names both cultural producers ―the anti-aesthetes‖ and explains their determined efforts in breaking away from dominant notions of beauty in formulating their respective aesthetic styles: ―Because of their shared commitment to experimentation, both resigned themselves to ugliness‖ (19). Pavloska goes on to explain how Picasso and Stein embraced (yet denied interest in) African artistic techniques. For Stein as well as Picasso this meant deliberately accentuating styles that would appear as ―unfinished‖ within conventional Western art and literature. Multiple focal points within a given piece also characterized these styles, which, in addition to describing jazz and other emerging avant-garde forms 37 of the era, 31 emphasized the multiple erotic zones attributed to female sexuality as much as it exoticized the raw sexuality linked to non-white primitive otherness. Particularly in Tender Buttons, such notions of multiplicity and rawness manifests as an erotics that mobilizes its corporeal images as a progressive damaging of language. Peter Nicholls notes that ―although Stein‘s words in Tender Buttons do assume a ‗bodily‘ allure, blurring divisions between inside and outside and undermining any contemplative position of knowledge, her writing is also rigorously anti-mimetic‖ (207). Indeed, the lack of fixed significations underscored in the text‘s distortion of syntactic structures lends itself to a thorough disengagement with any straightforward meaning about sexuality; nonetheless the text formulates a bodily aesthetic in enacting sexuality through sound that imitates, if obliquely, what sex ―sounds like‖ while raising further questions about the status of the auditory in the literary and the negotiation between the primitive and the modern. Highlighting the materiality of words stripped down to their bare phonetic and verbal forms, the text‘s primitivism takes on a distinctly aural/oral dimension in representing sexual practices and sexed bodies as various types of sonic incoherence. The role that sound plays in Tender Buttons‘ creation of a sexual landscape is not reducible to sounds of sex, such as moans, but rather, the text constructs sexuality as textures of sound, ones that encompass tactile representations of female bodies engaging in queer sex. If queer sex is thought of as that which obstructs heteronormative sexual ideals, then it only makes sense that Stein‘s literary version of lesbianism comes through as an obstruction of language and an abstraction of stable images of sexuality—particularly 38 lesbian sexuality. Of course, assigning any specific reading to the text can only be problematic at best; however as a prose poem that surrenders itself to a palpable ―feeling‖ of sound, recognizable, for instance, at the level of pronunciation, the text produces a markedly cacophonous aesthetics of sexuality as much as it avoids any ready explanation about its intentions. The cacophony of Stein‘s writing undoubtedly reflects the influence of the era‘s new technologies and is thus ―metaphorically linked with mass cultural forms‖ (Berry 139). Early-twentieth century popular culture, such as film, surrounds the sonic-visual constellation of sexuality in Tender Buttons. While the visual elements of the text are not explicit in the same ways as in film—which was ―silent‖ (except for live musical accompaniment) when Tender Buttons was written—the text forces the reader to visualize its often sexually explicit mutilation of signification. Linda Williams‘s description of pornographic filmic space offers a relevant equation: ―The allure of the sounds of pleasure resides at least partly in the fact that they come from inside the body and are often not articulate signs (meaningful combinations of sound and sense) but, rather, inarticulate sounds that speak, almost preverbally, of primitive pleasures‖ (Hard Core 126). Although Williams‘s study may seem anachronistic to a reading of Stein, as just mentioned, modern technological process are key to thinking about the links between expressions of sexuality and the mechanization characteristic of the modern era. 32 The text marks such technological ―movement‖ through its use of repetition and suspension of words and phrases. Susan McCabe has specifically connected avant-garde modernist film to the question of corporeality in Stein‘s poetry, which she writes as ―[subordinating] plot 39 to rhythm‖ and ―[insisting] upon the body in flux‖ (Cinematic 58), and even though Stein‘s work historically locates itself in relationship to silent film, Tender Buttons amplifies the rhythm and flux that McCabe discusses, turning up the noise of queer sexuality, an increase in volume that drowns out heterosexist definitions of decency at the turn of the century through the first half of the twentieth century. 33 The extent to which the text embodies what Jonathan Sterne describes as turn-of- the- century noise‘s ―social disruption‖ (279) via its use of language directly corresponds with its formulation of lesbianism; however many prude readings of Tender Buttons either ignore its treatment of lesbian sexuality—or any sexuality for that matter—in favor of concentrating on theories of signification with less attention to specifying the noticeably gendered and sexual contours that characterize the text. 34 Concentrating on its overt sexuality, McCabe insists that the text‘s shifting signifiers and unfixed referents are part and parcel of how it encodes lesbianism: ―That a reader can be lost in the language and its possibilities points toward the disruptive presence of lesbian desire‖ (―‗A Queer Lot‘‖ 77). Detecting lesbian desire as this disruption, like Sterne‘s above account of noise, marks Tender Buttons as an ugly (and ―loud‖) interference with turn-of-the-century ideologies of repressed sexuality; thus as moving beyond Victorian-era sexual mores, the text‘s disobedient linguistic structure is also a disobedience of sexual normativity. But this sexual-textual insubordination extends further than just claiming that lesbianism in and of itself constitutes that transgression; instead I want to suggest that Tender Buttons constructs a harsher, less-romanticized version of lesbian sexuality than has generally been attributed to the text. Recognizing the non-ideal aspects of lesbian sexuality as a 40 neglected avenue of concentration in scholarship on Stein means questioning the ―clitorally‖ explicit Tender Buttons as solely understood or reduced to ideal or empowering configurations. Reading for the ideal only serves to ―protect‖ the text 35 — confining it to a secure position within literary history and/or interpretability—hence ―protecting‖ an idea of lesbianism itself. Often, when critics investigate the text for evidence of lesbian sexuality, the seemingly obvious clitoral reference of the title is either given cursory treatment or outright ignored. Harriet Scott Chessman‘s otherwise astute readings of the text fall short of a fully articulated connection of it to lesbianism, much less lesbian sexuality. Chessman opts for reading ―tenderness‖ as what ―occurs between the author-lover and the words‖ (91) and even though she suggests that ―buttons‖ may also refer to erogenous zones, 36 this observation is secondary to attributes such as the ―cuteness‖ or ―smallness‖ implied in ―button‖; for Chessman, ―button‖ becomes a term of endearment associated with children and non-erotic body parts such as noses and belly-buttons. When it is singled out for an examination of lesbianism, the ―tenderness‖ named in the title refers to a vanilla erotics of gentleness and caressing. Characterizing the text as such is only logical if one directly links Stein‘s description of language as ―caressed objects‖ to what Chessman and Elisabeth Frost both describe as a distinct eroticization of linguistic play that has the effect of ―[asserting] lesbian sexuality in radical new forms‖ (Frost 6). For Frost, Stein‘s transgression of form marks the text as a strikingly liberatory space in which extreme ruptures of traditional linguistics translate as the breaking away from conventions of heterosexuality. 37 Although valid, both Chessman‘s and Frost‘s readings, 41 in assuming more or less unquestioned affirmative strategies behind Stein‘s linguistic play, place the text in an emancipatory space that has the effect of re-fixing Tender Buttons that counters its open-ended aesthetic. Bound up with its textual intricacies is a contestatory space of lesbian expression. This is not to say that Tender Buttons necessarily depicts lesbianism as displeasurable, but rather it suggests a de-idealization of lesbian sexuality. Part of what gives the text its avant-garde complexity and uneasy location even alongside the most demanding of Modernist (and contemporary) styles are its contours of difficulty. Frustration and futility are embedded in the text‘s simultaneously dynamic and static structure; to overlook these features of readerly discontentment is to overlook the very force of interpretability that underwrites the text. Though frustration may in itself be pleasurable, reading Tender Buttons becomes more of a masochistic pleasure, an expression of sexuality that is missed in refusing to see the text in ways other than traditionally enjoyable. Returning once again to the title, ―tenderness‖ need not solely define as ―gentleness‖; but ―tenderness‖ also specifically denotes soreness and damage, the result of overuse, and thus corresponds to the text‘s abuse of repetition—a repetition of sexual/textual practices that connotes exhaustion and tedium. 38 Illegible as a romantic view of sexuality, Tender Buttons has explicitly sexual contours that cast lesbianism in undesirable ways, or, at the very least, resists being read as normatively desirable. I show that, even though it critiques the primacy of heterosexuality and its accompanying sexual practices, the text nonetheless offers a non-ideal image of lesbian sexuality in its corruption of grammar, syntax, and signification. Thus if the anti-representational is characteristic of Stein‘s 42 writing, then the text‘s approach to representation is more likely to be regarded as hostile than as a playful system of signification. This hostility translates as neither misogynistic nor homophobic, but also resists being celebratory. How does Tender Buttons, then, construct lesbian sexuality as a disagreeable erotics of female corporeality? Alex Goody has argued that the text establishes a grotesque body that is bound up with the processes of consumption, digestion, and excretion that, for her, need not be read as necessarily gendered, but as a way to characterize the body in modernity. In mentioning the text‘s formulation of lesbian sexuality, Goody also points to the emphasis that Tender Buttons places on the domestic sphere usually associated with conventional femininity. While the text can be said to queer domesticity in deviating from standard representations of domestic elements such as food and cooking, Goody, on the other hand, writes, ―Stein‘s poetics should certainly not be characterized as oppositional lesbian modernism‖ (160). Goody instead sees the body that Stein configures in the text as more apt to characterize a general condition of the unromantic, modern body. Although the text does move through ―objects‖ and ―food‖ in ways that can be read as universally constitutive of a grotesque human subject, I contend that the text maps the body through configurations that are specific to lesbian sexuality, but that nonetheless do not claim a fixed status within Stein‘s linguistic scheme. The following poem, which appears in the text‘s ―Objects‖ section, depicts such configurations of sexuality, doing so through a de-familiarized interaction of bodies: PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE. Rub her coke. (Stein, Tender 29) 43 The erotic charge contained in such lines does not come from reading it as an example of a soft sensuality of embrace, but rather the poem exhibits a raw sexuality that moves against the universal formulations that Goody suggests. Lisa Ruddick reads ―rub her coke‖ as ―rubber cock,‖ an image of a dildo that specifically speaks to the gendering of lesbian sexual practices (211 – 12). But ―rub her‖ as ―rubber‖ also refers to the rubbery texture of the clitoris, an emphasis on clitoral rather than phallic or necessarily penetrative sex. Along these lines, ―rubbing‖ is thus also bodily rubbing—tribadic, digital, with ―objects.‖ Nonetheless the ―objects‖ that name the section of the text ―rub‖ up against the reader: ―rubbing‖ signifies discontentment, i.e. rubbing someone the wrong way, a characteristic of the text‘s use of signifiers that transgress the connections to their referents. As a concept, ―rubbing‖ is more likely to be linked with ―grating,‖ which is associated with physical dryness rather than wetness, so the ―rubbing‖ here is less akin to genital ―caressing‖ and instead connotes a sexual chafing of sorts. Thus unlike an ideal sexual readiness symbolized by a wet body, the available body that comes through here figures more prominently in terms of dryness, or a lack of arousal. Moreover, the poem‘s abrupt placement of choke describes a sudden effect of dryness on the throat, which points to a range of oral-genital sexual practices. Cunnilingus tends to be associated with lesbian sex more than with heterosexual sex: the poem illustrates lesbian sexuality not by verbally depicting oral sex between women, but by negating it. The immediacy of the way that the word choke emerges in the poem critiques the dominance of heterosexual desire; ―choke‖ immediately follows ―peeled pencil,‖ as a phallic symbol, and suggests choking on penis during fellatio. 39 44 Peeled pencil is then also a ―peeling away‖ from heterosexual supremacist notions of sexual practices: if peeling away the layers of a pencil is a way to illustrate non-phallic, female genital arousal, ―peeled pencil‖ here evokes the peeling back of genital layers, of the clitoral hood, exposing the (pencil‘s) ―point,‖ the ―tender button‖ or clitoris. Accordingly, a ―peeled pencil‖ is a sharpened pencil, which here corresponds to a clitoral hardening (or ―sharpening‖) resulting from stimulation; ―sharpening‖ might more accurately describe female genital arousal rather than notions of tumescence. Yet the text does not rest with an account of lesbian sexuality as necessarily triumphant over the heterosexuality that it critiques. In the section, ―Rooms,‖ for instance, clitoral arousal is second-best, 40 an unspecified ―something,‖ which revolves around a hard, ―swelling‖ object: ―Something that is an erection is that which stands and feeds and silences a tin which is swelling‖ (Stein, Tender 64). If the ―something‖ in the above citation anticipates the female body as a Beauvoirian ―second sex,‖ then it also speaks to the inferior position that Alice Toklas held alongside Stein‘s fame. The ―something‖ stands in for Toklas and Stein‘s well- documented relationship, since neither of the women ever named it ―lesbian.‖ 41 Moreover, their dynamic as a couple is suggested in the line ―something . . . which stands and feeds and silences‖ and seems to describe Stein herself, similar to what Janet Malcolm observes in her biographical account of their relationship: ―Stein‘s self- admiration and self-assurance needed to be fed, and Toklas appeared just in time to give them the nourishment . . .‖ (40). This ―feeding‖ of Stein from Toklas‘s support characterizes Stein‘s dominance (her ―standing‖), which, in turn, ―silences‖ Toklas as 45 much as it depends on Toklas to occupy that position. The negotiation of their social positions comes full circle in the much later Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) wherein Stein ventriloquizes ―Alice‖ in order to narrate her own, not Alice‘s, biography. Not only did the text allow Stein to ―dispense with the fiction of humility that the conventional autobiographer must at every moment struggle to maintain‖ (Malcolm 13), but it also revealed Stein‘s fascination and writerly identification with ugliness as eccentric visual presence. Under the guise of ―Alice‘s‖ observation, the linguistic rendering of Stein‘s encounter with unconventional art is nonetheless strikingly conventional, as shown in her reaction to Matisse‘s La Femme au Chapeau (1905): The show had a great deal of freshness and was not alarming. There were a number of attractive prints but there was one that was not attractive. It infuriated the public, they tried to scratch off the paint. Gertrude Stein liked that picture, it was a portrait of a woman with a long face and a fan. It was very strange in its colour [sic] and in its anatomy. She wanted to buy it. (Stein, Autobiography 34) Here, Stein equates ugliness with the ―[strangeness]‖ of the painting‘s ―color‖ and ―anatomy,‖ qualities that speak to a distinct exoticizing of the racial other. Even if the subject of the painting (Matisse‘s wife) appears to be otherwise, the painting is iconic of the Fauvism art movement (fauve is French for ―wild animal‖) because of its rough brushstrokes and unnatural use of color, which matched Stein‘s own approach to primitivism in her writing. For Stein, ugliness is ingenuity, what she describes as creative ―resistance‖ to tradition: ―[being] under the shadow of the thing that is just past [. . .] is the reason why the creative person always has the appearance of ugliness‖ (Stein, ―How Writing is Written‖ 154). She goes on to write, ―the world always says of the new writer, 46 ‗It is so ugly!‘ And they are right, because it is ugly‖ (emphasis in original; ―How Writing is Written‖ 154). Yet unlike the experimentation-as-ugliness of Tender Buttons, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was one of Stein‘s best-selling texts partially because it compromised aesthetic innovation, which had the effect of muting explicit accounts of sexuality. Stein‘s visual presence was bound up with an explicit image of non- heteronormativity, which was also read as ugly and often merged with the reception of her work. A 1915 review of Tender Buttons in The New York Morning Telegraph made sure to include that ―Miss Stein is a very large, a massive lady‖ (Kreymborg 167) while another 1914 review of the text ended with describing Stein as ―a mountainous lady, wearing a voluminous (necessarily voluminous) monkish robe of brown, roped—where the waist should be—with a cord‖ (New York City Call 16). As mentioned earlier, Stein‘s friendship with Picasso yielded his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, a literally visual incorporation of primitivism in depicting Stein‘s face and, accordingly, her linguistic ―portraits‖ of him to a similar effect. Pavloska writes that ―[w]hile Picasso was obviously impressed with Stein‘ physical appearance, he seems to have been aware of her private proclivities as well‖ (20). More than merely translating into the female homoeroticism of Picasso‘s work, this ―awareness‖ of Stein‘s lesbianism also contributed to how she and her work were publicly perceived. Stein‘s appearance was of particular interest to the public, significantly the extent to which she exuded ugliness, not just in terms her weight and masculinity, but more in relation to her unkempt quirkiness in the context of the era‘s fashion. Note the following description of Stein in a 1934 periodical: 47 Gertrude‘s hat was called a jockey‘s cap, a deerstalker‘s cap, tweedy and mannish, with a visor in front and an upcurl at the back . . .She was reported to be wearing men‘s shoes, her stockings were thick and woolly, she had a masculine haircut and sturdy legs, she was stocky, she was plump. . .she was a hearty irreverent old lady. (qtd. in Kent 150) Such characterizations of heaviness and having a taste for bad fashion directly inform how to read clothing and de-idealized erotics in Tender Buttons. The following poem, ―SHOES,‖ places its account of sexuality as ―shoes,‖ in other words, at the bottom, the lowest rung of paradigms of desire: To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes as steady mid- night. It is pus. A shallow hole rose red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine. (Tender 26) ―Shows shine‖ can be read as ―shoe shine,‖ which conjures up the notion of ―spit shine,‖ the common practice (by shoe shiners and others) of spitting on shoes after polishing them in order to seal the polish, or to add an extra layer to the shine. The act of shining shoes is one that covers up the wear on shoes, and, that ―it‖ merely ―shows‖ shine corresponds to giving the appearance of newness, a merely surface newness that actually calls attention to its illusory status as new. ―Newness‖ or sexual excitement, here, is worn out, a tedium and monotony that the clearly suggestive ―shallow hole‖ and the repetitive motion that ―in and in‖ implies. Any revolutionary account of sexuality becomes questionable at best, as ―a stream of pounding‖ invokes an aggressive and constant penetrative ―pounding‖ in ―a shallow hole,‖ invoking rough physical movement of a distinctly distasteful sort, even if not exclusively in terms of a lesbian sexual dynamic. 42 48 This vaginal ―shallow hole‖ and the unpleasant penetrative sexuality that it connotes also calls up another poem, ―CHICKEN‖: Stick stick call then, stick stick sticking, sticking with a chicken. Sticking in a extra succession, sticking in. (Tender 54) The rhyming of ―chicken‖ and ―stick in‖ and the repetition of ―sticking‖ emphasizes the off-putting characterization of penetration as ―sticking it in.‖ ―Stick in‖ also sounds like ―sticky‖ or ―stickiness‖ and can be read as ―sticky in‖ or ―stickiness within,‖ which replaces the image of a sensuous notion of wetness or moisture with a tacky quality of genital secretions. While this ―sticking‖ comes ―in a extra succession,‖ it does not signify a smooth rhythmic movement since the experience of reading the poem is a jagged and discontinuous one and more likely represents poking and prodding. Rather than indicate an even succession of orgasms, the effect of reading the poem is awkward and sharp, disrupting any sense of a climactic grace. Note the following passage, which similarly generates an image of orgasmic upheaval: ―A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since‖ (58). Although this passage begins with a word added to each phrase, these additions do little to advance the flow of words and instead further draw out the frustration of reading it: ―since‖ and ―when‖ simultaneously advance and regress this linguistic activity. Accordingly, ―A no since‖ is ―no sense‖ or ―a nonsense‖ and ―nuisance‖ of such a process; yet the emphasis here is the word no. The ―no‖ constantly and forcefully interrupts the stream of words, with a negating and punctuating presence. Additionally, the passage‘s repetition of ―no‖ 49 plays on the clichéd repetition of ―yes‖ that accompanies orgasmic buildup and climax in popular cultural interpretations. But ―no‖ need not signify a prohibition of pleasure. While functioning to damage the premises of sexuality‘s and language‘s conventions, Tender Buttons‘ erotic qualities of the non-ideal also ultimately disturb the separation between what is and is not considered desirable—to read or otherwise. As Stein aptly puts it, ―What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it‖ (Tender 10). “Them’s All Ugly Womens”: The Racialization of Dyke The above quotation appears in Claude McKay‘s 1928 Home to Harlem and specifically refers to a characterization of lesbians in Harlem. Although the majority of the novel largely glosses over lesbianism (even the figure of Sappho is heterosexualized at one point), Home to Harlem becomes a crucial example of how ugliness is articulated at the intersections of blackness and lesbianism in the modern American imaginary. While the text treats lesbianism in a cursory fashion, ugliness remains a key delineation of the racially and class-specific cultural milieu that McKay illustrates. Located amongst other popular black cultural expressions from the early-twentieth century, Home to Harlem sits uncomfortably within the tradition known as Harlem Renaissance writing, and McKay situated himself against prevailing ideas about the connections between positive representations of blackness and social acceptance, or ―racial uplift.‖ 43 In other words, Home to Harlem‘s frankness about the struggles of living in working-class Harlem as well as the ideal and non-ideal facets of its nightlife proved to be questionable 50 for fashioning a racial image that relied on assimilating into white society. 44 As Wayne F. Cooper notes, ―Conservative black critics condemned [Home to Harlem] as a strictly commercial work that pandered to the worst stereotypes of Afro-Americans held by white America‖ (Foreword xviii). At the same time, for black and white cultural producers, exploiting supposedly negative or ―dangerous‖ images of blackness as exotically other became profitable for those both immersed in Harlem culture and those living outside Harlem. Associating oneself with seemingly derogatory depictions was, for some, a black brand of racism, while for others, an intentionally radical self-definition of black difference from white conceptions of cultural standards. The employment of and affiliation with primitivism by artists and writers entailed capitalizing on the popularity of art styles that moved away from European conceptions about beauty and respectability. 45 Conceived in this way, primitivist aesthetics functioned to position black arts against white representational models. As an intentionally primitivist text for McKay, Home to Harlem distinctly critiques Western ideologies about ―proper‖ or ―civilized‖ social behavior and, in doing so, raises questions about where the parameters lie between the problematic and the empowering in representations of blackness. A. B. Christa Schwarz explains McKay‘s use of ―primitivism‖ as a form of black opposition to white supremacist perceptions about cultural practices: ―black protagonists, though living in a white world, enjoy their lives because of what is presented as specifically ‗black‘ vitality which apparently immunizes them against the ‗corrupting‘ influences of a ‗civilization‘ McKay defines as Western, white, materialistic, Christian, and inherently racist‖ (96). As Schwarz notes, McKay‘s investment in 51 primitivism was strategic in delineating and endorsing folkloric presence in black arts against Western logics of what was artistically valid. Despite this critique of cultural mandates defined as primarily white, such creative strategies were deemed counterintuitive, if not damaging, to ideas about what constituted socially useful depictions of African Americans in the 1920s. Yet as Houston Baker discusses in his work on Harlem Renaissance artists, black arts that challenged notions of (white) acceptability were those that insisted upon vernacular traditions. Baker discusses these artistic interventions as displaying a ―deformation of mastery‖ (56), that is, modes of expression that deliberately put into view ―unabashed badness—which is not always conjoined with violence‖ (50; emphasis in original). Validating cultural difference by simultaneously emphasizing the recognizable and the unfamiliar, the notion of ―deformation,‖ for Baker, establishes an active rejection of subservience to dominant discourse while, ironically, also defines such a position as inextricably linked with the governing principles that enforces that which falls under ―mastery.‖ 46 Minority discourse and art practices as ―deformed‖ function as progressive primitivisms of sorts and thus point to the contradiction embedded in any use of primitivism in literary and ideological characterizations construed as racially other to whiteness. Victor Li‘s notion of ―neo-primitivism‖ is useful here in expanding the definitions of such allegiances to contradiction. Li reads critical texts as primary examples of the various ways that primitivism continues to resurface when critiquing the dominance of the West. Neo-primitivism, according to Li, insists upon a radical alterity that does not 52 depend on any relationship to the West. Describing such relationships as in service of either the primitive‘s autonomy or the West‘s superiority, he writes, ―the primitive is either inferior in evolutionary terms or he embodies certain vital values the West lacks‖ (17). What Li calls an ―anti-primitivist primitivism‖ (16) is one that counters Western ethnocentrism while at the same time has the counterintuitive effect of reinscribing itself as other in the process of claming such otherness in contradistinction to the West. Locating primitivism as such allows a way to think about the difficulty of specifying difference in a manner that does not necessarily revert back to locating that difference through a logic of inferiority. Yet tracing the history of this logic foregrounds the connections between primitivism as not just specifically raced, but raced through sexual difference. In referencing Sander Gilman‘s important work 47 on the figure of the Hottentot, 48 Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo explains that, within nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical constructions, the black female body became the site through which primitivism registered as an innate characteristic of blackness. 49 White-supremacist classifications were based upon corporeal ―evidence‖ of excessive physical traits, namely genitalia, in order to claim an underdeveloped mental capacity. As Bloodsworth-Lugo writes, ―underlying the view of blacks as primitive in relation to whites is a conception of black bodies as overdeveloped in relation to (white) European ones. That is, lack of complexity in blacks, rather than being attributed to underdevelopment, is precisely ascribed to the reverse‖ (48). This logic of racial ―dominance‖ gained its defining features through linking non-white bodies to notions of exaggeration and simplicity depending upon 53 which stance was projected as being further from ideals of whiteness. In turn, the specific ways that racial and sexual subjects were similarly categorized in terms of corporeal qualities shared lines along sexology, inversion, degeneracy theory, and eugenics in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries. As scholars such as Siobhan Somerville and Robin Hackett have shown, the connections between scientific discourses of inversion and eugenicist models of racial ―superiority‖ take the white, heterosexual female body as the standard from which to be differentiated. In Home to Harlem, McKay brings these interlocking constructions of blackness and femaleness in the context of his adherence to primitivist discourse, that is, an attention to the vernacular tradition in representing race. Similar to what Baker describes as ―deformation,‖ primitivism in the text is an intentional characterization of blackness as negative in both form and content. Although such characterizations of blackness extend to all facets of Harlem and its inhabitants, McKay‘s strategic use of Black English Vernacular primarily situates female corporeality in a primitive position within the overall primitivist aesthetic that he crafts. Put differently, the dominance of primitive beauty, even as contextually subversive to white representational models, still requires ugly non-white others through which to claim that beauty rather than situate the vernacular within a binary framework of whiteness/blackness. 50 The text‘s central character, Jake, who is described as ―[detesting] nastiness and ugliness‖ (71) and whose presence is ―so naturally beautiful [. . .] that everybody liked and desired him‖ (103), is the figure that embodies McKay‘s subscription to primitiveness, but also becomes the model against which gendered configurations of blackness are aligned with racist 54 pathologies that mark female subjects as sexually deviant. Thus as a novel that is obsessed with notions of blackness as ugliness, and with the harsher and enjoyable sides of living in Harlem during the 1910s, Home to Harlem, moves in a hypocritical direction; it constructs black female subjects as racially other within its own deployment of blackness as primitive otherness. Written primarily in Black English Vernacular, dialogue in Home to Harlem betrays its own position as the linguistic manifestation of primitivism since the declarative syntactic structure of the omniscient narration complicates the ―simplicity‖ attributed to colloquial speech. This inconsistency sets up the contradictory designations of what necessarily qualifies as ―lesser types‖ in the text, that is, similar to a eugenicist mindset, these designations become their own brand of hierarchical classification. Two principle female characters, Gin-head Susy and Miss Curdy, stand out in their ugliness and become minority subjects through which racial definitions of acceptable female appearance operate; however unlike the medical and scientific discourse of racial purity discussed above, having a less-acceptable physical presence in the context of the novel does not equate with social ostracism. Described as ―fat and ugly as a turkey‖ (78), Gin- head Susy, named as such for her wild gin parties and plentiful cooking, is a popular personality in the pocket of Harlem culture that the text takes as its subject. Alternately, but no less disparagingly, her friend Miss Curdy is portrayed as follows: ―Miss Curdy was less attractive than Susy. Miss Curdy was a putty-skinned mulattress with purple streaks on her face. Two of her upper front teeth had been knocked out and her lower lip slanted pathetically leftward. She was skinny and when she laughed she resembled an old 55 braying jenny‖ (60). When Jake, who befriends the women, later discusses them, the hue of blackness included in characterizations of them becomes an arbitrary indicator of the level of ugliness that the women are depicted as embodying. Jake states, ―‗Black and ugly is exactly Susy, and that there other Curdy creachur all streaky yaller and ugly. I couldn‘t love them theah kind‘ [. . .] Gimme a nice sweet-skin brown. I ain‘t got no time foh none o‘ you‘ ugly hard-hided dames‘‖ (238). By specifying that their ugliness is a ―kind,‖ Jake‘s claim positions the female characters here as deviating from the appropriate spectrum of (heterosexual) desire based on a gendered category of blackness that only randomly indicates where the limits of desirability lie. For instance, Gin-head Susy‘s ugliness is equated with the blackness of her skin (―black and ugly‖ is repeated twice in this section to describe her) so that beauty appears to correspond to a lighter shade of ―sweet-skin brown.‖ Nonetheless, Miss Curdy‘s lighter complexion (―yaller‖) makes no difference since it is off-set with acne and scarring (―purple streaks‖). Similarly, while Gin-head Susy is ―fat and ugly,‖ it is Miss Curdy‘s skinniness and annoying laugh that further qualifies her ugliness. In either case, beauty can only be sustained precariously next to what qualifies as female ugliness. The above descriptions of Gin-head Susy and Miss Curdy position them as queer figures to ideals of heterosexual desire not because their ugliness corresponds with masculinity, but with configurations of heterosexual femininity. Because Gin-head Susy is ―ugly as a turkey‖ and Miss Curdy‘s laugh resembles a ―braying jenny,‖ such animalistic characterizations mark the women as a different species, so to speak, and thus as (racially) other; accordingly, for Jake, Miss Curdy is not simply a ―creature,‖ but 56 classified as ―that other Curdy creature,‖ as if ―Curdy‖ is its own order rather than her last name. The queerness of the female characters‘ desiring paradigm comes through in terms of this acknowledgment that they are ugly to black heterosexual men. In other words, both characters assume their own ugliness, nonetheless, in doing so, also subvert a romanticized image of heterosexual pairing. For instance, when Miss Curdy advises Gin- head Susy about what kind of man to pursue, one who will, in turn, be dependable, she states, ―when I wanted a man foh keeps I took me a black plug-ugly one‖ (61). 51 ―Plug- ugly‖ in this characterization works against a heteronormative eroticization of the male body: ―plug,‖ slang for penis, 52 emphasizes a superlative ugliness so that desire become subversively modified in terms of wanting to take a male lover who is not only ugly, but who is as ugly as a penis. Coupled with ―black,‖ ―plug-ugly‖ also associates ―not black‖ or ―less black‖ with attractiveness. Furthermore, the narrator appropriates the vernacular racial description, which troubles the distinction between euphemism‘s ―proper‖ positioning in the Black English Vernacular dialogue: ―It wouldn‘t have supported the plausibility of Miss Curdy‘s advice if she had mentioned that more than one black plug- ugly had ruthlessly cut loose from her‖ (61; emphasis added). Here, of course, contradiction continues to extend to the very content of the narrator‘s explanation. Although ugliness characterizes male and female subjects across a range of sexualities in the text, the black female body, as just demonstrated, becomes the epitome of physical ugliness in being the figure through which sexual ―abnormality‖ must filter. Yet where Home to Harlem delineates its racial ugliness is also where it de-specifies any sexuality attached to lesbianism, thereby replacing sexuality with a linguistic gap, which 57 pertains to blackness itself. 53 Kevin Bell articulates what this notion of blackness means in a literary context, as it has been constructed within modernist aesthetics and ideology: ―the absence or void presumably communicated by the signifier blackness amounts in humanist or subjectivist critical practice to an all-to-facile link with death, now brought into view as synonymous with epistemological abyss‖ (29). 54 In Home to Harlem, lesbian sexuality embodies the absence Bell outlines above. This embodiment functions, within the larger racial imaginary illustrated in the text, at the expense of the concept of lesbianism itself. Lesbianism as a concept, then, cannot be divorced from the neglected racial history of queer female embodiment, which informs connections between black femaleness and lesbianism as principal manifestations of physical ugliness. As Sharon Holland asks, ―Can we think of a lesbian without thinking about her origins? Is a lesbian, therefore, always inscribed, written, identified as black first, becoming white through a series of transgressions, through the theorist‘s pen?‖ (145; emphasis in original). The lesbian subject, as Holland‘s questioning suggests, moves through racist understandings of the female body before becoming a figure of non-normative sexuality; however in Home to Harlem the lesbian subject does not just function as an ugly other within the unconventionally ―beautiful‖ Harlem being represented but also becomes, in a determinably linguistic register, the figure of blackness itself. The text demonstrates this at the moment when Jake is having a conversation with Ray, another of the text‘s central characters. Jake, who circulates in Harlem‘s vibrant nightlife of cabarets, sex, and alcohol becomes, in many ways, a polar opposite to the college-educated, Haitian-born Ray, who is less interested in participating in Harlem 58 culture. Though Jake and Ray, at this point in the text, are both working as waiters on a railroad car, they contrast significantly in their respective characterizations of lesbianism. A. B. Christa Schwarz notes that, as much as lesbians were a part of the predominantly working-class society that made up Harlem culture, they were still viewed as either deviant or with ambivalence at best: ―Concerns about female sexuality were mainly voiced in middle-class circles, but a woman‘s choice of a female sexual partner was presumably equally perceived as a serious threat in a black working-class environment‖ (18). Yet in Jake and Ray‘s dialogue, the ―threat‖ that lesbianism poses is not so much about lesbianism per se as much as it is about its linguistic representation. While reading Alphonse Daudet‘s story of Sappho, Ray discusses the words lesbian and bulldyker 55 with Jake and, in doing so, reveals distinct differences in the conceptions of lesbianism. Both characters‘ unfamiliarity with each other‘s descriptions of lesbianism foregrounds the variations in their classed perceptions, even if these perceptions do not necessarily indicate a reaction to the concept ―lesbian‖: ―[Sappho‘s] story gave two lovely words to modern language,‖ said [Ray]. ―Which one them?‖ asked Jake. ―Sapphic and Lesbian . . . beautiful words.‖ ―What is that there Leshbian?‖ ― . . .Lovely word, eh?‖ ―Tha‘s what we calls bulldyker in Harlem,‖ drawled Jake. ―Them‘s all ugly womens.‖ ―Not all. And that‘s a damned ugly name,‖ [Ray] said. ―Harlem is too savage about some things. Bulldyker,‖ [Ray] stressed with a sneer. Jake grinned. ―But tha‘s what they is, ain‘t it?