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Feeling Queer Together: Identity, Community, and the Work of Affect in the Pre- Stonewall Lesbian Magazine, the Ladder by Clare

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Feeling Queer Together: Identity, Community, and the Work of Affect in the Pre- Stonewall Lesbian Magazine, the Ladder by Clare View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Waterloo's Institutional Repository Feeling Queer Together: Identity, Community, and the Work of Affect in the Pre- Stonewall Lesbian Magazine, The Ladder by Clare Bermingham A thesis presented to the University Of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2018 © Clare Bermingham 2018 Examining Committee Membership The following served on the Examining Committee for this thesis. The decision of the Examining Committee is by majority vote. External Examiner Dr. Michael Cobb Professor Supervisor Dr. Victoria Lamont Associate Professor Internal-external Member Dr. Shannon Dea Associate Professor Internal Members Dr. Alice Kuzniar Professor Dr. Kevin McGuirk Associate Professor ii Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. iii Abstract This project examines the emergence of lesbian identity and community through the work of queer feeling, specifically as it was produced in the American magazine, the Ladder (1956-1972). The Ladder was published by the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first national lesbian organization, whose politics of respectability called for lesbians to conform with and adjust to normative gender and class ideals. While such strategies of assimilation responded to the traumatic discourses of disease and deviance that framed lesbian life in the 1950s and 1960s, they further marginalized women who could not easily or legitimately occupy normative categories of gender and class. As an extension of DOB, the Ladder has been treated as a largely conformist text; however, I argue that its short fiction, poetry, and readers’ letters engage differently with the push towards normativity. By reading the Ladder as an affective archive, I show that the movements and currents of this community in progress open up this historical moment for more complex readings. My affective and discursive framework isolates affective currents in the short stories and poetry published in the Ladder, and it reads them alongside and against the more political or community-oriented articles published in the magazine. I examine how value was ascribed to the lesbian through happy alignment with normative models of gender and homonormative couplings, and then I show how (un)happiness and pleasure interrupt alignment and create space for alternative ways of doing lesbianism. I examine the workings of strange feeling in poetry and fiction to show how strangeness produces inter-subjectivity, various belongings, and a sense of community responsibility. Finally, I excavate the workings of romantic affect to iv show how it navigates the spaces between beginnings and endings, love and death to produce queer futurity. By examining the Ladder’s literary texts and letters for the ways in which they invoke feeling and affectively produce different ways of being and doing queerness, I explore the ways that queer feeling opens up everyday spaces for lesbian possibility. In reading the Ladder as a complex affective archive of this period of early lesbian identity and community, I show how a community’s texts during critical historical moments can reveal the workings and movements of, what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feelings,” the affective currents that constitute a community’s becomings and changes before and as they coalesce into a static history. v Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Victoria Lamont, for inspiring my scholarly imagination from the start. Your friendship, mentorship, and unfailing patience have been invaluable. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Kevin McGuirk and Dr. Alice Kuzniar, for your helpful feedback, support, and ongoing generosity. Thank you to my external examiner, Dr. Michael Cobb, and my internal-external examiner, Dr. Shannon Dea, for your thoughtful questions and comments. All of your feedback will guide this project forward from here. To the faculty and staff in the English Department at the University of Waterloo, thank you for your many acts of support and kindness over the years. I am particularly grateful to Margaret Ulbrick, Tina Davidson, Julie-Ann Desrochers, and Maha Eid for your exceptional coordination and administrative magic. I would like to thank Dr. Mario Coniglio for supporting me professionally and for generously giving me the time I needed to finish this project and a space to write in. Thank you, too, to my friend and mentor, Katrina Di Gravio, for your encouragement and moral support, all the coffee, and the soon-to-come wine. To my colleagues at the Writing and Communication Centre, thank you for your cheerleading, for