Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
http://sociology.rutgers.edu/people/faculty/menu-ii/228-arlene-stein
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 92105369
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n92105369
HEADING: Stein, Arlene
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046 __ |f 1959 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Stein, Arlene
372 __ |a Sociology–Study and teaching |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Rutgers University |2 naf |s 2001
373 __ |a University of California, Berkeley |2 naf
374 __ |a College teachers |2 lcsh
670 __ |a Sisters, sexperts, queers, 1993: |b CIP t.p. (Arlene Stein) galley (Ph.D. in the sociology of gender and sexuality, U.C. Berkeley)
670 __ |a Her Sex and sensibility, 1997: |b CIP t.p. (Arlene Stein) CIP data sheet (b. 1959)
670 __ |a Rutgers University WWW site, May 13, 2016: |b “Stein, Arlene” webpage (Arlene Stein is a professor of Sociology at Rutgers University since 2001)
953 __ |a sb17 |b sd07
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of California Berkeley, Ph.D., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Rutgers University, professor of sociology, 2001-present. Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers, director.
AWARDS:American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award, career contributions to the study of sexualities.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Arlene Stein is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University and is the director of the Rutger’s Institute for Research on Women. Stein received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in the sociology of gender and sexuality in 1993. Her research centers on the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics, for which she received the American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities. Stein teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, culture, self and society, and trauma and memory, and writing within and beyond academia. She also serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
Sex and Sensibility
In Sex and Sensibility, Stein investigates the lives of baby-boomer lesbian feminists who reshaped what it means to be a gay woman in America. The book is comprised of thirty interviews with these influential women, who vary in race, class and ethnic background. Most of the interviewees came out between the late sixties and seventies, during the heyday of both the feminist and gay liberation movements.
Stein explains that these women’s actions transformed society’s perception of lesbians from fringe deviants to a social group, and, to some, a legitimate political force. She outlines the birth of the movement, how it transformed and expanded, and the internal conflicts and political backlash that stunted its progress.
In the sixties and seventies, radical lesbian feminists adopted the concept that lesbianism was flexible and expansive, introducing the notion that all women were ‘potential’ lesbians. Stein’s interviews highlight this concept, indicating that some of these women felt they were lesbians all their lives, while others came to this identity at the encouragement of women in the movement. By blurring the definition of lesbianism and deemphasizing the necessity of same-sex attraction, the movement hugely expanded their population and the power of their movement. Yet as the movement progressed, a desire for a more specific, defined experience of lesbianism emerged. One one hand, ‘true’ lesbians began to be defined by lifestyle choices, such as androgynous dress and vegetarianism. This observable identity was exclusive and specific. Lesbians of color and more feminine-inclined lesbians in particular felt excluded from this identity. Simultaneously, the existence of ‘experimental’ lesbians, women who felt they had chosen lesbianism, invited the dangerous notion that lesbians could then choose heterosexuality. Stein uses her interviewees voices as well as her own to describe how these internal conflicts eroded at the movement’s initial, idyllic origins.
Karen Kahn in Women’s Review of Books wrote, “Stein has done an important service by reminding us of the radical nature of the lesbian-feminist vision and of the legacy inherited by today’s queer movement.” Pauline Klein in Library Journal penned, “recommended for academic libraries, especially those supporting lesbian, gay and bisexual studies.”
The Stranger Next Door
In The Stranger Next Door, Stein examines a political battle in a rural Oregon community. In 1993, Timbertown (a pseudonym), enthusiastically led an initiative to vote in a measure denying civil rights protection to lesbians and gays. Through a series of interviews taken over two years in the town, Stein sought to understand why this community, which was essentially devoid of any queer presence, developed such united passion over this issue.
While the issue at hand was gay rights, Stein concludes that civil rights protections were symbolic of the townspeople’s discontent with outsiders, the failing economy, and a sense of invisibility. Since the 1980s, the timber industry on which Timbertown so entirely relied, had been flagging. Simultaneously, newcomers began to slowly trickle into the region. This included outdoorsy hippies, off-the-grid devout Christians, and wealthy Californians. The townspeople saw their home and way of life being pulled from beneath them, while simultaneously their source of income was disappearing. Loss of wealth in the 80s and 90s led to increased church attendance, and these disenfranchised white Americans found community and comfort in a stern God. Stein argues that many of these people felt shame in their individual and personal decline, and yearned for a scapegoat and sense of identity. She suggests that they found this ‘other’ in the gay rights movement, and rallying behind a united cause offered them a feeling of community and purpose they had been so lacking.