‖ (129) For Ray, the concept ―lesbian‖ emerges as beautiful only within a framework of European literary history and, even so, the focus of his admiration is the sound of the 59 word rather than what it signifies. What is signified instead is an erasure of lesbianism, which becomes nothing but its own ―beautiful‖ sound. The aesthetics of sound, as Fred Moten writes, is part and parcel of locating blackness as an example of the fundamental inconsistency embedded in its aural articulation: The mark of invisibility is a visible, racial mark; invisibility has visibility at its heart. To be invisible is to be seen, instantly and fascinatingly recognized as unrecognizable, as the abject, as the absence of individual self-consciousness, as a transparent vessel of meanings wholly independent of any influence of the vessel itself. (68) Their conversation, then, is not so much about lesbianism as it is about the very terminology that describes it, symbolizing a ―invisibly visible‖ space; therefore as a blackness within the very terms of blackness that the text constructs. Moreover, when Jake picks up Daudet‘s text, it is not lesbianism that surprises him but the style of speech that he observes as varying from conversational speech. He states, ―‗This heah language is most different from how they talk it‘‖ (McKay 129). How lesbians (―they‖) talk rather than how ―they‖ have sex becomes the subject in question. The use of they in Jake‘s statements (and them in another part of the conversation) deepens the separation between Jake and ―them‖ (black lesbians in Harlem). For Jake, lesbian does not signify anything at all; the term is alien to the Harlem culture with which Jake is familiar and while bulldyker emerges as the racial manifestation of the lesbian subject, its sexuality disappears under a discussion of the words themselves. Thus the characters‘ conversation is less about what lesbianism is and more about how it is linguistically expressed; their conversation does not designate a concept of ―lesbian‖ in terms of sexual practices or sexual identities. Jake‘s questioning simultaneously 60 reinforces and cancels out the subject of lesbianism in the way that the text frames the conversation. In other words, vague ellipses—what the reader can assume is Ray‘s description of lesbianism—continue after Jake‘s question to which Jake responds with the ―black‖ concept of ―lesbian‖ as bulldyker: Jake follows Ray‘s intrigue with the term bulldyker with a question about what lesbians are, which establishes that savagery is ―embodied‖ in the terminology specific to Harlem culture. Harlem‘s ―savagery,‖ then, stands in for the blackness that Ray opposes to the beauty (or whiteness) of the word lesbian. 56 So what lesbianism ―is‖ is a gap, or a void in this context, hence, a blackness that, along the lines of Moten‘s notion of the paradox of in/visibility, centralizes the sonic dimensions of this spoken racial marking while draining out its sexual specificity. This sonic specificity directly relates to a song that Jake recalls hearing in a cabaret, and subsequently hums: ―‗And there is two things in Harlem I don‘t understan‘ It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man . . .‘‖ (McKay 129). These are lyrics from Bessie Smith‘s ―Foolish Man Blues,‖ which Jake is reminded of after he and Ray discuss the lesbian terminology. What is ―not understood‖ becomes another lesbianism-as-void in that the song names of what it claims to be unaware: queer sexuality (and gender- crossing), declared as not understood, is simultaneously specified as it is cancelled out. In his study of the crucial role that Harlem culture‘s nightclub space played in bridging sexuality and race, Shane Vogel writes, ―For McKay, the cabaret and other places of amusement are places for the cultivation of nonnormative intimacies that ultimately imagine a world of interclass solidarity between the working class and a criminal and sexually deviant underclass‖ (135). Vogel goes to state that the space of the cabaret in 61 Home to Harlem ―undoes [racial] uplift‖ (166) by loosening the distinctions between class that qualify ideologies of uplift. The undoing of a division between putatively positive and negative racial representations brings us back to the queer and racial specificity of bulldyker, which marks the queerness of black femaleness as it marks the blackness of lesbianism. Neither bulldyker nor bulldagger have neatly emerged as terms of reclamation like dyke, nor have they circulated/survived in the same way that dyke has within contemporary conversational and cultural frameworks. We might then ask what losing the racial specificity of dyke implies about the limits of resignification and for whom it stands. 62 CHAPTER ONE ENDNOTES 24 Stein, ―How Writing Is Written,‖ 154. 25 Adorno, 48 – 49. 26 Barnes‘s original 1915 booklet, The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, was also printed as a chapbook in 1948. The pagination refers to Loncraine‘s edited volume, which includes the poems and drawings from the original booklet as well as other poems that Barnes did not want distributed to the public, see Loncraine‘s introduction to the volume. 27 Kaplan, 24. 28 See especially Somerville‘s chapter, ―Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,‖ 15 – 38, for an astute reading of the medical writings and case studies used to forge these connections. Also see Hackett, ―The Homosexual Primitivism of Modernism,‖ 21 – 37. 29 Wachman also makes reference to this document and the subsequent case. 30 Also see another portrait, simply entitled ―Picasso‖ in which Stein writes, ―Something had been coming out of him, certainly it had been coming out of him, certainly it was something, certainly it had been coming out of him and it had meaning, a charming meaning, a solid meaning, a struggling meaning, a clear meaning‖ (Stein 17). 31 See Pavloska‘s introduction, ―Primitivism as a Theme in Rhetoric, Science, and Art,‖ xxvi. 32 See Berry, ―Modernism/Mass Culture/Postmodernism: The Case of Gertrude Stein,‖ 133 – 152, for an argument about Stein‘s work as classifiably more postmodern than modern in her incorporation of mass culture and new technological forms. 33 Also see Suárez for a compelling study of noise in the early twentieth century and the question of a queer modernism that is bound up with popular culture and street life. 34 For a recent example of this see Watson, ―Modifying the Mind: William James and Tender Buttons,‖ 36 – 56. Watson‘s study is important as far as examining the role of conversation in Stein‘s work; however to remove any thorough discussion of gender or sexuality from an analysis of verbal interaction problematically decontexualizes the text in relation to Stein herself. 35 Thanks to Shelly Goodman for discussing with me the problem of ―protecting the text.‖ 36 Chessman ends up only indirectly specifying the text‘s clitoral imagery. Note the vagueness of the following quotation: ―‗button‘ may call up images or parts of the female body‖ (91; emphasis added). 37 See Frost, ―‗Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, and Gertrude Stein‘s Tender Buttons,‖ 1 – 28. 38 For an example of how Stein‘s language comprises an affective dimension of both ―shock and boredom,‖ see Ngai, ―Stuplimity,‖ 248 – 297. 39 Of course, ―choke the chicken‖ (for men) also means to masturbate. See Spears, Slang, 82. 63 40 See Jagose for a theory of the valuable possibilities in seeing lesbianism as secondary, belated, and derivative. 41 Malcolm, 47. 42 While some poems, like ―Shoes,‖ in Tender Buttons less explicitly imply lesbianism or lesbian sexuality, others more obviously suggest lesbianism. Note the following passage: ―Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers‖ (29). Not only does ―muncher‖ connote oral sex, ―carpet muncher‖ is derogatory sexual slang for a lesbian. Also see entry for ―munch the bearded clam‖ in Spears, Slang, 301. Moreover, a pejorative and embarrassing account of sexual activity is designated in the repetition of ―whow,‖ which can be read as ―whoa,‖ ―how,‖ and/or ―wow.‖ 43 See Cooper, Foreword, xi, and Schwarz, ―Claude McKay: ‗enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance,‘‖ 88 – 119. For an extended history of the critical reception to Home to Harlem, see Cooper, ―The Expatriate Years, 1925 – 1929: Home to Harlem and Banjo,‖ 223 – 263, in Claude McKay. For a reading of Home to Harlem as a semi-autobiographical reference to McKay‘s ―queer black Marxism,‖ see Holcomb, ―‗Dark Desire All Over the Page‘: Race, Nation, and Sex in Home to Harlem,‖ 91 – 138. 44 See Miller for a reading of the figure of the black dandy as complicating notions of self-creation via white imitation in the predominantly black urban space of Harlem: ―On the one hand, [Harlem notables such as Du Bois] desired to use the figure to exhibit black sophistication and ‗knowingness‘ concerning the history of black representation; on the other, they wanted to limit the knowledge to the project of ‗uplift,‘ or the practice of a politics of respectability that worked against stereotypes‖ (188). 45 See Pavloska‘s introduction, ―Primitivism as a Theme in Rhetoric, Science, and Art,‖ xi – xxix, for an account of European appropriation of African art, defined as ―crudeness, flatness, and non- representationality, qualities associated with children‘s art, combined the classical conception of primitivism as a link with the archaic past with nineteenth-century notions of evolutionary biology‖ (xxii – xxiii). 46 See also Goldberg‘s discussion of the contradictions inherent in rooting analyses of primitivism in a binary model: ―A critique of primitivist discourse that so readily reiterates the discursive terms at issue tends to reproduce the terms it is committed to resisting‖ (158). 47 See Gilman, ―The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality,‖ 76 – 108. Gilman gives a detailed analysis of the Hottentot as the figure of uncivilized primitive difference from European views of sexuality and physicality; these differences find their specific location in the black female corpus: ―The nineteenth century perceived the black female as possessing not only a ‗primitive‘ sexual appetite, but also the external signs of this temperament, ‗primitive‘ genitalia‖ (85). 48 See also Fausto-Sterling for a history of the scientific construction of the Hottentot, which emphasizes the story of Sarah Bartmann. Interestingly, unlike Gilman, Fausto-Sterling chooses not to include images in her article for ―[i]ncluding such visual material would continue to state the question as a matter of science and to focus us visually on Bartmann as a deviant‖ (19). 49 For a specific reading of the black female body as the receptacle for cultural exploitation of primitivism as articulated through the image of Josephine Baker, see Sweeney, especially ―Black Woman/Colonial Body,‖ 55 – 70. For a reading of female sexuality, reproduction, and black women as the target of eugenicist science from the turn of the century through the modern era via the example of the Sonoma State Home for the Feeble-Minded in California, see Kline, ―From Segregation to Sterilization: Changing Approaches to the Problem of Female Sexuality,‖ 32 – 60. For a discussion of Asian American male 64 subjectivity in light of Freud‘s Totem and Taboo as contributing to a discourse on primitivism that is chiefly articulated through hypersexuality, see Eng, ―Introduction: Racial Castration,‖ 1 – 34. 50 See Moten‘s description of the incongruities embedded in dis/engaging with the dominant and the reframing of binaristic thinking about racial difference: ―the opposition between the vernacular and the modern, the black and the white, is to be thought precisely in that they are both, if they are real, the product of a miscegenative encounter that exists as a function of difference between the actors and the internal difference of the encounter‖ (71). 51 At one point, Gin-head Susy is also described as ―plug-ugly.‖ See McKay, 81. 52 See Spears, entry for ―plug,‖ in Slang, 347. As a verb, in this entry, ―plug‖ also means ―to coit a woman.‖ According to Spears, both slang references date from the eighteenth century through the present. A mid- century slang definition for ―plug‖ is also a tampon. It should also be noted that ―college lingo‖ in the subtitle on the cover of the dictionary is replaced with ―homosexual lingo‖ on the title page. 53 I am not separating sexuality from race here, but instead I point to how black lesbianism is configured within a black-authored, ―black‖ text. As Hart writes, ―Cultural otherness [. . .] becomes a stabilized site of subversion that continues to serve the interests of Western metaphysics [. . .] I would suggest that a similar relationship exists between the historical construction of the (white) lesbian as a secret and the displacement of the ‗real‘ lesbian onto lower-class women and women of color, a relationship that renders white lesbians and lesbians of color differently marked‖ (108 – 09). 54 In Derrida‘s study of aporias, the negative position of death is also, paradoxically, a positive articulation: ―How to justify the choice of negative form (aporia) to designate a duty that, through the impossible or the impracticable, nonetheless announces itself in an affirmative fashion?‖ (19). 55 Relevant here is Carl Van Vechten‘s 1926 Nigger Heaven, which was also criticized for its use of primitive depictions of Harlem life, and is especially pertinent to establishing connections between ugliness and constructions of the specifically marked sexual and racial subject. One of the first literary appearances of bulldagger or bulldyker appears as bulldiker in ―A Glossary of Negro Words and Phrases‖ (285) included at end of his text. Van Vechten, a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, meant to be ironic in naming his novel as such. Nigger Heaven is forthright in depictions of sexuality and does not shy away from including sexually explicit colloquialisms that were frequently used in African American cultural contexts of the time. As a white, bisexual participant in Harlem culture, Van Vechten complicates the very categories of race, racialized language, and sexual identity; therefore the fact that ―bulldiker‖ first appears in Van Vechten‘s novel comes as less of a surprise given the crossing of queer and black communities within Harlem Renaissance culture—and the degree to which this crossing is apparent in Van Vechten‘s work and within his various sexual and social identifications. 56 It should also be noted that ―nigger heaven‖ refers to the segregated upstairs section of a theater and is also mentioned in McKay, 315. Also see Bogus, ―The ‗Queen B,‘‖ and Walker, ―The Debutante in Harlem,‖ 58 – 102, and ―Lesbian Pulp in Black and White,‖ 103 – 38, for considerations of the figure of the black bulldagger in other Harlem Renaissance texts such as Blair Niles‘s Strange Brother. For a combination of a poetic and critical reading of bulldagger as signifying black lesbian identity, see Omosupe. 65 CHAPTER TWO INFORMAL CONTENTIONS: DYKE COMIX AND QUEER NIHILISM If [comics‘] validity as an art form appears self-evident, it is curious that the legitimizing authorities [. . .] still regularly charge it with being infantile, vulgar, or insignificant.—Thierry Groensteen 57 Something‘s gone wrong again and again and again . . .—The Buzzcocks 58 In July 2006, DC Comics re-introduced Batwoman, but this time, as a high- femme lesbian. Week 11 of 52, a comic named for its year-long weekly release, initiated Batwoman‘s appearance alongside references to her dating history with the more tomboyish, yet still extremely feminine ex-detective, Renee Montoya, a staple character in the comic. Despite its inclusion of lesbian characters, the success of 52 and Batwoman‘s lesbianism stands for a contradictory confrontation between the statuses of ―the marginal‖ and ―the popular.‖ This confrontation suggests that even in the marginal art form of comics, expressions of lesbianism tend to conform to popular heteronormative fantasies or subscribe to the most prominent models of gay and lesbian liberation. My aim instead is to show how the connections between non-gender-normative queer visibility and the visual medium of comics interrogate the authority of contemporary political and representational logics: in other words, to be politically incorrect is also to be visually incorrect. I accomplish this by exploring Roberta Gregory‘s 1991 – 99 collection of lesbian comic strips, Bitchy Butch: World’s Angriest Dyke! and Erika Lopez‘s Lap Dancing for Mommy: Tender Stories of Disgust, Blame, and Inspiration 66 (1997), a collection of illustrated essays. Bitchy Butch features a middle-aged, butch- identified lesbian and the stories in Lap Dancing mainly feature a Latina, femme- identified persona (semi-autobiographically) named Erika. Both characters are utterly alienated by queer coalitional politics of the 1990s. In turn, the comics‘ aesthetic inconsistencies challenge the formal properties typical of graphic texts. By exposing the extent to which these visual discrepancies operate in terms of politically counterintuitive identifications, I contend that Bitchy Butch and Lap Dancing reveal the restrictions on sexuality and its depictions, and ultimately question the limitations of allowable and expressible queer identities in the late-twentieth century. Indeed, both comic art and images of lesbianism have had uneasy relationships with mainstream cultures; they have been all at once confirmed and denied as cultural subjects, thus becoming examples of ―unpopular culture.‖ The designation ―unpopular‖ in this chapter, then, bridges comic art‘s putative illegitimacy with lesbian identities that critique established models of political empowerment. ―Unpopular culture‖ previously has been used to define, among other things, both comic art‘s and lesbianism‘s cultural marginality. Significantly, two books in the field of cultural studies take Unpopular Culture as their very titles: Bart Beaty‘s 2007 study of the circulation and reception of the comic book in Europe in the 1990s and Kathleen Martindale‘s 1997 work on contemporary lesbian cultural production, which contains a chapter on lesbian comics. Beaty and Martindale equally put pressure on the ―un‖ of the word unpopular in their titles, 59 but they each maintain different emphases about what falls under this negation of popularity. Beaty sees comic books as a neglected area of 67 scholarship in cultural studies, as ―a field commonly derided as merely popular, but reaping few of the benefits that accrue to producers of genuinely popular culture‖ (15; emphasis added), and his work traces the imbalances between mainstream reception and artistic autonomy within European comic book circulation. For Martindale, the focus of unpopularity is not relegated to just one cultural medium, but instead to lesbianism and its very relationship to culture itself. Of lesbianism, Martindale writes, ―[a]s a sexual culture, it is too low to be genuinely high, but as a culture created by women it is too genteel or too marginal to be genuinely popular‖ (19; emphasis added). Both critics identically use ―genuinely popular‖ against which to compare their objects of study. Following Martindale and Beaty, I consider the role that the ―non-genuine‖ and ―unpopular‖ play in allowing us literally to see in Bitchy Butch‘s and Lap Dancing‘s visual discrepancies, the political discrepancies that the comics represent. Often, objects of study—especially queer objects of study—are given the ambitious name and role of being sites of resistance. Yet ―resistance‖ is regularly reduced to examining the political stakes of just one textual feature rather than reading formal qualities and narrative elements together in attempting to map out where resistance is situated and what encompasses that resistance. Comic art, as simultaneously verbal and silent, literary and visual, is unlikely to be read as having a singular representational dimension and, thus, as having transparent political aims. 60 Yet, surprisingly, the various studies that move toward theorizing the particularities of the medium‘s word/image convergences very rarely take into account the heterosexually specific contexts into which these analyses fall. 61 When ―queer‖ is overtly linked to the medium, little attention 68 is given to aesthetic features, and the tendency instead is to examine the roles that gay and lesbian comic characters play in asking questions about assimilation, marginality, and mainstream representations of GLBT identities. 62 Although generally not described as ―queer‖ or as a ―queering‖ of graphic components, comix 63 have already historically set themselves up as queer texts in relationship to mainstream comics. In portraying sexually graphic material in what had traditionally been a medium associated with mass audiences (universal humor, daily newspapers strips) and children (―simplistic‖ form, minimal narrative layers), comix have become defined in terms of visual incongruity, queering the medium‘s subversion of the mimetic while encompassing the dual definitions of graphic as both explicit and pictorial. Nonetheless critics such as Ole Frahm have pointed out comic art‘s performative dimensions, referencing early queer theory that radicalized theories of perfomativity and signification. Frahm observes that comics parody the very notion of an original and therefore of something preceding ‗beyond the signs.‘ They are a parody on the referentiality of signs. They parody the presumed relation between signs and objects. And they make fun of the recurrent notion that, in some cases, a proximity between object and sign actually exists that can be called truth. (179 – 80; emphasis added) Arguing against reading for a unity of signs in comic art, Frahm mobilizes Butler‘s theory of gender performativity for the purposes of formulating an aesthetic theory of comics that undermines a structural analysis of signs‘ complementarity. But, again, the queerness outlined by Frahm is one that fails to include heterosexuality in critiquing the notion of ―originality.‖ Although I think a critique of heterosexuality—especially in light 69 of his reference to Butler‘s early work—can be implied when Frahm uses ―making fun of‖ to describe the elements of parody that imbue comic art, it remains absent in his argument. Regardless of what ―making fun of‖ may suggest about the instability of the dominant‘s position as dominant, ―making fun of,‖ or insulting, has particular affinities with the constructions of non-normative identities and the queerness of the comic medium. In a section of his book that equates insult with caricature, Didier Eribon outlines the collectivizing force that caricature has in ―[claiming] to reveal the objective ‗truth‘ about an entire group‖ through ―[defining the gay subject] by a set of traits that anyone can immediately recognize‖ (70 – 71). Using injurious speech 64 as a point of departure for connecting gay identity to the language of insult, of which caricature becomes an example, Eribon explains that the ways in which one comes into gay 65 identity is inextricably linked to the structures of domination that negatively configure the gay subject prior to that subject‘s ―self-knowledge‖; gays are thus always already socially located in insult. Unfortunately, Eribon ends up prescribing the visibility of gay-produced positive images as a way to solve the problems of social stigmatization. He claims that when gays laugh at caricatures of themselves, they do so only to avoid being identified as gay, a claim that, in actually becoming its own brand of reductive collectivizing, universalizes the content of gay caricature as well as its effects. Such an assumption misses the ways that the humor of putatively homophobic caricatures—regardless (almost) of who is generating those images—might in fact subvert the homophobia that caricatures provoke at the same time as forge a critique of what appropriate responses 70 should be. In other words, strictly claiming an outside or a ―beyond‖ the exaggerations that caricature, or any comic art, illustrates fails to address those identities that are constituted in terms of distortions to given representations. 66 There is nothing new about investigating comics as a space for transgressive expression, but there is less work that specifically approaches the subject of comic art as a medium that may offer other ways to think about the contentious qualities of queer identities. Of course, comic art is not necessarily in a more privileged position to articulate sexual non-normativity than other forms of expression; however what equips the medium to engage with queerness as such is its historically illegitimate position to prevailing standards of artistic expression. To be sure, there is no such thing as a truly transgressive space, as Isobel Armstrong states in discussing the lesbian body as an example of such a space: ―Largely dependent on the host discourse for its life, it has to mime out an anti-discourse within the discursive limits set by heterosexual iteration, leaving that discourse intact‖ (218). Armstrong rightly points out the restrictions bound up with locating positions external to the dominant, which renders suspect any claims of the transformative potential of such designations. Nonetheless, tracing a brief history of where comics have been defined as an oppositional political space and art practice is necessary. Despite its debased status as art, comic art, in general terms, has gained considerable respectability, becoming the subject of major museum exhibitions, 67 with exhibitions even centered on its influences within contemporary art practices. 68 The appropriation of comic aesthetics in art, beginning with Pop Art in the 1960s—of which 71 comic imagery became a definitive feature—is now ubiquitous in art and culture. Significantly, the 1960s was also the start of the then non-―art world‖ emergence of underground comics. 69 Operating alongside and within various countercultural movements of the 1960s, these underground comics, known as comix, provided an unconstrained space in which to depict sexually explicit content, specifically critiquing middle-class, sexually inhibited facets of the era‘s dominant culture. Aimed at an adult audience—specifically those against the status quo of ―straight‖ 70 society—work by artists such as the now-canonical Robert Crumb depicted a range and mixture of taboo subject matter such as nightmarish exaggerations of everyday anxieties, pornographic fantasies, and psychedelic drug use. But as many comix historians have noted, the majority of these comix did not keep up with the emerging feminist movements of the era and, in addition to the subversive content and stylistic inventiveness they brought to the medium, are known for the sexism of their depictions. 71 By the 1970s, many comix artists reacted to the male-dominated underground comix scene and to much of its putatively degrading content, by forming collectives and self-publishing their own comix. 72 These comix provided a space for women, in particular, to mark out counter-positions to many of the comix by men; 73 however there were a range of political stances illustrated in comix by women, which were not necessarily in line with feminist ideals of the era. For instance, while some specifically labeled themselves as ―politically incorrect,‖ 74 reclaiming offensive terminology (using titles such as Tits & Clits and Dyke Shorts), others frequently included violent misandry as well as debatably sexist imagery. Mostly, these feminist comix took vanguard 72 positions in containing straightforward representations of abortion and menstruation, as well as sex-positive images from women‘s perspectives and narratives of lesbianism that diverged from heteronormative fantasies—in other words, images largely absent from the more well-known comix by male artists. Even though the majority of feminist comix were coming from heterosexual viewpoints, Roger Sabin notes that ―[lesbian titles] were as much an offshoot of the women‘s comix as an expression of something new‖ (124). That Sabin uses ―new-ness‖ to label these early lesbian comix is significant: as lesser- studied cultural spaces where sexuality and politics specifically intersect, what is considered ―new‖ as far as the content of comix, and ―old‖ as far as lesbianism as a category of identity, raises questions about historically contingent receptions of comics and lesbianism both. But my goal here is not to trace lesbian representation in comix, nor is it to chronicle work by lesbians in the medium. Rather I show how and to what extent the aesthetics of marginal comix reveal marginal lesbian identities, that is, those that are illegitimate to standard models of liberation. In examining the status of identity in such a manner, there is the danger of privileging the marginal in its position of marginality; however my aim is not to assign these representations favorable positions in standing for the disfavored. Instead I chose Gregory‘s and Lopez‘s work because they illuminate the inconsistencies and tensions that constitute specifically queer subjects, and are texts that I believe may have been, for those reasons, left behind or under-examined because they may not be said to be ―working‖ for any beneficial purpose in their respective constructions of ―queer identities.‖ Thus in thinking about ―the marginal,‖ I take heed of what John Champagne calls an ―ethics of 73 marginality,‖ a critical awareness of the simultaneous advantage/disadvantage of marginality as signified both socially and academically, 75 all while cautioning against striving for an exclusive status of the marginal: ethical transgressive criticism must be willing to abandon previous critical positions and strategies should they prove to be too easily assimilable by the liberal academy, as well as attempt to glimpse of the ways in which all claims to alterity are necessarily contingent upon a certain proximity to the center. (xxxv) Champagne‘s warning is important for understanding how queer existences may be construed outside political hopefulness but that also refuse to emerge neatly as pure pessimism. In other words, I am less concerned with finding empowerment in disempowering places and even less interested in idealizing non-ideal situations; instead I consider oppositional practices that take into account formations of identity that do not adhere to the optimistic goals to which they are presumed to subscribe. Therefore, I look at comics as a marginal art form and the ways it constructs sexual and racial identities as identities that are not politically viable. Queer nihilism, then, is what I will use to describe how lesbianism is graphically conveyed in Gregory‘s and Lopez‘s texts in question. Queer Nihilism: Funny, Isn’t It? In his essay ―Nihilism in Black America,‖ Cornel West departs from a strictly philosophical sense of nihilism, linking the term to the combined effects related to internalizing histories of oppression and succumbing to dominant capitalistic ideology: ―black existential angst derives from the lived experience of ontological wounds and 74 emotional scars inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and images permeating U.S. culture‖ (17; emphasis in original). For West, black self-definition is marred by a ―nihilistic threat‖ that describes the general condition and question of black survival. Through what he calls a ―love ethic,‖ a set of affirmative strategies that strives to simultaneously recognize the bleak histories of oppression and anticipate the overcoming of present-day conditions, nihilism in black America supposedly can be remedied. West is right to point out the dominant structures in place that contribute to racist logics, whether consciously subject to them or as experienced in their more hegemonic, diffuse forms. Even though he explains that a ―love ethic‖ has less to do with emotions and more to do with recognizing ―non-market values‖ constructed by the inevitabilities of the cultural forces that contribute to disproportionate alignments of power, West‘s perhaps too idealistic and unrealistic ―love ethic‖ is out of sync with the enormity of the cultural attitude that he describes. Rather than think about nihilism as something to be defeated, the question might be extended to interrogate or expand nihilism as a concept that can be identified with. Even if nihilism can only precariously describe difference 76 —racial or otherwise—under which conditions can such identifications take place? As a general term, nihilism is analogous with meaninglessness and hopelessness; but employed as a theoretical term, it has designated postmodern aesthetic practices and contemporary literary readings informed by deconstructive play, characterized, for example, as ―something that can never come into Being‖ (Slocombe 88) and in terms of ―a pessimism stemming from the acknowledged inescapability of writing within the aesthetically exhausted Western expressive tradition‖ (Miskinis 1047). If nihilism was 75 ever linked to gender under these definitions, skepticism about the efficacy (and existence) of any ―true‖ political aims outside disruptions to ―the text‖ have been directed via critiques of French feminist aesthetics. 77 Whether the principal French theorists of sexual difference 78 are read as persuasively oppositional or as utterly useless very much depends upon where ideals are positioned and what is defined as ideal in terms of accounting for the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. Although his book is steeped in canonical philosophies of nihilism with no attention to how nihilism is experienced, altered, or intensified for specifically marked gendered and racial subjects, John Marmysz‘s Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism effectively argues for the application of a humorous attitude to nihilism, which he characterizes as the incongruity between ideals and the inability to achieve those ideals (85). Marmysz‘s study makes particularly useful distinctions about the categories of nihilism in terms of their relationship to ideals. Marmysz distinguishes between ―radical‖ (or ―authentic‖) nihilism and ―complete‖ nihilism (or ―post-nihilism‖). 79 Radical nihilism is, overall, a brand of idealism: ―Authentic, radical nihilism is bound up with the battle between a desire for the ‗best‘ and the belief that the best is never attained‖ (76). ―Complete nihilism,‖ on the other hand, is a nihilism that does away with ideals altogether, as ―[opting] instead to accept the world as it is‖ and ―concerned only with the way that things actually are‖ (76). In taking into account Marmysz‘s approach to nihilism, what would it mean to have queer nihilism? An enormous amount of scholarship on queer, racial, and sexual identities has challenged the very premises of idealism, associating it with whiteness and 76 heteronormativity. Indeed, contextualizing idealism in terms of dominant frameworks has the effect of situating non-normative subject positions as always already falling short of those ideals. But non-normative positions themselves easily can become ideal in their own right, setting up other orthodoxies of idealism. Queer nihilism, then, requires that notions about what is ideal—especially in ―queer‖ contexts—are questioned in the first place. Rather than assuming that there are general, agreed-upon ideals, a queer approach to ideals must involve taking account of the fact that certain ideals are unimaginable and therefore unavailable. Queer nihilism, to return to Marmysz‘s classifications, entails being thought of as an insufficiently ―radical‖ or ―complete‖ nihilism. In other words, it is a nihilism that always sets standards of value beneath those traditionally regarded as ideal but does not long for or envision the possibilities for significantly improved conditions—it takes neither pessimism nor resistance at face value. Queer nihilism, then, is a nihilism that refuses to be defined in its most extreme forms. 80 Karen Carr‘s perspective is also valuable here, especially given that nihilism generally tends to be thought of as ―doing something,‖ even if that something is a describing of nothing. Carr moves away from casting nihilism in absolutist terms: ―nihilism ceases to be something from which we must escape, loses its potentially transformative and redemptive power, and becomes instead simply a rather banal characterization of the human situation‖ (7). What I am calling queer nihilism, then, can never be reducible to examining nihilism in queer contexts because to do so would be to take nihilism as a universal premise that merely gets ―played out‖ without being challenged as theoretical concept. Nor should 77 queer nihilism be regarded as simply a queer appropriation of nihilistic attitudes: this would assume that such thing as a ―queer appropriation‖ is definable. Although not exactly a formulation of queer nihilism, Lee Edelman‘s No Future considers the political strategy of hopelessness in light of what he names as ―reproductive futurism‖ (3). For Edelman, the question of queer temporality is one that must accompany a critique of how ―the Child‖ is positioned in relation to the exclusion of queer social positioning: ―the freedom of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of the deference to imaginary Children whose futures [. . .] are constructed as endangered by the social disease as which queer sexualities register‖ (19). Edelman focuses on the ways that the figure of the child dooms the queer subject to being outside of political signification 81 and as the quintessential threat to the heteronormative structures, value-systems, and reproducibility that constitute ―the family‖—this ―threat‖ that marks queerness is not only what Edelman names as a locus of homophobic discourse, but is also what he forcefully argues a queer anti-assimilationist position must encompass. 82 In conversation with such anti-assimilationist theorizing is Heather Love‘s recent work, which likewise calls into question a ―hopefulness of the future‖ that characterizes queer politics. Love explains that ―one of the paradoxes of queer studies is that its dreams for a better future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence‖ (―Selections‖ 522). In tracing this paradox historically as part and parcel of queer subjectivities, Love argues for the importance of recognizing the roles that negative affect have played in the formation of gay and lesbian identities. For Love, moments that cannot be easily co-opted for prideful purposes are the very moments of queer history 78 that need to be located and acknowledged. While Edelman epitomizes the political ramifications of negatively self-proclaiming oneself as a non-breeding queer, Love aligns queerness with otherwise eschewed histories, both of which have hopelessness and despair at their core. As convincing and influential as are Edelman‘s and Love‘s positions, absent in their radical lines of reasoning is an investigation of the ―seriousness‖ of their claims. By this, I do not mean failing to buy into the claims that they make, but instead I ask where the queer inflections of ―humoring‖ seriousness lie in examining queer identity as something other than emancipatory or politically optimistic. In other words, the question of how queer nihilism operates in relation to the formal properties of Bitchy Butch and Lap Dancing has everything to do with how their content functions alongside the queering of form communicated through their use of humor. Even though finding humor in perspectives not usually regarded as humorous sometimes functions to downplay or ignore the realities being represented or reduce such seriousness to forms of emancipation, 83 the use of humor in the comix I examine queers the form of a medium that—even in its marginal positioning—may still invite fixed assumptions about what it encompasses. Of course, when queerness has been linked to humor or if queerness presumably has an aesthetic, camp has become the definitional framework for that humor or aesthetic. As Fabio Cleto writes, ―The politics of camp in a way reveals itself to be a politics of radical dissidence. It is a dissidence of desire, at the level of sexual and/or aesthetical preference‖ (31 – 32). Usually read in terms of gender parody via theories of performativity and the use of irony, 84 the queerness of camp‘s off-kilter humor has thus 79 been translated as the failure to distinguish between oppositional spheres (such as good and bad taste, real versus fake) and as based on a ―disparity between high seriousness and the absurd‖ (Long 78). Moreover, camp humor has been less about provoking laughter out of inopportune situations and more about representing the status of the gay male subject‘s negotiation with dominant cultural practices and the displacement of homophobic ridicule. As usually linked to gay-male specific cultural contexts in this regard, camp has also been read as operating at the expense of female subjects. 85 In her recent study of the links between debasement, queerness, and blackness, Kathryn Bond Stockton nuances definitions of camp in coining the terminology ―dark camp,‖ which ―keeps the violent edge of debasement visibly wedded to camp caprice‖ (205). Akin to Love‘s analysis of The Well of Loneliness, 86 Stockton discusses the humiliation that shapes Stephen Gordon‘s gender dysphoria/lesbianism/queerness. While Love rightly wants to claim this humiliation as an important part of the construction of lesbianism, Stockton instead examines similar moments as examples of dark camp: ―Such pathetically funny scenes, with over-the-top religiosity and anguish, are dark camp played for the sense of moral earnestness—and for a history of lesbian suffering‖ (206). Stockton‘s reading of The Well as an example of (dark) camp points to the ways that particular subject positions, blackness and lesbianism for instance, have had estranged relationships to what is not only humorous, 87 but also characteristically ―queer.‖ Locating humor in moments that are deemed homophobic, racist, and misogynistic may be read as coming from a discriminatory logic, but I show that the ―fine lines‖ that distinguish the depictions of lesbianism in Bitchy Butch and Lap Dancing 80 indicate how queer identities may push against being monolithically maintained within dominant contexts. Therefore this chapter demonstrates examples of confrontations within characterizations that are difficult to differentiate as either complying with or resisting the homophobic and racist characterizations they would logically seem to oppose—such objectionable characterizations are bound up with their textual expressions. I investigate identities that are defined through conflict (where commonality is presumed to abound) in an art form that has an aesthetic history of not being taken ―seriously.