Exploring Narratives of Women Who Shifted from a Heterosexual to a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, And/Or Unlabeled Identity
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THINKING OTHERWISE: EXPLORING NARRATIVES OF WOMEN WHO SHIFTED FROM A HETEROSEXUAL TO A LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, QUEER, AND/OR UNLABELED IDENTITY Clare Lemke A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2015 Committee: Bill Albertini, Advisor Ellen W. Gorsevski Graduate Faculty Representative Sandra Faulkner Ellen Berry ii ABSTRACT Bill Albertini, Advisor Stories about adult women shifting from a heterosexual identity to a lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and/or unlabeled identity emerge in many areas of contemporary U.S. culture, including anthologies of personal narratives, self-help books, women’s magazines, talk shows, blogs, major network news outlets, and academic scholarship. This dissertation explores discourse about once-heterosexual-identified women to better understand contemporary U.S. culture. Using a mixed methods approach involving textual analysis and focus groups, I argue that stories about women shifting sexual identities during adulthood illuminate assumptions and contradictions shaping broader thinking about LGBQ sexualities, women’s sexualities, and sexual fluidity in the U.S. Each chapter is organized around a significant concept influencing the construction of contemporary American sexualities. These concepts include the notion that LGBTQ people are “born this way”; the increasingly popular idea that women love “the person, not the gender”; the formative role of whiteness and middle class identity in stories about women coming out in midlife; and the concept of normalcy as it determines LGBTQ people’s relationship to the nation. The topic of once-heterosexual-identified women has yet to be extensively studied with a cultural studies methodology. These stories are ideal sites to investigate the construction of American sexualities because they circulate a confusing whirlwind of ideas that challenge, reaffirm, and complicate what is commonly accepted as the truth about sexuality. These stories reveal the strange, contradictory workings of contemporary understandings of sexuality, workings that are easy to overlook while one is living in the present moment. iii This dissertation is dedicated to: My parents, who have always been the biggest supporters of my education, And The women in my family, especially my grandmothers. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was lucky to draw on a broad network of supportive, creative, resourceful, and generally wonderful people while writing this dissertation. My advisor Bill Albertini has supported me and helped me cultivate my voice as a researcher throughout my PhD and MA programs. Without his challenging and enthusiastic feedback, this project would have stalled out in some less interesting territory a while back. Sandra Faulkner has been fundamental in helping me expand my training to include qualitative interview methods—something this former English major never expected to take on—and her insightful suggestion to include focus groups in this dissertation completely revitalized the project. Ellen Berry’s positive influence in my life cannot be overstated: she has continually been a fierce advocate for me, and for so many other students, and I have been renewed numerous times by her wit, her savvy, and her brilliance. So many individuals have shaped my writing, research, and professional development over the past six years, but I am particularly indebted to Radhika Gajjala, Rebecca Kinney, Ellen Gorsevski, Mary Krueger, and Tobias Spears. I am grateful to the Feminist Writing Group for workshopping drafts of these chapters, especially Angie Fitzpatrick, who has been my most dedicated reviewer the past few years. Thank you, Brock Webb for designing the flyer for my focus group recruitment. Thank you, Jamie Stuart for your careful copyediting. Much love to Manda Hicks for her unrelenting support during this process, even during the ugly parts of it. Lastly, this dissertation could not have been possible without the women who participated in my focus groups. Without their generous insights, this project would have been far less interesting, complex, and ambitious. Thank you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ..... ........................................................................................................... 1 Terminology ……………………………………………………………………….. 8 Literature Review: A Critical, Cultural Approach to the Topic of Once-Heterosexual- Identified Women …………………………………………………………. ……… 10 Coming Out as a Genre ……………………………………………………. 11 The History of Women’s LGBQ Identities in the U.S. ……………………. 17 Methodology: Mapping Discourse in Motion ……………………………………... 24 Positionality as Feminist Methodology: Self-Reflection and Situated Knowledges…………………......................................................................... 