innumerable conversations in hallways, and for enabling me to find the time to write. Thanks especially to Dr. Nadine Fladd and Chao Yang for your leadership of the WCC during my four-month leave. Thanks, too, to John Vardon for your keen proofreading eyes on that first chapter when I was too close to see it clearly. A very special thank you to my friend and colleague, Dr. Jordana Garbati, for giving so much of your time to be my coach and taskmaster. Your daily emails, vi gentle reminders, and not-so-gentle pushes were just what I needed to sustain my writing schedule. As well, your thoughtful feedback motivated me to keep going. Thank you to my friend, Dr. Shana MacDonald, for generously reading some of this dissertation and sharing your feedback and encouragement. This journey has coincided with numerous life events, and I am eternally grateful to Adrienne Barker for standing beside me through everything. You have always believed in me and encouraged me. No matter how tight time was with children, laundry, or grocery shopping, we managed to carve out time for me to write. I am so very lucky to share my love and my life with you. To our very special children, Adair and Desmond, thank you for teaching me patience and reminding me to laugh. To Adair, who arrived fourteen weeks early, you taught me the art of breathing, one breath at a time, and you showed me what it means to outrun expectations. To Desmond, you have taught me to let go, laugh louder, play harder, and how to turn anything into a game. Thank you to my parents, Margaret and Derek, and my siblings, Pam, Grace, Philip, and Anna. Your love and friendship sustain me. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library, ONE Archives in Los Angeles, and Gale’s Archives Unbound for helping me access the research records I needed for this work. Thanks to Phyllis Lyon and the late Barbara Grier for generously giving their time to be interviewed, especially when time was so precious. Finally, this project and my PhD studies were made possible by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. vii Dedication For Adair and Desmond who are my whole heart. For Adrienne who makes me possible. viii Table of Contents Examining Committee Membership ii Author’s Declaration iii Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Dedication viii Table of Contents ix List of Figures xi Chapter One: Introduction 1 Daughters of Bilitis and the Ladder 5 Resisting Dominant Discourses 24 Affect and Emotion 33 Affect Theory 44 Chapter Two: Happiness and Pleasure: Constructing Value in Lesbian Lives 53 Producing value and the ‘good lesbian’ 57 Sketching the “common, garden-variety Lesbian”: Research as a corrective 62 The promise of the family 69 Sex, butch lesbians, and injustice 88 Queer pleasure and the cruise 101 Chapter Three: Feeling Strange: Affective Possibility for Lesbian Identity and Community 110 “I walk alone:” Feelings of strangeness and early lesbian identity 112 Feeling Strange Together: Recognition, Intersubjectivity, and Identity 119 Queer Belongings: productive images and queer moments 128 INTERLUDE – Defamiliarizing strangeness 137 Dividing Politics: The Ladder at the end of the 1960s 141 Jane Rule and the Ladder 146 Making strange: the violence of hospitality 148 Generous Hospitality: Turning towards community 154 Feeling strange: The critical work of strangers in the Ladder 160 ix Chapter Four: Beginnings and Endings: Potentiality in Romance and the Promise of Endings 163 Happy Endings: investments in closure and romantic fulfillment 166 “Within the twinkling of an eye”: Extending the moment of the cruise 173 Undone By Love: Love, death, and unsettling endings 183 Love’s Ending: Constructing queer bonds through love and grief 189 In Desire and in Grief: Love as a defiant practice of “queer futurity” 202 Chapter Five: Conclusion 206 Copyright Permission 216 Works Cited 217 x List of Figures Fig. 1: First cover of the Ladder as used for issues 1.1 to 1.12 Fig. 2: Sample covers of the Ladder: October 1957, April 1958, January 1959, and April 1959. Arno Press, 1975. Fig. 3: Photo of Ernestine Eckstein on cover of the Ladder, June 1966. Fig. 4: Photo of Ger Von Braam on the cover of the Ladder, November 1964. xi Chapter One: Introduction “Again unwillingly, she found herself taking the seat from which she could best see the girl with the red hair. And there she sat; miserable, confused, one moment near tears, the next near laughter, eyes straight ahead, with a terrible feeling of flushed excitement.” - “Homeward” by Jean Ray, The Ladder, December 1956 “We must be fed through our hearts with occasional booting in the rear. So keep up the fiction and poetry.” - Barbara Grier, letter to Del Martin, Friday Eve, July 31, [1958]1 This project is concerned with how the work of feeling in and between individuals produces the bonds that construct a community and with the making of queer female subjects in a particular historical moment.
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