‖ If the dyke comix examined here exemplify queer versions of nihilism, then what is ―funny‖ about them is the humor of their seriousness, which, in the end, leaves little to hold onto except perhaps the humor itself. Bitchy Butch’s Unapologetic Discrepancies In looking at depictions of lesbianism in comics—and in broader cultural mediums more generally—the question of ―legitimate‖ representation has been less about necessarily gaining access to particular cultural domains and more about the ways that it has been expressed in the domains to which it has gained access. Despite the myriad areas of scholarship where lesbianism has been named as a critical subject, two strands characterizing its production and reception are relevant to a reading of Bitchy Butch: ―lesbian chic,‖ its integration into dominant media representation, and ―lesbian studies,‖ its esoteric position in theoretical work on identity categories. But these are not discrete categories. The ways that lesbianism was taken up in the 1990s exemplifies the degrees to which ―theory‖ seeped into the popular imaginary and became its own fashionable 81 discourse—much like the ubiquitous naming of ―queer‖ for everything theoretically and politically dissident. As Lisa Duggan described it in 1992, ―Lesbian and gay studies—the new kid on the academic block—has a split personality, appearing by day as Queer Theory, sporting a stylish postmodern vocabulary and huge bibliography, and by night as Queer Nation, shouting confrontational slogans and struggling [. . .] to create a militant, multicultural politics‖ (173). Duggan, and numerous others, makes reference to the straddling of theoretical and political domains initiated by feminism, and which queer theory has since followed. Like the popularity of ―queer,‖ the category ―lesbian‖ was equally singled out for scholarly inquiry, but had its own impact on the culture at large. The explosion of theoretical work that called itself ―lesbian studies‖ 88 in the 1990s, has influential writings such as those of Monique Wittig from nearly two decades earlier to thank/blame for theorizing the signifier ―lesbian‖ as a corporeal and textual framework of utopia, destined to transform language, and thus thought of as a—if not the—way out of dominant discourses of sexuality. 89 Interestingly, the prevalence of ―lesbian chic‖ in popular media, rather than the status of ―lesbian‖ in literary and theoretical contexts, engendered its own brand of scholarly writing. 90 According to Danae Clark, images that can be read as ―lesbian‖ in mainstream magazine layouts typify a particular ambiguity surrounding the acceptability of lesbianism in popular contexts. She argues, ―The sexual indeterminacy of gay widow advertising‘s dual market approach thus allows a space for lesbian identification, but must necessarily deny the representation of lesbian identity politics‖ (195). For Clark, the self-recognition as well as the commodification of a lesbian ―stylishness‖ that accompany reading the magazine images 82 as such function as a way for lesbianism‘s marginality to be simultaneously integrated and dissolved as a political identity. The various degrees of unfixed identification processes through which mainstream imagery produces ―lesbianism‖ also extends—albeit differently—to the reading practices that are associated with lesbian comics, which, even though determinably lesbian-themed and marginal as texts, construct identificatory and visual discrepancies that are both specific and non-specific to comics aesthetics and lesbian cultures. When lesbianism and comics are thought of in terms of each other, Diane DiMassa‘s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and Alison Bechdel‘s Dykes to Watch Out For generally come to mind. Beginning in the 1990s through the present, both DiMassa‘s and Bechdel‘s work has garnered much critical and commercial attention (for lesbian comic books, that is), reaching audiences beyond those of their lesbian readerships. 91 Hothead capitalizes on a ―dangerous‖ image of lesbianism by having its character systematically assassinate agents of homophobia and sexism. Dykes, on the other hand, aims for a more true-to-life depiction of a group of lesbian friends. According to Kathleen Martindale, who is interested in how these two comics appropriate ―outdated‖ lesbian-feminist politics while being situated within, against, and outside traditions of the avant-garde, Hothead‘s surrealistic destructiveness and Bechdel‘s ―realistic‖ portrayals both advance their respective narrative sequences with a specific eye toward the lesbian-feminist—and in some cases, separatist—past. In examining DiMassa‘s and Bechdel‘s comics alongside one another, Martindale notes that ―[t]hough heterosexuals and heterosexuality are virtually absent from the world depicted in 83 Bechdel‘s strip, they loom menacingly in DiMassa‖ (70). As Martindale suggests, the relationship of these comics to heterosexuality is an important one in how they may each reflect two different versions of the same vision. In other words, the utopian vision of a diverse, lesbian community in Dykes is not that much unlike the idealizing of homicidal behavior against compulsory heteronormative figures in Hothead. The relative success of both Bechdel‘s and DiMassa‘s work has carved out a place for lesbianism in the comic medium, making visible queer expressions ranging from violent fantasies of obliterating homophobia to portrayals of everyday scenarios featuring lesbians. Yet often overlooked in critical and historical work on lesbian comics is Roberta Gregory‘s character Bitchy Butch, 92 a middle ground, of sorts, between the two aforementioned comics: if Dykes depicts life from an exclusively lesbian perspective and Hothead aggressively carries out the desire to make such a universe possible, Bitchy Butch represents the impossibility of either of these utopian positions, which may or may not have something to do with why the comic was less popular than the others. Unlike Hothead and Dykes, Bitchy Butch never ran as a regular comic strip series, so the comic does not have standard issue numbers and has therefore been less available to be studied (and read) than other regularly serialized lesbian comics. Instead, Butch, originally introduced as the lesbian counterpart to Gregory‘s more well-known character Bitchy Bitch, appeared sporadically in alternative publications and queer comics throughout the 1990s, including The Seattle Weekly, Gay Comics, and predominantly in Gregory‘s Naughty Bits. 93 When the Bitchy Butch strips were finally compiled into a single volume in 1999, Gregory stopped featuring the character. 94 So although Bitchy Butch is 84 contemporaneous with Hothead and Dykes, Butch does not have the same kind of cult following as characters such as Hothead or Mo from Dykes. 95 Like Bitchy Butch‘s placement alongside more popular lesbian comics, Butch symbolizes a social position that is difficult to identify with because hers never fully comes through as empowering or productive in any standard fashion. Therefore Bitchy Butch the comic and the character embody what has been less translatable and/or digestible in both mainstream and specifically lesbian cultural contexts. As a lesbian character steeped in a stubborn perspective that can be construed as misguided within the utopian strain of lesbian- feminism but as regressive to the anti-identitarian effort of queer coalitional politics, Butch is all at once a characterization of queer hypocrisy, politically incorrect lesbianism, and offensive feminism. Set against the backdrop of the 1990s, Bitchy Butch takes into account lesbianism‘s popularity in dominant culture by containing references to Ellen Degeneres‘s coming-out on prime-time television in 1997 and to other lesbian icons such as k.d. lang. 96 The comic also makes references to the ―post-identity‖ era characterized by 1990s queer politics, in which ―lesbian‖ emerges as an unfixed signifier of postmodern identity and aesthetics, what Robyn Wiegman, in describing ―the lesbian postmodern,‖ has discussed as ―somewhere between and beyond categorical crisis and the logic of a system that visibly fails‖ (16). Although Butch is situated within the context of this ―categorical crisis‖ that marks the new generation of queer politics and lesbian visibility, what she stands for is antithetical both to the political climate characterized by an optimistic feminism of the 1970s and to the tangibly changing theoretical moment 85 signified by ―queer‖ in the 1990s. The character is supposed to be in her forties, and continuously calls attention to the loss of any political solidarity, especially with the younger generation of queers in their twenties and thirties. Readers can determine this from Butch‘s constant mentioning of her participation in the feminist movement of the 1970s; in ―Bitchy Butch Has the Last Word,‖ the last Bitchy Butch comic, the character holds up two calendars, one that says 1953 and another that says 1999, and states, ―Maybe I DO have some of the. . .BITTERNESS of a failed IDEALIST, but I‘ve ALSO been around enough to be able to gain a little PERSPECTIVE!‖ (81). Lamenting the lost ideals of the second-wave era, Butch remarks that those who ―were in DIAPERS while WE were [. . .] layin‘ the GROUNDWORK for a whole new SYSTEM‖ (87) are unappreciative and oblivious of feminism‘s contribution to a queer politics that appears to disavow a feminist—specifically lesbian-feminist—social subject. In theorizing feminist generational time, Elizabeth Freeman questions the entire structure of feminist and queer generations. 97 For Freeman, traditional generational models are insufficient ways to address feminist political movements and the non-linear trajectories that individually lived identities and experiences may follow. What she calls ―‗temporal drag‘‖ (2) is nothing like drag as it is commonly known: ―the humorless radical feminist is the political subject-position that has seemed most at odds with the drag queen‖ (6). In other words, Freeman pits the ―seriousness‖ linked to second-wave feminisms against the playfulness associated with gay male drag. Yet this different drag that Freeman outlines always seems to operate in terms of ―lesbian‖ even though its relationship to ―lesbian‖ is precarious at best. Accordingly, Butch is the drag to 86 queerness, ―drawing politics inexorably back‖ (Freeman 2), but conspicuously embodies the hostility of being such a drawback. As representative of a resentful version of 1970s lesbian-feminism displaced in a cultural landscape of queer fluidity, Butch constantly blames what she sees as an ungrateful younger generation; Butch is also unabashedly anti-femme, transphobic, 98 and considers bisexual as the worst possible way to identify. Extending her resentment to all facets of GLBT identities that do not adhere to a strict code of what she regards as ―visibly‖ lesbian, Butch ironically thinks ―queer‖ is complicit with frameworks of heteronormativity. Rather than identify with the term ―queer,‖ Butch often appears wearing a T-shirt with ―DYKE‖ printed across the chest and shuns the use of ―queer,‖ even right after hypocritically using the term at one point. 99 ―Dyke‖ need not necessarily equate with ―butch,‖ 100 but ―dyke‖—especially as literally worn across one‘s chest—corresponds to how Butch represents a negotiation between female and butch identifications in Bitchy Butch. As Judith Halberstam asks, ―why should we necessarily expect butches suddenly to access some perfect and pleasurable femaleness when everywhere else in their social existence they are denied access to an unproblematic female subjectivity?‖ (Female 125). This interrogation is directed toward the corporeal and identificatory contradictions specific to desires and sexual practices that link to stone butch sexuality. Though there is very little sexual activity and few indicators of how Butch sexually identifies in the comic, Halberstam‘s question is significant for thinking about how Bitchy Butch articulates the incongruities that come with queer female embodiment, even if not necessarily in the context of stone butch. For instance, while Butch is repeatedly 87 mistaken for a man in the comic, she has noticeably huge breasts yet never wears a bra or binding device of any sort, and lashes out at those who call her ―sir.‖ Her defensive reaction to being misidentified as a man serves as a conflicting counterpart to wanting to fix her identity as a masculine woman. Inasmuch as she insists on being read as a woman, she reacts extremely negatively to specifically female bodily inevitabilities such as menstruation, periodically using it to rationalize her appropriation of the misogynistic construction of PMS-related bitchiness. Bitchiness, of course, tends to characterize a strand of disagreeable femininity rather than masculinity; Butch‘s ―bitchiness,‖ then, marks her gender identifications as always in contradiction. Moreover, the comic constantly lets the reader know moments such as when Butch bleeds through her jeans; these episodes construct the character as a subject of embarrassment and insult, and point to the comic‘s capitalization of non-dominant female and masculine identities via discrepancies between its aesthetic frameworks and the ―bitchiness‖ of the character that it showcases. To be more specific about these discrepancies, I turn to the Bitchy Butch anthology‘s introduction, a meta-comic in which Gregory draws herself having a conversation with Butch about identity categories. Responding to Gregory, Butch quips, ―You have to draw the line somewhere! Next you‘ll be saying that white hetero males fit your ‗queer‘ category!‖ (Gregory 30). Here, Butch‘s comment is pertinent to introducing the discrepancies between how the character draws political lines and how lines are literally drawn in the comic. Theorizing the queer directions, or ―lines,‖ of sexual orientation, Sara Ahmed writes, ―[t]he queer orientation might not simply be directed 88 toward the ‗same sex,‘ but would be seen as not following a straight line‖ (70). Ahmed shows how the unmarked ―straightness‖ of heterosexual lines of desire organizes how bodies ―naturally‖ point toward specific sexual object choices; but in discussing the vicissitudes of lesbian desire, she also explains that ―drawing ‗a dividing line‘ can in its turn make other forms of sexual desire unlivable, even if that line does not follow a straight line‖ (99; emphasis in original). While Butch‘s lesbianism may indeed be exceedingly non-straight in its symmetrical relation to heterosexuality, her insistence that lesbian identity need follow a particular line is, in fact, more ―in line,‖ to borrow from Ahmed, with straightness than not. This is not to say that Butch represents a version of normativity, but simply to show how the variability that underwrites non-normative identities can easily congeal and become an orthodox standpoint. This inconsistency extends to the comic‘s graphic indeterminacies: ―the line‖ is never drawn for the reader in how the comic visually communicates her perspectives. In other words, in ―indirectly‖ conveying Butch‘s ―direct‖ view of lesbian identity, Bitchy Butch may be read as working both with and against ―queer‖ as a concept and an identification: Butch critiques the diluting of identity that ―queer‖ represents, opting instead for an identity-based politics of (an unsuccessful) lesbian-feminism—and yet the text‘s form queers the comic medium in how it depicts her frustrations with lesbianism as an instable category of identity. Because her actions and states of mind represent divergence rather than coalition, how we read Bitchy Butch might then suggest the frequency to which irresolvable disagreements come to the surface, disagreements that we do not want to face but are nonetheless always there to be seen. 89 Butch‘s anger, despair, and hostility are the center of the ―action‖ in the comic, which does not consist of ―adventures‖ per se, but of the drudgery and disappointments of everyday life. From Butch‘s perspective, marked by the gay and straight spaces that she encounters daily, these encounters position her as always outside those spaces. In line with the comic book‘s strained relationship to other popular media, Bitchy Butch references and critiques its own marginal position in relationship to mainstream comics, alternative weeklies, and queer newspapers. The comic, despite its inclusion in smaller periodicals and other comics, levels Butch‘s reaction to all periodicals, which always have a negative effect on her. In many of the strips, Butch reads a periodical of some sort and always reacts violently to being alienated by what she reads, such as anti-butch personal ads or headlines along the lines of ―gay rights takes a huge setback.‖ Significantly, periodicals as ―voices of the community‖ represent, in this context, the divergences within any notions of ―community.‖ For instance, after picking up a gay weekly, Butch‘s thought process is revealed as follows: Typical MEN-ORIENTED Gay paper . . . but it comes out WEEKLY, and the LESBIAN paper only comes out MONTHLY ‘cause the FAGGOTS are the ones who have ALL THE MONEY . . . shit . . .This thing is HALF ADS [. . .] SHIT!!! FIGURES!!! Two pages of OBITUARIES and TEN pages of SEX ADS in the BACK . . . shit . . . it‘s a wonder these faggots haven‘t ALL dropped dead of AIDS . . .‖ (Gregory18) 101 Initially responding to the lack of coverage about a religious right threat in the gay newspaper that she reads, Butch removes herself from any alliance with gay men, even as she admonishes anti-gay views. Instead, she adopts homophobic rhetoric in this instance, claiming solidarity with neither position. Without necessarily aligning herself with anti- 90 gay ideologies, Butch points out the economic disparities within ―the community,‖ and raises questions about the extent to which white gay consumerism is complicit with the perpetuation of uneven classed and gendered social positions. Her inflammatory statements also obliquely reference a queer politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s that heavily circulated around gay men and AIDS activism. Peaking in the mid-1990s, AIDS activism shifted gears and complacency set in as did a diminished urgency about the disease, partially as a result of the increasing availability of symptom-treating medications. While activism, then, seemed less crucial for gay men‘s interests, lesbian health issues continued to be minor. Quoting a lesbian ACT-UP member in his 1998 essay ―Like Cats and Dogs: Why Fags and Dykes Can‘t Stand Each Other,‖ Patrick Califia attributes such rifts between gay men and lesbians to several factors including the question of whether gay men would have responded similarly about a health issue largely affecting lesbians: ―‗without women in the movement, it would never have moved beyond gay men‘s issues‘‖ (93). The casting of ―gay men‘s issues‖ as queer politics puts into perspective the exclusionary logics that may underwrite ―queer‖ and with which Butch takes issue; nonetheless her disaffection for gay men also extends to lesbians. Several moments in the comic episodes show Butch pining for past visions of a utopian lesbian-feminism, yet not only does she realize that these ideas are unattainable, but she also no longer sees the purpose of striving for them. As extreme as are her views on identity politics, they never fully come to fruition in the visual plane of the comic. In one of Butch‘s memory sequences, two images of lesbian separatism are juxtaposed: one, an idealized image of a 91 separatist collective and another, a de-idealized image of the same space, without any indication as to which one signifies the ―true‖ image that Butch imagines. [See Figure 1]. When Butch does attempt to put herself in spaces of ―lesbian community,‖ she finds a plethora of individual queer identities, none of which are ―exclusively‖ lesbian. One episode shows her on her way to a lesbian support group, but she stops in aggravation with not being able to find the room number where the group meets. The thought bubble reveals her agitation as follows: ―Where IS this place? [ . . .] I‘ll bet this stupid paper got the NUMBER MIXED UP! FIGURES! These stupid women‘s papers are ALWAYS screwing things up like this . . .Shit!‖ (10). In her frustration with the inability to initially find the room, Butch tears up the lesbian newspaper. This act of tearing and the conveying of her agitated affect become one and the same: surrounding her are line squiggles that are nearly identical to the jagged lines that represent the tearing apart of the newspaper, so that the act of tearing the paper, the ripped paper itself, and the visual rendering of her agitation are all graphically identical. [See Figure 2]. In this instance Butch‘s reaction signals the frustrated effort of what she represents as queer politics clashing with fixed lesbian identification: the aesthetic indistinction between the comic‘s representation of her affect, the action of the character, and the visual element being acted upon mark a particular frustration with political projects that, like the execution of the lines in the panel, are only distinct in terms of where they are placed. In other words, although there is no ambiguity as to what is supposed to be the ripped newspaper and what represents her emotional state, there is barely a difference in how they are illustrated. Butch‘s attempt to get to the meeting thus also corresponds to a larger notion 92 Figure 1 Ideal/Non-Ideal Lesbian Separatism, Bitchy Butch, 1999 93 Figure 2 Frustration with Not Finding the Room, Bitchy Butch, 1999 of those who get lost on the way to a definitive political place. A statement of a frustrated identity politics in the ―post-identity‖ era that characterizes the 1990s, Butch‘s ―Where is this place?‖ is the realization of having no place in terms of both an older model of feminist political projects and a newer model of queer inclusiveness. Of course many readers of the comic invariably will fall into one or both of those categories and in the meta-comic that introduces the Bitchy Butch compilation, Butch calls the readers ―jerks.‖ Bringing attention to the fact that the comic‘s readership is primarily lesbian, Butch alienates her audience and thus positions the lesbian readers as the jerks that are the enemies, indistinct from the homophobia that she constantly observes. This movement ―outside‖ the text sets the stage for thinking about the ways 94 that Bitchy Butch negotiates the process of reading comics with its presumed reader. Because comic art demands a different type of attention to its visual qualities (i.e. static narrative forms), an analysis of comics requires being attuned to the reading practices that come along with such a medium. Thierry Groensteen discusses the paradoxical processes of reading comics compared to those of other written texts, film, and animated cartoons; like film, comic art consists of a series of several frames, but he argues that unlike film, ―[e]ach new panel hastens the story and, simultaneously, holds it back. The frame is the agent of this double maneuver of progression/retention‖ (45). Bitchy Butch‘s framing goes astray in its inability to distinguish what she imagines from what ―actually‖ seems to be going on. Entrenching the reader in her thoughts while adhering to neither fantasy nor realism, the comic attempts to convey the recognizable and stereotypical effects of being visibly lesbian, doing so through permanent discrepancies between what is and is not as bad as it seems. These discrepancies suggest that what is not ―visible‖ within a heteronormative frame of reference must be exaggerated in order to present a non- heteronormative gender and sexual identity that is politically at odds with itself. Exaggeration and making visible what is non-visible are, to a certain extent, part and parcel of comic art, as speech, thought, and affect consciously figure as readable objects in comics. Will Eisner‘s classic Comics & Sequential Art explains particular genres of thought and speech bubbles, which also correspond to the shapes of the panel borders. For instance, ―straight edged borders [. . .] usually are meant to imply that the actions contained therein are set in the present tense. [. . .] The wavy edged or scalloped panel border is the most common past time indicator‖ (44). Of course, even without 95 Eisner‘s explanation, these are fairly recognizable communicative devices in comics as well as in popular cultural spheres not specific to comic art. But I emphasize these formal qualities in order to show how the comic constructs the split between Butch‘s perspective and how it is visually translated. In a comic sequence narrated in all straight-edged panel borders, Butch runs into Rita, a former acquaintance of hers; the reader learns that both used to be members of the same feminist collective. Suddenly, Rita‘s boyfriend runs up and states, ―Hi, Honey! Sorry it took so long..EVERYONE seems to want these Holly Near tickets . . .‖ (Gregory 5). Holly Near‘s music, a symbol of lesbian-feminist culture, in this case becomes the object through which Butch‘s activism of the 1970s clashes with 1990s politics. The fact that Rita‘s boyfriend is purchasing the tickets signals to Butch the mainstream and heterosexual acceptance of a symbol of lesbian-feminism (―EVERYONE‖ is in all-caps in the panel), an acceptance that is at odds with the separatist politics that she once represented for Butch. Butch takes offense not to Near‘s seeming popularity outside of a lesbian-feminist audience, but to Rita‘s unfixed identity, which Butch assumes to be either heterosexual or bisexual. Although Rita‘s sexuality is never named at that moment and readers learn of her past identification as a lesbian when Butch spots her, Rita is framed as other than lesbian. Here, lesbian-feminism no longer ―belongs‖ to Butch—or no longer belongs in the contemporary moment: for Butch, the price of visibility surfaces as anxiety about ―losing‖ a specific version of lesbian identity. Significantly, this moment also calls up what Scott McCloud explains as the reader‘s participatory role in making transitions from one panel to the next (69 – 74). ―The gutter,‖ or the white spaces between panels that the reader ―uses‖ to connect the 96 panels in sequence, is what drives the narrative force of comic art: ―Here in limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea‖ (66). McCloud goes on to name this gesture on the reader‘s part as ―closure,‖ but Bitchy Butch complicates this notion of closure in relation to the gutter. To explore this, it is necessary to return to the above example. In response to learning of Rita‘s boyfriend, Butch slaps Rita, pounds her boyfriend, and walks away angrily; however, the comic is ambiguous about whether the beatings have actually taken place in Butch‘s mind or ―in reality.‖ Recall that this entire sequence contains all ―present-tense‖ panels. As Butch walks away, Rita and her boyfriend pick each other up, but their dialogue suggests that Butch has either merely yelled or walked away in anger: Rita‘s boyfriend asks, ―Who was that?‖ to which Rita ironically replies, ―. . .uh . . .friend of mine‖ (6). [See Figure 3]. Rather than just have its panels‘ gutters advance the action, the entire sequence itself holds a transgressive gutter-like function in its inability to be fully articulated as having ―happened.‖ Put differently, the entire sequence functions as a gutter of sorts since it does not properly connect the moments between Butch‘s encountering Rita and her boyfriend with her walking away—this moment sits uncomfortably as either fantasy or ―reality‖ in relationship to the comic as a whole. The lesbian subjectivity that Butch represents is thus ―in the gutter‖ both aesthetically and politically—the visual narration is incorrectly carried out as it advances Butch‘s hostility toward the marginal lesbianism that she symbolizes. 97 Figure 3 Transgressive Gutter Function, Bitchy Butch, 1999 98 Though it contains no references to theories of signification, McCloud‘s notion that ―words are the ultimate abstraction‖ (McCloud 47) indicates the importance of how comic art organizes ―utterance‖ in its narrative dimensions, which are especially amplified in examining the convergence of words and images that characterizes the medium. Taking a semiotic approach to theorizing comic sequence, Groensteen argues against the privileging of text over image, showing fault with earlier theorizations of comics as a mixture of text and image. For Groensteen, it is not so much that the image takes precedence over text in the genre of comics, but more that the visual sequences lend themselves to what he calls a ―system‖ rather than need to be singled out as individual elements in making up comic texts; 102 however Groensteen maintains a differentiation between what is classifiably a word and an image. 103 In Bitchy Butch there is less of a distinction between the two: the lettering becomes images, in many cases, so that the comic does not quite replace words with images but instead composes lesbianism in specifically affective textual registers that fail to be distinguished as either words or images. 104 Most of the strips open with Butch in the middle of a mental tirade; that is, rarely do these particular qualities of the lettering occur when Butch is actually speaking or shouting. Instead Butch‘s general misandry and discontentment with everyday existence come through in forms such as rough lettering; lettering without spaces between words; and crossed-out text. 105 [See Figures 4, 5, and 6]. Throughout the comic, the lettering and text transform into indecipherable scribbles of alphabetical characters, literally translating the harshness of her sentiments into abrasive visual/textual features. 99 Figure 4 Words as Images, Bitchy Butch, 1999 Figure 5 Indecipherable Scribbles, Bitchy Butch, 1999 100 Figure 6 Unchanged Mistakes, Bitchy Butch, 1999 101 In a critical reversal of Austinian speech-act theory, Denise Riley examines ―how words do things with us‖ (3) and theorizes the ways that language traverses, as opposed to being spoken by, its speakers: ―There‘s an experience that could be described as a linguistic occasion, of being poised somewhere halfway between ‗language speaks me‘ and ‗I speak language‘‖ (18). For Riley, language, mostly as ―spoken‖ in her study, can be ―felt‖ in ways that exceed the mere expression of emotion. But I want to extend these notions, somewhat less ―literally,‖ to the ways that Bitchy Butch uses its visual languages to configure itself as commensurable with the lesbian identity that its character exhibits. In other words, Butch‘s political discrepancies follow a particularly contentious trajectory in being ―spoken‖ through the hyper-expressive medium of comic art. Such formal elements also bring into view the status of lesbian cultural production: the particular qualities of Gregory‘s lettering call attention to the comic‘s own place within both comic and lesbian cultures. Words that are marked as mistakes, crossed-out, but nonetheless purposely stylized as such point to Bitchy Butch‘s not being culturally digestible to mainstream readerships but estranged from the popularity of other lesbian cultural production. The comic‘s textual features that come across as mistakes left unchanged suggest how limited resources, such as the inability to have a text ―properly‖ edited, may get incorporated into a less-popular comic‘s aesthetic. But leaving mistakes unchanged also suggests that in disowning what is visually ―proper‖ in the medium, Bitchy Butch in the same way questions suitable modes of political identification. The refusal to change textual ―mistakes‖ to make the comic look ―better‖ is also a refusal to see them as mistakes or as needing to be changed for the 102 better. Butch does not necessarily represent the notion that the world ought to be better than it is; instead she embodies the critique of a queer cultural moment that has already imagined itself as better. Even though Butch is often shown imagining things as worse than they are, ultimately what she signifies is the notion that inhabiting a sexually minor social position was better when GLBT identities were less accepted or unrecognized: as Butch states, ―YEAH, things have changed . . . they‘re a WHOLE lot worse!‖ (Gregory 50). Over a decade after the last Bitchy Butch comic, we would like to think that the 2000s can unproblematically yield an openly-lesbian Batwoman in a mainstream comic. Yet if Batwoman‘s empowering female image represents the extent to which lesbian visibility has somehow ―made it,‖ perhaps we might do better to examine that extent, to think about which marginal forms, identities, and politics will continue to be ―incorrect‖—for better or for worse. Lap Dancing for Disempowerment Although Bitchy Butch conveys an antagonistic queerness through the perspective of butch gender and political incorrectness, the comic leaves little room to examine how race operates in the aesthetics of comix. 106 How is the feminine lesbian subject constructed within this scope of textual representation? How do queer of color identities get navigated in such genres? In what ways are specific markers of queer race produced? Erika Lopez‘s Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997) is a collection of illustrated stories that do not follow a linear sequence of events and looks more like a fanzine in how it is put together. The text mainly consists of cartoons and words that appear as consciously 103 handwritten; the stories do not conform to a consistent style of comic lettering or narrative continuity, except for one character that appears in more than one story. Moreover, when the text does include graphic elements that are recognizable within the comic art medium, such as panels and speech bubbles, they are sloppily drawn while the words and images that make up the stories are unevenly distributed on each page. 107 Accordingly, Seal Press, which published Lap Dancing, classifies the text as ―Graphic Essays/Humor‖; as far as genre, the text is arguably unclassifiable since it simultaneously appropriates and leaves behind distinct features of narrative comic art. The ―problems‖ with the inability to categorize Lap Dancing, or any of Lopez‘s work for the matter, then, speak directly to the liminal locations that connect the text‘s visual features and the ethnic identifications it displays. As a text that represents a dejected queer Latina subjectivity, Lap Dancing, in turn, adds layers of conflict to the simultaneous inhabitations of racial and sexual identities, such as being half-Puerto Rican and living in the U.S. but not knowing Spanish, as well as being hairy but identifying as femme. 108 [See Figures 7 and 8]. Ultimately, the text takes into account the difficulties that come with illustrating race in terms of exaggerated physical features—even in marginal mediums such as the graphic texts discussed here. In limiting its visual depictions of race and including an excess of erratically handwritten words, Lap Dancing‘s words instead themselves surface as images. I show that such visual limitations mark the limitations of political ideals for queer of color subjects. Like the connections between the ugliness of Bitchy Butch‘s textual aesthetic and the subjectivity it expresses, Lap Dancing looks ugly, but unlike Bitchy Butch, it 104 formulates its ugliness in relationship to the whiteness of lesbianism and the question of racial specificity in comix. The text broadens ugliness to include a range of lesbian gender and a range of racial identity, doing so through the lens of femme and Puerto Rican identities. Lopez‘s work shows that, more often than not, there is nowhere to go when charting a marginal direction in already marginalized locations. Lap Dancing‘s disempowerment is thus branded onto the queer of color subject in a manner that stops somewhere before one can fully laugh and ends before letting its reader identify with the circumstances in a serious way. In this way do Lopez‘s portrayals of ethnicity allow us to re-examine the constructions of queerness within marginal spaces. Like a lap dance, then, Lap Dancing is not unproblematic to normative accounts of (feminist) empowerment narratives: how it employs lesbian Puerto Rican subjectivities in opposition to whiteness nonetheless does not politically ―gain‖ anything in return. As discussed earlier, the majority of underground comix emerged out of specifically countercultural and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, creating an oppositional space for expressions of anti-establishment beliefs and non-normative sexualities; however the historically ersatz art form of comix also very much influenced and was influenced by the ―low‖ culture that punk signified during the 1970s and 1980s. This sharing of subcultural space lent itself to a particular kind of ready-made relationship between the anti-aesthetic and the nihilistic, as music journalist Daniela Soave put it, ―The uglier you were, the more true to the spirit of punk you were‖ (qtd. in Colgrave and Sullivan 317). Guy Lawley discusses the intersections between comics and punk culture as beginning with fanzines, which provided a space for music promotion, 105 Figure 7 Hairy Woman, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 Figure 8 Hair and Sexuality, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 106 art, and writing by punks to crossbreed and be ―published‖ and distributed within the scene. 109 Even though it began as a fanzine, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez‘s Love and Rockets comix from the 1980s signaled a break from both the underground comix of the 1960s and the DIY (Do It Yourself) aesthetic characteristic of fanzines from punk culture. As straight and white as punk‘s history is thought to be, Love and Rockets— specifically in Jaime Hernandez‘s ―Locas‖ stories—did not shy away from including queer sexuality and racially specific aspects of the subculture. Unlike other punk and punk-themed comix by straight men during the era, Latino identity, punk culture, and lesbianism notably overlap 110 in Hernandez‘s ―Locas‖ stories, which chronicle the everyday lives of Maggie and Hopey, two Chicana friends/lovers involved in the punk scene and living in the lower-income Mexican neighborhood enclaves of Los Angeles. 111 As staples of punk culture, the stories about the two characters—and Love and Rockets in general—are key texts in the history of comix because they are never exclusively about being a lesbian, or a punk, or Chicana. Instead these stories focus on interactions between characters, demonstrating that depictions of hardships, non-verbal expressions, and conversations could be just as—if not more—interesting or ―punk‖ than the most elaborate fantasies. Departing from a ―traditionally‖ punk aesthetic, the ―Locas‖ stories instead feature clean lines and realism in representing the marginalities of the subjects presented, and ultimately push against totalizing definitions within the comix genre. [See Figure 9]. Even though Lap Dancing emphasizes the Puerto Rican subject rather than the Chicana subject, Hernandez‘s choice to name his stories ―Locas‖ is pertinent to thinking 107 Figure 9 Clean Lines and Realism, Locas, 2004 108 about constructions of queer ethnicity in Lopez‘s work, since loca does not just translate as ―crazy,‖ but instead characterizes particularly racialized notions of femininity. In investigating the ways that Puerto Rican homosexualities differ from those of the U.S., Manolo Guzmán discusses the category of the loca as not necessarily equating with the category ―homosexual,‖ but rather with ―non-man‖ or ―crazy woman,‖ which does not automatically designate the sexed body of the individual who inhabits that subject position. In other words, ―homosexuality‖ is a precarious category in Puerto Rican classifications of these identities since erotic exchanges are organized around gendered positions rather than understood as ―same-sex‖ relations. 112 Guzmán argues that the question of defining Puerto Rican homosexualities has to do with attempting to see specific Latino same-sex sexualities outside of hegemonic gayness. Despite the fact that the focus of his book is largely, but not exclusively, that of Latino men, Guzmán‘s discussion of the loca extends to the nationally, culturally, and geographically liminal conditions that generally mark Puerto Rican identity and, in turn, establish a way to theorize sexuality‘s ethnicity and vice versa: ―locas [. . .] the most typical of derogatory terms used to signal homosexuals in the island, inhabit the border between gayness and the loca(l) system‖ and ―is a collection of lived experience that does not belong to one system or the other even though it is structured in relation to both‖ (36). This outlining of liminal ethnic identity, queerness, and femininity is necessary for looking at how Lopez‘s work all at once establishes itself with and against the assumed visibility of race through its configuration of femme and Puerto Rican identities. 109 Lap Dancing‘s visual depictions of such identities, then, interrogate whether resisting problematic representations of race is possible. The ways that the text fills its pages with an excess of words instead of images maintains an irresolvable distinction between the two: the words themselves both become images as well as withstand ―being imaged.‖ Regardless of where Lopez‘s graphic text fits into the genre of comix, it embodies a disruption to word/image binaries. 113 Lopez exhibits such tensions beyond the framework of the merely aesthetic and instead locates the forms that political disempowerment takes in queerly inhabiting racially specific subject positions. Useful here is Sianne Ngai‘s coining of the term ―animatedness‖ to tackle the subject of racial (in her example, African American) representability in light of how emotionality collapses into corporeal qualities in animating the racial subject: ―the affective ideologeme of animatedness foregrounds the degree to which emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities [. . .] reinforcing the notion of race as a truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body‖ (95; emphasis in original). 114 The confrontation between the affective and the aesthetic that Ngai theorizes points to the difficulties of depicting race without submitting to stereotypically racist configurations. 