“Stein’s sophisticated critique of essentialist views of homosexuality, especially those held by liberals, is a needed corrective,” wrote Tex Sample in Christian Century. Vanessa Bush in Booklist noted: “Stein sympathetically portrays an area made anxious and frightened by change.”
Unbound
In Unbound, Stein interviews four individuals who are on the spectrum of transgender identification. The first three, Ben, Parker, and Lucas, are all in the process of having top surgery to remove their breasts as they transition from female to male. Nadia, the fourth interviewee, identifies as a butch lesbian, and is also seeking top surgery to masculinize her chest.
The individuals come from diverse backgrounds, and each adds to the portrait of what it means to be transgender in America today. Ben, who never identified as a woman, grew up in a highly supportive environment. Nonetheless, he struggles with body image issues on a daily basis. Parker found less support in his youth, but was outspoken and assertive in his identity. Lucas identifies as neither a man nor woman, but feels more comfortable with a more masculine appearance. Nadia does identify as a woman, but prefers to modify her body to better represent her identity. The book offers a group portrait of the individuals, as well as a history of transgender people and a sociological perspective of this community of people.
Michael Cart in Booklist described the book as an “accessible, thoroughly researched, and well-written examination of a circumstance still noted for its complexities.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Unbound “succeeds in documenting what it means to be trans today,” while a contributor to Kirkus Reviews described it as “a stellar exploration of the complexities and limitations of gender.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Prospect, October 22, 2001, EJ Graff, review of The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights, p. 42.
Booklist, March 1, 2001, Vanessa Bush, review of The Stranger Next Door, p. 1213; May 15, 2018, Michael Cart, review of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity, p. 5.
Christian Century, October 17, 2001, Tex Sample, review of The Stranger Next Door, p. 32.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of Unbound.
Lambda Book Report, March-April, 1995, Rachel Pepper, review of The Good, The Bad, and the Gorgeous, p. 30.
Library Journal, May 1, 1997, Pauline Klein, review of Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation, p. 128; February 15, 2001, Mark Bay, review of The Stranger Next Door, p. 188.
Nation, October 4, 1993, Liza Featherstone, review of Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, p. 360.
Publishers Weekly, May 3, 1993, review of Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, p. 300; January 1, 2001, review of The Stranger Next Door, p. 74; April 9, 2018, review of Unbound, p. 70.
Women’s Review of Books, January, 1995, Judith Kegan Gardiner, review of Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography, p. 19; April, 1998, Karen Kahn, review of Sex and Sensibility, p. 8; September, 2001, Rebecca Gordon, review of The Stranger Next Door, p. 12.
Faculty
Fac Stein ArleneArlene Stein
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1993
Department of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
26 Nichol Avenue
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901
Office: Davison Hall, 045
Email: arlenes@sociology.rutgers.edu
CV
Arlene Stein’s research focuses on the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The author or editor of nine books, she received the American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities. She teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, culture, self and society, and trauma/memory, and writing within and beyond academia. She is the director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers and serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.
Her latest book is Unbound: Transgender Men and the Transformation of Identity (Pantheon, 2018). She is also the author of The Stranger Next Door, an ethnography of a Christian conservative campaign against lesbian/gay rights, which explores clashing understandings of religion and sexuality in American culture; it received the Ruth Benedict Book Award. Her book Sex and Sensibility examines generational shifts in lesbian identities. Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Descendants, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford, 2014), looks at how children of survivors became narrators of their parents’ stories of genocide. Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (J. Daniels, coauthor), is a guidebook for publicly engaged scholars.
You can follow her at twitter @SteinArlene.
Print Marked Items
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of
Identity
Michael Cart
Booklist.
114.18 (May 15, 2018): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity.
By Arlene Stein.
June 2018.336p. Pantheon, $26.95 (9781524747459). 306.76.
