Celebrating Queer Lesbian Desires with Dorothy Allison: from Moral Monstrosity to the Beautiful Materiality of the Body

DOI: 10.5007/2175-8026.2015v68n2p127 CELEBRATING QUEER LESBIAN DESIRES WITH DOROTHY ALLISON: FROM MORAL MONSTROSITY TO THE BEAUTIFUL MATERIALITY OF THE BODY Mélanie Grué* Université Paris-Est Créteil Paris, FR Abstract Using social and queer theory on domination, sexuality and gender, this contribution explores how the queer American author Dorothy Allison celebrates the vilii ed transgressive lesbian body. As, in the 1970s, the mainstream American feminist movement crystallized around the dei nition of an acceptable sexuality in the name of femininity, female sexual practices were standardized according to strict identity frames, carnal desire was denied, and transgressive lesbians who play with gender roles were dei ned as abject. In response to this extreme taming of the body, Allison interrogates the notions of masculinity and femininity, domination and submission in her exploration of sexual pleasure and traumatized sexuality. She celebrates the aggressiveness and masculinity of queer lesbianism, promotes the l uidity of gender roles, and asserts the primacy of the l esh, sensuality, and materiality in sexuality. Keywords: Dorothy Allison; feminism; gender; lesbian body; sexuality. Introduction do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very i eld of description that we have for the human?” According to Judith Butler, sexual identity is not (xxiii). Concepts of sex, sexuality and gender underlie freely chosen, the individual’s choices being constrained the dei nition of a viable and intelligible identity, by social regulations and heteronormativity (Bodies so much so that practices which do not conform to 95). h us the formation, circulation and signii cation gender norms interrogate the very notion of “person” of bodies are mobilized by the law, which is reproduced (23). Besides, Sara Ahmed explains that the principle by a seemingly free subject in a process that Butler of “compulsory heterosexuality [...] shapes what it is calls “performativity.” She envisions sex as a regulated possible for bodies to do […]. Bodies take the shape production which contributes to the dei nition of of norms that are repeated over time and with force” viable bodies and to the preservation of the social (Cultural Politics 145). h e attraction or repulsion of a order: the reiterated performance of sexual identity, body by another dei nes the value granted to pleasure, which comes with constraints and a threat of ostracism in the sense that pleasure is considered valuable only or death to those who do not comply with the rules, if the body is attracted to a body of a dif erent sex. In becomes instrumental in perpetuating acceptable virtue of the prohibitions and injunctions aiming at sexual practices (23; 95). In Gender Trouble, Butler guaranteeing a certain social order, homosexuality asks: “how do presumptions about normative gender was i rst dei ned as an abject position, to be repudiated and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify in the favor of heterosexual identii cation (163). If as the ‘human’ and the ‘livable’? In other words, how homosexuality came to be increasingly acceptable, * Mélanie Grué, PhD, is a temporary teaching and research fellow at Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne, where she teaches Literature, translation and English for specialists of other disciplines. Her i elds of research include Dorothy Allison’s works, trauma and resistance literature, literary representations of the body and sexuality, gender and queer studies, as well as feminist and queer visual arts. E-mail: [email protected]. Esta obra tem licença Creative Commons 128 Mélanie Grué, Celebrating Queer Lesbian Desires with Dorothy Allison social regulations and prohibitions evolved and new lesbian bodies which question the value of femininity. abject identities emerged, along with the deinition of Finally, we shall see that against feminist abstractions, new aberrant bodies and practices. Allison’s writing of the lesh gloriies the desires and Indeed, history proved that the liberation needs of the material female body. movements themselves are not immune to the temptation to deine unbearable positions. he Moralizing sexuality, shaming the monstrous anxiety provoked by non-viable sexual practices has lesbian body never stopped feeding and orienting the claims of the feminist and gay liberation movements: as the irst In a patriarchal society where sexuality is victories were won against the stigmatizing deinition constructed in order to satisfy the dominant group’s of homosexuality, priorities and goals shited within political interests, women are transformed into passive increasingly moralized groups acting along strict lines objects of male pleasure