115 José Muñoz‘s article ―Feeling Brown,‖ on the other hand, provides a different approach to the question of racist depictions. In it, he discusses Latino affect as ―excessive‖ to normative emotional displays characteristic of whiteness. Muñoz reads the figure of the ―hot n spicy spic‖ (70) as way to call out dominant modes of affect: ―Rather than simply reject this toxic language of shame I wish to reinhabit it and suggest that such 110 stigmatizing speech permits us to arrive at an important mapping of the social‖ (70). While Muñoz‘s theory highlights the ways that minoritarian subjects can negotiate these characterizations, which, elsewhere he developed as a theory of disidentificatory practices that work against these characterizations by working with them, Muñoz ends up with a celebratory negativity. 116 Significantly, in his reading of a play that ―represents a life world where Latino/a affect structures reality‖ (73) and one that is ―without white people‖ (76), Muñoz goes on to demonstrate the ways that whiteness can be radically circumscribed and shown to be ―underdeveloped and undernourished‖ (70) through examining and counterintuitively holding up these characteristically negative identifiers of Latino subjectivities. Like Muñoz‘s examples, Lap Dancing locates itself in the margins of queer culture, but in contrast, Lap Dancing is an example of a queer marginal space that refuses to be read as utopian, a space in which specifically marked queer subjects do not have the choice to opt out of existing alongside dominant and stigmatizing logics and therefore have difficulty with transforming this existence into something necessarily productive—politically or otherwise. Departing from standard empowerment narratives characteristic of canonical feminism, Lopez begins Lap Dancing with a proclamation of sorts: a short explanation of ―Phallusies,‖ the ―ongoing exhibition‖ of penis drawings that punctuate the text between stories: 1/2 way into planning a collection of fake penises, I thought of Judy Chicago and my mother. Two women from the generation that loved its vaginas. Was I kicking dirt in the face of everything they fought for, + celebrating my internalized misogyny by surrounding myself w/penises + 111 devoting a whole lot of time to making them? What happened to all that cunt positive thinking? (1) 117 The aloof anxiety that accompanies this description of ―Phallusies‖ not only outlines ways of being that are fallacies to traditional logics of feminist resistance but also begins to address the question of how to identify and identify with queer Latina subjectivities expressed through frameworks of disempowerment. Historically, feminisms of color have had an uneasy relationship to feminism as a broadly conceived concept. 118 Even if part of her purpose is to celebrate the multiple and transitory locations of queer Chicana identities, Gloria Anzaldúa‘s classic theory of la mestiza expands anti-essentialist thinking by embracing conflict and clashes between cultures. 119 Such questioning of normative ―collectivity‖ underlies many queer of color theories/identifications, which defy single-issue political logics to begin with, as Muñoz‘s reclamation of shame demonstrates. Accordingly, Frances Negrón-Muntaner explains that shame is a constitutive property of boricua 120 identity, which she calls ―[c]onsensually [q]ueer‖ (9). In other words, she discusses the colonial practices that have marked boricuas as figures of a gendered passivity, which is maintained by a precarious relationship to notions of individual autonomy and national sovereignty: ―From the enduring affect of American contempt necessary to pursue colonial and political interests, boricua agency, be it enthusiasm for the metropolis, demands for self government, or democratic cravings, invariably came to confirm inferiority, represented in both racial and gendered (or better still, racially gendered) terms‖ (13; emphasis in original). Negrón-Muntaner‘s study is key for recognizing the ways in which Lap Dancing‘s representation of femme Puerto 112 Rican identity 121 demonstrates particularly racialized and queer inhabitations of disempowerment, ones that emphasize the social and cultural barriers created by ideals of whiteness, lesbianism, and feminism—as well as those of other racial and Latino identifications. 122 In ―Draining Like a Dead Chicken,‖ a story about saving money by boycotting tampons and making one‘s own pads and using sea-sponges, the whiteness and ―crunchiness‖ of lesbian-feminism is ridiculed alongside an attempt to disengage with the dominance of corporate influence; however the speaker‘s 123 critical separation from both spheres does not, in the end, create a new space of resistance, but leaves her worse off than she was in the first place. As the title of the story suggests, ―draining‖ indicates being monetarily drained as well as an obvious reference to bleeding, which are, for the speaker, bound up with each other. ―Dead Chicken,‖ calls up not only the ―death‖ of an older model of (white) lesbian-feminism, but also the whiting-out of Puerto Rican identities in dominant U.S. contexts that translate Puerto Ricans as whites or group Puerto Ricans into other more ―visible‖ Latino cultures—―chicken‖ is Lopez‘s undeniable reference to such whiteness. 124 The text reflects the lack of having any concrete space within either oppressive systems of capitalism and heteronormativity or ―welcoming‖ spaces of feminist collectivity based on the ―female experience‖ of bleeding—each have, for the speaker, their own impossible cultural mandates. The speaker states, ―Who said that everything must be white like those hermetically sealed tampons + wedding dresses?‖ (Lopez 38). In literally refusing to put a ―face‖ in the ―picture,‖ the text here maintains inconsistent capitalization and disorienting switches 113 between cursive and print letters. [See Figure 10]. This inconsistency and switching formally embodies the speaker‘s ―facing‖ a dislocated political solidarity, trapped in financially and politically irresolvable conditions. Functioning as a dejected image of queer racialized subjectivity, the story re-assesses feminist of color empowerment narratives that hold up multiplicity. Therefore ―Draining Like a Dead Chicken‖ does not set up its chaotic aesthetic as a racially and sexually diverse approach to resistance. Instead it illustrates the limitations of any resistance efforts: ―the sponges deteriorated and the romance faded w/red familiarity./Past due therapy bills started taking precedence, and I still had no money w/all the tampon boycott cash I saved‖ (Lopez 47). As just shown, Lap Dancing‘s visual details that serve as markers of race vary significantly from standard renderings in comic texts. Despite its displacement of words and images Lopez‘s word-images call up a central issue in comic art: depicting a gender- and racially specific face. McCloud discusses the figure of the face and what its details communicate: ―the more cartoony a face is [. . .] the more people it could be said to describe‖ (31; bold in original). [See Figure 11]. For McCloud, the more generic and less realistic facial features a comic book character harbors, the more likely that character will correspond to universal characterizations and identifications. Yet this explanation does not consider that a nonspecific face also reflects the neutrality that whiteness and maleness have in not being specified as the universal. As easy as it is to see the two dots and a line as eyes and a mouth, it is considerably more difficult to imagine that face as encompassing racial, gender, and sexual differences. Suggesting this default to the dominant and written from the perspective of a queer cultural producer of color, ―Waiting 114 Figure 10 Cursive and Print Switching, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 115 Figure 11 Generic Face, Understanding Comics, 1994 for Self-Esteem + Financial Independence,‖ presents the specificity of its minority experience with a ―face‖ that only appears as words that defy generic textual and comic lettering. When the speaker states, ―I wade through the knee-deep piles of rejection letters. It seems like I get rejection letters from people I didn‘t even write to‖ (82) her subjectivity simultaneously operates within and reaches beyond the rendering of the words used to describe her circumstances: the words visually contextualize themselves as images of discouraging yet all-too-real ―features‖ of sexually and racially specific experiences. [See Figure 12]. Ironically, this story‘s emphasis on waiting for things that will never come, as named in the title, also demonstrably comes through in examples that appropriate traditional comic formats. In continuing to ―[mine her] own misery for cartoons‖ (78), the 116 speaker ―practices‖ what she will say should she run into someone familiar. [See Figure 13]. Here, the repetition of the generic ―Hi, how are you?‖ greeting and ―I‘m fine‖ answer, all packed in the same speech bubble coming from a specifically femme of color Figure 12 Words as Images, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 117 Figure 13 Speech Bubble Repetitions, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 118 silhouette, manically configures not being fine. In another example, the speaker describes a conversation with her grandmother who refuses to acknowledge the speaker‘s lesbianism; here, the panels literally go nowhere in depicting a conversation that figuratively goes nowhere. [See Figure 14]. Rather than looking at these examples in terms of theories of performativity, which delineate the subversive possibilities of repetition with a difference, these are examples of repetitions with few differences: the figure of the femme Puerto Rican subject dead ends in coming to terms with the linguistic- and visually specific representational and social settings in which she is defined. The transformative potentials of combining languages—both visual and conventional—may seem specifically suited to non-dominant cultural contexts such as Lap Dancing. Wanting to visualize spaces of queer racialized languages, Juana María Rodríguez has explored such use of language both as encompassing the hybridity of queer Latino culture and as fostering community based on common political agendas. In specifying Puerto Rican identity this way, Rodríguez names ―a politics of a ‗not yet‘ as a response to the existing political strategies for national self-definition‖ (17). Nonetheless while Rodríguez anticipates liberating possibilities defined by a ―not yet,‖ Lopez‘s queer of color politics looks more like one that ―will never be.‖ 119 Figure 14 Going Nowhere, Lap Dancing for Mommy, 1997 120 CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES 57 Groensteen, ―Why are Comics,‖ 29. 58 The Buzzcocks, ―Something‘s Gone Wrong Again.‖ 59 The significance of how the covers of both scholars‘ texts differently present the word unpopular speaks to how each view their subjects in relationship to both mainstream culture and in terms of the scholarship about the subjects they discuss. While the ―un‖ is set off in different color ink on the cover of Beaty‘s text, it still conforms to the font of the rest of the title. Martindale, on the other hand, splits up the word unpopular, literally using the slashed un/popular in the title of her book: the ―un/‖ is also a different color, lowercase, and set off in a font resembling handwriting. 60 One can easily link the study of comic art with that of film and literature, and many scholars have borrowed from film theory and narrative theory in order to develop a critical vocabulary for the study of comics; however several crucial differences exist between these other textual mediums and comics. It is important to differentiate comics from film and literature without necessarily claiming its exclusivity from them or the scholarship about them. For specific connections between comics, narrative, and film, see Christiansen. For a reading of animated cartoons in relation to printed comics, see Taylor. For arguments about the temporal and visual differences between comics and film, see Harvey, ―Only in Comics: Why Cartooning Is Not the Same as Filmmaking,‖ 173 – 191; Groensteen, The System of Comics; McCloud, especially ―Setting the Record Straight,‖ 2 – 23, and ―Time Frames,‖ 94 – 117. 61 See Groensteen, The System of Comics and McCloud. Although groundbreaking as theories of comics, both lack any thorough connections of their arguments to differences in gender, race, or sexuality. 62 For an example of this, see Sewell. 63 Roger Sabin writes, ―Instead of pandering to a kids‘ market, these titles spoke to the counter-culture on is own terms [. . . ]. For this reason, the new comics became known as ‗comix,‘ both to set them apart, and to emphasize the ‗x‘ for X-rated‖ (92). 64 Eribon also addresses Austin‘s speech-act theory, from which Butler‘s work on injurious speech draws and subsequently complicates. See Butler. 65 On the very first page of the first chapter of his text, Eribon writes, ―‗Faggot‘ (‗dyke‘)—these are not merely words shouted in passing. They are verbal aggressions that stay in the mind. They are traumatic events experienced more or less violently at the moment they happen, but that stay in memory and in the body [. . .]‖ (15). ―Dyke‖ literally inhabits a parenthetical position in the above sentence. This positioning actually extends to his discussions of lesbianism, which is similarly reduced to footnotes and/or periodically set off by M-dashes after the use of the word gay; nonetheless Eribon‘s text is otherwise useful for discussing particular formulations of queer subjectivities. 66 David Carrier describes caricature as encompassing a presumed assumption of temporal linearity on the reader‘s part, what he calls a ―causal connection‖ that the reader makes when encountering the visual narrative of a single image. He sees caricature as needing to follow a direct route in ―successfully‖ being a communicative form: ―When [. . .] the artist‘s image is visually ambiguous—capable of more than one plausible interpretation—then he or she has failed to communicate. Thus we understand many caricatures by forming some hypothesis about the previous or the next scene of action‖ (14). 121 67 For instance Masters of American Comics, at the Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2005 – 2006, featured artists considered to be ―staples‖ of both mainstream and underground comic art—the artists ranged from Charles Schultz to Art Spiegelman to Robert Crumb. As expansive as the exhibit was (it needed to be housed in two museums), not a single female artist was included in this exhibit of ―masters.‖ See the exhibition catalogue, Carlin, Karasik, and Walker. 68 In 2007, Comic Abstraction, an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, featured artists who ―have used the vernacular language of comics as a springboard for abstraction, not to withdraw from reality but to engage with it more critically‖ (Marcoci 9). 69 Like Pop Art, the aesthetics of some underground comix—at least those of its most well-acknowledged (male) practitioners—no longer elicit a shocked response and are, nowadays, fairly recognizable. As Jameson describes, ―there is very little in either the form or the content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable and scandalous. The most offensive forms of art [. . .] are all taken in stride by society‖ (124). 70 ―Straight‖ primarily signifies ―the establishment‖ rather than heterosexuality during this era; however I am obviously also linking ―straight‖ to heterosexuality. 71 See Estren, ―Sex & Sexism,‖ 114 – 139; Rosenkranz, ―1969: Free Love,‖ 123 – 170. 72 Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits are the most well-known of these comix. For more detailed histories and personal accounts from those involved, see Skinn, ―Girls on Top,‖ 154 – 177; Robbins, ―Womyn‘s Comix: 1970 – 1989‖ in From Girls to Grrrlz, 79 – 110; Robbins, ―Chicks and Women,‖ in The Great Women Cartoonists, 107 – 119. It should also be noted that Roberta Gregory, whose comic Bitchy Butch from the 1990s will be examined later, was an active participant in the feminist comix scene; her 1976 Dynamite Damsels is one of the first lesbian comix to exist. 73 Note, for example, the following statement of one feminist comix collective: ―WIMMEN’S COMIX – ‗THE ANTHOLOGY OF WOMEN CARTOONISTS‘ – IS INTENDED TO GIVE SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT TO ASPIRING WOMEN CARTOONISTS THRUOUT THE COUNTRY. WE HAVE NO DESIRE TO BE AN EXCLUSIVE, DIVISIVE OR FEMALE CHAUVINIST GROUP, A FEAR SOME OF OUR FRIENDS HAVE EXPRESSED. WE DO HOPE THAT PUBLICATION OF HIGH QUALITY BEGINNING WORK WILL GIVE OUR WIMMEN ARTISTS A CHANCE TO BE SEEN, AND A FOOTHOLD IN ‗THE INDUSTRY‘ BASED ON THEIR TALENTS OF MIND, HAND AND EYE, RATHER THAN THE MORE TRADITIONALLY REQUESTED PARTS OF THEIR ANATOMY, AND PROVIDE GOOD COMIC ENTERTAINMENT FOR ALL.‖ See Wimmen‘s Comix Collective, Wimmen’s Comix, Issue 2, inside cover. It is impossible to replicate the lettering here, but the quotation conforms, as much as possible, to the capitalization and bolding of the lettering as it appears in the comic. 74 See Wimmen‘s Comix Collective, Wimmen’s Comix, Issue 10, front cover. See also the inside cover of Farmer and Fleener, Tits &Clits, Issue 7, which advertises its comic as ―WOMEN CARTOONISTS AT THEIR POLITICALLY INCORRECT BEST.‖ 75 Champagne specifically calls into question his own status as a queer scholar working with putatively queer texts and theories. 76 For essays that specifically explore minority discourse and nihilism in Nietzsche, see Gordon; Boundas. 77 There is a plethora of critical work that makes these critiques, which are at this point, canonical in the history of feminist theory. Some of the most compelling: see Felski for specific critiques about feminist 122 aesthetics. For a re-thinking of ―style‖ in relationship to straddling a space between feminist aesthetics and feminist political ideologies, see Straub. 78 In particular, see Cixous and Clément; Irigaray. 79 Marmysz discusses these categories of nihilism vis-à-vis Allan White‘s typology of nihilism, which is explained in terms of ―stages‖ beginning with ―religious nihilism.‖ For the purposes of my project, which presumes a secular understanding of the category of nihilism, it is more relevant to think of these delineations of nihilism as types rather than as stages. 80 This is not the same thing as ignoring how ―extremes‖ operate in depictions of gender, race, and sexuality in comic art: I show that in some instances extreme depictions mark irresolvable distinctions between the word and the image; the problematic and the empowering; and the fixing and unfixing of identities. 81 This outside, or negativity, which Edelman convincingly outlines, has everything to do with remaining inside a psychoanalytic methodology: Edelman‘s argument is, essentially, a queer theory of the Lacanian sinthome. Edelman introduces the term sinthomosexuality as that which ―links the jouissance to which we gain access through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack in Symbolic meaning- production‖ (113). In other words, the Symbolic Order, which inscribes the organizing principle of heterosexual desiring relations onto the social, is that to which queers, or sinthomosexuals, function as unintelligible. It makes sense, then, that queers must, according to Edelman, identify with the sinthome: as I understand it, the sinthome is alien to the logic of the Symbolic in being the part of jouissance—(orgasmic) enjoyment of going beyond the Pleasure Principle—which constitutes this unintelligibility and thus equates queer, non-reproductive sexuality with the Death Drive. 82 See Bersani for a critique of gay and lesbian assimilation that centers on what he observes as the disengagement of sexuality from the sphere of political praxis. For Bersani, striving for visibility through assimilation into the social sphere has the effect of what he calls ―de-gaying gayness‖ (5). In other words, Bersani wants to put sexuality back into queer politics, a sexuality that he argues becomes diffuse or completely removed in what he sees as a faulty privileging of ―community‖ over a non-heteronormative- friendly ―homo-ness.‖ While the first two sections of his book lay out the problems and limitations of visibility and resignification through critiquing ―community,‖ the second two chapters foreground his discussions of sexuality. Key to Bersani‘s formulations are the possibilities inherent in linking modes of non-relationality to specifically gay sexual practices, such as anal sex. 83 Similar in some ways to West‘s ―love ethic,‖ Marmysz re-fashions nihilism, removing its negative associations through what he calls ―the humorous attitude‖: ―With humor, even the problem of nihilism may appear within its appropriate context as a painful yet ultimately valuable phenomenon in the history of our world‖ (161). 84 For a reading of camp as disavowing irony in negotiating with mainstream and non-mainstream audiences, see Tinkcom, ―‗Beyond the Critics‘ Reach‘: John Waters and the Trash Aesthetic,‖ 155 – 188. 85 See Robertson; however Robertson argues that camp has distinctly feminist potentials that need not be specifically associated with gay men. 86 See Love. 87 Volumes of work exist discussing how laughter, humor, and jokes have been points of identificatory contention and recuperation for non-white and non-male subjects. For a defense of the use of minority humor and some compelling histories of slurs and stereotypes, see Rappoport; for a reading of the figure of 123 the ―humorless feminist,‖ comedic treatments of women in literature, and notions of feminist humor, see Walker, ―Feminist Humor,‖ 139 – 167; for an analysis of laughter that takes both popular culture and psychoanalytic feminism into account, see Gray, ―Part I: Theorizing Laughter,‖ 17 – 38; for a reading of the implications of racially specifying and de-specifying the blackness of ―black humor‖ via postmodern literary texts, see Solomon; for an argument about ethnic humor as a form of political solidarity, see Leveen. 88 Several anthologies under the rubric of ―lesbian studies‖ were published during this period; note the need to name this strand of criticism as ―new,‖ a ―newness‖ that in some cases literally makes its way into the titles. For examples, see Munt; Zimmerman and McNaron. 89 Bridging theoretical and experimental creative processes, Monique Wittig‘s well-known Le Corps Lesbien ―uses‖ the lesbian body to ―write‖ the instability of the ‗I‘ (the j/e and m/oi are always slashed throughout the text) through fragmented descriptions of lesbian sexuality; thus, ―lesbian‖ in Wittig‘s textual aesthetic becomes an ideal marker that disrupts the dominant ordering language, positioning the text—as ―the lesbian body‖—in and as a utopian space. 90 For example, see Hamer and Budge. 91 While both comics have been incredibly successful among lesbian readerships, Bechdel‘s work has reached wider audiences because of the success of her 2006 graphic novel, Fun Home. In 2008 Houghton Mifflin published the largest anthology of her strips to date. See Bechdel. The complete collection of DiMassa‘s Hothead comics was published in 1999 by Cleis, a much smaller press. See DiMassa. 92 Only once throughout the life of the strip, do readers learn that Bitchy Butch‘s name is Ronnie; ―Butch‖ will be used hereafter. 93 Naughty Bits primarily chronicles the life of overtly and incorrigibly negative heterosexual female office worker, Bitchy Bitch. Bitchy Butch is essentially Gregory‘s ―dyke version‖ of this character. In a few of the strips, the characters meet and end up canceling out each other‘s heterophobia and homophobia, using very similar language and thought patterns against one another. Several volumes of Bitchy Bitch compilations exist and in 2005, Fantagraphics released Life’s a Bitch, a selection of Bitchy Bitch strips. 94 All references are to the compiled volume, Bitchy Butch: World’s Angriest Dyke!. 95 My aim in this statement is not to pit these comics against each other but to examine the circumstances under which some comics gain more of a following that others. 96 The comic is inconsistent with how it veils these references, however. For instance, k.d. lang is referred to as herself while the ―Eileen Purvis‖ show stands in for the ―coming-out episode‖ of Ellen. The ―Purvis‖/―Pervert‖ wordplay mirrors that of the right-wing‘s use of ―Degenerate‖ for ―Degeneres.‖ See Gregory, ―Bitchy Butch in ‗That‘ Time of the Year,‖ 45 – 50 and ―A Butch Is Born,‖ 51 – 65. 97 See also Halberstam, ―What‘s That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives,‖ 152 – 187, in In a Queer Time and Place, for a theory of time that argues for disrupting the oppositions between adolescence and adulthood in cross-generational spaces of queer subcultures. 98 Yet in one comic, Butch has a romantic connection with an individual she later finds out is a transsexual woman. See Gregory, ―Bitchy Butch Meets a Nice Guy,‖ 40 – 44. 99 See Gregory, ―Bitchy Bitch Meets Bitchy Butch,‖ 36. 124 100 See Halberstam, Female Masculinity, for the most thorough theorizations of butch identities to date. ―Butch‖ signifies straight and gay male masculinities as much as lesbian ones; ―dyke,‖ on the other hand, remains rather specific to lesbianism. The use of ―dyke‖ does not solely signify ―butch,‖ though ―dyke‖ may tend to be associated with ―butch‖ rather than ―femme.‖ Even if the use of ―butch dyke‖ brings to the surface the masculinity that ―dyke‖ is thought to contain, ―butch dyke‖ is not redundant. 101 It is impossible to replicate the lettering of the comic in citing it, but the citation corresponds, as much as possible, to Gregory‘s use of capitalization for emphasis. 102 See Groensteen, The System of Comics. Groensteen names particular processes that make up this system and gives a thorough analysis of the ways that comic art uses space in narrative timing. 103 Alternatively, Gene Kannenberg, Jr. discusses the collapsing of word/image binaries in his reading of the work of Chris Ware, who ―[deliberately manipulates] the appearance and placement of text within—and surrounding—his comics pages‖ (175). Here, words are nonetheless still words, which are employed as images rather than necessarily visually presented as images. 104 See McCloud, ―Living in Line,‖ 118 – 137, for specific genres of emotions as visually illustrated in comic art. 105 Several critics read comic art in terms of how it may constitute or represent a unique language or use thereof. For a reading of the use of slang and onomatopoeias in mainstream comics, see Inge, ―Comics and American Language,‖ 16 – 27; for a linguistic approach to the ways that lesbian comics present a notion of ―lesbian language‖ in undermining both putatively male and female speech patterns, see Queen. 106 Characters of color do appear in Bitchy Butch, but do not factor into the strips in any significant ways. In one comic blackness is stereotypically conveyed via the depiction of a store owner‘s use of Black English Vernacular: ―Hole on..ah think ah gots a dime…‖ (14); Butch reacts to him as part of the system of heterosexuality rather than as outside the domains of dominant privilege. The stereotypical image is not what is noteworthy here, but serves as another example that Butch is antagonistic toward anyone who is different from her, including lesbians, as mentioned above. 107 Lopez‘s trilogy of graphic novels differ somewhat in style and are more classifiable as a graphic novels. See her ―Tomato Rodriguez‖ trilogy of graphic texts: Hoochie Mama; Flaming Iguanas; They Call Me Mad Dog!. These texts contain fewer examples of handwriting and more ―found‖ images; page numbers appear as date stamps and smeared fingerprints adorn several of the pages. 108 For a reading of the figure of the menacingly dark, hairy woman translated in terms of female masculinity and lesbianism, see Halberstam, ―The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.‖ For a discussion of identifications vis-à-vis the whiteness and ―good hair‖ of the Barbie Doll and the ambivalence toward Puerto Rican Barbie, see Negrón-Muntaner, ―Barbie‘s Hair: Selling Out Puerto Rican Identity in the Global Market,‖ 206 – 227. 109 Lawley goes on to discuss the advent of the Xerox photocopying machine around 1980 as enabling the creation of fanzines. For remarks on photocopiers and fanzines‘ role in punk cultures see Colegrave and Sullivan, 150 – 155. It should be noted that in consisting of quotations from those who participated in punk culture during the 1970s as well as photographs, album covers, t-shirt designs, and other miscellany, Colegrave‘s and Sullivan‘s text is coextensive with the punk aesthetic that it outlines. See also McNeil and McCain, which is comprised solely of interviews and statements from band members and other punk music participants as opposed to more traditionally academic oral histories. McNeil‘s fanzine Punk is said to be what initially launched the connection of using the term punk to correspond with the culture known as punk 125 (Colegrave and Sullivan 82 – 83). Of course see also pages 111 – 112 of of Hebdige‘s classic text on the aesthetics of punk. 110 See Halberstam, ―What‘s That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives,‖ 152 – 187, in In a Queer Time and Place, for a reading of contemporary dyke subcultures as alternatives to male-dominated and primarily youth-oriented registers of subcultural space and participation. See also Nyong‘o for a notion of punk read in terms of racially specific—but not necessarily ―punk‖ specific—queer subject positions. For an analysis of queer of color disidentifications with punk, see Muñoz, ―‗The White to Be Angry‘: Vaginal Creme Davis‘s Terrorist Drag,‖ 93 – 115, in Disidentifications. 111 In 2004, Fantagraphics published Locas, which contains all of the stories from Love and Rockets featuring Maggie and Hopey. 112 Also see Almaguer for a reading of Mexican systems of erotic exchanges that are defined in terms of active versus passive sexual roles rather than necessarily as ―gay‖ identities for Chicano men. 113 This is along the same lines as what Charles Hatfield calls an ―otherness‖ of reading graphic art that requires that one ―grapple with [. . .] tensions that are fundamental to the art form‖ (36). 114 Ngai goes on to explain that this convergence of amplified emotional expression and ―racial‖ physical qualities, or ―animatedness,‖ becomes a way to explore the questions and limits of agency exhibited by animated dolls using foamation (similar to claymation). The characters she discusses are animated both by physical manipulation and by the actors‘ voices. One would assume, of course, that there is very little room for the animated subject‘s agency in this case; however, in discussing the process involved in synching up the actors‘ voices with the mouths of the dolls, the need to constantly replace the dolls‘ mouths sometimes results in ―slippery mouth syndrome‖ (116), or the unintentional movement of the mouths beyond that of their deliberate function. Ngai writes that this tendency ―suggests something like the racialized, animated subject‘s ‗revenge,‘ produced not by transcending the principles of mechanization from above but [. . .] by obeying them too well‖ (117). 115 See Strömberg‘s historical survey of comic imagery of African Americans. Of reading stereotypical traits as racist, he writes, ―According to this theory [cartoonists‘ highlighting historically specific social views] the representations of certain minorities with clear iconic attributes simply reflects the fact that the artist has taken a shortcut, and does not necessarily betray genuine racism on the part of the individual cartoonist. If we accept this as true, then it becomes, if anything, even more interesting to examine what society has deemed acceptable at a certain point in time‖ (23 – 24). 116 See Muñoz, Disidentifications. 117 It is impossible to replicate the lettering of the text in citing it: for the purposes of readability all material quoted from Lap Dancing will use standard capitalization, but symbols such as plus-signs will be left in tact in citing them. 118 For reading of the ways that black lesbian feminism contested the whiteness of feminism and the sexism of Black Nationalism at the height of feminist and black civil rights movements, see Ferguson, ―Something Else to Be: Sula, The Moynihan Report, and the Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism,‖ 110 – 137. 119 See Anzaldúa, ―La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,‖ 99 – 123. 120 Negrón-Muntaner defines boricua as ―the indigenous name many Puerto Ricans call themselves in a nativist gesture to indicate the end of colonial subordination and the beginning of a still politically undefined new era‖ (xiii). For consistency and accuracy, I will use boricua in the context of Negrón- 126 Muntaner‘s work; however because Lopez never uses the term in her text—which raises further questions about boricua identity for non-Puerto-Rican-born individuals who identify as Puerto Rican—I will use ―Puerto Rican‖ when discussing Lap Dancing. 121 See Cvetkovich, ―Transnational Trauma and Queer Diasporic Publics,‖ 118 – 155, for a reading of the ways that sexual and national identity intersect in being othered through the Puerto Rican lesbian subject. It should be noted that Cvetkovich uses Negrón-Muntaner‘s creative work here as an example. 122 See Flores for a discussion of the historical conditions and cultural positions that distinguish Puerto Ricans from other Latino groups. He states that ―the public image [of ―Latino‖] typically gravitates toward the upper or most successful examples of ‗Latino‘ life [. . .] with the suggestion that those who fail to match up to this pattern of accommodation have primarily themselves to blame. Thus, what presents itself as a category of inclusion and compatibility functions as a tool of exclusion and internal ‗othering.‘‖ [. . .] In our times, with the many middle-class Cuban Americans and South American exiles to serve as foils, the relegation of the Puerto Rican has taken an even more virulent form than ever, with age-old social pathologies and theories of cultural deficiency now buttressed by the loudly touted success stories of so many of their presumed ‗Hispanic‘ cohorts‖ (8 – 9). For a critique of the privileging and dominance of African American studies over Latino/a studies in the academy and in theories of race in general, see Gil- Gomez, ―Rethinking Identity Construction: Placing the Lesbian of Color,‖ 3 – 37. For a study of Puerto Rican art practices that takes into account the influences and effects of class differences among Puerto Ricans, see Lippard, ―Landing,‖ 104 – 149. 123 Several of the stories in the collection can be read as semi-autobiographical. In some of the stories, the speaker‘s name is Erika Lopez and characters such as Pia Sweden (―ethnic‖ first name, ―European‖ last name), who appears in more than one story, are introduced as half Puerto Rican. 124 See Lopez, Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat, a hilarious graphic text about the gentrification of San Francisco‘s largely Latino Mission district. 127 CHAPTER THREE RECOLLECTING RAPE, DISAVOWING LESBIANISM, VIOLATING EXPECTATION: SAPPHIRE’S POETICS OF ABUSE Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.—Friedrich Nietzsche 125 I‘m trying to find the blackest, bloodiest, female-est form of expression I can!—Sapphire 126 You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all- knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. [. . .] And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.—Toni Morrison 127 The third epigraph is from Toni Morrison‘s The Bluest Eye (1970), a novel that articulates physical abuse through racialized constructions of physical appearance. When the text has been taken as an object of critical analysis, it tends to be read primarily in terms of its depictions of the incestuous rape and subsequent pregnancy of its adolescent character, Pecola. Even though Pecola‘s rape becomes a central element of the text, equally important are the questions that it raises about representations of race in light of characterizations of beauty. The novel is, overall, about ugliness: the ugliness of incestuous rape as well as the unattainable ideals of beauty defined as normative whiteness. The text critiques ideals of whiteness and of heterosexuality both, but does so not in order to hold up blackness and non-heterosexual sexualities, but instead to demonstrate the frameworks of the pejorative that mark the construction of black sexuality in the novel. 128 The novel begins with an epigraph of sorts, a proverbial Dick 128 and Jane children‘s story repeated three times; the second time, the punctuation is removed and the letters increasingly move closer together. By the third repetition, the text completely runs together and is startling to look at, its form upset by the lack of spacing and capitalization. [See Figures 15 and 16]. This visual ugliness of the text is formulated by distorting the white heteronormative family dynamic, whose (textual) image collapses. The Dick and Jane narrative‘s literal collapse signifies the collapse of an ideal bound up with dominant understandings of race, gender, and sexual relationality. Each chapter is then introduced with an excerpt of the narrative in its most distorted state, so that that the character emphasized in a given chapter operates in the same scope as the literally broken-down Dick and Jane narrative. What results is a framework whereby bodies of color are ugly because they do not live up to white ideals of beauty. The aesthetic mechanisms that allow for such specific accounts of ugliness do not merely function as literary devices, but as cultural transcriptions of ugliness‘s dimensions construed through race. Pecola, whose story is slowly revealed by way of the chapter breaks mentioned above, becomes the vehicle through which beauty‘s equation with whiteness is critically transgressed in the dominant cultural imaginary; however the crux of this equation foregrounds itself in a tale about incestuous father-daughter rape. In the end, Pecola walks around as the physical manifestation of sexual shame. While being visibly pregnant by her father, she imagines that the speechlessness from onlookers corresponds to their envy for the blue eyes that she has always wanted and later imagines that she has: 129 Figure 15 Dick and Jane Epigraphs, The Bluest Eye, 1970 130 Figure 16 Startling Third Repetition, The Bluest Eye, 1970 131 ―Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all of the time. Do you suppose she‘s jealous too? [. . .] Everybody‘s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off‖ (Morrison 151). What Pecola sees as admiration from those around her is what she cannot see: the whiteness of the imagined blue eyes is the shame of blackness physically embodied as her pregnancy. That the ugliness of sexual abuse is substituted for a notion of white beauty expressed only impossibly on the body of Pecola echoes the larger racist paradigms that inform dominant constructions of blackness. In The Bluest Eye, beauty can only come through as a white body, and despite situating whiteness in a precarious position to that beauty, the text suggests that we re-examine which ideals we bring to marginal social subjects and less-acknowledged circumstances. While Sapphire and her work are the subject of this chapter, it is necessary to locate her poetry within a history of black female literary production, which Morrison‘s work is perhaps one of the most well known. The strategic use of ugliness in the mid- 1960s – mid-1970s by female poets of the Black Arts Movement 129 radically carved out a literary and political critique of white cultural dominance by emphasizing offensiveness, vernacular aesthetics, and negative experiences, often integrating undesirable physical qualities within a black feminist poetics. In her poem ―I HAD TO BE TOLD‖ (1970), Sandy Robinson 130 uses all-capital letters to formulate a wide-eyed response to racist definitions of blackness as ugliness: ―I HAD TO BE TOLD THAT MY BIG LIPS AND WIDE/FLAT NOSE WERE NOT UGLY MISTAKES OF NATURE/[. . .]/I WAS TOLD AND I ALMOST DID NOT BELIEVE/BUT A BEAUTIFUL BLACK MAN TOLD ME [. . .] AND ONLY NOW HAVE I BEGUN TO LIVE‖ (34). Here, heterosexual desire 131 becomes the 132 remedy for the ugliness that the narrator outlines and anticipates the redemptive process that links to heterosexuality in Sapphire‘s work. Also relevant in this literary history is the work of Lucille Clifton. 132 Using all lower-case letters, her poem ―what did she know, when did she know it,‖ originally published in her 1996 volume The Terrible Stories, represents childhood sexual abuse through destabilizing the construction of the family as protective: ―in the evenings/[. . .]/the cold curve/of the sheet arced off/ the fingers sliding in/and the hard clench against the wall/[. . .]/why the little girl never smiled/they are supposed to know everything/our mothers what did she know/when did she know it‖ (Clifton 125). The work of Clifton, along with that of Robinson and Morrison, exemplifies how the black female body has become an icon of the abused body, which surfaces in a black female literary history that references the racial specificity of sexualized violence. Best known for her 1996 novel Push, Sapphire has offered path breaking accounts of sexual abuse, combining elements from her personal history with innovations in literary form. The structure of Push, for instance, is that of a journal, written from the perspective of a functionally illiterate, HIV-positive teenager who, raped by her father and pregnant for the second time by him, overcomes her circumstances by learning to write and accepting her condition. Based on Sapphire‘s past and present selves, the characters in Push are also composites of students she encountered when teaching at an alternative school in New York. While Push was both critically acclaimed and negatively critiqued for its bold foray into the world of abuse and its unflinching account of the racial dynamics linked to poverty, much less critical attention has been given to 133 Sapphire‘s volumes of poetry, American Dreams (1994) and Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999). 