Approximately 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender, sociologist Stein reports. Her illuminating book examines the lives of three of
these, Ben, Parker, and Lucas, all of whom are in transition from female to male and all of whom are in the process of having surgery to
masculinize their chests. Joining them is a fourth subject, Nadia, who is a bit of an outlier: a gender-bending butch lesbian, she is not in transition
but wishes to have her breasts removed to appear more masculine. Stein uses these four lives as context for a larger, more expansive examination
of the condition of being transgender in America at a time, she notes, when notions of gender are changing, and transgender persons are more
visible than ever, thanks in part to the internet. Part history, part sociology, part group portrait, Stein's book is an accessible, thoroughly
researched, and well-written examination of a circumstance still noted for its complexities, inviting searching discussions of the meanings of
gender and masculinity. Happily, Unbound will bring much needed clarity to such discussions.--Michael Cart
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cart, Michael. "Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 5. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=020875c7. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400721
Stein, Arlene: UNBOUND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stein, Arlene UNBOUND Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4745-9
A new sociological study on transgender individuals and their experience transitioning.
In her latest, gender theorist Stein (Sociology/Rutgers Univ.; Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust
Consciousness, 2014, etc.) follows the lives of four individuals who have gone through the process of transitioning from female to male. The
author states that her book is a "group portrait of those who choose to remake their bodies and lives using the tools they have at their disposal."
Stein spent considerable time with her subjects, Ben, Parker, Lucas, and Nadia, each one existing at different levels of the transgender spectrum.
Ben, who grew up in a highly supportive environment, never identified as a woman; he had large breasts and struggled on a daily basis with his
body image. As a result, he started hormonal treatments and eventually underwent top surgery to fully transition from female to male. Parker is a
prototypical Californian, though he is from Virginia. Muscular and blond, he referred to himself as a "gurl" and dressed as a tomboy. He was
outspoken and refused to wear the clothes his parents wanted him to wear as a girl. Lucas' identity fits near the intersection of male and female--
i.e., he identifies neither as a man nor a woman but rather "somewhere masculine of center." Finally, Nadia wishes to modify her body but still
wants to be recognized as a woman. Stein takes readers on each one of these individual's incredible journeys, shedding a rigorous, respectful, and
highly studied light on the experience of transgender individuals today. For example, "transgender men," she writes, "are not simply retrieving the
male that resides within; they're also creating themselves." This significant book provides medical, sociological, and psychological information
that can only serve to educate those lacking understanding and awareness of an entire community of individuals who deserve representation.
A stellar exploration of the complexities and limitations of gender.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Stein, Arlene: UNBOUND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375134/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9bf23b28. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375134
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of
Identity
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity
Arlene Stein. Pantheon, $26.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-5247-4745-9
Stein (Reluctant Witnesses) tracks the rapid evolution of gender identity in this provocative group portrait of trans men. The book opens in the
waiting room of a South Florida plastic surgery clinic, where four patients are scheduled to undergo "top surgery" (chest masculinization) on the
same day. For the next year Stein follows the four subjects as they recover from surgery and grow accustomed to their new bodies, interviewing
their friends, families, and acquaintances. While in the past passing as cisgender was the goal, Stein finds these days people are just as likely to
reject the gender binary outright and claim trans as their own identity. Of Stein's four subjects, Lucas makes a point of coming out as trans, Parker
is interested in passing in the traditional sense, Nadia chooses to change her body but not her gender, and Ben is still figuring out where he is most
comfortable (meanwhile he uses social media to keep people updated, posting a photo of the bandages and tubes on his chest). The book also
notes the prominence of reality television and social media in creating space for more gender identities to flourish by making "the personal
eminently more public." Stein posits that trans identity as it exists right now in younger people is less an act of survival and more an act of selfreinvention.
Though Stein finds no tidy conclusions, her book succeeds in documenting what it means to be trans today. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 70. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535100006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ead581c. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535100006
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small
Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights
E.J. GRAFF
The American Prospect.
12.18 (Oct. 22, 2001): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2001 The American Prospect, Inc.
http://www.prospect.org/
Full Text:
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights By Arlene Stein. Beacon Press, 267 pages,
$27.50
A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN. It's one of the great themes of American literature and film, not to mention contemporary American politics.
Often our towns don't seem big enough for everyone, especially when profound disagreements arise. Liberalism at its most limited sometimes
tries to overlook those disagreements, as if all we needed to live happily side by side were a kindergarten diversity curriculum in which brownand
yellow- and pink-skinned children and children with two mommies happily taste one another's foods and sing one another's holiday songs.
But that pleasant vision of pluralism can itself offend those who believe tolerance to be dangerous and immoral while seeing their own
philosophy as the One True Way. What happens when liberalism meets fundamentalism, when Why can't we all just get along? meets Get thee
behind me, Satan?