28 Primary Sources for Textual Analysis ……………………………………... 31 Focus Group Methods ……………………………………………………… 33 Methodological Assumptions …………………………………………….… 36 Limitations …………………………………………………………………. 40 Chapter Summaries ………………………………………………………………… 41 CHAPTER 1. NOT BORN THIS WAY: ALTERNATIVE DISCOURSES OF SURPRISE AND AGENCY IN ONCE-HETEROSEXUAL-IDENTIFIED WOMEN’S NARRATIVES …… 46 The History of “Born Gay” Discourse in the U.S. …………………………………… 50 Exploring Alternative Discourses of Surprise and Agency ......................................... 54 Surprise Troubling Backwards Birthing in the Coming Out Story ………………….. 55 Feeling Like an Imposter: Surprise and Illegitimacy ………………………………... 65 Agency as Refusing Compulsory Heterosexuality and Celebrating Contingency …... 67 vi Agency and Political Community ……………………………………………………. 77 Incredible Stories: Displacing Contradiction about Sexuality onto Once-Heterosexual- Identified Women …………………………………………………………………… 80 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………........... 86 CHAPTER 2. LOVING “THE PERSON, NOT THE GENDER”: TRANSCENDING GENDER OF OBJECT CHOICE, AND, THE PERSISTENCE OF GENDER ……………………….. 89 Living Without a Label: Using PNG Discourse to Dismantle Existing Sexual Identity Categories ……………………………………………………………………………. 94 PNG Discourse as a Progressive, Gender Non-Discriminatory Approach to Love … 102 Love as Universal: PNG Discourse and Neoliberal Anti-Identity Ideology ……….. 111 PNG Discourse in Popular Culture and the Persistence of Gender ………………… 121 Conclusion: (Re)Braiding Multiple Directions of PNG Discourse ……………….... 130 CHAPTER 3. THE FORMATIVE ROLE OF MIDDLE CLASS IDENTITY AND WHITENESS IN STORIES ABOUT WOMEN COMING OUT MIDLIFE……………………………………………………………………………………. 137 Midlife as a Second Adolescence for Women ……………………………………… 142 “Life after forty is so much better”: Midlife as an Empowering Time for Women … 149 The Self-as-Labor in Stories of Coming Out Midlife ……………………………… 158 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………… 173 CHAPTER 4. NATIONAL BELONGING, ILLEGITIMACY, AND ANXIETY: THE INCONSISTENT EFFECTS OF NORMALIZING DISCOURSES ON ONCE- HETEROSEXUAL-IDENTIFIED WOMEN ……………………………………………... 178 vii Illegitimacy, Invisibility, and Suspicion: The Cultural Context in which Normalcy Challenges Once-Heterosexual-Identified Women’s Authenticity………………… 184 “Things queer women aren’t supposed to do”: Using Normalizing Discourses to Speak Back to Delegitimizing Messages …………………………………………………. 193 Perfectly Normal: Normalcy Signifying Strangeness and Inciting Anxiety in News Media about Once-Heterosexual-Identified Women ……………………………………… 204 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………. 218 CONCLUSION: BECOMING NEW, BECOMING OURSELVES: THE CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF THINKING OTHERWISE AND DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH …………………………………………………………………………… ..... 221 Directions for Future Research …………………………………………………….. 225 Conclusion: Learning to Think Otherwise …………………………………………. 231 NOTES …………………………………………………………………………………….. 233 WORKS CITED ........ ........................................................................................................... 249 APPENDIX A: FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEW PROTOCOL……………………………. 274 APPENDIX B: SAMPLE PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY ……………….. 278 APPENDIX C: PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY RESULTS ……………… 280 APPENDIX D: HSRB APPROVAL ……………………………………………………... 284 1 INTRODUCTION “I am a lesbian and it was a later-in-life recognition. … Some people would say, well, you’re living a lie and, you know, the truth is—not at all. This has only been for the past seven years.” --Actress Meredith Baxter coming out on the Today show (Marikar). “Life threw me a surprise party. … I was looking for something fun and chic. I didn’t think it would redefine me as a person.” --Comedian Carol Leifer on falling in love with a woman at age forty (James Donaldson). “I had never met a woman I was attracted to [before Christine]. And maybe if I’d met her when I was 20, I would have fallen in love and only dated women. But maybe if I’d met her at 20, I wouldn't have responded at all. Who knows?” --Actress Cynthia Nixon on falling in love with her wife at age thirty-eight (Breen). The above quotations, all published between 2009 and 2010, are part of a recent surge of public discourse in the U.S. about lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and/or unlabeled women who once identified as heterosexual. Stories about women like Baxter, Leifer, and Nixon—stories featuring women coming out in midlife or women leaving male partners for female partners—emerge in many areas of contemporary U.S. culture, including anthologies of personal narratives, self-help books, women’s magazines, talk shows, blogs, major network news outlets, and academic scholarship.1