133 Sapphire‘s poetic oeuvre is more explicitly autobiographical than Push and details the varying degrees of dissociation bound up with being a survivor of abuse; accordingly, survival has played a significant role in her lesbian identity and subsequent disavowal of that identity. These volumes trace the trajectory that Sapphire‘s sexual identity follows in relationship to her history of abuse. While American Dreams reflects this personal history through lesbian identification, Black Wings & Blind Angels signifies her disavowal of lesbian identity in reconciling with her past. The selected poems in question illustrate a movement away from conventional abuse narratives as much as they obliquely reference the sexualized violence associated with the black female body. Following from these raced and sexed associations and the dissociations related to memories of abuse, this chapter investigates the connections between lesbian sexual identification and surviving sexual abuse. Using Sapphire‘s poems, I demonstrate that although lesbian identity may be used as a way to heal from an abusive past, the full process of healing ends with heterosexual identity, leaving intact lesbianism‘s affiliation with sexual abuse. The structures of the poems examined rely on Sapphire‘s history of survival and formally reflect critiques of ―appropriate‖ healing processes and sexual identification. Violating expectations about sexual identity, then, surfaces within the poems‘ representations of abuse: they violate the conditions of how they represent. In other words, the scenes of violation are turned back onto the expectations that the poems construct. Ultimately, the poems use the theme of rape to re- construct the ―self‖ in and through a violating language of the violated body. Sapphire‘s 134 poetics of abuse 134 thus corresponds to the representations of rape that rupture expectations about sexual identity and the stability of its depictions. Moreover, rape‘s putative inexpressibility becomes a refusal to be silent in the poems. If the experience of rape is akin to encountering a set of discordant responses to the anticipation of violence, responses that defy the context of their articulations, then such articulations, I show, are always already limiting in their capacity to ever fully render their content in a discernible fashion. Therefore, poetically depicting the memory of rape must always depart from the terms that it sets up for itself while all at once latch onto what it seeks to represent. As James Longenbach writes in his description of (poetic) language‘s limits, ―[i]t is to ask the poem to be useful so that it might never be useful enough‖ (89). As a cultural producer who has reinvented life writing by undermining its norms, Sapphire has consistently refused to be constrained by the terms that have defined her. 135 ―[M]y mother named me ramona lofton,‖ the poet wrote in 1985, ―i gave the lesbian feminist lawyer $300 to change my name, she changed her address and phone number but not my name. it was a good experience in that it taught me, i am who i say i am, not what some piece of paper says i am. i am SAPPHIRE‖ (―the way‖ 192). This insistence on naming oneself against the authoritative logic of official naming positions the poet and her work in opposition to the language of the self through the reclamation of Sapphire as a specifically racialized and gendered moniker. Accordingly, Sapphire‘s poetry locates where the instabilities of the ―i‖—moving through black, female, and queer identities— conflict and diverge in their various intersections. Such conflicts call up what Hortense Spillers has discussed of the ways that enslaved female subjects become the iconic bodies 135 of rape and torture. Spillers uses the figure of ―sapphire‖ as a way to destabilize the given frameworks of racial and gender difference explicitly associated with black female subjectivity: Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ―name‖), which her culture imposes in blindness, ―Sapphire‖ might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment. (80; emphasis in original) Here, the negative figure of sapphire alternatively re-locates the pejorative classification of the black woman who embodies blackness‘s outspoken bitch, what Geneva Smitherman defines as ―the stereotypical evil, loud, complaining, emasculating Black woman‖ (198). 136 Reclaiming racialized negativity in name and as an aesthetic, Sapphire and her poetry complicate sexual identification in light of representing sexual abuse. Before exploring the poems in question, it is necessary to review briefly the racial mechanisms of rape and sexualized violence specific to African American female subjects. To not address the realities of the gendered and racial dimensions of violence is to do violence to those who often fail to be recognized in those dimensions. Sexualized Violence and the Black Female Body I begin here by outlining some key theorists who explicitly discuss rape in the context of gender, race, and sexuality rather than as a broad-based social problem. While I will not be exhaustive in charting these gendered and racial dynamics specific to rape, I will trace where sexual ideologies pertaining to rape are crucially informed by dominant cultural constructions of gender and race. 137 Such notions have informed discourses about 136 sexualized forms of violence and the survey below places into perspective how the racialization of sexual abuse operates in complicating the routes that sexual identities are thought to take in Sapphire‘s poetry. Therefore, investigating how rape has functioned in constructions of gender and race is crucial for understanding how bodily difference is embedded in representations of violence. Feminist criticisms that take rape as their subject invariably include the infamous and problematic writings of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. Given that both critics have been credited for helping to bring the issue of rape into the public domain but have done so through extremely conservative brands of feminism, it is worth pausing for a moment on their logics of gendered violence in order to think about questions of agency. In an essay cataloguing various acts of violence against women, Dworkin contends, ―Some crimes happen once—the rapist who is a stranger rips apart a woman‘s life, shreds it with his bare hands, a penis, a knife, the poison of an amnesiac drug, and after that every shadow has the possibility of a rapist folded into it‖ (58). The equation between male anatomy and weaponry that Dworkin draws is a familiar one used in discourses about rape that specifically gender the sexed bodies assumed to be the subjects of rape as well as the subject positions produced in the narrow framework outlined in such equations. 138 Grounded in a similar logic, MacKinnon writes, ―Rape and intercourse are not authoritatively separated by any difference between the physical acts or amount of force involved but only legally, by a standard that centers on the man‘s interpretation of the encounter‖ (171). 137 As has been well documented, the writings of both Dworkin and MacKinnon have instigated a view of rape that reduces specific kinds—if not all kinds—of sex practices to the category of rape and, in essentializing the female subject as victim, perpetuates rather than counters anxieties about the female body. Moreover, such views do not recognize the variability of gendered experiences and feminist subjectivities. In effect, Dworkin‘s and MacKinnon‘s rape discourse ends up serving conservative agendas rather than sex- positive, anti-rape feminist aims since the rationale that underwrites their modes of feminism automatically deems all feminist subjects as operating within a totalizing sphere of heterosexuality and its concomitant practices. In critiquing MacKinnon‘s contradictory logic of gender subordination, Wendy Brown has engaged with the extent to which MacKinnon rhetorically reproduces the dominant frameworks of gender binarism that she seeks to overcome. Brown writes, [for MacKinnon,] every feminist issue, every injustice and injury suffered by women, devolves upon sexuality: [. . .] the construction of female economic dependence is sexual availability to men; incest, sexual harassment, rape, and prostitution are all modes of sexual subordination; women‘s lack of authoritative speech is women‘s always already sexually violated condition. (81) Although Brown specifically analyzes MacKinnon‘s view of pornography here, a comparable reasoning is at work in rigidifying rape via heterosexual male and female subjects that are assumed inescapably to occupy a predetermined set of social positions. Female-bodied individuals, as Brown explains, can then only become passive subjects that lack any agency whatsoever and therefore enter back into the dominant gender positions that presumably are being opposed in the first place. Indeed, a sex-negative, 138 conservative feminism cannot be sustained as a lens through which to view the complexities of sexual identifications in examining rape. Instead, breaking down heteronormative assumptions about bodily differences and desires requires being attuned to the varied circumstances that produce identities to begin with. At the same time, the ways that dominant frameworks of sexuality establish the boundaries of agency is significant for thinking about the invisible regulations that are inextricably linked with sexual behavior. In ―Heterosexuality under the Microscope,‖ a compelling chapter in her Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape, Nicola Gavey investigates the ways in which the cultural ordering of heterosexuality promotes broad frameworks of rape. While she explores examples that are not always strictly identified as rape, Gavey argues that normative understandings of (hetero)sexuality ground ideologies about sexual practices that have the effect of limiting female agency. What Gavey calls ―the coital imperative‖ is one feature of such understandings: ―[t]he coital imperative is not the same thing as coitus itself. Rather it is the cultural nest in which coitus takes place that renders it central to sex; the defining feature of sex; the main act‖ (Gavey 124). For Gavey, the cultural standardization of behaviors pertaining to sex revolve around this imperative; in turn, any practices that are not or do not lead up to penetrative (heterosexual) sex are considered to be less-acceptable forms of sex, if considered sex at all. Obviously, the notion that sex need be defined by penis-vagina penetration closes off an extremely wide range of sexual practices—queer and otherwise—but Gavey‘s point is not so much to vilify heterosexual sex but to point out the modes of coercion behind meeting the ―requirement‖ of heterosexuality strictly defined in terms of penetration. As 139 Gavey‘s study demonstrates, normative perceptions of sexuality continue to raise important questions about the perhaps less obvious forms of rape that filter into everyday experiences. If we think about the ways that desire becomes defined in terms of the male body, we quickly see formulations that rely on heteronormative conceptions of sexuality and how these conceptions fall into dominant configurations of race. As discussed in Chapter One, the normalizing of whiteness as the racial dominant has positioned blackness in terms of a primitive otherness, an otherness that is bound with up sexuality. Feminist theories of race have thoroughly engaged with the extent to which women of color have been multiply excluded from analyses of marginal gendered and raced socio-historical postions. Hazel Carby‘s well-known work on the representational dynamics of black feminist subjectivity situates constructions of black femaleness in the context of historical ideologies of the enslaved body. 139 Carby‘s influential notion of ―the cult of true womanhood,‖ the antebellum-era delineation of desirability, which operated within racist and sexist ideals of white feminine frailty, positioned black female bodies as physically unattractive in light of their being regarded as not properly feminine. ―Strength and ability to bear fatigue, argued to be so distasteful a presence in a white woman,‖ Carby writes, ―were positive features to be emphasized in the promotion and selling of a black female field hand at a slave auction‖ (25). In other words, the use-value of the presumed physical strength in black women was inextricably linked to the designation of their bodies as ugly to the dominant white ideal, which in turn not only perpetuated racist 140 ideologies about black bodies but insisted upon these ideologies in order to identify as well as justify the usefulness of female slaves. This notion of usefulness extended directly to slaves giving birth who, in addition to being regarded as human commodities, were not seen as birthing children, but as producing more commodities in human form. As many scholars and historians have shown, the pregnancy of female slaves was, in many cases, the result of rape by white plantation owners. 140 Yet as pervasive as was the rape of black women by white men, ―certain male slaves readily accepted the slaveholder‘s gift of access to women as a reward and as recognition of their own elevated status within the community of bondsmen‖ (Moore-Foster 347). This, of course, set up sex-specific boundaries in which only enslaved male subjects could secure their limited agency by being complicit in the standard practice of raping female slaves. In her comprehensive cultural history of rape, Rape: Sex, Violence, History, Joanna Bourke discusses subjects who have been incapable of consent and, in taking female slaves as a primary example of these subjects, she writes that ―[s]lave women were regarded as lascivious, and therefore always consenting‖ and thus ―could not be raped because they were ‗naturally‘ promiscuous‖ (77; emphasis in original). This positioning of the rapable body as the black female body speaks to a formulation of the ugly (black female) body as conjoined with ugly, or deviant, (sexual) behavior. In her study, Bourke engages with degeneracy theory as it sought to configure ―abnormal‖ sexual and criminal behavior in terms of outward corporeal traits; the degenerate subject became embodied as a primarily non-white subject. If blackness has been linked to sexual deviance as such and sexual deviance has been thought of in terms 141 of possessing a criminal ―nature,‖ then in which frameworks has this racialization of criminality operated in more diffuse forms? As explained in Chapter One, classifying subjects as ―primitive‖ relied upon assumptions about ―inherent‖ sexual deviancy that was thought to correspond to ―excessive‖ physical features. In delineating black female corporeality as the physical manifestation of sexuality‘s excess, this interlocking logic of racism and misogyny has continued to shape cultural perceptions about black femaleness in the contemporary era. Nowhere are these perceptions more certain than in dominant cultural contexts about which subjects‘ intimate behaviors, relations, and circumstances are policed for their appropriateness. Candice Jenkins‘s important work on black intimacy and sexual vulnerability is centered on what she names as ―the salvific wish,‖ the desire for a white, middle-class ideal that is complicit with stigmatizing black sexuality and creating parameters within which desire can be defined as socially acceptable. Jenkins writes that ―black desire itself is potentially vicious because it is situated within a racialized narrative of intimate deviance that makes black subjects hyperaware of and hypersensitive to the vulnerability that desire engenders‖ (153). Here, Jenkins refers to the dynamics of normative desiring practices embedded in the salvific wish, which she explains as having the insidious effect of re-pathologizing blackness under the guise of racial uplift. Indeed, desire, intimacy, and violence find a common denominator in rape. As apparent as the gendered dynamics of rape may be for examining the racial components of sexual abuse as well as the very subjects of sexual abuse, black female subjectivity has 142 been largely left out as a focal point. In Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s influential work on the connections between racial and gender oppression in rape discourse, black women become invisible subjects in both feminist and anti-racist efforts to uncover assumptions about which subjects rape and which ones are raped. According to Crenshaw, the problem of black women‘s exclusion from rape discourse has to do with the critical oversight of the ways that race and sexuality intersect in theorizing difference; in insisting upon discrete categories of discriminatory practices, Crenshaw contends that such oversights overlook the specificities of black female experience. As Crenshaw and many other scholars of critical race feminism have pointed out, black femaleness‘s cultural configuration as hypersexual has functioned as a vehicle for the omission of black women from analyses of sexualized violence. Even if the rapable body has been historically constituted as the black female body, and sexual violence is culturally inscribed on black bodies more broadly, when certain dimensions of rape are revealed via a racist logic that perpetuates the image of blackness as conjoined with violent criminality and sexual degeneracy, such dimensions continue to re-assign the standpoints of the perpetrators and victims as black men and white women respectively. For Crenshaw, ―[r]ather than being viewed as victims of discrimination in their own right, [black women] become merely the means by which discrimination against black men can be recognized‖ (372). The importance of recognizing the systematic circumvention of black female subjectivity in rape discourse has much to indicate about how to conceive of its articulation in narrative contexts that use gender and racial differences as lenses through which to read rape and its representations. 143 This omission suggests that black women, in being invisible subjects within rape discourse, continue to be abused; in other words, the exclusion from acts of violence in which racial dimensions are only thought about in terms of black men as perpetrators further exploits black women in being the templates for sexual pathology as well as the hidden subjects of race and gender. Yet representing this invisibility must account for what conceivably cannot be represented. In other words, if black female subjectivity within rape discourse can only come through in terms of its use for black men, as Crenshaw notes, how can this exclusion be represented? Sharon Holland has begun to answer this question by theorizing the space of invisibility that black subjects occupy in the social; Holland has read such silencing as types of death. For Holland these deaths need not be thought of as literal, but as, for instance, a contradictory position in which black women are ―[m]ammies if [they] don‘t speak and Sapphires when [they] do‖ (41) or in the case of queer black subjects, ―[having] to search in outrageous places to find voice—they have to come back from the dead to get the recognition they deserve‖ (120). To speak from a racially and sexually marginal position is to always speak through and against the violence of exclusion embedded within it, especially within a violent context that is already deemed unnamable from the start. Notwithstanding the problems of depicting racial and gendered invisibilities, the general difficulty in representing scenes of rape and other sexual assault has as much to do with rendering the scene of assault as it does with emphasizing the intended perspective. To depict violence is to be cautious of undermining or misrepresenting what may be the intended subjective framework expressed—representing violence tests the 144 limits of identification in situating the act of reading in terms of what is being represented. In her study of the narrative elements of reading rape, Laura Tanner focuses on the reader‘s encounter with literary representations of rape; Tanner argues that the reader‘s critical awareness of his or her own reading position allows for oppositional approaches to reading rape scenes. For Tanner, the reader‘s vantage point to a certain extent maintains a level of complicity in the rape, ―impatiently awaiting the promised violence‖ (21) and, in some cases, ―the victim‘s pain is defined only through negation, her agony experienced only in the reader‘s imagination‖ (31). 141 As useful as is Tanner‘s work for textual analyses of rape, Sapphire‘s poetry demonstrates that what is putatively inexpressible or unrepresentable can come through in very specific ways, with the effect of violating or abusing the processes through which depictions of sexual violence occur. Moreover, rather than silences and absences, Sapphire‘s poems in question refuse to be silent, bringing what is seemingly absent from rape discourse to the surface. 142 Significantly, these poems bring to bear the constructions of black female subjectivity that are always informed—obliquely, if not explicitly—by a history of abuse. Narrating the “Self” as Survivor In Chaya Bhuvaneswar and Audrey Shafer‘s study of the roles that survivor narratives play in clinical practice, survivor tales as a literary genre ―can be a model to remake oneself into ‗story,‘ assembling the fragments of family, identity, love, and belonging into a coherent and sustaining whole that requires neither disgust with and disavowal of the past self that was abused, nor acceptance of continued violation‖ 145 (111). 143 According to Bhuvaneswar and Shafer, the forms that survivor narratives take generally move the survivor-protagonist through a process of healing characterized by the interactions between the survivor‘s experience from the past and her or his present encounters with those past memories; however Sapphire‘s poems in question are neither set up to be encountered as lamentations of an abusive past nor do they convey a conventional route to healing, which Bhuvaneswar and Shafer describe as ―putting [the survivor] in a different place (even if he or she hasn‘t moved out of the situation of suffering or abuse) than he or she was at the beginning‖ (111). Instead, the poems illustrate nuanced terms of healing and the limitations therein; what are typically designated as circumstances that have irreversible effects on the psyche and on everyday lived experience become focal points for initializing and subsequently reconfiguring sexual identity in Sapphire‘s work. Sapphire‘s poetry forcefully violates expectations about survival and the modes of expressing that survival. Such violations come through as a poetics that employs a violating language of the body to structure its depictions of the violated body. In turn, abuse in the poems is ―used‖ as a way to sexually identify as a lesbian; lesbian sexual identity, then, becomes ―used‖ and eventually ―discarded.‖ The poems are not necessarily reparative, nor are they solely meant to shock, but they formally disrupt the anticipated responses they are assumed to elicit in recollecting rape and disavowing lesbianism. These disruptions reconfigure sexual identity through a language of the ―self‖ that bridges the divide between the ―I‖ that is abused and the fractured ―I‖ that is an effect of abuse. This fracturing of identity undermines monolithic views of sexuality and resists a 146 narrow understanding about the trajectories that survival follows. Reading selections from American Dreams (1994) alongside poems from Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999) forces a rethinking of the links between sexual identity and sexual abuse and thus raises questions about lesbianism as an emancipatory identity. Ann Cvetkovich‘s groundbreaking work on sexual trauma and lesbian public cultures interrogates the connections between lesbian identity and incest. In asking, ―Does Incest Make You Queer?‖ (89), Cvetkovich outlines a controversial formulation that rigorously revises the parameters of thinking about abuse as well as the ways that queer identities destabilize traditional understandings about healing processes. What she identifies as queer processes of healing corresponds to a re-imagining of how to reconcile with past trauma in light of sexual identification. For Cvetkovich, the importance of re- conceiving standard logics of therapeutic cultures that insist on linear processes of healing need not necessitate a scripted idea about what queer identity should encompass. She writes, ―Queerness militates against the neatness of a heterosexual/homosexual binarism that might, for instance, indicate that a change of object choice could heal the trauma of sexual abuse‖ (90). In other words, queer identities include those that refuse to be seen as changeable only within rigid parameters that adhere to a predetermined set of identificatory definitions. Cvetkovich‘s argument crucially intervenes in theories of sexuality that very rarely take into account trauma as a viable—if unpopular—place to locate the queerness of queer identity. Cvetkovich‘s influential work on the subject of rape and sexuality has provided a way to think about how Sapphire‘s poetics opens up a reconsideration of expectations about specifically raced and sexed portrayals of survival. 147 Thus the importance of the role that autobiography plays in Sapphire‘s work pertains to locating how history has narrated the black female subject as a figure of abuse. How those narratives of abuse have come to shape contemporary black and female subjectivities is also implicitly what is at stake in exploring the ―internalization‖ of abuse in Sapphire‘s construction of the ―self.‖ As a genre, autobiography is mainly associated with narrating life events, even if narration takes place in the context of creative non-fiction or in more overtly fictionalized formats. Because Sapphire‘s poems that recollect her abuse operate somewhere between narrating life events and entering a subjective account of being raped, the blurred distinction between autobiography and poetry becomes a more feasible marker of the constructed ―self.‖ In theorizing the impossibility of ever fully narrating the ―self,‖ Judith Butler asks, What is left if we assume [. . .] that narrative gives us the life that is ours, or that life takes place in narrative form? [. . .] to the extent that the ‗I‘ agrees, from the start, to narrate itself through [the norms of life narration], it agrees to circuit its narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in the telling through modes of speech that have an impersonal nature. (Giving 52) If Butler is right, then the tension between narrating the ―self‖ and the inability of that ―self‖ to be ascertained without that narration corresponds to a ―self‖ that can only be articulated in a contradictory position to its being narrated. Rather than autobiography, Sapphire‘s work perhaps more closely resembles what H. Porter Abbott calls ―autography,‖ which is ―the larger field comprehending all self-writing‖ (2). Self-writing, as Abbott suggests, does not necessarily correspond to writing about oneself in a linear, 148 event-laden fashion, but instead characterizes a mode of writing the ―self‖ in which physical existence is formally articulated and purposefully constructed. Autography, then, draws more attention to embodiment as textual form, an expression of life experience that is always aware of the modes of its construction. Speaking about the components of her work that are derived from life experiences, Sapphire, in a 1994 interview for Deneuve, characterized her poetry as a ―‗testimony to the abuse I suffered‘‖ (Pepper 34), but she went on to state, ―‗[n]one of the poems are court cases against my parents‘‖ (34). As autographical, Sapphire‘s poems that call up her incestuous past formally embody a conception of lesbian identity as non- recuperative, which, as Cvetkovich has theorized, takes into account the terms of abuse as constitutive of that identity; however lesbian identity itself is threatened—and ultimately disavowed—under those terms in Sapphire‘s poetic configurations of abuse. As much as lesbian identity is used to reconcile with an abusive past, the poems in question ultimately break down the space of healing for which lesbianism comes to stand. As representing sexual violation and violating expectation, Sapphire‘s poetics of abuse suggests that the true terms of healing must come through disavowing lesbianism. The Aesthetics of Violation Despite the non-linear frameworks bound up with autography, it is crucial to investigate the poems chronologically, beginning with selections from 1994‘s American Dreams, alongside selections from 1999‘s Black Wings & Blind Angels. Contextualizing the volumes of poetry, separately, in terms of their historical location in Sapphire‘s life is 149 necessary for understanding the trajectory of disavowal that the poems formulate and subsequently follow. Whereas Sapphire writes from a position of black lesbian identity and several poems reflect her incestuous past in American Dreams, the poems from Black Wings & Blind Angels revise her sexual identity in light of being raped and past identity as a lesbian; it is vital to read this distinction in terms of how sexual identity is articulated in both volumes. In a 1991 interview with Andrea Juno in Re/Search‘s Angry Women volume, Sapphire calls attention to the instability of identity categories while also claiming a lesbian identity. In responding to Juno‘s question, ―Do you define yourself as a lesbian?‖ (Juno 127), Sapphire states, ―I do. I don‘t run from that; I embrace that definition of myself—even though I have loved men and maybe will again. I don‘t define myself as bisexual or heterosexual; I‘m just a lesbian‖ (173). She goes on to explain that her writing helped her to establish the conditions of her abuse: for instance, writing ―Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio,‖ a poem from American Dreams, allowed her to access those memories through configuring her voice as a writer. In demonstrating the contours of subjectivity established within a linguistic aesthetic of the abused body, such poems reproduce the scenes/memories of assault, ushering in an abuse of poetic form and expectation. This poetics functions to destabilize rigorously the status of lesbian identity as a curative for an abusive past. The speaking voice in ―Mickey Mouse‖ locates the violence of rape in its immediate moments, but nonetheless undermines this immediacy by shifting between the memories of it as it occurs and the present tense recollection of the event. Rather than emphasize a unilateral subjective framework that proceeds from a traumatic past, the 150 ambiguity that characterizes the split in the child/adult narration ends up not only violating the scene of abuse through a constantly mediated narration but also confirms such a violation through obliterating the speaking subject itself. The narrator states, ―no one hears except my sister/who becomes no one cause she didn‘t hear./years later I become no one cause it didn‘t happen/but it‘s night now & it‘s happening‖ (Sapphire, American 22). 144 Here, the speaking subject is verified only in terms of negation, a negation that paradoxically affirms the actions as they occur in the simultaneous past and present frameworks of the recounting. Her sister, the double-negative 145 ―no one‖ who ―didn‘t hear,‖ is the acknowledged ―someone‖ who hears/knows, but does nothing. Rather than nothing being done, everything that occurs and that her sister hears becomes embodied as ―nothingness‖ in terms of how the victimized subject conceives of herself and how that self is articulated. This ―development‖ into nothingness—―[becoming] no one cause it didn‘t happen‖ (22)—also establishes a contradictory assertion that what did happen can only come through as not having happened. Yet rather than ―properly‖ leave the negated articulation as positively expressing the rape, the poem defies its framework of negativity by continuing with, ―it‘s night now & it‘s happening‖ (22). The shift from the memory to the (re-)experience of the rape is less a shift than an indeterminate position between the two. This indeterminacy directly extends to the definitional boundaries of rape itself: it both is and is not something other than (and in addition to) non-consensual sex, which has been linked to legal determinations about whether it can be defined as a crime or even said to have happened. ―Rape,‖ according to Sharon Marcus, ―is clearly neither sex nor 151 simple assault. Rape could best be defined as a sexualized and gendered attack which imposes sexual difference along the lines of violence‖ (397). Marcus‘s definition is particularly relevant for situating rape in terms of the poetics of abuse that describes Sapphire‘s work. For Marcus, rape surfaces in the social imaginary as a specifically linguistic event, 146 or what she proposes as rape‘s functioning as a ―social script‖ (390) that authorizes the victimization of women as rapable and thus reinforces gender binaries of active/passive and perpetrator/victim. The ways that rape is inscribed onto the social operates not just as a linguistic inscription, in Marcus‘s formulation, 147 but as a ―gendered grammar of violence‖ (392; emphasis in original), which she explains is a system that regulates the roles into which both black and female subjects inevitably fall. This link between language and articulating rape opens up one of several ways to understand how language reflects the negotiations with the larger representational spheres that come to define social subjects and constructions of the self. This negotiation is apparent in Sapphire‘s use of the lower case I throughout ―Mickey Mouse,‖ which speaks to a self-positioning that is neither fixed within the child‘s own thought process as the rape occurs nor relegated to the adult‘s memory of it. Furthermore, in the line ―my name disintegrates in the night‖ (Sapphire, American 23), the narrator dissociates herself from experiencing the trauma by separating herself from the definitive linguistic marker of self—in other words, it is not she but rather her name that disintegrates. There is a double process of dissociation here: not only does the narrator disengage herself from her name, but that disengaged component itself ends up dissolved in being the vehicle through which those memories surface. 152 In re-creating the memory of assault, the poem situates the rape as it occurs but without necessarily remaining in the child‘s position of the experience. The child‘s perspective cannot, then, be the child‘s perspective in being permanently altered by the sexual trauma that constructs it. Put differently, the narrator‘s speaking position undermines itself as much as it qualifies the actions that it shows taking place. The poem oscillates between perspectives and conjoins its descriptions with the material dimensions of discomfort that it produces. As evidenced in the poem‘s title, Mickey Mouse, a dominant icon of childhood innocence instead becomes associated with—if not outright embodies—a violent, male perpetrator, who is specified as the narrator‘s father. 148 Clearly indicating the corruption of innocence, the image of Mickey Mouse in the poem also functions to rupture the memories pertaining to childhood. The words Mickey Mouse are spelled out twice throughout the poem and thus automatically become the putatively recognizable anthem from the Mickey Mouse Club. This spelling out forces it to be sung when encountered; this abruptly shifts the overall tone and ultimately transforms the poem from a tangible account of rape to an unexpected singing of a song associated with youth. In the second instance, the anthem is depicted as follows: ―M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U- S-EEE‖ (23). At the level of the auditory, the extra E‘s break down the continuum of the song—which is itself already a disruption—and ultimately becomes a disturbing rendition that is marked by the drawn-out pause or repetition of the acute vowel sound of the long E. Hence the E‘s signify an overload of negative sensations, and in addition to indicating a deterioration of childhood innocence, also suggests a slowly deteriorating self as constituted in being raped. From there, the poem quickly fuses the tangibility of its 153 recollections with the more elusive imagery of the (Mickey) mouse: ―mouse is in the house/running thru my vagina/& out my nose‖ (23 – 24). The poem follows suit by ending with a distorted nursery rhyme that borrows from several well-known children‘s literary references: ―hickory dock/the mouse fell off/the clock/the farmer takes Jill down the well/& all the king‘s horses/& all the king‘s men/can‘t put that baby together again‖ (24). This subversive mixture of nursery rhymes calls attention to the place of poetry in the construction of childhood: invoking the image of humpty dumpty‘s falling off the wall and shattering reinscribes the rhymes as articulations of a permanently altered self, fragmented through abuse. As discussed above in Bhuvaneswar and Shafer‘s exploration of survivor narratives in clinical contexts, an abuse victim‘s reconciling with his or her past is a key strategy for attempting to recover from that past. In these contexts the emphasis falls on the survivor‘s rather than physicians‘ piecing together of the survivor‘s traumatic memories. As a genre, then, the survivor narrative is meant to be fragmented rather than holistic. This fragmentary quality is evident in Sapphire‘s work in question; yet the disjointed elements characteristic of the survivor narrative come through less in terms of the structure of its telling and more along the lines of a specifically corporeal formulation of those fragments. The childhood memory of rape in ―Mickey Mouse‖ is recounted in an unapologetically palpable manner; thus the cracks that continually recur in the poems do not merely correspond to breaks in narrative structure, but to the literal breaking of the body as experienced by the narrator. Particularly in ―Mickey Mouse,‖ the aftermath of rape is described in terms of the actual effects that rape has on the physical body: the 154 narrator states, ―blood, semen & shit gush from my cracked ass‖ (22) and, later, ―my cells crack open like glass‖ (23). Whereas the body literally bursts open from sexual violence in the first instance, in the latter mention of cracking, the body cannot be sustained even when reduced to its most elemental state: it metaphorically degenerates into cells that go on to ―crack open.‖ Cracking also symbolizes the anticipation of an unpleasant event; if something (or someone) is cracked, it is on the verge of breaking, splitting, or being destroyed in some manner. Thus the anticipation that cracking represents relates to foreseeing the arrival of damage, pain, or harm. The poem explicitly expresses this ominous expectation in its opening lines: ―the night was no light,/black./he came in/light cracking the night/stuck in the doorway/of dark/deep hard‖ (22). Here, the crack of light in the doorway directly indicates that the narrator‘s father is in the doorway, about to enter the room, which becomes a space of interrupted darkness and looming violence. But rather than initially described as ―dark,‖ the night instead ―was no light,‖ a negated negation of sorts; that is, darkness as the putative figure of nothingness itself becomes inverted, as a negation of light. This conception of darkness is, of course, mediated by the entrance of the narrator‘s father, who blends in with the night—both are ―black,‖ as the word black is on a separate line of the poem, undifferentiated as either characterizing ―the night‖ or ―he.‖ When the words light and dark, contrary to ―no light,‖ do surface, they continue to be formulated in terms of the contradictory elements of negation and inversion that the poem sets out in characterizing the night as ―no light‖: light functions to crack the night, while the doorway, the source of light, in this case, is a doorway ―of dark.‖ Given the reversal of 155 what a notion of looking forward to—a distinctively positive anticipation—entails above, the poem‘s defiance of the context that it creates for itself fittingly corresponds to the counterintuitive path that sexual identification eventually takes. Thus the crack later becomes a figure for lesbianism itself; cracking directly links to the trajectory that lesbianism follows in the poems in question. ―Reflections from Glass Breaking,‖ a prose piece in American Dreams, employs notions of cracking in similar ways that ―Mickey Mouse‖ does. Like the lines, ―my cells crack open like glass‖ (22) from ―Mickey Mouse,‖ the notion of ―glass breaking‖ and its accompanying ―reflections‖ from the title of ―Reflections‖ also designates the paradigm of recollection that the poem (re)constructs—reflections here signify both thoughts and the literal reflections from the broken glass. This piecing together of chards of glass—of memories—directly relates to the literal sharpness of the objects (glass) and the conceptual sharpness of the description (explicitness) of assault, which may either stand in for several snippets of similar memories or a single memory remembered in pieces. As in ―Mickey Mouse,‖ ―Reflections,‖ then, never fully articulates its position in terms of the experience as it occurs from either the standpoint of the child or the adult‘s memory of it; such a breakdown of perspectives exposes the necessity of expressing the precision of that violence incongruously through the poetic. James Longenbach‘s notion of the ―spokenness of language‖ is useful here in seeing how the poetic provides a way for traumatic memory to come through while simultaneously taking into account poetry‘s (and memory‘s) ―untrustworthiness.