That question runs through two recent books about strangers who ride into town and decide to stay. In Stephen G. Bloom's Postville, small-town
Iowa is shaken when an unfriendly group of Lubavitcher Hasidim buy a failed Iowa slaughterhouse so that they can supply kosher meat and
poultry to Orthodox Jews worldwide. The story in Arlene Stein's Stranger Next Door is more complicated: In a small Oregon town, an
evangelical Christianity springs up among dispossessed white men and women and finds political focus in a campaign against "special rights" for
gay people (who are all but nonexistent here). Each book structures its story around a local election that everyone understands to be a referendum
on those cast as aliens. The back story is that of a global economy increasingly shifting work away from local white men while bringing in
outsiders whose habits and values seem arrogant, inconsiderate, and strange.
Postville is the lighter read, and frames its microcosmic culture clash with Bloom's own story. In 1993 Bloom, a San Francisco journalist, takes a
job as a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. At first he and his wife are enchanted by Iowa City's exotic cultural habits: people sitting
on the wraparound porch, driving under the speed limit, fishing with fresh-dug worms, eating all-pork meals at the county fair. But after a few
years, the Blooms notice that they don't quite fit, both as "city slickers," as the locals call them, and as Jews. For their fellow Iowans, Christianity
is neutral background; Jesus is unthinkingly invoked by teachers and scoutmasters, neighbors sing Christmas carols outside their door as if this
were benign, and the newspaper's Easter headline is "He Has Risen."
And so when Bloom hears about the Lubavitcher Hasidim in Postville, 350 miles north, wearing their payot (those curly earlocks) and black hats
in a state "where pigs outnumber people by almost five to one," he's riveted. "While I knew the Lubavitchers to be fierce fundamentalists who
proselytize other Jews the way Jehovah's Witnesses go after nonbelievers," he writes, "I also realized that the Hasidim in Postville were as close
to family as Iris and I could muster in our new home state." Although the Hasidim, notoriously xenophobic, don't answer his calls requesting an
interview, eventually a non-Jewish plant manager at the kosher slaughterhouse invites him to come by. Once he's inside, the Hasidim recognize
his ethnicity and start recruiting.
The fact that Bloom is actually going inside the slaughterhouse flabbergasts the locals, whom he interviews as well (and who don't realize that he
can be Jewish without a yarmulke and so forth). Postville is so small--population 1,465--that "no one used turn signals because everyone knew
where everyone else was going." The local newspaper covers everyone's vacation destinations, afternoon visitors, and birthday-party decorations.
It's a town so monoculturally descended from German Lutheran settlers that before World War II, German was spoken more often than English on
the street. But by 1987, when Aaron Rubashkin, a Brooklyn butcher, came looking for a place to start a glatt-kosher slaughterhouse, Postville was
in economic crisis. Fueled by the worldwide Orthodox boom and advances in international shipping, Rubashkin's business became wildly
successful, bringing money into town.
Nevertheless, 10 years later, the locals aren't exactly happy with their marriage of necessity. "The Jews," as they're called, drive like maniacs,
never mow their lawns, build without permits, bargain furiously (which the locals feel implies the price is unfair), and wait months, if ever, to pay
their bills. Disregarding the fundamental rule of Iowa coexistence, the Hasidim won't even make eye contact on the street. One of Bloom's local
informants asks: "Hadn't their mothers taught them any manners?"
Bloom does his best to be fair to the Hasidim as he explores their hermetically sealed world. He notes his relief at the familiar speech rhythms,
the questions upon questions. He accepts an invitation for a Shabbat stay with a Hasidic family, revels in the food, and prays with his hosts on
command. But finally, Bloom is a liberal, not a fundamentalist: He's repelled by their intolerance, their insularity, their open delight in cheating
"the goyim," and their manipulative arguments. He quotes one Hasid as saying proudly: "I am a racist.... Why haven't the Jews been extinguished
after scores of attempts throughout history? That we are still here defies logic. There is only one answer. We are better and smarter. That's why!"
Bloom's heart is with the Postville local who says: "It's not such a great religion if they don't want to be a part of the community, is it?"