and submitted to the norms of identity deinition. In the 1970s-1980s, while still and restrictions it implies (De Lauretis 62). When it ighting against male violence, mainstream feminism was created, the American feminist movement thus and lesbian-feminism hardened their speech and reasserted women’s right to control their bodies and made female sexuality a key element in the struggle sexuality, and fought against male domination and against inferiority. A new, morally acceptable feminist oppression. he gay liberation movement, as for it, sexuality was deined, from which humiliation, power intended to overthrow heterosexist social structures relations and violence were excluded. he reality of based on gender asymmetry and the nuclear the corporeal experience was ignored, the diversity of patriarchal family. Gay liberationists contended female sexualities was disregarded, and the question that homosexuality announced the subversion of of pleasure and desire seemed to become dangerous. normative categories of sex and gender (Jagose 36- Consequently, transgressive sexualities based on gender 37). However, the feminist and gay movements roles and violence were excluded from the sphere of progressively crystallized around acceptable acceptability, deemed immoral and anti-feminist. deinitions of homosexuality or femininity, started An incest survivor and sadomasochist lesbian to defend hegemonic values, and excluded from their feminist, the American writer Dorothy Allison found ranks those who did not satisfy them. Some gays and herself in the middle of the lesbian-feminist debates lesbians became representatives of normality, while over the correct expressions of female sexuality. In her others were considered deviant and were marginalized political writing, she addresses the question of pleasure (Hollibaugh 264), leading Matt Wolf to observe: and desire, takes part in the feminist conversation on the status of women, and calls for more openness, tolerance [A]re we now too mainstream, too visible and and honesty, arguing that women will not be free unless acceptable, to desire a kind of sexual liberation that renders our sexuality countercultural and desire enters the public realm. his article proposes radical? If mainstream gay politics, speciically to explore how Allison’s representation of the female the politics of gay marriage, neutralize and body contributes to make desire and pleasure public, soten the edge of gay sexuality, then is a call for and opposes the abstract, sterilized female igures liberated, utopic, and radical intergenerational sexuality in fact a nostalgic impulse that clings to promoted by the moralized liberation movements. It previous ideals and modes of expression? (668) will irst explain the modalities of the “Sex Wars” which tore the feminist movement apart in the 1970s-1980s, and the consequent creation of morally and physically As she studies the evolution and hardening of the monstrous female igures. An analysis of Allison’s gay liberation movement, Jagose remarks that the depiction of intimate relations will show that genders homosexual community progressively constructed itself are subverted and trauma is overcome by transgressive as an ethnic minority with recognizable characteristics Ilha do Desterro v. 68, nº 2, p. 127-140, Florianópolis, mai/ago 2015 129 and a clearly deined identity, in order to legitimize its power relations into erotic role games was morally claims and defend its rights within a preexisting social condemned, which particularly afected the lesbian structure (61). Similarly, Steven Seidman deplored the circles. For example, the National Organization for mainstreaming of a movement which, he noticed, was Women’s 1980 resolution deined “tolerable feminist no longer as demanding as it was when it irst formulated expressions,” and explicitly opposed the inclusion of claims for recognition (“Symposium” 172). As it evolved pornography and sadomasochism in lesbian claims along the ethnic model, the gay and lesbian movement (Hart 83). Lynda Hart remarks that the resolution’s deined a ixed homosexual identity, characterized by terms imposed to the lesbians willing to join the NOW monogamous, intra-racial, intra-generational romantic a certain lifestyle, based on the static and de-eroticized relations and reinforcing itself through the exclusion identity of the lesbian (85). Respect, romanticism of certain practices, such as butch/femme couples and equality became key notions in the deinition of interracial relations and sadomasochism, the latter collectively decided sexual practices. being considered “deviant, abnormal, or perverse” Seidman describes the dangerous moral line (Seidman, Diference 149-150; 201). which divided the movement and led to further Within the feminist movement, the debates over exclusions: “rigid moral boundaries

Load more