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Rereading Heterosexuality Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction Rereading Heterosexuality View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Teeside University's Research Repository RaChel CaRRoll ReReading HETEROSEXUALITY Feminism, QueeR TheoRy and ConTempoRaRy FiCTion Rereading Heterosexuality CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd i 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiii 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 Rereading Heterosexuality Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction Rachel Carroll CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiiiii 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 © Rachel Carroll, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3955 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4908 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 4928 0 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 4927 3 (Amazon) The right of Rachel Carroll to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iivv 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality 1 Part One: Revisiting the spinster 1. ‘Becoming my own ghost’: spinsterhood and the ‘invisibility’ of heterosexuality in Sarah Waters’ Affi nity 25 2. Telling tales out of school: spinsters, scandals and intergenerational heterosexuality in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal 45 Part Two: Transgressive female heterosexuality 3. Queering Alice, killing Lolita: feminism, queer theory and the politics of child sexuality in A. M. Homes’s The End of Alice 67 4. Unauthorised reproduction: class, pregnancy and transgressive female heterosexuality in Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar 91 Part Three: Reproducing heterosexuality 5. ‘First one thing and then the other’: rewriting the intersexed body in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex 111 6. Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 131 Bibliography 149 Index 157 CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd v 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vvii 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 Acknowledgements Some of the material contained in this book has been published previ- ously; I would like to thank the publishers for permission to reproduce work from the following publications: • ‘ “Becoming my own ghost”: spinsterhood, heterosexuality and Sarah Waters’s Affi nity’, Genders (Spring 2007), n.p. • ‘Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’, Journal of Gender Studies, 19: 1 (2010), pp. 59–71. • ‘Retrospective sex: rewriting intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex’, Journal of American Studies, 44: 1 (2010), pp. 187–201. I am very grateful to my friends Heike Salzer and Ingi Jensson for allow- ing me to use a still image from their work for the cover of this book. CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vviiii 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vviiiiii 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality The ‘invisibility’ of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its ‘ “unmarked” and “naturalised” ’1 status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned. Indeed, as Linda Schlossberg puts it, ‘heterosexual culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm [emphasis added].’2 Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction aims to contrib- ute to what Richard Johnson has described as the ‘impetus to render heterosexuality visible to critical scrutiny’.3 Heterosexuality as an insti- tution continues to have immense normative power; while this power impacts most explicitly on non-heterosexual identities it also extends to heterosexual identities which do not conform to familial, marital or reproductive norms – norms which have a particular impact on female identities, the principal concern of this book. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and sexuality, Rereading Heterosexuality takes as its distinctive focus the representation of female identities at odds with heterosexual norms; more specifi cally, it explores representa- tions which serve to question the conventional equation between hetero- sexuality, reproductive sexuality and female identity. In this context, it will offer close readings of six novels published by British and American authors between 1995 and 2005: Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (1995), The End of Alice by A. M. Homes (1996), Affi nity by Sarah Waters (1999), Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002), Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller (2003) and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The diverse subject matter of these novels refl ects contemporary concerns and anxieties about the future of sex, gender and sexuality; some address topics which have been the focus of media attention and social policy debate, including child sexual abuse, human cloning and transgender identity, while others turn to historical periods which have CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd 1 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 2 Rereading Heterosexuality played a pivotal role in the development of modern discourses of sexu- ality, including the late Victorian era and the ‘sexual revolution’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have selected these texts for the unique opportunities they provide to refl ect on the dynamic and often contested relationship between feminism and queer theory in relation to the analy- sis of heterosexuality. This introduction offers a selective overview and evaluation of rel- evant work on heterosexuality in the context of contemporary gender and sexuality studies. Its focus is on the formative contribution of two key theoretical frameworks: feminism and queer theory. Feminist and lesbian feminist theorists have offered an ideological critique of hetero- sexuality in relation to the gendered and sexual oppression of women; in this way, heterosexuality has been analysed as a patriarchal institution which perpetuates gendered power relations through sexuality. More recently, queer theory has extended the terms by which heterosexuality can be understood through its discursive analysis of heterosexuality as an effect of historical and cultural construction. Queer theory approaches heterosexuality as a normative category of sexed, gendered and sexual identity which serves both to support the binary logic by which ‘hetero-’ and ‘homosexual’ identities are produced and to perpetuate the con- struction of homosexual identities as deviant and abnormal. The work of leading Second Wave feminists has had a lasting impact on feminist critiques of heterosexuality; however, tensions emerging from the legacy of this movement have also contributed to what has been described as an ideological impasse where female heterosexuality is concerned. Queer theoretical frameworks offer to reconfi gure critical perspectives on het- erosexuality but also present challenges for feminist frameworks and have provoked often polarised responses. In what follows, feminist and queer contributions to the analysis of heterosexuality will be considered, as will affi nities and tensions between the two frameworks. Compulsory heterosexuality: feminism and heterosexuality Lesbian feminist theorists have been instrumental in establishing het- erosexuality as an object of feminist critique and in setting the terms by which it is approached. Adrienne Rich’s ground-breaking essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (fi rst published in 1980) documents the ways in which heterosexuality is constructed as the ‘natural’ destination for all women, in patriarchal and femi- nist discourses alike, and the coercive means by which this presump- tion is imposed, both discursively and materially. Her assertion that CCARROLLARROLL 99780748639557780748639557 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd 2 221/02/20121/02/2012 114:404:40 Introduction 3 ‘heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution [emphasis in original]’4 retains its counter-intuitive power, challenging as it does persistent assumptions about heterosexual- ity as rooted in the natural and instinctual (especially where reproduc- tive sexuality is concerned), rather than the ideological. Rich asks why ‘such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men’5 and in doing so establishes heterosexuality not simply as a sexual relation but also as a power relation. According to this thesis, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ divides women from each other by its ‘othering’ of lesbians as ‘deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived’.6 Rich offers the ‘lesbian continuum’ not only as an antidote to compulsory hetero- sexuality but also as a form of collective resistance to patriarchy; the lesbian continuum places same-sex desire between women within a spectrum of female attachment and solidarity
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