‖ He writes, ―To one degree or another, no poem extends the illusion of an individual speaker without challenging that illusion; at the same 156 time, no poem, no matter how strenuous its challenge, manages to avoid the illusion of being spoken‖ (67). To ―speak‖ of rape in the poetic is to speak the body—and if speaking the body in this context is speaking the abused body, then that spokenness must rhetorically replicate the ways that abuse articulates itself as an embodied experience. Therefore, accurately representing rape—or any traumatic violence acted on the body— presupposes a structural inaccuracy inherent in a representational account since (traumatic) memory does not welcome, yet also depends upon, re-experiencing the event through an always already fragmentary account of the experience. In his linguistic theory of violence, Jean-Jacques Lecercle defines language as a violent intervention and, in doing so, emphasizes the collapse of an event‘s literalness and the abstraction of its expression. For Lecercle, rather than necessarily align with the objects with which they are associated, words intervene and interrupt the circumstance that they describe. One of the principle ways that he demarcates this violence is by showing that words become materially embodied, and in being bodies themselves so to speak, all at once have a literally and figuratively violent force pertaining to lekta, what he describes as the movement of words through bodies: 149 Utterances as arrangements of lekta, as ‗forms of expression,‘ express forms of contents, that is mixtures of bodies, as the utterance ‗the knife cuts the flesh‘ gives form to the incorporeal transformation of the event denoted by the verb ‗cut,‘ and expresses the bodily mixture of knife and flesh. The important point is that the incorporeal transformation, the event, is not a representation of the mixture of bodies, but intervenes on it, to delay or precipitate it. One does not speak of states of affair, one speaks in the midst of states of affair. [ . . . ] Language lies on both sides of the divide. Words take part in material mixtures, their lekta intervene on the 157 surface of bodies, as their incorporeal attributes. (226; emphasis in original) As Lecercle explains, the word cut does not merely stand in for the act of cutting, but instead enacts a dimension of felt experience beyond the level of the word‘s sound and meaning. In thinking about Lecercle‘s theory in the context of ―Mickey Mouse‖ and ―Reflections,‖ the words breaking and cracking amplify the fracturing that they denote through the effects that the sounds of the words themselves have on the reader or listener of the poems. The specificity of what the words describe assumes a violence or destruction embedded in their materiality: the harshness of the words‘ consonants become aligned with the bodily fracturing they communicate. Accordingly, the sensation of pain depicted in the following lines, ―a train with razor blades for wheels/is riding thru my asshole‖ (22) metaphorically concretizes the physical agony of being anally raped. 150 The description, in effect, literalizes the subjective account of the experience and moves to materialize—as in Lecercle‘s sense—the physical realm of the circumstance paradoxically through the abstraction of its precise diction. 151 Similar to the above depictions, ―Reflections‖ references its account of incestuous rape as it takes place, but unlike ―Mickey Mouse‖ the poem shifts into ambiguity as the narrator dissociates herself from herself in accounting for what she is experiencing. Rather than strictly operate in a liminal position between the child‘s account and adult recollection of the scenario, this dissociation comes through in terms of gradually defamiliarizing not only the actions as they happen but also the very subjects involved, her father and herself. The piece is written in a child‘s voice; the narrator continually 158 calls her father ―Daddy‖ and, in mixing a naïve perspective with an observation of what is obviously happening, later asks, ―What is he trying to do?‖ (35; emphasis added). In a poignant account of the rape that ensues, ―Reflections‖ moves away from the diminutive address for father, replacing it with the unspecified ―he,‖ and continues with its description of the actions from an ―objective‖ child‘s perspective: ―He pushes his thing, forces his thing in me, and my pelvis cracks‖ (35). The use of the word thing as a substitution for the word penis directly extends to the mixing of child/adult perspectives via the poetic articulation of the trauma of rape: the repetition of the imprecise ―thing‖ throughout the piece stands in for the accuracy and immediacy of what is occurring. As in the above examples, the cracking that occurs here is both literal and figurative; when the narrator‘s ―pelvis cracks,‖ this cracking may be literally occurring but might more likely describe a cracking of the psyche bound up with the other kinds of physical damage implied. 152 Immediately following this moment, the piece shifts into third person and the narrator becomes ―the little girl‖ while her father becomes ―the man‖ (35); however the ―I‖ that is watching here is separated along the same lines as the breakdown of the body‘s integrity in the narrator‘s distancing from herself: ―I float up to the ceiling and from far away I see a child‘s bones come loose‖ (35). Inasmuch as the expected progression of the piece would be the movement toward a disintegration of the self, the narrator regains consciousness. Moreover, she does not actualize what has just happened to her, but instead focuses on the physical effects that the rape has on her body. In the following lines, the voice, speaking after the rape, shifts back and forth between an adult‘s and a 159 child‘s: ―The green curtains look like flags at half mast and the sun seems old. Where‘s Daddy? What happened? A cool breeze from the open window rushes over me and I feel a wetness around my hips‖ (35). Rather than the ―I‖ splitting further, it is re-integrated, distancing the narrator from the trauma of the experience as it brings her closer to her body‘s condition in the aftermath of the rape. As the narrator goes onto describe, the wetness that collects underneath her elicits a matter-of-fact assessment about whether it is urine or blood. Rather than qualifying the experience, the discovery of blood ―spreading from under the broken bowl of [her] hips‖ (35) defers the actualization of rape to the ―the light disappearing‖ (35) from the window. The use of windows is a recurrent theme in Sapphire‘s work and while it is a metaphor for looking into oneself, Sapphire‘s use of windows moves away from that convention. For example, in the explicitly sexual prose poem ―There‘s a Window‖ from American Dreams, a window figures prominently in the context of depicting two women who have sex in prison. Although the poem transgresses traditional accounts of desire by emphasizing the older age of one of the women, the eroticization of the entire scenario never fully transcends the containment of the prison in which it is expressed: ―[h]ere we was in death‘s asshole, two bitches behind bars, hard as nails and twice as ugly—caring‖ (106). While the poem sets up the encounter between the two women as decidedly erotic, it leaves off with an ambivalent account of sexual desire as it is informed by their surroundings. While they have sex, one of the speakers communicates the following: Oh please woman don‘t stop I begged but at the same time in the middle of my crazy good feeling something was creeping. I tried to ignore it and concentrate on the rivers of pleasure she was sending through my body 160 and the pain good feel of her fingers in latex gloves up my asshole. But the feeling was creeping in my throat threatening to choke me. Nasty and ugly it moved to my eyes and I started to cry. (107 – 08) Rather than an orgasm in which the scene is assumed to culminate, a ―creeping feeling‖ emerges from the sex. While this ―nasty and ugly‖ creeping pertains to the women‘s imprisonment—the speaker has not seen the night sky in months—the ―creeping‖ materializes in the context of a sexual scenario that is thought to make the women temporarily forget where they are. When the other woman reveals that the moon is visible from a window, to which some inmates might eventually have access, accessing the window nonetheless stays in the confines of the prison, literally within its walls, linking inescapability here with lesbian sexual identity. The link that windows have to sexual identity as imprisonment comes full circle in ―A Window Opens,‖ a poem from Sapphire‘s 1999 volume of poetry, Black Wings & Blind Angels. The poem begins with the imagery of a window in front of which curtains have been thrown open to let light in, a well-known, if not clichéd, literary device signifying new beginnings. While this might be the expected reading of the window imagery, it instead invokes the recollection of being sexually abused by the speaker‘s father: ―The memory is very clear—/you are large, shining, naked—all penis/trying for my mouth. I am around four/years old‖ (Black Wings 83). The poem quickly transforms from the childhood memory of her father to a present moment of heterosexual desire for a man: ―clear/he is not a perpetrator but still a man. And I‘m not four/and I want it, in my cunt, mouth, his penis‖ (83). Eventually the poem ends up with ―I am not four, his penis/is not my father‘s‖ (84). The unapologetic expression of desire in the above lines 161 sets up the terms of healing through the lens of heterosexuality, which extricates lesbian identity as the emancipatory space for overcoming abuse. While the first mention of remembering being four years old is illustrated in the context of sexual abuse, the moment when the speaker is ―not four‖ is disconnected from being equated with abuse and signifies the entrance into new desiring relations: to not be four, or to reconfigure/detach from the memory is to desire heterosexually. When the memory of being four resurfaces again in the poem, it is interspersed with rejecting lesbian desire: ―the old bulls stop me on the train, street. I am four/looking in a window at my father and a four-/year-old. The old bulls want to rub and lick my cunt now‖ (83). The rejection of desire here is not a rejection of the speaker‘s lesbian desire as much as it is an illustration of ―the old bulls,‖ whose desire must be rejected. Breaking away from the event of abuse articulated in the above lines—the speaker‘s looking at both her four- year-old self and her father— suggests the breaking away from lesbianism: the memory of abuse attached to being four is also attached to the characterization of the old bulls, who stand in for the predatory figure of the speaker‘s abusive father. Nonetheless, in using identical terms to characterize the transitions from the memory of abuse (―all penis trying for my mouth‖) to the expression of heterosexual desire (―I want it, in my cunt, mouth, his penis‖) to the eschewing of lesbian desire (―The old bulls want to rub and lick my cunt now‖), the poem unpredictably dislocates the framework of desire that it constructs. In other words, while the words penis and mouth become, in a sense, resignified as expressions of desire in the second instance of their use, cunt becomes a 162 transitory expression of desire that, in the second instance that it is used, loses its attachment to the desire articulated in its initial use. Similar to poems in American Dreams, many pieces in Black Wings & Blind Angels have endnotes explaining the specific references to which they refer. ―A Window Opens‖ explicitly addresses Sapphire‘s disavowal of lesbian identity and in the endnote to the poem she writes, Despite being internationally known as a lesbian [. . .], I no longer live as, or call myself, a lesbian (or a homosexual). [. . .] what began as a separatist and man-loathing identity [. . .] evolved into a journey on which I began to heal myself from the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Part of that healing has been being able to, after the devastation and betrayal of rape and childhood sexual abuse, love men again. (128) Although the endnote does not quite disparage lesbianism, it does, according to Sapphire, configure lesbian identity as a space that is closed off from paradigms of desire that the initial identification encounters and subsequently remedies. If we think about Cvetkovich‘s notion that some queer identities are a result of incestuous abuse, it follows that Sapphire‘s lesbian identification is an instance that qualifies the formulation at which Cvetkovich arrives. Yet what is less certain in that equation is the extent to which some queer identities may not necessarily ―stabilize.‖ Returning to ―A Window Opens,‖ the speaker states, ―I wonder what this has all been for—/the women I hid in and could not love, the lesbian front/that became a wall, the sex work. It is clear/I was not cut out for bulldyking or prostitution now‖ (83). For Sapphire, the disavowal of lesbian identity means an avowal of a present moment that can be sustained only by being equipped with a new framework of identity. Even as the ―now‖ in the above line assigns lesbianism as 163 unfit for the recuperative outcome that her poetry illustrates, heterosexuality is not normatively defined for her either. In a 2000 interview, she stated, ―even though I‘m now relating heterosexually, I don‘t ever foresee being a ‗normal heterosexual.‘ I have always been alone, even though I‘ve related sexually. I‘ll never have my picket fence. It‘s someplace else I‘m going—it feels like it‘s someplace else I‘ve been‖ (Gordon 30 – 31). That Sapphire repeats ―someplace else‖ as where she both was and is going sets her identification apart from typical constructions of the sexual self that assume a chartable path that that self will take. It is fitting, then, when the speaker in ―A Window Opens‖ declares, ―I could just go back to what I wasn‘t‖ (83), vacating the self in question, going back to a place where she never thought she was in the first place. This chapter has contended that the trajectory that lesbianism follows in Sapphire‘s poetic configuration of abuse violates expectations about how sexual identity is imagined and abuse is overcome in structuring the ―self.‖ The last poem in Black Wings, her latest book of poetry to date, is no different in this regard: it ends with ―Broken,‖ a poem whose structure, rather than mimic being broken, takes the form of a paragraph. Accordingly, as a prose poem, its rhythm, rather than being choppy, flows in the same way as the souls of her parents that she watches ―ride down the river‖ (125). This ―[riding] down the river‖ calls up the antebellum-era notion of being ―sold down the river,‖ or betrayed into being sold into a worse form of slavery; the concept of worsening designates the violation of expectation, and this moment in the poem situates her parents‘ betrayal as broken promises that operate in the same scope as the abuses of enslavement. Despite the images of breaking, as demonstrated in the following lines, ―The shiny 164 ceramic red heart/lies on the floor in shards, its light that used to flash electric now glows/steady in the dark‖ (125), the poem‘s lines break in anticipated locations, between subject and predicate, verb and adverb, breaking only after long lines of text, all but mending the effect of looseness or shattering that may be experienced in reading them. Moreover, the light from the shards ―glows steady‖ but does so ―in the dark,‖ not to mention that the shards imply the expression ―a broken heart,‖ the physical impossibility of which becomes actualized in terms of the image of a ceramic one. Unlike the earlier examples of breaking experienced through the physical body, what breaks in ―Broken‖ is mostly a psychic breaking. For instance, the first line, ―I think everything in me has been broken‖ (125) indicates that what was once accompanied by physical damage has lasted in non-physical realms—and that there is essentially nothing more to break. Yet given what Sapphire has described of the poem as ―a will and a deep desire and a determination to live that comes through despite the broken quality‖ (Gordon 31), this ―broken quality‖ more accurately signifies the breaking with a conventional route to overcoming a painful past rather than describing the piece‘s form. And while the poem indicates the determination that Sapphire explains, it is a determination executed counterintuitively: in the last line of the poem—which is the last poem in the volume—to repair oneself ultimately is to be ―At last, broken‖ (Black Wings 125). 165 CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES 125 Nietzsche, 94. 126 Juno, 172. 127 Morrison, 34. 128 One telling instance of this occurs when the text switches to Pecola‘s mother‘s perspective, in which her sexual dissatisfaction with her husband is revealed as follows: ―She hopes he will not sweat—the damp may get into her hair; and that she will remain dry between her legs—she hates the glucking sound they make when she is moist. When she senses some spasm about to grip him, she will make rapid movements with her hips, press her fingernails into his back, suck in her breath, and pretend she is having an orgasm. She might wonder again, for the six hundredth time, what it would be like to have that feeling while her husband‘s penis is inside her. The closest thing to it was the time she was walking down the street and her napkin slipped free of her sanitary belt. [. . .] And then a slight and distinctly delicious sensation collected in her crotch. [. . .] That must be what it is like, she thinks, but it never happens while he is inside her. When he withdraws, she pulls her nightgown down, slips out of the bed and into the bathroom with relief‖ (Morrison 69 – 70; emphasis in original). That the menstrual pad accidentally provides pleasure for her in a way that her husband cannot sets up a transgressive formulation of sexual pleasure that critiques heterosexual sex without celebrating the pleasure that it does depict. 129 See Smethurst, ―Artists Imagine the Nation, the Nation Imagines Art: The Black Arts Movement and Popular Culture, History, Gender, Performance, and Textuality,‖ 57 – 99. 130 Thanks to Ajuan Mance for introducing me to the work of Sandy Robinson. 131 Several critics discuss the problem of homophobia and heteronormativity not only within the Black Arts Movement but also within the era‘s rhetoric of Black Nationalism. See Clarke, ―Queen Sistuh: Black Women Poets and the Circle(s) of Blackness,‖ 47 – 93. See also Ferguson, ―Something Else to Be: Sula, The Moynihan Report, and the Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism,‖110 – 137. 132 Thanks to G. Conti for introducing me to the work of Lucille Clifton. 133 For an interview with Sapphire detailing her reaction to the reception of Push, see James. Even though more critical work exists on Push than on her poetry, scholarly work on Push remains sparse. See Liddell; Michlin; Donaldson. 134 Although they maintain quite different emphases from my notion of a poetics of abuse, several other scholars have sought to bring together the aesthetics of language with various incarnations of violence. See Lashgari for her notion of a ―poetics of violence,‖ which pertains to speaking the improper in the context of contemporary Asian American poetry; see de Lauretis‘s chapter, ―The Violence of Rhetoric,‖ 31 – 50, in which she reads Derrida‘s well-known work on ―the violence of the letter‖ through problematizing the gender of the subject who acts as the ―deconstructor.‖ 135 In her keynote address at the 2007 Arizona State University symposium ―PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art,‖ Sapphire discussed the dilemma of identifying social problems in terms of exclusive identities; she specified the prevalence of AIDS in the black community and the notion that AIDS is not exclusively a gay male issue anymore. After the keynote, when she was signing my books, I asked her about the reception to Black Wings & Blind Angels (the collection of poems where she explicitly expresses 166 her disavowal of lesbian identity). She responded with, ―You know, I got a lot of shit from the supposedly inclusive queer community when that was published.‖ 136 For a specification of the Sapphire stereotype in terms of sexual aggressiveness, see Marshall. 137 See also Ferguson‘s landmark work on sociology‘s role in marking African American culture as the locus of deviant sexuality, Roderick Ferguson writes, ―As its embodiment in whiteness attests, heteronormativity is not simply articulated through intergender relations, but also through the racialized body‖ (20 – 21). Ferguson‘s important critique foregrounds the specific ways that the pathologizing of non- white bodies intersects with the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. 138 See Bourke‘s chapter ―Violence, Politics, Erotics,‖ 413 – 44, for a critique of the connections between aggression and the male body in her reading of ―the rapacious penis,‖ which she argues is a ―deeply flawed instrument of domination‖ (418). 139 Also see Spillers for a theory of black female subjectivity that specifically discusses frameworks of colonialism in abusing black bodies. 140 See Dalton for an intriguing analysis of sexual abuse by white slave owners articulated through silence in the example of Harriet Jacobs‘s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 141 The context here is the representation of violence in a short story by Gloria Naylor. Tanner contends, ―In order to capture the victim‘s pain in words, to contain it in a narrative unable to account for its intangibility, Naylor turns referentiality against itself‖ (31). 142 See also Doyle for reading of intimacy in the context of Tracey Emin‘s art: what Doyle calls a ―bad sex aesthetic‖ is one that ―draws us too close‖ and ―is grounded firmly in those things (semen, tears) against which high art is traditionally defined‖ (111). 143 Bhuvaneswar and Shafer specifically address Sapphire‘s Push in their study. 144 In discussing her father‘s abuse, Sapphire states, ―[my abuse] was a Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde thing in the middle of the night. And nothing happened; it was a lifetime of denial for my father. He never ever on any level copped to what he had done‖ (Juno 167; emphasis in original). 145 The use of the double-negative is, of course, a feature of Black English Vernacular. See Rickford and Rickford, 123, 152. Nonetheless, the Black English Vernacular double-negative is not used in this poem. 146 Also see Tanner, ―Reading Rape,‖ 17 – 34 for an account of rape as communicated distinctly in terms of linguistic absences. 147 Marcus‘s formulation obliquely points to Spillers‘s. See Spillers. 148 See Strömberg for differing conceptions of Mickey Mouse as a racialized figure: ―Considering that the early Mickey, like Felix the Cat, had arguably embodied some characteristics of black stereotypes, one might view the strip‘s transformation as Disney‘s ‗whitening‘ of the Mickey figure as he became an American icon‖ (69). 149 See also Riley for a theory of how language moves through its speakers. 150 See also Bersani‘s and Stockton‘s respective theories related to cultural perceptions and attractions bound up with anal sexuality and anal rape. Bersani discusses gay male sexuality in the context of cultural 167 anxieties about AIDS and the alignment of anal sexuality and vaginal passivity. In her chapter ―When Are Dirty Details and Scenes Compelling?: Tucked in the Cuts of Interracial Anal Rape,‖ 101 – 147, Stockton analyzes interracial anal rape between adult men in the context of contemporary film. 151 See also Scarry‘s study of physical pain as ―[resisting] objectification in language‖ (5). 152 Although much medical research on pelvic fracture in children exists, there is very little information about this type of injury as a result of rape. See Quallich for a study of the relationship between pelvic fracture and genitourinary injury as a result of blunt trauma in children. Quallich concludes that there is no relationship between the two types of injuries. She also states that ―[c]onventional thought proposed that children suffer fewer GU injuries than adults because their pelvis is more elastic‖ (273). Also see Silber and Flynn‘s study on pediatric pelvic fracture; however in their study the causes of the injuries are left unspecified. They write, ―Orthopaedic traumatologists have long recognized the unique fracture patterns and injury constellations of pediatric pelvic fractures. However, an understanding of the change of pelvic fracture patterns with advancing skeletal maturation is needed to avoid applying adult classification and management to pediatric pelvic fractures‖ (720). They conclude that the pelvic bone in such injuries tends to be damaged before the ligaments in an immature pelvis and that ―pediatric ring fractures‖ are rare. Without knowing the physical effects that rape has on an adolescent pelvis, it is difficult to discern the extent to which the narrator‘s pelvis cracking should be read literally. 168 CHAPTER FOUR ALIEN/ATING LESBIANISM: ADDICTION AND DYSTOPIAN DESIRES IN LIQUID SKY AND HIGH ART Alienation is something you wear.—Liquid Sky, the novel based on the screenplay 153 Drink and drugs she abhorred because they were ugly.—perspective of Valérie Seymour in The Well of Loneliness 154 While the previous chapters identified lesbianism in terms of pejorative frameworks associated with nihilism and rape, this chapter locates lesbianism as a site of estrangement through addiction. Estrangement takes shape as an aesthetics of alienation that brings together the diegetic, the corporeal, and the photographic in configuring lesbianism. By explicitly considering the role that addiction plays in this configuration, I contend that lesbian sexual identity is constituted via dystopian desires—for heroin, for self-destruction—that ultimately reveal the limits of lesbianism‘s development. Alienation is, then, specifically marked as cinematic and photographic and is routed through portrayals of addiction in two films that perhaps have less in common than more: Slava Tsuskerman‘s Liquid Sky (1982) and Lisa Choloenko‘s High Art (1998). What ties them together is the way they bring together lesbianism, alienation, and addiction. Simultaneously science fiction, midnight movie, and postpunk film, Liquid Sky accomplishes this by situating queer female embodiment as more deadly than heroin in a dystopian landscape that positions feminism as disempowering empowerment. Liquid Sky ―literally‖ alienates its queer female subject—the central character‘s body is used to transmit opiates to space aliens. High Art, a drama not classified in any above genres that 169 characterize Liquid Sky, establishes heroin addiction and lesbian desire in terms of each other and within the context of the photographic arts. In using the photographic processes central to its narrative, High Art‘s alienation corresponds to lesbian desire as the desire for heroin, formulated as the (photographic) negative. Regardless of the extent to which it links to sexuality, contemporary cinema is no stranger to portrayals of addiction. While early-twentieth century films such as Reefer Madness (1936) used substance abuse as a tool of propaganda, exaggerating the effects of marijuana use, by the mid-twentieth century, alcoholism became suitably tragic content for a dramatic feature, as in The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Such films eventually became classic articulations of a particularly American brand of overcoming inner hardship, and by the late-twentieth century, representing addiction and/or excessive substance use accelerated in independent as well as mainstream cinema. Depictions of messy escapism in films ranging from heroin and crack use in Permanent Midnight (1998) to Nicholas Cage‘s Oscar-winning performance as an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) have functioned to critique addiction in resolving characters‘ substance abuse, even if those resolutions come through as simply giving in to the addiction. The tendency in these films is to focus on characterizing the addict in his or her relationship to substances, but other addiction films have emphasized the substances themselves, using formal devices to communicate the chemical effects on the body. Conveying these effects, such as the visual presence of a character‘s hallucination, in the film‘s diegesis has become expected, if not standard practice: for instance the typewriter-as-talking insect in David Cronenberg‘s 1991 film adaptation of 170 William Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch; the conversing coma-baby in the 1988 film adaptation of Jay McInerney‘s semi-autobiographical Bright Lights, Big City; and the dizzying camerawork coextending with methamphetamine and heroin use in Darren Aronofsky‘s 2000 adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.‘s Requiem for a Dream. As adaptations, these films visually attempt, in their various aesthetic renditions, to achieve something that the written text cannot, and in doing so, notably strive to illustrate particular pockets of generational shifting. 155 Key to contextualizing addiction in such films is the establishment of a connection between substance use and the construction of particular social subjects in the late-twentieth century. Films about addiction, such as those mentioned above, obviously do not share a singular message about substance abuse in common; nonetheless, they open up ways to visualize both the figure of the addict and cinematic expressions of alienation, whether obliquely or explicitly related to substance abuse. While looking at depictions of addiction in cinema is perhaps itself unremarkable, the relationships among representations of alienation, sexuality, and addiction are important and less-explored, particularly in the similarities between the figure of the addict and the sexually degenerate social subject. 156 In the early 1970s, Raymond Durgnat‘s Sexual Alienation in the Cinema explored erotic alienation in international films ranging from the Western to inter-war avant-garde genres. Of the non-heterosexual examples he uses, Durgnat turns to male filmmakers such as Cocteau, Warhol, Pasolini, and Kenneth Anger to investigate the ―often biased but trenchant interrogations of our current culture‘s uneasy blend of glib erotic romanticism, a deeper hypochondria, and a secretly depressed complacency‖ (250). 171 More than thirty years later, these observations are still relevant, but need to be brought into the broader, if not more specific, context of female sexualities. Why, then, should lesbian subjects be singled out as a figures of alienation? Theories of subjectivity have revealed that the productions of all subjects, not just lesbian subjects, are structured in terms of alienation. Psychoanalytic discourse, especially of the Lacanian variety, has been the setting for such theorizing, even without particular attention to categories of identity. Lacan‘s theory of the Imaginary is usually used to explore alienation because in his formulation of the Mirror Stage, alienation is part and parcel of the construction of the ego: the ego, the illusory notion of singular self, is constructed when identification with the reflection of one‘s image in a mirror is misrecognized as the image of an autonomous being. Yet in an essay specifying alienation, ―The Subject and the Other: Alienation,‖ Lacan outlines the parameters by which the subject in this case, rather than the ego, is constituted as external to itself, hence, alienated by the structure that produces it. Using a Venn diagram to describe such a space, Lacan fashions two circles, each representing the subject and the other, which converge halfway through, forming an oval-like shape between them. The oval-like shape created where the circles intersect represents a space that does not belong to each circle respectively, but is constituted by each of the circles in tandem. Lacan describes this space as a vel, what he describes in terms of a logic of or: ―The vel of alienation is defined by a choice whose properties depend on [a logic of joining], that there is, in the joining, one element that, whatever the choice operating may be, has as its consequence a neither one, nor the other‖ (211). In other words, the vel, the location of the subject and 172 other‘s coming together, does not necessarily function to unite harmoniously the designated portions, but instead might be read as adulterating the connecting components, engendering antagonism rather than complementarity. While I depart from a specifically psychoanalytic methodology in examining alienation, Lacan‘s formulation of the subject is useful for understanding the shaping of sexuality vis-à-vis cinematic and photographic space in the films. Dystopian desires come through as structures of negation, perhaps better described in terms of a ―neither/both‖ (or ―none/all‖) framework. Extending to the diegetic, this framework translates in Liquid Sky as what I call ugly sex (displeasurable sex and antagonistic androgyny) and disempowering empowerment; in High Art this framework translates as the inability to distinguish the desire for heroin from lesbian desire, and in terms of the literal and conceptual photographic negative. In bringing together filmic depictions of drug use with the aesthetic components of each film, I explore the technical apparatuses of photography and the diegetic in film as theoretical tools for understanding the production and expression of the late-twentieth century lesbian subject. The mechanics and techniques that encompass these filmic and photographic forms disclose much more than we may think about the constructions of the subjects they represent. And while psychoanalysis has been a well-charted route for studies of film and photography, I turn instead to the technical components of these mediums in order to investigate their relationship to the formation of sexual identities, specifically how the alienation of the lesbian subject and its accompanying desire paradigms are read in filmic and photographic technologies. 173 In his classic essay ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‖ Walter Benjamin writes, ―From a photographic negative [. . .] one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‗authentic‘ print makes no sense‖ (224). The loss of ―authenticity‖ from modern art practices—what Benjamin famously calls a work‘s ―aura‖—brings to bear modernity‘s alienating effects, which for Benjamin, calls into question photography‘s very status as a work of art. As a product of modernity, photography, whose formal ―mechanical‖ qualities Benjamin then links to film‘s ―equipment-free aspect of reality‖ as ―the height of artifice,‖ (233) should be thought about in relationship to film sound for the purposes of this chapter. While Benjamin takes to task photography‘s reproductive process as displacing the terms by which art ―originally‖ gained meaning and value, John Belton‘s formative theories of film sound, written more than four decades later, interrogates authenticity at the level of sound‘s role as fabricated. In discussing the process of synching film sound to its accompanying visual display, Belton explains, ―Sound lacks ‗objectivity‘ (thus authenticity) not only because it is invisible but because it is an attribute and is thus incomplete in itself. Sound achieves authenticity only as a consequence of its submission to tests imposed by other senses— primarily by sight‖ (64). Both film sound and photography mask the qualities of their constructions, ―deceiving‖ the viewer into experiencing what is a seemingly ―genuine‖ visual or sonic expression. Whereas photography is bound up with documenting ―reality‖ at a given moment in time, film sound merges disparate elements so that diegetic speech or music, for instance, maintains a dependence on the illusion of simultaneity. This dependence eludes the exposure of precisely what is being manipulated. If dependence is 174 what obfuscates a ready distinction between the categories of fake and real, then dependence here doubly signifies drug dependence as it pertains to the uncertain differentiation between ―reality‖ and a substance‘s manipulation of that ―reality.‖ Therefore, this analysis considers filmic and photographic arts together and alongside addiction and the vicissitudes of its representation. UGLY SEX AND POSTPUNK FEMINIST DYSTOPIA IN LIQUID SKY Set in New York‘s new wave subculture, Liquid Sky (1982)—slang for heroin— begins with space aliens, who seek to ―steal‖ the opiates released from heroin use, landing on the roof of an apartment where heroin use is frequent and ubiquitous. Scenester and new wave fashion model Margaret lives in this apartment with her heroin- peddling, performance-artist girlfriend, Adrian. As the film progresses, the aliens discover that the ―better‖ opiates are those released during orgasm, which they proceed to obtain ―through‖ Margaret‘s body every time she has sex; consequently, obtaining the opiates also kills those with whom she has sex—the victims are speared through the head with a small glass arrow and, eventually, all are vaporized after they have an orgasm. Each instance that Margaret has sex in the film, it is coercive, joyless, or unwanted; therefore she never has an orgasm and always survives, but every partner she has does and dies (and is then vaporized to nothing). The film‘s sex scenes are also, then, its death scenes. Because it is used to transmit opiates to the space aliens, Margaret‘s body becomes ―literally‖ alienated and situates queer female embodiment as more deadly than heroin addiction. Essentially a string of sex scenes gone bad, Liquid Sky uses this spatial- 175 corporeal transfer of the opiates to question Margaret‘s agency within a brand of hedonism marked by negative pleasures and desires. While sexual ambiguity and drug use specific to the new wave scene promised a utopian world beyond the confines of normative social space, I show that the transformative possibilities of feminist and subcultural disengagements from dominant spaces are alienated from the utopian, and instead reveal these disengagements as a feminist dystopia. This dystopia frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement and names the film‘s constellation of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and diegetic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes empowerment‘s tentative position in a social landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation. Predating The Hunger‘s release by one year and contemporaneous with Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, Liquid Sky premiered at the Montreal World Festival in 1982 and was released as an independent feature in the United States in 1983. The film had positive-leaning mixed reviews, won various awards, and was generally appreciated for its sophisticated special effects on a small budget. 157 In using the new wave punk scene of early 1980s Manhattan as the setting for Liquid Sky, director Slava Tsukerman was meticulous in his execution of the film‘s visual and musical details. Researching clubs on which to base the film‘s overall aesthetic, he and the film crew frequented the Mudd Club, the nightclub/performance/gallery space that became a mainstay for those in various postpunk music and underground art subcultures in New York‘s East Village. 158 Clubs such as the Mudd Club and Club 57 played a large part in opening up the 176 intersections and blurring the boundaries between performance art, music act, fashion show, gallery space, dance club, and movie theater. Bernard Gendron calls these creative practices ―borderline aesthetics‖ and in his study of avant-garde art and music, 159 he chronicles the formation of these connections alongside the rise of new wave‘s identity as ―‗punk in pop drag‘‖ (269), with participants taking part in several subcultural ―scenes‖ at once. A participant in New York‘s downtown culture at the time, Anne Carlisle began as a new wave actress-model when Tsukerman asked her to star as Margaret in the film. Carlisle, who co-wrote the script and later went on to author a novel based on the film‘s screenplay, 160 also loosely based the Margaret character on her own life. In the film, Carlisle plays both Margaret and her gay nemesis Jimmy; both are androgynous, queer, and always at odds with each other whenever they interact. Being ―at odds‖—and looking/sounding odd—is key to thinking about the multiple axes that gender, sexuality, and the diegetic share in configuring the alienation of lesbianism in Liquid Sky. Accordingly, gay male beauty is markedly set against lesbian ugliness as represented by Jimmy and Margaret, and, in playing two characters who frequently appear in the same scenes, Carlisle‘s cinematic position speaks to the film‘s diegetic uncertainties. In other words, the film‘s incorporation of postpunk aesthetics translates as an indistinct boundary between the diegetic and non-diegetic. These filmic, gendered, and sexual features describe Liquid Sky‘s aesthetics of alienation as one that simultaneously excludes what it includes and includes what it excludes. Through a framework of negation (described above in terms of ―neither/both‖ or ―none/all‖), the film maps bodily difference as non-difference onto a diegetic landscape of 177 disempowering feminist empowerment. Central to the feminist dystopia and its aesthetics of alienation is what I call ―ugly sex,‖ which indicates both displeasurable sexual activity and female-bodied antagonistic androgyny, or to put it differently, that which is ―fucking ugly.