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Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 2008 Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders Margaret G. Frohlich Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications Part of the International and Area Studies Commons, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons Recommended Citation Frohlich, Margaret G. Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality Across Borders . Tempe, AZ: AILCFH, 2008. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FRAMING THE MARGIN: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders II Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica AILCFH margaret.indd 1 11/20/08 9:25:47 PM El Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica se otorga anualmente en memoria de una de las fundadoras de la Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica. Siguiendo el espíritu de Victoria Urbano el premio se concede a la mejor monografía sobre tema femenino/feminista en el área de literatura y estudios culturales de Iberoamérica o US latino. margaret.indd 2 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM Margaret G. Frohlich FRAMING THE MARGIN: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders Tempe, 2008 margaret.indd 3 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM Serie: Victoria Urbano de Crítica Editoras: Carmen de Urioste y Cynthia Tompkins Asistente editorial: Inmaculada Pertusa Seva Asistente de redacción: Christopher Kark Comité del Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica: Ksenija Bilbija, Cynthia Tompkins y Carmen de Urioste. © 2008, Margaret G. Frohlich Portada y diseño: Magdalena Soto El presente libro ha sido publicado por la Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica (AILCFH). Queda prohibida, sin la autorización escrita del titular del «Copyright», bajo las sanciones establecidas en las leyes, la reproducción parcial o total de esta obra por cualquier medio o procedimiento, ya sea eléctrico, químico, mecánico, óptico, de grabación o de fotocopia. Esta prohibición incluye el diseño y la fotografía de cubierta. Printed in US-Impreso en EEUU ISBN 978-0-9794480-1-0 margaret.indd 4 11/20/08 9:25:48 PM CONTENTS Acknowledgements ....................................................vii Introduction ................................................................1 Chapter 1 Nationality and Sexuality across Borders 1.1 The Nationality of Lesbianism. 17 1.2 Identity Crises and Border Crossings in Flores raras e banalíssimas. 18 1.3 Competing Nationalisms: Lesbian and Catalan Identity . 27 1.4 Latina Lesbians and Transnational Negotiations of Sexuality. 41 Chapter 2 Bi’s, Bugas, and Borders in Lesbi Narrative 2.1 Borders, Identity, and the “Bisexual Threat” . 51 2.2 The Sexual Politics of Chicana Lesbian Identity: Margins . 56 2.3 Off the Chart: Sexual Desire and Sexual Identity in La insensata geometría del amor. 62 2.4 The Distance between a Lesbian and a Buga: Rosamaría Roffiel’s Amora. 71 Chapter 3 Se le ve la pluma 3.1 Female Subjectivity and the Production of Meaning. 81 3.2 Taking Up the Pen . 88 3.3 Political Writing, Visuality, and Commodity Fetishism . 100 Chapter 4 Taking Place in Time: Somewhere over the Rainbow 4.1 Sexuality and Temporality in the Bildungsroman ..................111 4.2 Queer Ontology and Identity: Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes ......121 4.3 Queering Spatiality ..............................................................131 4.4 Another Stage: Countering American Hegemony in the “Utopia of the Mirror” ................................................139 margaret.indd 5 11/20/08 9:25:49 PM Conclusion .............................................................. 149 Works Cited ............................................................. 155 Index........................................................................ 169 margaret.indd 6 11/20/08 9:25:49 PM Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful for the support of many individuals and institutions that gave their assistance to this project. I would like to thank the talented professors of my dissertation committee: my doctoral advisor Lou Charnon-Deutsch at Stony Brook University, to whom I would like to pay special tribute for her expert knowl- edge of women writers, generous advice, and constant support; my second reader Daniela Flesler, also at Stony Brook University, for her critical insight that helped to maintain the project’s coherence; Brad Epps at Harvard University for his inspirational research and spirited critique that helped me to refine my analyses; Román de la Campa at The University of Pennsylvania, whose exceptional passion for Hispanic literature and culture continues