Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1995 Looking Like What You Are: Race, Sexual Style and the Construction of Identity. Lisa Walker Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Walker, Lisa, "Looking Like What You Are: Race, Sexual Style and the Construction of Identity." (1995). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 6078. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/6078 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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LOOKING LIKE WHAT YOU ARE: RACE, SEXUAL STYLE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Lisa Walker B.A., Oberlin College, 1987 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1991 December 1995 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9613430 U M I Microform 9613430 Copyright 1996, by UM I Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Elsie Michie for her support, encouragement, and friendship; James Olney, Dana Nelson, and Pat McGee for their thoughtful and helpful readings of chapters in progress; Maxie Wells for her great help in proofing and printing so much of my work; and my parents, Donna and Michael Walker for their love and understanding. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Contents Acknowledgements ........................................... ii A b s t r a c t .................................................. iv Introduction In/visible Differences .................................... 1 Chapter 1 Martyred Dutches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the Construction of Lesbian Id e n t i t y.................. 25 Chapter 2 The Invisible Man Meets the TransparentEyeball: Structures of Fetishism and the Visible in Ellison . 66 Chapter 3 "The Other Harlem": Performative Differences in Blair Niles' Strange Brother.......................... 103 Chapter 4 Strategies of Identification in Three Narratives of Female Development .................................... 157 Chapter 5 How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You A r e ................................. 223 A f t e r w o r d ................................................... 262 Works Cited ................................................. 268 Appendix: Letter of Permission ......................... 2S1 V i t a ......................................................... 282 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract This project explores the function of body politics in constructing minority identities, or how people's physical and stylistic attributes are invested with meanings about who they are. It is interested in how race and sexual differences are defined .in the confluence of discourses around visibility and invisibility. The first two chapters set up the parameters of in/visibility with regard to sexual and racial differences in readings of two paradigmatic texts about visibility, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which produces the lesbian as visible in the figure of the butch, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which explores the paradoxical notion that dark- skinned African-Americans' "high visibility" actually renders them invisible. Chapter 3 reflects on the comparison between racial and sexual paradigms of visibility enacted by the structure of Chapters 1 and 2 through a reading of Blair Niles's 1931 novel Strange Brother. Chapter 4 argues that the pattern of identification is central to the way I analyze structures of visibility in the first three chapters. It begins with a reading of Homi Bhabha's theory of the stereotype as a form of fetishism, and moves into a reading of three novels, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng, which are interrelated in that each of the latter two novels rewrites the text(s) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which precede it. The last chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," analyzes the status of the relationship between identity-formation and visibility within current feminist criticism. It examines how the construction of the identities "butch" and "woman of color" as visible leads to the displacement of those who do not "look like what they are" (women of color who can "pass" for white and femme lesbians who can "pass" for straight) from the communities feminism intends to represent. Reading the theoretical/autobiographical texts of Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldua in connection with critical responses to those texts by both white feminists and feminists of color, the chapter argues that strategies of visibility are sometimes deconstructed, but also reinscribed to underpin the construction of lesbian identity within contemporary theories of race, gender and sexuality. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction: In/visible Differences The Anecdote I was initiated into the intricacies of lesbian sexual style when my first lover, ML (butch for Mary Lou), announced that there was such a thing as a "lipstick lesbian" and that I probably was not the only one even though she could not acquaint me with any peers. It was at a New Year's Eve party at which I had met her friends from the rugby team. As she requested, I wore my Christmas present from her, a vintage sweater that had belonged to her grandmother, cashmere with a mink collar and pearl clasps. I was the only one there not dressed in flannel and jeans, except for ML, who had generously agreed to don a gold lame shirt to make me feel less out of place. I sensed that her teammates were skeptical about me when I was introduced. They smiled quickly, shook my hand, and broke off into pairs and trios with their drinks. I mingled long enough to be informed which of the guests were ML's ex­ lovers. The ice did not really break until someone suggested we play a word game. Everyone took seats and formed a circle. I chose an armchair and ML sat at my feet. In the middle of someone else's turn, ML turned and lifted the hem of my long swishy skirt to peek underneath. I smiled and lightly popped her on the head, and the rest of the women burst into laughter. 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 The gesture both marked and recuperated my difference in a way that eased the mistrust of women whose codes of recognition did not include the sexual style "femme" but did acknowledge, if not overtly then tacitly, the sexual style "butch"--or at least the eighties version of it, the ubiquitous flannel-shirts-and-jeans lesbian drag.1 I'm still not sure exactly what made the gesture work to that effect. It plays on the heterosexual oedipal scenario in which anatomical difference figures sexual difference and then reduces it to an instance of visible perception (the little boy looking