‖ Before exploring specific examples from the film that crystallize this landscape of alienation, it is essential to clarify briefly the definitional frameworks of postpunk aesthetics and the role that midnight and cult film genres have played in constructing queer sexualities through inclusion/exclusion as described above. Postpunk Aesthetics and the Cult Film/Midnight Movie While punk has been given much critical attention as a primary cultural and aesthetic marker of contemporary music‘s break with harmony and homogeneity, the period and genre that follows punk, beginning in the late 1970s and eventually peaking in the early 1980s, has been underexamined or collapsed, somewhat erroneously, with the category punk; therefore, as much as postpunk defines itself against punk it also simultaneously overlaps with it. The variety of experiments in music, fashion, and artistic styles that fall under postpunk maintain several recognizable differences from punk— incorporating dub, funk, and disco; emphasizing electronic music; and embracing non- normative sexuality and longer song-lengths—without fully dissociating from what is generally classified as punk. In his comprehensive survey of postpunk, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984, Simon Reynolds describes the distinctive range of genres associated with the category while isolating specific features of postpunk sound: for instance Talking Heads‘ songs ―often had stop-start structures and melody lines that 178 were angular and jumpy rather than gently curving‖ (160) while Wire‘s use of keyboards were ―regarded with suspicion as somehow unpunk‖ and their ―guitars [were] so heavily treated that they might as well be synths‖ (173). Without claiming that postpunk characterizes a distinctive sound or style, Reynolds‘s study branches postpunk into several subcategories ranging from the widely recognizable new wave synthpop sounds to more impenetrable noise stylings and confrontational performances of no wave and industrial groups. 161 New wave is probably the best example of which components of postpunk crossed over into mainstream music in the early 1980s. Incorporating synthesized sound and androgynous looks into the popular imaginary, new wave ushered in the bizarre and sexually ambiguous, emphasizing the relationship that the visual and performing arts had with underground music. As a postpunk—or specifically new wave—film, Liquid Sky‘s overall structure and content make for uneasy genre distinctions and stand perilously at the edges of both being ―merely aesthetic‖ and being a formally innovative meditation on negative hedonism and the unfulfilled promise of a subcultural utopia in the late-twentieth century. In relationship to Liquid Sky‘s making literal the orgasm as ―little death‖ in its postpunk setting, the logical combustion of excesses associated with these music subcultures found its manifestation in the deaths of prominent icons in the punk and postpunk music scenes—such as Joy Division‘s Ian Curtis (suicide by hanging in 1980), The Sex Pistols‘ Sid Vicious (heroin overdose in 1979), and The Germs‘ Darby Crash (suicide by deliberate heroin overdose in 1980)—all of which also signaled a turning point in the direction of the music. When John Lydon departed from the punk image he 179 cultivated while singing lead as ―Johnny Rotten‖ for the Sex Pistols, he ironically named his new band Public Image Ltd. (PiL). Formed in 1978, PiL 162 characterized its postpunk sound by ―[assimiliating] both the dread feel of roots reggae and the dub aesthetic of subtraction‖ (Reynolds 214). The incongruous combination of these styles provided a way to strip the music of a single category (such as ―punk‖) and a subcultural identity (such as ―punk rocker‖), without necessarily creating or becoming something ―new.‖ Describing a PiL show, Reynolds writes, ―There was no encore and the gig ended sourly, energy blocked, like bad sex‖ (25); here the correlation of a postpunk performance with bad sex stands for a way of seeing the less-ideal consequences of moving beyond strictly conceived genres, invoking sex as a substandard public performance. In bridging the gaps between putatively suitable and inappropriate feminist desires, the scenes of sexual performance in Liquid Sky also bring together sexual cross-identification, drug use, and underground cultures to describe inconsistencies within the production of postpunk film. Visually documenting a performance such as those of the bands named above is one way of delineating what might be called punk film and, subsequently, postpunk film. Clips in random sequence from various punk and postpunk performances, such as The Punk Rock Movie (1978), shot on affordable, low-quality Super 8 film, made up what was initially called punk film. Emerging from the less-listener-friendly no wave scene in New York, ―these filmmakers saw the previous generation [Warhol, Brakhage] as both an inspiration and an establishment to overthrow‖ (Masters 140). Incompatible styles within, or approaches to, post/punk film became its defining feature. 163 Significantly, these films relied on cultural participants as both audiences and actors, reinventing the club space as 180 movie theater while reinterpreting film as performance art. Entrenchment in downtown music scenes, then, largely dictated to whom such films were available, as ―[m]ost of the punk films [. . .] were originally shown in clubs, both in special backroom screenings and as a visual backdrop to the bands‖ (Hawkins 229). Punk‘s relationship to cinema has been understudied and my task here is not necessarily to emphasize this relationship; however attempting to define postpunk film—if not clearly distinct from punk film— opens up a way to consider dystopian space in relation to the structural incoherence embedded in postpunk aesthetics. Like postpunk music, postpunk film does not share one distinctive feature but instead combines several elements of underground cinematic technique and subculturally specific subject matter, which results in alienating—and being alienated from—the very influences from which it is derived. This sense of an alienated influence extends to the ways that post/punk film is shot in contradiction to what is putatively punk style. ―Instead of fast-moving narratives, and frequent jump cuts,‖ describes Stacy Thompson, ―punk film-makers [. . .] slow their narrative pace to a crawl, scarcely move the camera, make infrequent cuts and, in general, forego most of the techniques that would lend their film commercial viability‖ (25). This resistance to commercial success becomes even more ambivalent when specifically gendered. Questioning non-conformity-as-conformity has been the subject of several postpunk films, often featuring female protagonists. Breaking Glass (1980), La Brune et Moi (1980), Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981), for instance, all share similar narratives of success in the music scene. Frequently more about style and music than plot, such films single out the female subject to interrogate whether ―success‖ is 181 actually desirable in disengaging from dominant musical, gendered, and social spaces. This disengagement lends itself directly to thinking about the ways that female embodiment becomes the locus of postpunk‘s complication of normative desirability and taste, as Liquid Sky demonstrates. Operating in the same scope as these narratives, the degree of success in postpunk film is usually measured in terms of whether the film achieves cult status, which perhaps only arbitrarily marks the subcultural investment in its content. 164 Accordingly, the difficulty of classifying postpunk film in terms of specific qualities is similar to explaining what the many genres that encompass cult film have in common. 165 The ―cult‖ of cult film, of course, describes an unreasonable, sometimes obsessive, commitment to the film in question. Since many postpunk films achieve cult status, a status of which rests on fandom and/or an audience‘s entrenchment in the film‘s content, it follows that music, drug, and sexual subcultures define which types of audiences typically comprise those of cult film. Discussing the role of the audience in shaping, and being shaped by cult film, J. P. Telotte describes cult film as ―[evoking] a kind of subcultural desire, a desire not simply for difference, but for an identifiable and even common difference, in effect, for a safe difference that is, ultimately, no difference at all‖ (11). Telotte continues his description by providing some distinctions between cult films and midnight movies, which ―fashion a context of difference—of rebellion, independence, sexual freedom, gender shifting—that helps us cope with real-world conformity‖ (11). In Liquid Sky, the active withdrawal from ―real-world conformity‖ is not only the difference from a conformist environment but also an indifference to the 182 ideal environment such a withdrawal provides. This indifference often comes through as an escape from ―reality‖ through drug use. Even though heroin addiction is central to Liquid Sky, addiction in the film is really less about drug addiction and more about being addicted to self-destruction fueled by substance abuse and sexual degradation. Hence, the classification ―midnight movie‖ organizes as much as it de-specifies the genre of films for which it serves as a rubric. Indicating when such films were shown, ―midnight‖—when clubgoers are ready to go out; the time of night when various substances have fully taken effect; an unreasonable bedtime—foregrounds several assumptions about the intended audiences whose differences are both sustained by and reflected in the films in question. 166 Marking these differences within the context of non- standard viewing practices, a midnight show is and continues to be outside the framework of consideration for general audiences; for these reasons do midnight movies retain an iconic position as for and about ―creatures of the night.‖ 167 Significantly, this positioning makes explicit the use of underground cultures as formats for gender and sexual transgressions to be expressed. 168 Not all midnight movies gain cult status and not all cult films assume the given properties of midnight movies; yet Liquid Sky, all at once postpunk film, cult film, and midnight movie embodies its genre as anti-genre, its sexual ambiguity as antagonistic, and thus, nodding to Telotte, maps bodily difference as non- difference within its dystopian feminist and diegetic landscape. 183 Female Bodily Space and Disempowering Empowerment Key to Liquid Sky’s frameworks of difference are the film‘s new wave setting and the role that postpunk styles play in breaking away from sex and gender binaries. Just as contesting normative femininity in women‘s fashion often dictated female punk sartorial choices in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 169 androgyny and unisex styles eventually became trendy mutations of punk in the postpunk era, influencing both female and male new wave fashion, which also contributed to the popularity of queer identities, particularly bisexuality, within new wave scenes. While Liquid Sky capitalizes on these gendered and sexual ambiguities to almost-obsessive lengths, the alienated subject comes through as unambiguously female and lesbian. Janet Bergstrom has explored the significance of the film‘s preoccupation with androgyny, writing that Margaret‘s masculinity and Jimmy‘s femininity ―are used to cancel each other out‖ (48). Bergstrom is correct to read the film as breaking down the idealization of androgyny as taken up and routed through mainstream fashion imagery; nonetheless her notion that androgyny is used as a canceling-out device in the film is less convincing given the outcome of Margaret and Jimmy‘s final verbal confrontation. Eventually leading to their sexual interaction, this confrontation epitomizes the lesbian subject as the site of alienation: when Jimmy immediately vaporizes the moment he comes, Margaret is left behind as a kind of residue of the alien-orgasm because she never comes, and thus singularly embodies Liquid Sky‘s formulation of hostile androgyny through her female body. 184 Nowhere is this embodied location more apparent than in Margaret‘s stating ―I kill with my cunt‖ several times throughout the film, making explicit her position as a (non-literally) re-conceived vagina dentata; on more than one occasion, she ―euphemistically‖ states, ―this pussy has teeth.‖ Yet the sound the alien makes at the moments the opiates are transmitted—tinny, watery electronic mini-explosions, resembling sped-up distortions of wind chimes or bells—is labeled ―The Way the Alien Kills‖ on the film‘s original score. The alien, not Margaret, is identified in the track‘s title as responsible for the killings, marking her as both the agent and the vehicle with no agency. Margaret‘s realization that her body is lethal, but only lethal when fucking others until they come, grants her agency only in being filtered through her bodily dissociation. This dissociation ultimately translates as surrendering to the aliens any control her body harbors, thus marking her ―alienation.‖ As Margaret‘s body specifically develops as a conduit of sorts, replacing heroin as the source of the opiates, heroin becomes less lethal than the lesbian body that she signifies. When Liquid Sky premiered in 1982, homophobic claims about the AIDS- ridden queer body as a contaminating entity were firmly in place. In his landmark essay ―Is the Rectum a Grave?,‖ first published in the mid-1980s, Leo Bersani writes that AIDS has ―reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with a self-annihilation originally and primarily identified with the fantastic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable female sexuality‖ (222); yet his essay ultimately does not move beyond ―the gay man‘s rectum‖ (222). Focusing on public discourse about ―passive‖ sexualities and de- idealizing gay sexual liberation, Bersani‘s argument against a communitarian queer 185 politics has been critiqued by José Esteban Muñoz in his recent Cruising Utopia. In contrast to Bersani, Muñoz contends that utopian thinking ―permits us to conceptualize new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and institutionalized state homophobia‖ (35) but nonetheless grounds his critique mostly within the context of gay male cultures. Liquid Sky reroutes the framework of a queer sexual utopia through a dystopian space of female corporeality, displacing gay male sexuality. Anxieties surrounding sexually transmitted diseases instead are directed toward the lesbian body, which furthermore speaks to the film‘s being situated at the end of second wave feminism and thus also questions the female body‘s stability as the emblematic site of feminist coalitional politics. Notably, Margaret mostly has sex with men in the film, but her primary relationship is with her girlfriend Adrian, who is no less abusive than the others. Their relationship halts any promise of lesbianism as an escape from the strictures of heterosexuality. For the men who coerce her to have sex, Margaret‘s lesbianism is disturbingly intriguing, cast as more estranged each instance she appears to be desired for her androgynous femininity, which reads as a combination of slutty-punk and cabaret drag in the context of new wave styles. This desire for her androgyny, then, is defined in terms of aversion to the way she looks and sexually identifies; desire-as-aversion becomes a primary mode of alienation that the film manifests in relation to the figure of the lesbian. Paul, one of Adrian‘s heroin-addicted clients, takes an interest in Margaret, asking whether she is Adrian‘s girlfriend, to which she answers, ―What difference does it make?‖ Paul proceeds to taunt her about whether she ―[likes] girls better than boys,‖ after 186 which she accuses him of being a junkie who cannot get an erection. To prove otherwise, Paul returns later to ―show [Margaret] the difference between men and women.‖ The ensuing scene is telling since it reveals as much about sexual difference as it does about where the difference between consensual and non-consensual sex breaks down. ―Fuckin‘ dyke. You‘re just a dyke,‖ Paul sneers when Margaret continues to reject his advances. When Paul calls her a whore, Margaret shouts back, ―YOU‘RE RIGHT—I‘M A WHORE! I‘LL LIE DOWN AND YOU FUCK ME, SEE, ‗CAUSE IT DOESN‘T MATTER TO ME. ‗CAUSE YOU DON‘T EXIST, YOU‘RE NOTHING, YOU‘RE NOBODY. YOU JUST DON‘T EXIST.YOU‘RE JUST A FLY.‖ As they have sex, Margaret describes how bored she is and, clearly annoyed, tells Paul to ―Hurry up, please.‖ Gaylyn Studlar writes that Margaret ―rejects sexual puritanism and assumes the identity of the profane whore who will permit anyone to do anything to her‖ (151). Studlar‘s reading is valid, but Margaret‘s above statement does not quite fit into such a ready identification. On the one hand, Margaret can be said to have orchestrated her own rape; on the other hand, her aggrieved nonchalance in this statement is also a strange brand of empowerment. Margaret‘s vigorously apathetic participation in missionary-position heterosexual sex, the epitome of normative sex, constitutes her aggressive disengagement with it, or, to put it differently, becomes a non-transgressive transgression that eventually kills Paul. Insofar as it is the least expected in the above scenario, this mode of transgression also extends to the outcome of the film‘s first ―sex‖ scene: Margaret‘s brutal rape in the stairwell of her apartment and her subsequent avenging of it. Rape only precariously falls into a category of sex, but as a sexually violent act, rape is never fully separable from sex. 187 While all sex scenes in Liquid Sky may not necessarily be thought of as rape, Margaret‘s agency concerning when and with whom she has sex is questionable in each instance. In historicizing onscreen portrayals of sex, Linda Williams explains that bad sex was represented ―as the sex the woman did not want to have,‖ but by the 1970s, bad sex included ―inauthentic or faked sex‖ (171). 170 As Williams describes, ―the spectacle of the orgasmic woman‖ (170) became the focus of depicting unwanted sex and non-orgasmic sex; yet Liquid Sky significantly alters this equation. Sex in the film is certainly represented as orgasmic—for everyone except Margaret: her embodiment of lesbianism is also an embodiment of the non-orgasmic, non-desiring woman. Unlike the scene with Adrian‘s client described above, there is no question about reading the stairwell ―sex‖ scene as anything other than non-consensual; nonetheless the atypical rape-revenge formula that ensues invites a considerably less transparent reading than the rape scene itself. In order to kill her rapist, Margaret must give him an orgasm, and, armed with an observably fake desire for him, she later returns to the club to find him and lure him back to her apartment for sex/death. Ironically, this determined desire for revenge is also the only instance in which Margaret expresses any sexual desire—even if faked—in the entire film. As in the scene with Paul, the rape and all that leads up to it substitutes displeasurable sex for drugs: in both instances, forced sex supplants drug fixation for all involved. What is at stake here, besides whether desires for sex and drugs are distinguishable, is how to read Margaret‘s using sex with her rapist to avenge the initial episode of being raped by him. The framework of sexual violence gets turned on its head 188 in this instance because Margaret reinscribes the rapist‘s more ―traditional‖ act of sexual violence as a deadly version all her own. In other words, Margaret‘s brand of sexual killing revises both the sex and the violence in reversing the dynamic by which each violent sex act is accomplished: while the rape constitutes a sexually violent act, the rape- revenge constitutes the sex act to carry out the killing, thus placing Margaret as the potentially more dangerous figure. This is not to say that looking at this shift between Margaret and her rapist is not without problems. After all, the rapist never knows he is about to be killed (he dies the moment he comes) and when Margaret aggressively pursues him to go home with her, he eagerly consents. Tania Modleski‘s notion of ―counterphobic cinema‖ offers a way to approach the possibility that a film can be resistant while appearing to contradict the very terms of its resistance. In the context of sexploitation film, Modleski asks if ―we can locate moments that both protest sexual violence and keep alive woman‘s ‗right to sexuality‘ when sex is killing her‖ (48). Although specifying female filmmakers, Modleski‘s analysis is useful for thinking about Liquid Sky‘s accounts of desire as aversion and the decidedly questionable modes of resistance that Margaret stands for in returning to the sources of her oppression in order to work against them. As sexual promiscuity in Liquid Sky is the driving force behind revenge and death rather than pleasure, it is the non-desiring lesbian body that is cast as disease-ridden and infectious, rather than, as mentioned earlier, the stereotypical pleasure-seeking gay male body; what results is the film‘s inscription of lesbianism as a (dysfunctionally) misogynistic attraction to humiliation. The attraction to humiliation is inextricably linked 189 to the film‘s representation of desire as aversion. Margaret‘s first victim, her former acting instructor and ex-lover, Owen, criticizes her new wave androgyny, accusing her of looking ―like a hooker‖ who ―will come down with some horrible disease‖ but makes it clear that he is there to have sex with her. Mildly protesting while mildly succumbing, she responds, ―I thought I looked ugly and would give you diseases.‖ When Adrian returns to find the post-coital Owen lying dead, she unsuccessfully persuades Margaret to engage in necrophilia, and then face-fucks the body instead. Visibly upset about this, Margaret pleads with Adrian to stop, which develops into a barrage of insults. The significance of this episode is the pejorative framework of feminist empowerment that it constructs. Rather than emerge as traditionally emancipatory, Margaret‘s body in killing Owen becomes the reference point for a sexually specific estrangement. Besides being estranged from her body in its ability to kill, Margaret‘s lesbian relationship with Adrian is defined in terms of a hateful communication that constantly estranges rather than connects them; the bodily location of this estrangement and the alienating lesbianism crystallize in Adrian‘s constant use of the word cunt to insult Margaret. Adrian warns her, ―You better watch your mouth or I‘ll cut your face and no one will want to fuck your ugly cunt‖ and continues with, ―You‘re gonna kill me with syphilis one day, you dirty cunt!‖ Margaret tries to defend herself and the argument results in both women struggling for control of a switchblade. Describing Margaret at one point as ―an uptight WASP cunt from Connecticut,‖ Adrian is non-differentiated from Owen as an enforcer of Margaret‘s sexual degradation, effectively replacing a putatively male subjugation with lesbianism. Margaret symbolically qualifies this non- 190 differentiation by literally turning off visual markers of subcultural and sexual difference in their apartment—the neon lights—and, later, in day-glow make-up, confesses, ―men won‘t step on you anymore, women will.‖ Just as female bodily difference makes no difference here neither does the film‘s new wave landscape in providing a space that is all at once distinct from and complicit with the dominant. Subcultural style and queer sexuality, as elements such as lighting, clothing, color, make-up, and hair signify in the film, do not function as utopian promises of resistance to the status quo—especially when the unorthodox eventually becomes the standard, as the film suggests with respect to the influence of new wave. In his much- studied Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige discusses the commodification and incorporation of punk style in the fashion industry and emphasizes the aesthetics of alienation that contributed to it. Hebdige writes of the difficulty to ―[maintain] any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even though these categories are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures‖ (95). Accordingly, fashion is both critiqued and lauded in Liquid Sky‘s approach to fashion photography and fashion shows, as the film showcases what Chris Barber and Jack Sargeant fittingly observe as ―new wave‘s new attitude [of] chic indifference [and] alliance with crude camp expression, effete narcissism, and the obscene glamour and fashion industries‖ (208). Despite the fact that the fashion ―industry‖ in the film is part of underground club culture it is also, at the same time, on the precipice of mass consumer uptake. Featuring clubgoers as models, fashion shows occur in the club and, rather than in a studio, the fashion shoot for Midnight 191 magazine takes place on the roof of Margaret and Adrian‘s apartment. While the photographers and interviewers from the magazine seem eager to capitalize on the popularity of new wave, they also participate in its indulgences, for instance bringing drugs for themselves and their photographic subjects, with the intention of contributing to the decadent atmosphere of the shoot. Even though cocaine is the dominant drug throughout the Midnight magazine photography session, ―shooting‖ photography—and film—operates in the same scope as ―shooting‖ heroin. That is, the separation between diegetic and non-diegetic begins to break down as the film closes in on drug-altered subjectivity, which contributes to the alienation within the cinematic space itself. Diegetic Alienation and Subcultural Space Queer sexual difference and new wave androgyny, as I have been arguing, are further and further removed from being ideal spaces of resistance, and form a feminist dystopia that is characterized as much by empowerment as by disempowerment. I want to extend this constellation by interrogating diegetic difference in Liquid Sky‘s filmic landscape. Robynn J. Stilwell examines instances in film sound that are less able to be categorized, what she calls the ―fantastical gap‖ between the diegetic and the non- diegetic. Analyzing several elements such as subjective space and diegetic sound, Stilwell writes: The border region—the fantastical gap—is a transformative space, a superposition, a transition between stable states. [ . . .] when we are talking about movement through the gap between diegetic and nondiegetic, that trajectory takes on great narrative and experiential import. These moments 192 do not take place randomly; they are important moments of revelation, of symbolism, and of emotional engagement within the film and without. (200) Diegetic alienation, or postpunk diegesis, while not unlike Stilwell‘s notion of unfixed diegesis, expresses less ambition about the ―transformative‖ possibilities that Stilwell sees in the ―transition between stable states.‖ Bound up with postpunk, which, as earlier described, characterizes a range of experiments in musical boundaries, postpunk diegetic sound is not simply film music under the category postpunk that shifts from being non- diegetic to diegetic within the course of a film. 171 Coextensive with postpunk music culture‘s uncertain definitional borders, postpunk diegesis in Liquid Sky rather mobilizes the hostile instability of new wave androgyny and menacing sexuality within its production of new wave film sound. A prominent example of what this looks and sounds like returns us to the film‘s fashion shoot. When one member of the photography crew turns up the volume on the stereo, the electronic music that immediately follows is putatively diegetic (and uncannily sounds like The Glove‘s ―Like an Animal‖) even if it stops and starts rather than just stays ―on‖ in the background. But as the film quickly cuts between shots of drug and alcohol use, what at first appears to be music coming from the stereo, increasingly resembles insular-sounding electronic slurping coming from a straw grasping at the last bits of liquid; this sonic shift begins when various crew members and models pour drinks and snort lines in preparation for the shoot. As Nellie, the magazine‘s fashion editor, begins to interview Margaret, the last word of each question she poses repeatedly echoes in mechanized slowed-down or sped-up high- and low-pitches, taking the form of 193 electronic music. Nellie‘s interview, consisting of a series of insulting questions about Margaret‘s new wave style, ends in words such as look, tacky, and strange, which get distorted to the point of losing any semblance of a ―natural‖ voice, de-gendering it as it becomes robotic. Overloaded with the sensory environment of the photography session, Margaret‘s subjective reception of the words as the drugs have kicked in seems to be what is conveyed in this scene. But what is actually being heard here? Unwanted sex, as analyzed above, becomes questionable as unwanted for Margaret‘s dystopian brand of empowerment, and the film‘s diegetic landscape follows suit. Namely, the structure of alienation that un/wanted sex exemplifies is bound up with the film‘s auditory space. In his excellent study of noise, Paul Hegarty discusses ―unwanted ambience‖ in the context of hearing versus listening: ―[h]earing is the simple perception of sound, listening the reflective conscious hearing. Even though on occasion the words can be used interchangeably, [. . .] there is a division into attentive perception and inattentive or unwilled perception, with the latter the lesser‖ (197; emphasis added). If Margaret hears Nellie‘s questions, but also appears to be hearing the auditory hallucinations, 172 then the status of whether the sound is diegetic can only be measured to the extent that it is meant to include, yet is external to, what Margaret is listening to: neither the questions directly nor the auditory hallucinations directly, but skewed versions of both at the same time. Like her ―inattentive‖ relationship to both the sex and the killing, Margaret‘s not fully ―attentive‖ listening translates, in the film‘s diegetic sound, as a glitch, what Torben Sangild describes as ―a minor malfunction or spurious signal, often related to a system or an electronic device‖ (258). Because the words so closely 194 resemble the purposefully composed dissonance heard in many of the new-wave-inspired electronic tracks on the film‘s original score, the glitch in—and as—the film‘s sound functions as a refusal to be categorically bound to either the diegetic or non-diegetic. Moreover, each time one of the words transforms into an auditory hallucination that Margaret is assumed to be experiencing, the film cuts to still photographs of the photography shoot, which jarringly occupies a diegetic framework paralleling the future anterior of the diegetic photography shoot. 173 As the photographs of Margaret posing at overtly uncomfortable angles in brightly colored clothes and make-up 174 accompany the distorted words, the juxtaposition-as-intentional-glitch-in-the-diegetic takes on an otherworldly, or alien, quality, similar to what Arto Lindsay of no wave group DNA states as ―interested in ideas of structure that are just as obvious to the ear; but not so much like arithmetic‖ (qtd. in Heylin 318). Of course, alienation in Liquid Sky also finds its literal form in the figure of the space alien, which unambiguously mirrors the film‘s various other social ―aliens‖: queers, addicts, new wave punks, and the German scientist investigating the alien. In an interview shortly after the film‘s release, Anne Carlisle stated, ―‗if we dubbed [the film] in a foreign language and sub-titled it, it would play better‘‖ (qtd. in Patton). Carlisle‘s description aptly situates the film‘s alienating aesthetic in terms of its visual differences from familiar qualities of American cinema. The film owes its ―foreign‖ appearance, as Carlisle‘s remarks suggest, to the artificiality of its special effects, saturation of bright colors, including the use of neon lights, alongside the monotone-spoken lines of its actors, which lend to its overall new wave theatricality. Slava Tsukerman, a Russian- 195 Jewish émigré, thus no stranger to being an alien in the United States, was heavily influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht, whose plays are famously known for their ―alienation effects.‖ 175 In addition to linking explicitly Brecht‘s avant-garde aesthetics of alienation to late-twentieth century new wave culture, the film gives the impression of simultaneously borrowing and ignoring conventions of science fiction genres; 176 however Tsukerman stated that he had not seen 1950s American science fiction film when he made Liquid Sky, but instead was ―[unconsciously motivated] to make a film which would be impossible to show in Russia at the time‖ (qtd. in Batchan 26). While Tsukerman positions himself here as an filmmaker whose work is antithetical to the Russian cultural imaginary, as a soviet émigré working in Ronald Reagan‘s America of the 1980s, he is equally situated as Other within the Cold War politics accorded to the era‘s neo-McCarthyism. Vivian Sobchack nonetheless has remarked that ―the figure of the ‗alien‘ no longer poses the political and social threat it did in the SF of the 1950s. [. . .] [Alien Others] have become our familiars, our simulacra, embodied as literally alienated images of our alienated selves‖ (Screening 293). Indeed, such ―literally alienated images‖ in Liquid Sky correspond to the space alien, which looks something like a huge eyeball and is always ―watching‖ and waiting for the next moment heroin enters a vein, until it discovers the orgasm opiates that it acquires ―through‖ Margaret. The alien‘s perspective, which the film establishes via solarization processes, fluorescent make-up, and ultraviolet light photography techniques, 177 presents another diegetic schism in the framing of the alien‘s omniscience with regards to the film viewer. The viewer is presumably the only 196 one who can ―see‖ the alien, which seems to be invisible to the other characters throughout the film; yet this ―view‖ is undermined when the scientist tracking the alien shows someone a photograph of it—the identical image presented ―solely‖ to the viewer up until that point. While the viewer‘s perspective is the same as the alien‘s (ultraviolet, metallic-color rendering of the viewpoint) when it observes possible opiate sources, the difference between the sound that accompanies the alien and the sound that the alien appears to ―be making‖ is more obscurely presented. As stated earlier, each time the alien obtains opiates, first from heroin use, then from Margaret‘s body, the sound ―of‖ the alien (named ―The Way the Alien Kills‖ on the film‘s soundtrack) is incorporated within the scope of the non-diegetic music and the diegetic narrative; however the degree to which the music actually is non-diegetic brings to the fore the role that subcultural space has in the film‘s alienating diegesis. Unmistakably non-diegetic music introduces the spacecraft‘s landing as well as subsequent shots of the interior of Margaret and Adrian‘s apartment in the opening sequence, but when the film cuts to clubgoers dancing, the music changes to a synthesized dance beat. Switching between shots of the apartment and the club initially appears to correspond to non-diegetic and diegetic music, respectively; however a closer look reveals otherwise. In his examination of the film‘s music, Mitchell Morris writes: ―The dance music in Liquid Sky‘s club is sonically a few steps closer to the written- tradition avant-garde to give it qualities of increased depersonalization as well as more generic neutrality‖ (166). While Morris takes into account that Tsukerman ―did not aim at illusions of verisimilitude‖ (165) with respect to new wave music, the notion that the film 197 displays merely the idea of the era‘s music overlooks the fact that ―generic‖ and ―avant- garde‖ elements such as minimal bass hooks and the appropriation of sounds not traditionally thought of as musical characterizes postpunk aesthetics, particularly new wave synth and other electronic and noise styles. Although the film offers no recognizable song from the era, its soundtrack conceivably stands on its own as new wave electronic music, complicating the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic at the same time as it constructs its own postpunk brand of it. Caught between and beyond diegetic and non-diegetic, 178 the club music sounds similar to the spare electronic sequencing of notes heard in new wave songs such as The Human League‘s ―Being Boiled,‖ Men without Hats‘ ―Safety Dance,‖ or anything by Kraftwerk, for instance. This similarity positions the club music as plausibly diegetic music to which the clubgoers dance, but in mainly retaining features of recognizably new wave music, the film‘s club music in its uncanniness also becomes eerily mismatched with the dancing. Nonetheless presented as what Hebdige calls a ―dumbshow of blank robotics‖ (108), the dancing sets out to further obscure the diegetic composition of the scene in that the dancing‘s robotic qualities obfuscate its relationship to the music, which is already unclear as the source being danced to. With respect to the film‘s club music, this postpunk diegesis presents itself as uncomfortably distant from diegetic music inasmuch as it is inextricably bound to being represented as such; however, the way that Liquid Sky constructs the diegetic/non- diegetic in other instances is less a question of occupying a space outside of both categories and more a question of depicting music that is intended as one only to take on 198 the characteristics of the other. ―Although the film can create certain illusions that fortify audience acceptance of a given piece of music as diegetic,‖ Royal S. Brown writes, ―the diegetic tipoff generally comes from an object such as a radio or a phonograph in the visual diegesis‖ (69). As explored earlier, the indication of diegetic sound that Brown discusses emerges when a character turns up the volume on the stereo, only to have its diegetic certainty quickly undermined. In another scene, the film similarly disrupts its diegetic sound but specifically does so through ugly sex‘s double meaning as it pertains to androgyny and sexual activity. When Margaret and Jimmy go to her apartment for what turns out to be Jimmy‘s failed attempt at getting some free heroin on her initial assumption of going to her apartment to have sex, the first shot displayed is a record player, indicating that the music is diegetic. Yet as the scene progresses, the music, continuing at an identical volume, accompanies a medium shot of the outside of the apartment followed by the alien‘s sudden awareness of Margaret and Jimmy in the apartment. The sound of the alien‘s awareness (shown via the heat-sensitive-color perspective and the eye-like figure appearing suddenly to open) seamlessly blends in with the music. Only once Jimmy, in frustration, smashes a glass against the record player and the music stops is the viewer abruptly reminded that the music is supposed to be diegetic. Intercut with this scene is Adrian‘s performance piece, ―Me and My Rhythm Box,‖ which takes place at the club. With a beatbox literally strapped to her body, Adrian sings monotone lyrics about the estrangement of her body, a body as a rhythm box, against the backdrop of diegetic beats—resembling heart beats—emanating from the box. The moment Jimmy smashes the record player, the film immediately cuts to Adrian‘s 199 performance, the music of which, when switching back to the apartment, becomes the non-diegetic music that establishes the antagonistic tone of Margaret and Jimmy‘s fighting in the apartment. From there, the scene shifts to the dressing room at the club, where Margaret and Jimmy get ready to participate in a fashion show. The background music, which is still ―Rhythm Box,‖ is diegetic in that it is meant to be Adrian performing in the club‘s main room, adjacent to the dressing room. But this diegetic music is dislocated at best: because the previous scene positioned ―Rhythm Box‖ as non- diegetic within Margaret and Jimmy‘s hostile interaction with each other, the music was also, at the same time, diegetic in depicting Adrian‘s performance. The source of the background music in the dressing room, then, ruptures its position as the diegetic music from Adrian‘s performance next door, since its effect is conspicuously non-diegetic. Murray Pomerance has explored, of late, diegetic sound in the context of Michel Chion‘s theories of the acousmêtre, the source of a sound that can be heard but not seen. In dialogue with Chion, Pomerance discusses ―an acousmêtre for the eye‖ and de- acousmatization. He writes, This is a visual analogue for de-acousmatization: the unrealized and indefinable is slowly transposed as geography and form. A similar refiguration of the self takes place with de-acousmatization, as when, suddenly aware of the source of the sound that had presented itself suspended and disconnected from a visible origin, we recognize ourselves in a fixed rather than an indeterminate space. (Pomerance 119 – 120) Liquid Sky‘s de-acousmatized sound nevertheless is its re-acousmatized sound, so that self- recognition and a stable sense of familiarity are locatable only to the extent that they are temporary. 200 Unfamiliar Company Questions of recognition and familiarity directly come through in the two sex scenes that occur in front of a group of people in the film. The group ―participation‖ represented in them brings the film‘s ugly sex and feminist dystopia full circle; subcultural alliances form to antagonize rather than coalesce around liberatory intentions. Consequently, these scenes are the film‘s queerest and ugliest ones: Margaret‘s fellating Jimmy, and the lesbian sex scene with Adrian. Unlike the others, these sex/death scenes vehemently defamiliarize the contexts that they set up, doing so through undoing the modes of recognition that justify anything other than a foreclosure of lesbianism‘s redemption. Recall that Carlisle plays both Margaret and Jimmy, and as convincing as are her individual performances, the film capitalizes on both characters‘ looking alike in order to put pressure on the binaries beautiful/ugly, masculine/feminine, gay/lesbian, male/female all of which coagulate in the figure of Margaret. During the photography shoot, Margaret and Jimmy begin to exchange words 179 against the backdrop of a non- diegetic ―Rhythm Box‖; but each time Jimmy says to Margaret, ―You‘re so old and ugly, I can‘t look at you,‖ Margaret responds with, ―I‘m so ugly and you‘re so beautiful, I think you should hit me.