to spur me on; Kathleen Vernon at Stony Brook University, for encouraging me to compare the cultural productions of women across national borders, and Gabriela Polit-Dueñas at Stony Brook University whose conversations and reading recommendations helped me to broaden my treatment of identity. I would also like to thank Benigno Trigo at Vanderbilt University whose course on memory and the maternal body greatly expanded my understanding of female subjectivity and writing. I am truly grateful for the generous grants and awards that made my research possible: Dickinson College’s Research and Development Travel Funds, Stony Brook University’s Research Access Program, the Gloria Kahn Fellowship Award, the Patrick Charnon Scholarship Award, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and the Tinker Field Research Grant. I would like to extend a special thank you to all of my friends and family for their words of encouragement along the way. The unwavering support of my parents, Anna Lee and Mark, is a great act of love. Thanks to C.J. Prince for giving me solace and cheer in her adventures with the pen. Thanks also to my dear friends from vii margaret.indd 7 11/20/08 9:25:50 PM graduate school, especially Sobeira Latorre, Fernando Guerrero, Mariela Wong, Manuel Urrutia Zarzo, Megan Hughes Zarzo, Tania Miguel de Magro, Toni Rivas, Danny Barreto, and Monica Sanning for their comments and suggestions throughout vari- ous stages of this project. I am incredibly inspired by the work of Professors Jackie Collins, Inmaculada Pertusa, Melissa Stewart, and Nancy Vosburg, and thank them for their council and support over the years. I would also like to thank bibliophile Damon Stanek for providing me with such pertinent texts. My warmest gratitude goes to Flannon Jackson whose incisive critique, multiple edits of previous versions of this manuscript, patient conversations, and reading recommendations renewed my enthusiasm and widened my intellectual perspective. Finally, I want to thank the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica’s selection committee for the Premio de monografía Victoria Urbano 2007, Cynthia Tompkins, Carmen de Urioste, and Ksenija Bilbija, for their rec- ognition and for extending my research to a wider audience. I also thank Cynthia Tompkins and Carmen de Urioste for their editorial assistance. I am very grateful to Inmaculada Pertusa, editor extraor- dinaire, for her persuasive and careful guidance and for inspiring me with her own research before this project began. viii margaret.indd 8 11/20/08 9:25:50 PM Introduction Introduction ow are nationality and sexuality related? What is gained and what is lost when sexuality is framed in terms of identity politics, and what is the role of the nation-stateH in this process? Though nationality is one of many terms that connote aspects of subjectivity, such as gender, race, and class, it distinguishes itself as a metanarrative with a long his- tory of conferring legitimacy on political issues. Critical analyses of nationalisms in the era of late capitalism highlight the disparity between traditional understandings of national boundaries, contem- porary patterns of immigration, and globalized economies. Similar contestations of boundaries occur in relation to sexuality, such as we find in Queer Theory, encouraging a careful analysis of how nationalism and sexuality might be understood as co-determinant systems, each influencing the other’s intelligibility. Select lesbian novels are particularly illustrative of the complexity of the relation of nationalism to sexuality, depicting the formation of bonds between women in close relation or in opposition to nationalist discourse. The novels and films investigated in this present study span a vari- ety of nations and languages (Catalan, English, Portuguese, and Spanish) facilitating both national and transnational connections and an analysis of nationalisms and sexualities1 in multiple contexts. An increase in the production of lesbian narratives is occurring in an historical period in which stable forms of social identification, such as nationality and gender roles, are in flux. How these two phenomena intersect is the focus of this book. margaret.indd 1 11/20/08 9:25:50 PM Margaret G. Frohlich The term Lesbian Nation and the shift implied in the terms Queer Nation and Queer Planet are clear examples of how national discourse has been tied to global perspectives, no longer confined to groups bounded by territory, religion, or ethnicity.2 While cultural and political affiliations beyond the nation-state, such as those posed by Marxism, were in motion long before the term globalization came into popular usage, the connections forged
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