Bloom's background as a daily journalist shows; while the book brims with factual details, it lacks a sustaining narrative. As a result, parts of
Postville are compulsively readable, filled with vivid information about such things as the town's history, kosher killing and evisceration, the
filthy, algae-covered mikveh for Hasidic men, and Rubashkin's all-expenses-paid importation of labor. But there's too much filler: reconstructed
"conversations" full of nothing much, for instance, and detail about an assimilated Jewish doctor who'd coexisted nicely before the Hasidim
came. Bloom's own story doesn't fully hold the book together. Nor does the confrontation he constructs: a vote over whether the town should
annex the slaughterhouse land and that of other local businesses, subjecting them to city taxes and law--an effort the Hasidim call anti-Semitic.
Annexation passed; the Hasidim stayed. Postville's biggest disappointment is its failure to take on the larger questions: What does it mean that
more people worldwide are taking refuge in separatist ideologies like the Lubavitchers'? And what is to be done when a separatist culture crashes
into a pluralist one?
THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS THAT Arlene Stein takes up in The Strangers Next Door. In 1992 the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) ran a
statewide initiative campaign to prevent antidiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation. After the statewide measure failed, the OCA
targeted rural towns and counties that had voted in favor and attempted to pass similar measures locally. "Rural Oregon was a rather unlikely site
for a battle over homosexuality," writes Stein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. "In this vast, sparsely populated region of the country,
there were few visible signs of queer life: ... no out homosexuals lobbying for civil rights; no lesbian/gay coffeehouses, newspapers or running
clubs." Why this moral panic about a nonexistent threat? Stein chooses one rural town (calling it "Timbertown" to protect her informants) so that
she can closely examine the larger symbolic meanings behind the campaign.
Stein recounts how Timbertown had uneasily absorbed successive intrusions of newcomers--back-to-the-land counterculture folks, Jesus freaks,
latte-drinking Californians--whose manners and morals offended the town's frontier values of "strength and obedience, self-discipline, selfreliance,
and respect for authority." This uneasy meeting of cultures grew nastier as the lumber economy began to sputter. Loss of prosperity led
to a 1980s and 1990s explosion of membership in evangelical churches. There, many with shaky finances and unstable lives found shelter,
invoking a strict God and a stern but loving church family to shepherd them through change. Their beliefs infused the struggles of everyday life--
from maintaining sobriety and sexual restraint to making friends and sewing slipcovers--with purpose and meaning. But many, Stein believes,
remained deeply ashamed of their personal failures, embarrassed by their lower-class God--in need of a scapegoat to help define their outsider
Christianity as "traditional" and to prove to themselves that they walked in the path of righteousness. "By declaring who is strange," writes Stein,
"we come to know who is familiar." Enter the OCA and its antigay campaign.
The town's few lesbian business owners and school administrators were too afraid to come out. Opposing the "no special rights" measure was
thus up to heterosexual liberals, who peddled a generic (and inadequate) support for tolerance and diversity. For the liberals, the campaign was
about something other than gayness, which many weren't quite comfortable with. Many of them were fighting their own scapegoats, with the
OCA activists standing in for all backward Oregon "rednecks" (that class slur against white people who work outdoors). Writes Stein: "If few
OCA members were college educated, this group was, in contrast, a relatively educated, cosmopolitan one; if OCA members repudiated the
values of 1960s-style personal self-expression, social experimentation, tolerance of difference--this group proudly embraced them."
It was, in other words, a class battle--a battle of worldviews--and thus far more divisive than either side expected. The liberals underestimated the
depth of feeling on the other side, which was fed by class resentment, job loss, falling wages, and despair at failing family relationships, as well
as by disdain for supposedly rich gay people wantonly escaping their sex roles and family duties. Stein argues persuasively that liberalism hasn't
offered a compelling vision of what's moral and good in family and community life, and that "diversity" rhetoric can be patronizing. When one
identifies oneself as lesbian, say, or as Hasidic, "born that way" just doesn't cut it: Obviously, the offender is still choosing every day to embrace a
set of values that repels, even disgusts, a neighbor. Stein articulates the OCA activists' furious resentment at diversity rhetoric this way: "Who was
protecting their rights, their livelihood? Who was championing their needs when they lost their jobs, when their homes were repossessed, when
they. struggled to maintain their community? Who was making them feel included?"