‖ The magazine‘s crew, seeing this interaction as an S/M-flavored photo opportunity, dares them to have sex, chanting ―do it,‖ until the words become menacing, electronic bullets of sound. At first, Jimmy insists that he cannot; however, someone holds a mirror up to him, telling him, ―look at yourself, you are the most beautiful boy.‖ While looking at himself, he gives in to being fellated by Margaret and then vaporizes at the moment of his orgasm. 180 Taking what Chris Straayer calls ―bi- 201 sexed performance‖ 181 one step further, Liquid Sky, in having Carlisle play the roles of both characters, sets up Jimmy‘s gay male beauty in opposition to Margaret‘s ugly lesbianism, with the ugly dyke ultimately surfacing as the residue of the scenario. Here, the figure of the lesbian, in being the remainder, is alienated from the group even as she is the very catalyst for its grouping in this context. After Jimmy vaporizes and Margaret attempts to convince the onlookers from the magazine crew of her ability to kill, Adrian makes the crew a bet: ―I‘ll bet you $300 I can fuck Margaret and not die,‖ she says. ―Of course you won‘t die,‖ responds one of the photographers, ―but I‘m not sure that watching you two fuck is worth $300.‖ While moments earlier in the scene, the crew was keenly intent on documenting androgynous heterosexual sex for the magazine, lesbian sex is deemed ―too much,‖ as the photographer claims, implying that it will in no way resemble the idealized image specific to heterosexual pornography. Determined to prove that she can survive sex with Margaret, Adrian seems merely to want to have sex in front of the crowd. Significantly, Adrian gets two women from the crew to hold Margaret down as she non-erotically tribates with Margaret. Adrian uses a non-normative sexual act to prove lesbian sexuality‘s ugliness to the heterosexual gaze, but, in doing so, she is also proved wrong about Margaret‘s ability and dies. Female alliances at this moment position feminist resistance as an exercise in futility—and fatality. On several occasions throughout the film, Adrian mentions that she and Margaret will leave New York for Berlin. As Margaret attempts to resist being literally pulled to the bed by Adrian, she desperately asks, ―We‘re going to Berlin, right?‖ and repeats, 202 ―Berlin, Berlin,‖ all while knowing that she is about to kill Adrian against her will. Historically known for its thriving environment of feminist politics and lesbianism, Berlin was also a hotbed of new wave music cultures. 182 In the film, this convergence remains an inaccessible location, an ideal place without the ability to be realized. Recognizing that Berlin instead represents giving in to the alien/ation, Margaret climbs on the roof, injects a lethal dose of heroin, does a spastic, orgasmic dance and gets vaporized, dissolving what Berlin has stood for up until that point—which ends at the point of the needle in Margaret. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE IN HIGH ART If Berlin in Liquid Sky represents lesbianism as a utopian space that can never be realized, the appropriately named character Lucy Berliner (who has returned from Berlin with her girlfriend, literally a Berliner) in Lisa Cholodenko‘s debut feature High Art (1998) signifies that inaccessible space through her photography and is the driving force behind the film‘s construction of sexual alienation. While much of the film critiques success, High Art enjoyed a successful independent film run premiering at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. Moreover, Ally Sheedy won an Independent Spirit Award in 1999 for her role as Lucy 183 and director Lisa Cholodenko won the Best Screenplay Award at Sundance the year of its release. 184 Janet Maslin‘s New York Times review claimed that ―the film sacrifices any hope of raw edges and real emotion to its own chic sensibility‖ (E1); yet in 2000, it made Esquire magazine‘s list of the ―The Best Movies You‘ve Never Seen.‖ 185 In exploring the axes along which sexuality and 203 substance abuse run in the film, I argue that lesbianism emerges as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be ―developed‖: the negative corresponds with dystopian desire, and, signified here by an ineffable visual space, eventually locates lesbianism as extrinsic to viable desires. As the inability to distinguish the desire for heroin from lesbian desire establishes the film‘s overall framework of alienation and negativity, the photographic negative in this study just as much corresponds to the literal negatives of the photographs that Lucy shoots on her manual camera; the prints—and their negatives—symbolically register alienation as inextricably linked with the techniques and effects of their production. Deborah Bright writes, ―[photographs] masquerade as compelling evidence of the real, while obscuring their status as (always already) mediated representations‖ (5). As Bright suggests, this contradiction is conceptually embedded in the meanings afforded to photographic prints, whose very structures are oppositionally produced as positives from negatives. 186 Henry Fox Talbot patented negative-positive imaging on paper, or the calotype, in 1841, ushering in what would become a long history of artistic and documentation techniques built upon the possibility of multiple images from a given source. 187 Talbot‘s calotype was compared to Louis Daguerre‘s 1839 daguerreotype, which involved exposing light onto a metal plate, resulting in a more finely detailed image than that of the calotype but without the ability to be replicated. 188 Until the late-twentieth century, when digital photography, which requires no negative, became the standard, organic processes of shooting, developing, and printing photographs had everything to do with varying levels of manipulating the photographic negative. As its title suggests, High Art 204 features these organic processes in displaying the artistry of producing photographs as much as it names the relationship between addiction and photography in the film. The process of shooting photographs results in negatives while developing prints from the negatives become metaphors for, and physical agents of, how the film formulates its images of desire. Before exploring how lesbianism specifically gets translated in terms of these paradigms, it is nonetheless necessary to show how the film refracts lesbian desire through the desire for heroin and vice versa, establishing both desires as seemingly indistinct. The film‘s central narrative is set in motion when Syd (Radha Mitchell), in trying to find the source of a leak in her apartment, knocks on the door of the apartment above where she and her boyfriend, James, live. Their upstairs neighbor is Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a once-famous, heroin-addicted photographer who lives there with her never- sober girlfriend, Greta (humorously played by a drone-voiced Patricia Clarkson), a washed-up German actor who once had roles in Fassbinder‘s films. Syd eventually gets drawn into Lucy‘s world; Lucy‘s artsy friends, along with Lucy and Greta, regularly snort heroin in their apartment, which functions as a communal drug den of sorts. Recently promoted from intern to assistant editor at hip Frame magazine, Syd is intimidated by the seasoned editors who take credit for her work and treat her like a peon. This begins to change once she brings in Lucy‘s monograph, which immediately sparks the interests of her superiors, who remember Lucy‘s work from a decade earlier and her controversial leaving of the art world with no explanation. Lucy eventually agrees to do a feature for Frame, with Syd as her editor, and the two go on a weekend trip that functions 205 somewhat as an intervention and confirms their desires for each other. The photographs of Syd that Lucy shoots during their weekend end up as the magazine‘s feature, but just as the issue gets released, Lucy fatally overdoses after an unsuccessful attempt to get clean. On the surface, the film is concerned with the development of Syd and Lucy‘s mutual desires for one another fueled in part by Lucy‘s alienation from her past fame and current heroin addiction; however the film also reveals a critique of success in competing depictions of Lucy‘s inability to handle it and Syd‘s anxiety to achieve it, only to have professional achievement be the only thing that ultimately remains by the end of the film. Although Cholodenko cites photographer Jack Pierson as the primary influence for the film‘s overall look and narrative direction, the Lucy Berliner character is often compared to Nan Goldin. 189 Goldin, best known for photographing personal acquaintances in settings to which only confidants would have access, has focused much of her work on queer sexualities and drug subcultures; on the other hand, Pierson‘s work, also concerned with photographing close friends as well as ordinary objects, takes on ―[t]he appearance of technical maladroitness, as for instance when he over or under- exposes a photograph [. . .] as a means of emphasizing the momentary‖ (Heinrich 141). Accordingly, work by Goldin, Pierson, and New York photographer JoJo Whilden were used in the film as ―Lucy‘s‖ photographs and for the Frame magazine covers that adorn its office. 190 Syd‘s initial attraction is not to Lucy directly, but to Lucy‘s photographs. Seduced by their composition, subjects, and what she admires as their ―amazing symmetry,‖ Syd‘s infatuation with the images extends beyond a passion for the photographic arts. At one point in the film, the viewer learns that Syd studied critical 206 theory and, in casually referencing Roland Barthes, discusses how Lucy‘s work embodies his notion of photographic ecstasy. This exchange is telling since it establishes an undifferentiated view of Lucy from that of her photographs: flattered, and in this moment clearly taking to Syd, Lucy responds with, ―I haven‘t been deconstructed in a long time.‖ In examining what she calls ―the aesthetics of ‗intimacy‘‖ in the work of Goldin, Pierson, and other photographers known as the Boston School, Liz Kotz describes their aesthetic in terms of ―a possibly banal image, or even a gruesome one, that triggers a flood of memory, a spark of recognition, and a sense that something private and precious has been disclosed to you‖ (207). This ―private and precious [disclosure],‖ unspoken as it may be in photographically relaying the intersecting desires and dependencies that are to come for Syd and Lucy, also foresees its cinematic visualization in more concrete forms. Syd‘s first time on heroin is somewhat accidental. Under the impression that she is about to snort cocaine, Syd is immediately impacted by the effect of the heroin, and reclining on the couch, gazes up at one of Lucy‘s photographs of a dyke couple in bed. Syd hallucinates that she is watching the couple in the photograph seductively kiss, as if the photograph were a film or a bedroom window rather than a still image. 191 The couple from the photograph, close friends of Lucy‘s and fellow heroin aficionados, is literally sitting across from Syd. They are not touching each other as in the photograph, but are getting high instead. This moment is significant in that it contextualizes Syd‘s recognition of her own lesbian desire through its association with her heroin high as much as it confirms her temptation for the heroin within the context of lesbian sexuality. The photographic prints, then, mark a mode of becoming: for Syd, the heroin high ―awakens‖ 207 the static image of lesbian sexuality in the photo. From there, Syd goes downstairs to her apartment and wakes up her boyfriend by having sex with him, but cannot handle her heroin high anymore than she can handle her overwhelming need to be with Lucy. As Anat Pick states, ―this straight sex scene feels very much like substitution. We clearly sense that Syd is acting out her desire for Lucy‖ (114). Yet this enactment of lesbian desire goes beyond substitution in that it becomes one of a series of displacements among substance and sexual desires in the film. Later, at another one of Lucy‘s parties to which Syd has brought James, Syd goes into the bedroom to find Lucy, but the first thing she does once she closes the door is snort a line. When Syd and Lucy are alone, both high, they begin to kiss, though it is unclear whether the lure for Syd is Lucy, the heroin, or being high with Lucy. At several earlier points in the film, before Syd is aware of the heroin use in Lucy‘s apartment, ―in the bedroom‖ gets coded as the location of substance consumption; also a site of privacy, of sex and sleep, the bedroom in this instance is an alchemical mix of desires, signaling where divisions between intimacies collapse. Tellingly, Greta‘s overdose interrupts Lucy and Syd‘s kissing. Greta survives, but the episode raises concerns about both Syd‘s and Lucy‘s ―primary‖ relationships as much as it shapes lesbianism as alienated from notions of ideal coupling. Dependency, on drugs as well as on partners, is at the center of Lucy and Greta‘s complex relationship, at the same time as it initially is the basis of Lucy and Syd‘s. The film‘s first explicit depiction of lesbian sexuality involves Lucy and Greta, but while the two begin to have sex, Greta falls into a heroin stupor: Lucy continues to undress Greta and move down her body even though Greta has found refuge in the drug instead. The eroticism of this scene, then, is 208 also the site of affliction since it communicates the extent to which both women have fully given in to the temptation of being high in lieu of sexual arousal. Despite the film‘s depiction of Lucy as somewhat more in control of her drug dependency than Greta, her attempt to take care of Greta no less registers as a co-dependent framework wherein sexuality and addiction can no longer be differentiated. Referring to Greta‘s addiction, Lucy says, ―I‘m going to help you get over this,‖ which Greta interprets as an excuse to break up with her for Syd. This blurred state of reliance comes to fruition when Lucy returns after withdrawing, and Greta‘s request, ―be with me tonight,‖ leads to Lucy‘s fatal heroin overdose. Referencing Eve Sedgwick‘s connection between (male) same-sex desire and the addict‘s ―needs,‖ 192 Maurizio Viano discusses the similarities between filmic portrayals of homosexuality and those of drug use: ―If drug users are a closeted minority, an analysis of the cinematic representation of drug use is then bound to turn into an examination of another ‗celluloid closet‘‖ (151). While Viano‘s important investigation suggests that the on-screen visibility of the addict and the homosexual have been comparably suppressed, these minority figures become one and the same in High Art, further opening up questions about visibility—both off-screen and photographic, which will be discussed later. Though it may not be overtly thought of in terms of minority discourse, Greta and Lucy‘s relationship speaks to the film‘s subtle yet potent treatment of ethnic othering, since Greta is German and Lucy is Jewish. 193 The film addresses this othering in the context of Lucy‘s relationship with her mother, who is assumed to be directly connected to Holocaust survival and refers to Greta only as ―the German.‖ ―Jew-haters, all of them,‖ 209 Lucy‘s mother states and in the same conversation disapprovingly utters, ―god forbid in my time my mother would let me be with a girl, let alone a German.‖ While Lucy‘s mother clearly finds Greta‘s nationality more disturbing than her being female, the conflation of same-sex sexuality with a history of fascism speaks to a particular tension within the film‘s depiction of ethnicity. Greta and Lucy‘s mother share similarly thick Eastern European accents and both provide the film‘s version of ―comic relief,‖ 194 whether in Greta‘s drugged behavior or in Lucy‘s mother‘s exaggerated assumptions. In both cases, the deliveries of their lines become humorous in the film because of being associated with foreign otherness and competing histories of trauma (Lucy‘s mother) and fame (Greta). The power of memory for both characters dictates their delusional present perspectives, connecting, if obliquely, memory and negativity with the visual. Greta, having acted in Fassbinder‘s films but patently refusing to accept that she had no career after the director died, pines for the past in order to access a present desire to go back to Berlin—which exists as nothing other than a negative version of what it formerly meant for her. For Lucy‘s mother, the contradiction emerges within the collective Jewish imaginary specific to her generation, as W. J. T. Mitchell explains, ―The negativity of memory, the need to forget while remembering, is perhaps most vividly illustrated in Holocaust survivor narratives‖ (201). Mitchell links such accounts of remembering to slave narratives, which similarly evoke the complicated necessity of visualizing without necessarily (re)seeing. 195 Images of the past, as Mitchell suggests, stand as indirect re- experiences, ones that are simultaneously public and private, hidden and open. When Lucy confesses her addiction to her mother and implies that she is torn between Greta 210 and Syd, this moment is revealed as follows: ―I have a love issue and a drug problem or maybe I have a love problem and a drug issue.‖ Beyond failing to distinguish sexuality from addiction, this moment, more unsettling than Greta‘s being German, results in Lucy‘s mother simply walking away, a refusal to see what Lucy has, in possibly one of the film‘s most evasively honest scenes, just exposed to her. Much of High Art pertains to seeing and looking: whether literally or in terms of realization and/or understanding. It is no mistake, then, that eyes figure prominently in the film with close-up shots dominating many of the scenes. Lucy focuses her camera with open eyes while shooting photographs; minor characters respond with looks that articulate more than their words; and Syd constantly stares at people or gazes at objects and photographs. Images such as these strike a delicate balance among the seeing subject, the camera, and the embodiment of its technology. The camera was modeled on the physiology of the human eye, the optical principle of establishing an image out of inverting reflected light, which eventually led to the development of the camera obscura and the stereoscope. 196 But as Kaja Silverman explains, ―[t]he relation between the camera and the human optical organ might now seem less analogous than prosthetic: the camera promises to make good the deficiencies of the eye, and to shore up a distinction which the eye alone cannot sustain—the distinction between vision and spectacle‖ (130). This distinction is pertinent to the roles that the camera, eyes, and the camera-eye play in High Art‘s augmentation of the spectacle in terms of what is not seen. In other words, the film‘s most ―spectacular‖ moments are those left off camera 197 : the ill effects of heroin addiction such as frequent vomiting; what the body goes through in detoxifying; Syd and 211 Lucy‘s finally having sex; and Lucy‘s death. Lucy‘s death, for instance, is revealed when Syd walks by a mutual friend quietly sitting in Lucy‘s mother‘s car. After he simply tells her, ―she died this morning,‖ neither he nor Syd burst into tears but are emotionally dumbstruck instead. This de-emphasis of dramatic elements in favor of the unspeakable evokes Vivian Sobchack‘s historicizing of death and its visual representation in the twentieth century: Initially a social and public event [in the nineteenth century], what is today uncomfortably called ‗natural‘ death has over time become an antisocial and private experience—all the more shocking when we are confronted with the sight of it. At the same time, we are more familiar with the public sight of accidental and violent death, death thus seen less in the natural order of things than as an aberrant, if frequent and highly charged, dramatic event. (Carnal 227) According to Sobchack, this shift in ―the sight‖ of death corresponds with sexuality‘s entering public discourse; the range of privacies once associated with death and sex, for Sobchack, has resulted in casting ―natural‖ death as outside the realm of intelligibility, compromising its current representational status. Cinematically representing death in High Art precariously follows this formulation in the difficulty of classifying Lucy‘s death as either ―accidental‖ or ―natural‖ within the evenhanded approach to seeing sexual identity and/or problems with substances in the film. If seeing and looking dominate the film‘s shaping of sexuality and addiction, then equally significant is what is being looked at and/or seen. The reference here is not only to the photographic prints in the film, but also to the film itself. High Art‘s sophisticated look is ―flat‖ in the sense that it maintains a consistent tone in its execution of events. Hence, the film‘s narrative progression comes through as balanced throughout, even in its 212 most dramatic on-screen moments, such as the suddenness of Greta‘s overdose or the emotional charge of Syd‘s argument with James. Containing multi-genre, experimental songs by Shudder to Think for its mostly instrumental score, the film switches only twice to downtempo tracks by Reservoir and JeepJazz Project. Cholodenko also purposefully eschewed jarring camerawork and jump-cuts and in further enhancing the evenness of its tone, she combined near-seamless editing with cinematographer Tami Reiker‘s use of ―‗blue and orange washes‘‖ (qtd. in Rudolph 20) for the lighting as well as pastel greens and blues for Syd‘s wardrobe, and reds and browns for Lucy‘s. Along with this attention to color and lighting, Reiker shot half the film with a jib arm, which allowed for the ―floating camera movement‖ (Rudolph 22) and helped to craft what Cholodenko calls the film‘s ―languid quality‖; this quality, of course, operates in the same scope as the characters‘ opiate-induced perspectives. 198 Given the film‘s aesthetic ―flatness‖-as- consistency in tone and look, the concept of flatness lends itself to literal and figurative attributes of photographic prints. In a brief chapter equating photography with what he calls ―flat death,‖ Roland Barthes writes, ―Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the flat print‖ (92). In referring to the stillness of the photographic print, Barthes‘ equation touches upon what the prints of Syd and Lucy‘s weekend signify beyond the material condition of their flatness. Rather than submit these prints, Syd initially submits what one of the Frame editors calls ―completely flat‖ prints of Greta underwater, which, she states have ―no context.‖ But the prints of Syd and Lucy 213 eventually replace the prints of Greta and provide ―context‖ just as ―the simple click‖ frames sexuality and death at the very moment of being captured in the camera. Photography‘s primary relationship is that of the print to its negative—and it is in this context that the film gains its most crucial articulation of lesbian sexuality‘s aesthetic of alienation. On the way to a remote house upstate for the weekend, Lucy photographs Syd in the car, at which point Syd finds some heroin packed in with the camera and states, ―I don‘t want that to be our only connection.‖ While they presumably stay clean of hard drugs the entire weekend (one scene shows them drinking wine), what will ultimately connect them is indeed the heroin, but much like the occasion of their meeting, this connection is inextricably linked to the photographic: the memory of Lucy‘s heroin overdose will imbue the photographic prints while the prints themselves visually substantiate the outcome of acting on their desires. Additional photographs that Lucy takes of Syd in bed, the morning after they first have sex that weekend, congeal their sexual and affective connection, synchronizing the remnant of sexual and substance desires with finally seeing where those desires conflict. The very last photograph we see Lucy take is of the two of them embracing, both looking directly into the camera lens. As André Bazin tells us, ―photography does not create eternity, [. . .] it embalms time‖ (14). If to preserve memory is to make it infinitely endure, these concepts are also, as Bazin suggests, finely differentiated when located on/as the surface of a published photographic print. After Syd finds out about Lucy‘s death, she returns to her office: the Frame issue has come to fruition with the final photograph of Syd and Lucy adorning its cover. Yet the photographs are primarily of Syd, shot through Lucy‘s perspective, which is also the 214 camera‘s, and thus literally and eternally places Lucy ―out of the picture.‖ Syd‘s eyes well up as she looks at the photographs of herself frozen in the moments that she was last with Lucy. In preserving these moments, the development of the negatives into prints also reveal Syd‘s sexuality, documenting the development of Syd and Lucy‘s relationship. But just like the capturing of these moments as negatives in Lucy‘s camera, the development of lesbian sexual desire ultimately remains in the negative. Such potent images of the connections between lesbianism and ugliness, as I have sought to illustrate in this dissertation, demonstrate the network of representational, bodily, and experiential domains that resist recuperation by showing the identifications with and thus renewal of pejorative designations. As pejorative, late-twentieth century lesbian identity does not signify a strict return to initial forces of homophobia, racism, and misogyny that establish lesbianism as ugliness, but it also does not recuperate ugliness as positive, useful, or politically advantageous. Beginning with Stein‘s and McKay‘s application of primitivism in shaping lesbianism through damaged language, non-ideal sexuality, and racial otherness, to Gregory‘s and Lopez‘s identifying queer politics as nihilistic through political and visual incorrectness, to Sapphire‘s violated expectations about lesbian sexuality and surviving abuse, and Liquid Sky‘s and High Art‘s framing of lesbianism as dystopian desire, ugliness has been central, but largely overlooked, in accounting for the racial, gendered, and sexual differences that this dissertation has attempted to theorize in terms of lesbian identity. As long as lesbianism persists as an identificatory and representational context, the dykes will continue to revise and critically reassess what it means and looks like. 215 CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES 153 Carlisle, 5. 154 Hall, 352. 155 Dozens of films fit this characterization. Some examples: Gus Van Sant‘s Drugstore Cowboy (1989) uses heroin addiction as lens through which to view Portland, Oregon in the 1970s, for example, and Bright Lights, Big City characterizes the economic frivolity of 1980s New York in focusing on cocaine-addicted yuppies. 156 For an analysis of the connections between the figure of the addict and that of the homosexual in the nineteenth century, see Sedgwick, 171 – 178. See also Brodie and Redfield for a brief, but compelling, history of the concept of addiction and its relationship to sexual pathology and the non-Western Other. 157 A Los Angeles Times reviewer called the ―weird, decadent‖ new wavers in the film ―largely repellent,‖ but went on claim that the film ―is saved from tedium and pretentiousness by a savagely dark humor‖ (Thomas, ―Film Cornucopia‖ 41). A somewhat ambivalent New York Times review claimed it ―a celebration of virtually every antisocial attitude one can think of‖ (Canby A15), while Cindy Patton, who reviewed the film for Boston‘s Gay Community News, labeled it ―nihilist/feminist‖ (Patton). Thought of mostly as an art film, what one review fittingly described as having ―the manner of a comic strip about New York‘s punk culture‖ (Canby A15), Liquid Sky does not pretend to include a subtext that necessarily contains a revolutionary or ethical message about the hopelessness of modern-day society, drug abuse, or flexible gender and sexual identities. Instead, the film is largely preoccupied with underground subcultural aesthetics, which dominate the film‘s narrative and look, emphasizing the precarious position that new wave‘s increasing yet tenuous popularity played in temporarily mainstreaming queer genders and sexualities. See also Maslin; Thomas, ―Looking‖; London and Gross. 158 See Trefz, 65; Batchan, 27. 159 See especially Gendron, ―New York: From New Wave to No Wave (1971 – 1981),‖ 225 – 327. 160 Carlisle wrote Liquid Sky the novel in 1987, five years after the film‘s initial release. Dialogue in the novel is almost identical to the film; however the novel is markedly different in that the Margaret character imagines the alien and does not kill those with whom she has sex. See Carlisle. 161 For instance, Talking Heads had several chart-topping hits while mainstream radio virtually ignored groups such as Contortions or Throbbing Gristle, who, as ―musical‖ acts blur the lines between audience confrontation, noise, and performance art. 162 Purposefully lowercasing the I in image while abbreviating limited, Lydon named PiL as such for the added irony of ―incorporating‖ its image. 163 For example, while The Generation [The Blank Generation] (1976) consists of a series of silent recordings of live performances asynchronously mixed with recordings from those bands‘ albums, the classic documentary of the Los Angeles punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) is more conventionally shot and includes performance clips as well as interviews from band members and fans. 164 As late as 1986, the acclaimed Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen biopic, Sid & Nancy became a cult classic while just one year later, Hail the New Puritan (1987) fell into obscurity, even though its 216 unclassifiable aesthetic is more likely to be called postpunk: it combines warped ballet numbers (with a stage design consisting of flowers fashioned out of eggs and pipes and set to the music of The Fall); documentation of performers getting ready to go on stage; and a random fictionalized club scene. 165 See Harper and Mendik: ―While the cult movie can take many generic forms, its depictions are frequently aligned [. . .] to excessive, dangerous and even distasteful types of display, which impress themselves on their audiences as distinct from the viewing patterns that make up our everyday cinema consumption‖ (11). 166 See also Marchetti for a discussion of film audiences‘ identifying with negative representations of their subcultural positions. She writes, ―subcultural members can still enjoy a film in which their activities are condemned by assuming an ironic position vis-à-vis the film‘s narrative‖ (413). 167 Literally taking as its subject ―creatures of the night,‖ polysexual vampires and androgynous clubgoers, Tony Scott‘s The Hunger (1983) begins in an underground Manhattan goth club featuring a live show by postpunk band Bauhaus (performing their underground hit, ―Bela Lugosi‘s Dead‖). A postpunk film that is usually mischaracterized as simply ―horror,‖ The Hunger was dismissed as being ―artsy, esoteric, and self- indulgent‖ (The Hunger, director‘s commentary) but quickly achieved cult status partially because of its cast‘s fashionably enigmatic genders and sexualities: Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie play the central vampire couple and Susan Sarandon, featured in The Rocky Horror Picture Show just a few years earlier, has a lesbian sex scene with Deneuve. Similar to Liquid Sky, The Hunger depicts non-normative bodies, practices, and desires via a framework of substance abuse; in the case of The Hunger, the figure of the vampire translates as the inability to distinguish the need—or ―hunger‖—for substances (blood) from the need for sex. 168 In their study of midnight movies, James Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses such intersections in their aptly named chapter, ―Rock, Drugs, Drag, Camp, Punk, Gore, and Agit-Prop,‖ 252 – 300. 169 See Greenlaw for a personal account of being alienated from normative femininity in embracing punk style; Halberstam for a discussion of punk and tomboyism; O‘Brien for an account of being female and punk; LeBlanc for a sociological study of female punks‘ negotiations of masculinist punk culture and style. 170 Jennifer Doyle has also examined bad sex. Doyle discusses using bad sex ―to drive a wedge into discourse on women and sexual history in which negative, disabling, unpleasurable, humiliating, abjecting sexual experiences might be projected into a space defined by something more complex than a contractual, consent/nonconsent model of sexual encounters‖ (98 – 99). See her chapter ―The Effect of Intimacy: Tracy Emin‘s Bad Sex Aesthetics,‖ 97 – 120. 171 One ―Cine-Semiology‖ defines this as ―progressive diegeticization‖ (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman- Lewis 61). 172 For a notion of hallucinated sound as auditory imagination that is not drug induced, see Ihde. Ihde writes, ―There is, in auditory imagination, the possibility of a synthesis of imagined and perceived sound [. . .]. But in this case the auditory ‗hallucination‘ is not a matter of hearing one thing as something else but a matter of a doubled sound, a synthesized harmonic echo‖ (62). 173 See also Morris, 164 – 165 for a discussion of the defamiliarizing gesture in using an electronic version of Heinrich‘s ―Laurel Waltz‖ to accompany still photographs of Margaret‘s adolescence at another point in the film. 217 174 See Neale for a discussion of the use of color and the question of objective versus subjective representations of the female body as it relates to the history of Technicolor. 175 See Rorrison, xviii, xxiv. Because of its critique of bourgeois society, minimalistic original score, and subcultural setting, Liquid Sky is mostly compared to Brecht‘s The Threepenny Opera (1928) (one of the film‘s characters even mentions the play by name at one point in the film); however the film also appears to borrow heavily from Brecht‘s first play, Baal (1918), which has a strong focus on hedonism, ―primitive‖ sexuality, and features an ugly poet as well as female characters who are constantly demeaned. Also see Batchan, 27 – 29 for Tsukerman‘s discussion of being inspired by Brecht and the connections he makes to new wave aesthetics. 176 Discussing Liquid Sky alongside Repo Man, Knee argues that the films ―appear to undermine the [science fiction] genre by reducing what is alien, once an object of terror and awe, to the commonplace‖ (104). Also see Landon, ―‗Fantastech‘ Visions: Previewing Shifts from Science Fiction Film to Science Fiction Media,‖ 93 – 116 and ―Future So Bright They Gotta Wear Shades: Cyberpunk and Beyond,‖ 119 – 143, for a discussion of science fiction film and punk/new wave aesthetics and music. 177 See Trefz, especially 64 – 69. 178 The assumption I make here in stating ―between and beyond the diegetic and non-diegetic‖ is misguided in the sense that a pure notion of either category is somewhat of a fiction. In historicizing the concept of the diegetic, James Lastra theorizes the constructedness and contradiction inherent in its representational function: ―‗Diegetic‘ representations [. . .] threatened fictionality where they seemed to assert the truth. Breaking without appearing to break the necessarily material, causal links between a representation and its referent made diegetic modes of realism (filmic or acoustic) convincing, ideologically powerful, and troublesome for representational cultures of all types. Delineating which were real and which were convincing was a major concern‖ (75). See Lastra, ―Performance, Inscription, Diegesis: The Technological Transformation of Representational Causality,‖ 61 – 91. Royal S. Brown has also discussed the seamless movement between the diegetic and non-diegetic: ―The ear [. . .] is generally not afforded the luxury of being able to make a major distinction between the diegetic and nondiegetic musical cues: to the ear, both are aural/musical images. And, in fact, numerous movies have sequences in which the music shifts diegetic – nondiegetic alliances with no apparent justification, practical, artistic, philosophical, or otherwise‖ (69). See especially Brown, ―Actions/Interactions: The Source Beyond the Source,‖ 67 – 91, and ―Styles and Interactions: Beyond the Diegesis,‖ 92 – 147. 179 In her study of speech interaction in film, Sarah Kozloff discusses the characteristics of monologue, dialogue, and polylogue. At this moment in the film, the components of dialogue and character interaction are, to a certain extent, transgressed in that Margaret and Jimmy‘s dialogue is also Carlisle‘s monologue. See Kozloff, especially 70 – 77. 180 Margaret humorously alludes to this when she kicks Jimmy out of her apartment at an earlier point in the film; she says to him, ―fuck yourself.‖ 181 Straayer makes reference to postpunk icons such as David Bowie and Annie Lennox in the context of theorizing bi-sexed performance in contemporary film and video: ―Simultaneously we are given the pleasure of conventionally reading and the pleasure of subverting convention. The woman is the man‖ (88). Carlisle makes this literal in playing the roles of both Margaret and Jimmy. 182 See Stratigakos for a history of Berlin as a women‘s city. See Tamagne, Volumes I and II, for a pre- World War II history of homosexuality in Europe that specifies Berlin, London, and Paris. Uli Edel‘s postpunk film Christiane F. (1981) nonetheless situates Berlin as the locus of drug addiction and teenage prostitution, set against the backdrop of the city‘s burgeoning new wave club scene. 218 183 Interestingly, Sheedy plays a major role in Slava Tsukerman‘s latest film, Perestroika (2009). 184 See Rudolph; Munoz. 185 Gordinier, 105. 186 Derrida‘s theory of aporia is also relevant here. In discussing the formal contradiction embedded in impossibility knowing one‘s death, he writes, ―How to justify the choice of negative form (aporia) to designate a duty that, through the impossible or the impracticable, nonetheless announces itself in an affirmative fashion? [. . .] The affirmation that announced itself through a negative form was therefore the necessity of experience itself, the experience of the aporia [. . .] as endurance or as passion, as interminable resistance or remainder‖ (19). 187 See Rosenblum, 24 – 32; 194 – 98. 188 See The Edinburgh Review, January 1843: An Excerpt. 189 Rudolph, 20; Bowen. 190 See director‘s commentary on High Art DVD; Rudolph, 20. 191 See Silverman‘s chapter ―The Screen,‖ 195 – 227, for a Lacanian reading of the photographic image and the moving image. She writes, ―The still photograph dramatizes more strikingly than the moving image both the advent of specular existence as the loss of flux and vitality, and that necessarily suspended state in which any body aspires to formal coherence‖ (198). See also Sobchack‘s chapter ―The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic ‗Presence,‘‖ 135 – 162 in Carnal Thoughts. Sobchack theorizes the differences between the two mediums: ―Unlike a photograph, a film is semiotically engaged in experience not merely as its mechanical objectification—or material reproduction—that is, as merely an object for vision‖ (Carnal 148). 192 See Sedgwick, 171 – 178. 193 It should also be noted that in the very first scene where Lucy and Greta appear together, the two women joke about the success of an acquaintance in the context of her being Native American and disabled. 194 Cholodenko describes the characters as such. See director‘s commentary on High Art DVD. 195 Mitchell is one of many theorists who address the complexities of the visual in relationship to memory, history, and the archive. For a theorization of the photographic as a ―way of sound‖ and the question of a black mirror stage, see Moten, ―Visible Music,‖ 171 – 231; for an analysis of mapping self-identity and memory through the photographic portrait and its history as a taxonomic device, see Lury, ―The Family of Man,‖ 41 – 75, and ―Become What You Are,‖ 76 – 104; Lury‘s important book also includes exploring false memory syndrome and photographic imagery; for an analysis of historical practice as (photographic) documentary practice, see Tagg, ―The Pencil of History: Photography, History, Archive,‖ 209 – 233. 196 See Rosenblum, ―A Short Technical History: Pre-Photographic Optical and Chemical Observations and Early Experiments in Photography,‖ 192 – 199. 197 As mentioned earlier, Cholodenko‘s main influence for the film was the photography of Jack Pierson, in whose aesthetic, ―Death, poverty, and intense deprivation remain off-frame‖ (Kotz 212). 198 See Rudolph; Feliperin; directory‘s commentary on High Art DVD. 219 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. 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Creator Howard, Yetta (author)

Core Title Ugly dykes: pejorative identities and the anti-aesthetics of lesbianism

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/12/2012

Defense Date 03/09/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alienation,Lesbianism,nihilism,OAI-PMH Harvest,primitivism,Sexual Abuse,ugliness,unpopular culture

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Halberstam, Judith (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), McCabe, Susan (committee member), Modleski, Tania (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email yettahow@usc.edu,yettahoward@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2904

Unique identifier UC1456870

Identifier etd-Howard-3617 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-320419 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2904 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Howard-3617.pdf

Dmrecord 320419

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Howard, Yetta

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu