Male lesbianism

GLQ

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 391-399

  Schor, Naomi ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77749302702     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-7-3-391     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Gretchen Schultz, "Nineteenth-Century French Literature," in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Holt, 1995), 293;
2. Victoria Thompson, "Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France, 1830-1870," in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 399.
3. Thaïs E. Morgan, "Male Lesbian Bodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet, Baudelaire, and Swinburne," Genders 15 (1992): 37-57
4. constitutes a major pioneering inquiry into male lesbianism. The main thrust of Morgan's superb feminist analysis is that male lesbianism is doubly bad for women: it reinscribes the privileges of heterosexual males, and it appropriates the subject position of female lesbians. While I find her demonstration of the all-too-familiar Tootsie phenomenon entirely persuasive, my concern lies not with the rerouting of male-male desire through compliant lesbian bodies but with the psychic process whereby certain nineteenthcentury French male writers imaginatively divest themselves of their male attributes and come to occupy the desiring position of lesbians.
5. Where Morgan sees men in drag copulating, I see a nude man making love with himself. For another, quite different instantiation of male lesbianism see Terry Castle, Nœ̈l Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
6. "Indeed so ubiquitous were Coward's lesbian friendships, one is tempted to pronounce him, like Cole Porter or Carl Van Vechten or Cecil Beaton, a kind of 'male lesbian'-a man so responsive to female homosexuality, so psychically involved in its recognition, that conventional sexual categories seem ill adapted to describe him"(25; see also 117-18 n. 33).
7. Roland Barthes, ed., Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 152-53. In the earliest response to Barthes's first critical study, the notion of male lesbianism did not go unnoticed but left contemporary critics perplexed and calling for further elucidation. Thus Lucien Febvre writes in his April 1954 review of Michelet in Combat:
8. "Some will be annoyed by ⋯ certain sub-headings which irritate at first glance. I don't much like Michelet's 'lesbianism'⋯ an equivocal and ultimately obscure formulation. It needs explanation" ("Michelet Not Dead," in Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, ed. Diana Knight [New York: Hall, 2000], 32).
9. Julia Kristeva, "Stendhal and the Politics of the Gaze," in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 361.
10. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 381.
11. Interestingly, Freud too envisioned two types of homosexuality: "subject homœrotics and object homœrotics. Object inversion exists when someone who is mentally and physically masculine (an object homœrotic) seeks a homosexual partner who is biologically masculine and psychologically feminine (a subject homœrotic). A male invert with passive aims is anatomically or biologically masculine but mentally feminine" (Russell H. Davis, Freud's Concept of Passivity [Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1993], 176).
12. Cf. Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 60-111, esp. 71-72.
13. Wilson, while endorsing much of Silverman's analysis of the relationship between Marcel and Albertine, parts ways with Silverman when she argues that that relationship is a lesbian relationship between two women. Wilson then discusses "certain issues which may in fact encourage us not to think of Marcel simply as lesbian" (72).
14. Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust's Lesbianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 70-71.
15. Gustave Flaubert, œuvres complètes: Correspondance, supplément (July 1877-May 1880)
16. ed. René Dumesnil et al. (Paris: Conard, 1954), 287 (translation mine);
17. Paul Verlaine, quoted in Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Pœtry (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999), 210.
18. Jan Goldstein, "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 34 (1991): 148.
19. For an extended feminist discussion of the vexed question of Freud's linkage of femininity and passivity see Davis, Freud's Concept of Passivity, 171-97.
20. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74), 22:114, 115;
21. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition, 23:188 (emphasis added).
22. Freud, General Theory of the Neuroses, in The Standard Edition, 16:327.
23. Freud, Extracts from the Fliess Papers, Draft K, "The Neuroses of Defense (A Christmas Fairy Tale)," in The Standard Edition, 1:228.
24. John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5, 2.
25. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, trans. Carol Cosman, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2: 34-35.
26. Flaubert, November, quoted by Sartre, Family Idiot, 2:32.