WHAT'S ESPECIALLY VALUABLE about Stein's book is her detailed look at each individual's take on the meaning of the campaign and her
patient exploration of the wide variety of forces shifting the ground of these people's lives. She reveals both OCA activists and their liberal
counterparts as individuals with more ambivalence and nuanced emotion about the election than can be divined from the angry boycotts of local
businesses, the furious letters to the editor, or the protest demonstrations that became screaming matches.
Stein traces the way the global economic climate's peculiar currents are responsible not just for liberal choices like openly gay lives but also for
the rise in American fundamentalisms. None of us can get back to where we once belonged: That world is gone and we must choose a new one.
Gay-pride parades, Pentecostal churches, ritual mikvehs, and NPR cruises are a few of our newly invented homes. None can fairly be called
"traditional," since all are chosen adaptations or reactions to modern life. If once upon a time we had small-town harmony, it was because we
could purge our world of strangers, shipping the Puritans off to America, shipping the Quakers off to Rhode Island, shipping the Mormons off to
Utah, and so on. But how do you kick the strangers out of town--whether the strangers are Starbucks-drinkers or Hasidim--if their cash props up
your fading livelihood, or if they can turn to FedEx and Visa and the Web for everything they need?
Learning to live together while disapproving of--perhaps even despising--one another's behavior and beliefs is not the same as "celebrating
diversity." It's a grittier and less utopian accommodation to those who are both like and unlike ourselves. Timbertown's antigay measure passed,
but like the Postville annexation, the win was largely symbolic. It was presumptively overruled when the Supreme Court, in the 1996 Romer v.
Evans decision, struck down the Colorado antigay amendment on which the Oregon measures were patterned. Meanwhile, most churches on the
OCA side decided that political involvement was too divisive and returned to ministering to individuals. But neither did the liberals win,
conquering ignorance and hate as they'd hoped. The waves of global capitalism continue to wash strangers, with their peculiar and distasteful
choices, into town. As we've so terribly seen in recent weeks, we'll be facing showdown battles, large and small, again and again in years to
come.
E.J. GRAFF, a visiting researcher at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, is the author of What Is Marriage For?
GRAFF, E.J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
GRAFF, E.J. "The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights." The American Prospect, 22
Oct. 2001, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A79572997/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1de9849. Accessed
19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A79572997
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small
Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights
Tex Sample
The Christian Century.
118.28 (Oct. 17, 2001): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
By Arlene Stein. Beacon, 320 pp., $27.50.
EVERY LIBERAL ought to read this sociological study of a successful Christian-right, local initiative in a small Oregon town. In Timbertown (a
pseudonym), this initiative, later overturned by the courts, aimed "to prevent antidiscrimination protection for gays and lesbians and to prohibit
government spending to promote homosexuality." Arlene Stein provides an important depiction of life in a town which became a vortex of
national and local issues.
The Timbertown initiative was largely symbolic, Stein argues. There were "few visible signs of queer life" in the town, and yet homosexuality
became a primary issue for the community's self-definition. Why was this so? Stein's response to this question examines how sexuality, especially
homosexuality, can become a loaded symbol for people's anxieties about a changing world. She examines the deep divisions which result, the
way the community consequently defines itself, and what such things tell us about how we live together in a contested moral order.
Stein ignores neither the economic nor the cultural issues before this community. But on the homosexual initiative, she focuses on an
inclusion/exclusion dynamic: "Social groups know who they are in large measure by knowing who they are not. Timbertown's conservative
Protestants defined themselves in opposition to nonbelievers, homosexuals, radical feminists, and, in subtle ways, people of color."
Stein is a Jew and a lesbian, though--for good reason--she kept her homosexual identity hidden from this community of 8,000. Her sympathies
are clearly opposed to the initiative and the views of her Christian-right subjects. Yet she is able to nuance her descriptions so that such folk come
through as living, breathing people rather than as cardboard stereotypes. For those unfamiliar with Christian-right ideology, its local strategies and
its turn from "moral majority" rhetoric to "victimization" language, Stein's book is a good introduction.
But she may be at her best when she depicts the flaws of liberal ideological arguments against the Christian fight in a community undergoing
significant change in family structure as well as in the relationship between women and men and sexuality, and experiencing the influx of large
numbers of hippies, emigres from California, people of various racial and ethnic identities and other strangers.
