Gay marriage and pulp fiction: Homonormativity, disidentification, and affect in Ann Bannon's Lesbian novels

GLQ

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 583-609

  Carter, Julian ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70349976201     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2009-003     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Susan Stryker, "Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity," Radical History Review 100 (2008): 145.
2. Stryker's own analysis moves in the direction of epistemological normalization, but even her discussion remains centrally focused on power relations, and the other contributors to Radical History Review's special issue on homonormativities share this emphasis.
3. Lisa Duggan, "The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism," in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 179.
4. Although the construction of intimacy as apolitical did not begin in the 1950s, in the 1930s and 1940s U.S. popular cultures of love and marriage often emphasized the socially consequential and constructive character of personal choices, whether in terms of eugenics, economic activity, or one's contribution to the war effort. The mass culture of the Cold War tended instead to contrast politics to conventional forms of romance and domesticity, treating normal intimacy as the opposite of ideology insofar as love in America was widely represented as the expression of a free choice imagined as integral to human nature, rather than as a culturally specific political value.
5. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2, 3.
6. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
7. On the whiteness of the Village bar scene, see Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1982).
8. On Bannon, see Maida Tilchen, "Ann Bannon: The Mystery Solved!" Gay Community News 8 (1983): 8 - 12;
9. Susanna Benns, "Sappho in Soft Cover: Notes on Lesbian Pulp," in Fireworks: The Best of Fireweed, ed. Makeda Silvera (Toronto: Women's, 1986), 61 - 68;
10. Suzanna Danuta Walters, "As Her Hand Crept Slowly Up Her Thigh: Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp," Social Text, no.23 (1989): 83 - 101;
11. Diane Hamer, " 'I Am a Woman': Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s," in Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Lilly (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47 - 75;
12. Michele Aina Barale, "When Jack Blinks: Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker," Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 533 - 49;
13. Yvonne Keller, " 'Was It Right to Love Her Brother's Wife So Passionately?': Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950 - 1965," American Quarterly 57 (2005): 385-410.
14. Christopher Nealon evaluates Bannon's work as "the premier fictional representation of US lesbian life in the fifties and sixties" in "Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction," New Literary History 31 (2000): 748.
15. Barbara Grier, pers. comm, November 2001; Ann Bannon, pers. comm., June 2008. As of this writing, all criticism of Bannon's work has proceeded as if The Marriage's disappearance is inconsequential. Even Bannon's official Web site mentions the book only to say that it is "not part of the Beebo Brinker chronicles" (www.annbannon .com/books.html [accessed December 22, 2007]).
16. See Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, "Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall Lesbian History," in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 181-198
17. Joan Nestle's work, especially A Restricted Country (1988; rpt. San Francisco: Cleis, 2003)
18. and her edited collection The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson, 1992),
19. continues to be the touchstone for research on lesbian femininity in the second half of the twentieth century. See also Laura Harris and Liz Crocker, eds., Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls (New York: Routledge, 1997),
20. especially Harris and Crocker's "Fish Tales: Revisiting 'A Study of a Public Lesbian Community,' " 40-51.
21. Biddy Martin, Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996).
22. The descriptive terms normal, average, and regular were all used by women writing to the Ladder in response to the melodramatic depictions of lesbian life common in paperback originals like the Bannon novels (Martin Meeker, "A Queer and Contested Medium: The Emergence of Representational Politics in the 'Golden Age' of Lesbian Paperbacks, 1955 - 1963," Journal of Women's History 17 [Spring 2005]: 166).
23. Bannon herself was well situated to depict that experience: an educated, apparently normal feminine housewife with children who nonetheless loved women in a powerfully sexual sense, Bannon made the most of her fleeting opportunities to go to Greenwich Village and explore the lesbian world she found there. See Tilchen, "Ann Bannon: The Mystery Solved!"
24. On the hierarchies enforced by marriage, see Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999);
25. Siobhan Somerville, "Queer Loving," GLQ 11 (2005): 335 - 70;
26. Janet Jakobsen, "Sex + Freedom = Regulation," Social Text, nos. 84 - 85 (2005): 285-308.
27. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 107-108
28. For this essay, the most immediately influential entry in the literature on gay shame is Heather Love, "Spoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon's Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History," GLQ 7 (2001): 487 - 519.
29. See also Robert Reid-Pharr, "Tearing the Goat's Flesh," in Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 99 - 134;
30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 35 - 66;
31. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004);
32. Jochen Kleres, "The Entanglements of Shame: An Emotion Perspective on Social Movement Demobilization," in Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Helena Flam and Debra King (New York: Routledge, 2005), 170 - 88;
33. Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
34. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
35. Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). My thanks to the QStudy-L online community, many of whose members have shared their thinking and citations on gay shame with me.
36. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 185.
37. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 194.
38. There were, of course, exceptions. See, for instance, David Wellman, "Red and Black in White America: Discovering Cross-Border Identities and Other Subversive Activities," in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, ed. Becky Thompson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29-42.
39. Though I refer to Bannon's books according to their original publication dates, for readers' convenience all page citations are to the 1983 Naiad reprint editions (excepting The Marriage, which has not been republished; see note 8). Page references are parenthetical.
40. On the back cover of the Naiad Press edition, I Am a Woman is presented as the story of Laura's meeting with Beebo.
41. Bannon's official Web site also describes I Am a Woman as the book in which Laura meets Beebo: see www.annbannon.com/timeline .html (accessed August 20, 2007).
42. Matt Wray coined the term stigmatype to specify the stigmatizing work performed by some hostile stereotypes. Stigmatypes work to establish and maintain both social and symbolic boundaries. See Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 9-14.
43. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
44. Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 2002), 187.
45. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York: Viking, 2005), 226.
46. Coontz, Marriage, 230.
47. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Gay Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), 340. Subsequent citations in the text.
48. Frank Caprio, Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (New York: Citadel, 1956);
49. for an example of the popular exposition of this view, see Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 275-276
50. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
51. The argument that "power-evasiveness" is a characteristically white relationship to race comes from Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
52. Here I am articulating the white side of the coin Hiram Perez describes in his trenchant discussion of the "impossibility of a private Black sexuality." See Perez, "You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It Too!" Social Text, nos. 84 - 85 (2005): 185.
53. Self-restraint is, of course, an ideal that has had a powerful racial valence in U.S. and global history. On the importance of sexual self-control to modern U.S. white racial meaning, see Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
54. on sexual self-control as an ideological justification for colonization, see Ann Laura Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable," in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 344 - 73.
55. For a fascinating comparative approach to love as a normative emotional discipline in the service of empire, see Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
56. Didier Eribon makes a similar observation: "The closet has so often been denounced by gay activists as a symbol of shame . . . that we have forgotten or neglected the extent to which it was also, and at the same time, a space of freedom and a way - the only way - of resisting, of not submitting to normative injunctions. And for many gays it is that still. In a certain sense, it was a way of being 'proud' when everything pointed toward being ashamed" (Insult, 49).
57. On the link between racial and sexual narratives of maturity and development, see Julian Carter, "Normality, Whiteness, Authorship: Evolutionary Sexology and the Primitive Pervert," in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1996), 155-176
58. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11-12. Subsequent citations in the text.
59. Eribon, Insult, xxi.
60. Bannon, Beebo Brinker, 193, 189.