The Invisible (And Hypervisible) Lesbian of Color in Theory, Publishing, and Media
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Missing Bridges: The Invisible (and Hypervisible) Lesbian of Color in Theory, Publishing, and Media A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Renee Ann DeLong IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Maria Damon May 2013 Renee Ann DeLong copyright 2013 i I am indebted to the professors on my committee who helped guide me to the end of this journey: Dr. Omise'eke Tinsley, Dr. Patrick Bruch, Dr. Josephine Lee, and Dr. Roderick Ferguson. Rod read drafts generously, gave benedictions freely, and created the space for me to work within queer of color studies. He always reminded me that I was asking the right questions and welcomed me as a colleague. My adviser Dr. Maria Damon reserved many Friday mornings to talk me through the next steps of this project over double espressos. Her honesty helped me rethink my role as a scholar and educator as I began to plan the next phase of my career. Julie Enzer published a section of chapter two in Sinister Wisdom volume 82 as the article "Piecing Together Azalea: A Magazine for Third-World Lesbians 1977-1983." I am grateful for her early feedback and the permission to reprint the article within this dissertation. Taiyon Coleman was my sister in the struggle. Laura Bachinski kept me loved, grounded, humble, and laughing throughout the whole process. Thank you all. ii To Laura--my whole world. iii Abstract “Missing Bridges: The Invisible (and Hypervisible) Lesbian of Color in Theory, Publishing, and Media” While moving from theory, through the Women in Print Movement, and up to the current images of lesbians this dissertation considers how the figure of the lesbian of color has been erased and highlighted at different times and in different spaces. Chapter one, "What Does Invisibility Look Like?" examines how and where the figure of the lesbian of color is overlooked, squeezed out, or tokenized. In chapter 2: "Rhetorically irreverent, politically radical, and deeply personal: Lesbians of Color Organize," the work of the Azalea Collective in Brooklyn, NY, the Combahee River Collective in Boston, MA, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s planning for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and the work of Kitchen Table Press are explored. Chapter three, "Publishing and Perishing: The Women in Print Movement from 1980-2002," compares the climate in 1981 when This Bridge Called my Back: Radical Women of Color Speak Out was published to the climate for Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray: Feminist Visions for a Just World in 2002. Chapter four, "What’s visible now? The Creation of [White] Lesbian Celebrities" examines the classed and racialized messages embedded in the media figures of Rachel Maddow, Suze Orman, and Ellen DeGeneres. iv CONTENTS List of Figures v Introduction: Why Consider Visibility? 1-25 Chapter 1: What Does Invisibility Look Like? 26-51 Chapter 2: Rhetorically irreverent, politically radical, and deeply personal: Lesbians of Color Organize 52-91 Chapter 3: Publishing while Perishing: The Women in Print Movement from 1980-2002 92-118 Chapter 4: What’s visible now? The creation of [white] lesbian celebrities 119-153 Conclusion 154-160 Works Cited 161-170 v List of Figures Figure 1 “Dyke Next Door” by Irare Sabásu pg. 72 Figure 2 “sea anemonae or fine-line drawing or dreading for the revolution” by Lindajean Brown pg. 73 1 Introduction: Why Consider Visibility? spaces of invisibility, bodies of invisibility, moments of silence and reverence The dissolution of cultural imperialism thus requires a cultural revolution which also entails a revolution in subjectivity. Rather than seeking a wholeness of the self, we who are the subjects of this plural and complex society should affirm the otherness within ourselves, acknowledging that as subjects we are heterogeneous and multiple in our affiliations and desires. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 124 For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” 43 Within Young’s yearning for a shifting and fluid theory of the self and Lorde’s critique of language lies the problem of overlapping discourses, and the communities which make these identities possible. Language constructs one’s understanding of the self as lesbian, black, gay, white, or queer, yet language also frames and constricts the possibilities for the representations of those identities. Within society the individual may also be contextualized through one cultural construct and then also speak (or remain silent about) the other terms of her identity. The matrix of these privileges and oppressions repeated within black feminist theory and queer theory too often renders the figure of the lesbian of color invisible when she is not being tokenized. While black feminist theory foregrounds race and gender and queer theory focuses on sexuality, both discourses simplify the lived experiences of lesbians of color and other queer women. This project began with a science-fiction novel that chafed against a work of queer theory. Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads entwines women living in several time periods and explores the fluidity of sexuality, history, and power. In the novel three women live in different historical time-frames: Jeanne Duval, a dancer who is 2 also Baudelaire’s mistress; Meritet, an enslaved sex worker, and Mer, a field slave in Saint Domingue. Each character’s life is marked by a society that withholds racial and class privilege from her for the benefit of other bodies, although their stories entwine in a spiritual or immaterial space that connects them beyond a colonial version of linear history. In many ways, this space could be marked as queer, although this connection stretches the usual definition of this term. Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Space: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives examines how queerness revises bourgeois or conventional constructions of personal associations, time, and space. Halberstam’s theory silently centers bodies that are marked by racial privilege and class privilege. The queer, white, middle-class bodies that are explained by this theory have benefited from capitalist and colonialist inequities that in turn depend on the marginal status of the lives of women such as Jeanne, Meritet, and Mer. In this way, the figure of the lesbian of color does not appear within the framework of In a Queer Time and Space, because she cannot be conjured within the assumptions of race and class within the text. However, her absence highlights the privileges of the middle-class, white, queer body used to frame this theory. Halberstam defines queer time as: specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. ‘Queer space’ refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics (6). This concept of queer time and space explains the phenomena when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people move into specific urban 3 neighborhoods. Queer time also makes many LGBT people question the assumption that women have a “biological clock” that urges reproduction, the common wisdom that values living until 90 years old, and the legal narrative that connects wealth or property inheritance to a biological family tree. Queer time and space accounts for the critical space within which LGBT people make choices that critique the heteronormative and bourgeois narratives of family, aging, and gender roles. By naming these counter-narratives as queer, Halberstam shows how mainstream culture continues to privilege male-female relationships and middle- class lives through its norms and unspoken frameworks. The creation of a separate time frame echoes in both the Halberstam’s theory and Hopkinson’s novel, but the values of “family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” which are intentionally skewed by people living in the queer spaces figure differently for the characters of Jeanne, Meritet, and Mer, who are marked within their societies by several layers of marginalization. For example, a woman’s ability to control her fertility is vital to do the work of a dancer in a theater or a sex worker in a bar, but the likelihood of rape and sexual violence in the gendered and racialized spaces where she must work makes the task even more difficult. Although a visibly-pregnant body might get Jeanne fired from the theater, if she succeeds in marrying the poet Charles Baudelaire then she can benefit from some of the class and race privilege that he enjoys. Yet, a hypothetical mixed-race heir of Baudelaire might not be acknowledged as an heir at all, and structural racism could trump the mother-trope and leave Jeanne destitute. In a colonial society class and race privilege mark Jeanne’s body as other, so her freedom to “queer” time and space is 4 somewhat fractured as well. In addition, Jeanne, Meritet, and Mer have sexual relationships with women as well as men, and their lives exceed not only their gendered, racialized, and classed bodies, but do not neatly fit the queer (white, middle-class) classification described by In a Queer Time and Place. The “politics of visibility” is complicated by the conceptualization of visibility and passing for both texts and bodies. In queer studies the questions have been: How does a queer body “look queer” or pass as straight? In what spaces does an individual choose to do one or the other? These questions are followed closely by: Where can one be safe? As the murders of Mathew Shepard and Brandon Teena have shown, white GLBT people who are “found out” as queer in public or private spaces in the United States may be targeted for violence.