Add to this a severe economic downturn. In Timbertown the well-paying jobs with benefits that could support a family quickly disappeared. In
Oregon as a whole 80 percent of families lost income during the time immediately preceding the initiative, a decline well represented in
Timbertown. Yet the liberal battle against the homosexual initiative did not take these factors into account. In fact, the liberals seemed to regard
members of the working class as unsophisticated "rednecks"--the only racial slur allowed by such progressive enclaves.
Stein graphically delineates liberal elitism, with its abstract talk of inclusivity, pluralism and diversity and its often callous disregard for the
concerns of local, more traditional people. Her book is an education for liberals who care about race and gender but who would not know a class
issue if it walked up and belted them on their new-class-and-status backsides.
A frustrating aspect of The Stranger Next Door is the absence of an analysis of the voting results on the antigay initiative. Stein reports that the
initiative "won 57 percent of the vote despite the fact that its sponsors were outspent by their liberal opponents" and that "only one third of
eligible voters turned out to the polls." The number of registered voters is not reported. If roughly 20 percent, or 1,600, of the population of 8,000
are children and youth, then those over 21 make up, again roughly, about 6,400. Surely this figure significantly exceeds the number of registered
voters.
Nevertheless, if only a third of this number voted (around 2,100) and if 57 percent of these voted for the antigay measure, this amounts to about
1,200 antigay voters in my highly inflated guesstimates. If Christian conservatives make up around 20 percent of the population and liberals make
up 15 to 20 percent, is it possible that this was an electoral battle largely between the liberals and conservative Christians in town--a battle that,
though it received a great deal of media attention, did not really engage most of the people?
This question becomes important in at least two instances. While Stein is quite sensitive to the economic reversals of people in the working class-
-a sensitivity I applaud and appreciate--the impression the book gives is that these working-class people are primarily responsible for the
scapegoating of homosexuals, liberals, radical feminists and, more subtly, people of color. The election data do not support such a view. They
suggest that this community dogfight was a battle between middle-class liberals and conservative Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals and
Pentecostals, though certainly not all such Christian conservatives became politically involved.
The book gives the subtle impression that more traditional people are the carriers of racism, heterosexism and authoritarianism. But racism,
heterosexism and authoritarianism are found throughout this culture. Working people and traditionalists certainly bear the responsibility for their
own complicity in these culturally pervasive evils. At the same time, traditional life in the U.S. is complex and ought not be stereotyped as the
primary location of such views.
While Stein is too deeply humanitarian to make such claims flatly, she nevertheless implies them. For example, she sees the traditional family as
male-dominated, but such families are enormously complex. Many are headed by women. Moreover, the research of Judith Stacey, whom Stein
knows, finds that racial-ethnic and white working-class families are in fact the innovators of postmodern family forms.
But let the final word be one of genuine appreciation for the book. Stein's sophisticated critique of essentialist views of homosexuality, especially
those held by liberals, is a needed corrective. Many progressive views have not adequately engaged the socially constructed character of sexuality
in general and homosexuality and heterosexuality in particular. Moreover, her critique of the media, her careful treatment of symbolic boundaries,
her capacity for nuancing the lives and the views of the people of Timbertown and her appreciation for the other all make this book required
reading for those at the center of a host of issues now challenging us.
Reviewed by Tex Sample, coordinator of the Network for the Study of U.S. Lifestyles, based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Sample, Tex
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sample, Tex. "The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights." The Christian Century, 17
Oct. 2001, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A79514998/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=56bff90e. Accessed
19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A79514998
Dealing with difference
Rebecca Gordon
The Women's Review of Books.
18.12 (Sept. 2001): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights by Arlene Stein. Boston: Beacon Press,
2001, 257 pp., $27.50 hardcover.
One evening in the early 1980s an overflow crowd of sex radicals and other interested parties crowded into San Francisco's Modern Times
bookstore. We'd come to hear bookstore collective member Amber Hollibaugh describe her experiences during the campaign against California's
infamous Proposition 6--the "Briggs Initiative" of 1978. Had voters approved Proposition 6, it would have effectively prohibited lesbians and
gays from teaching in California's public schools and exposed them to sanctions ranging from simple dismissal to criminal charges. As it turned
out, after a hard-fought campaign 58 percent of California's electorate voted No.
Hollibaugh was one of an army of people who'd canvassed suburban and rural California to build an opposition to the Briggs Initiative. That
evening at Modern Times she described what it was like to appear on the doorstep of a perfect stranger and enter into a conversation that,
ultimately, was about sex. To her surprise, Hollibaugh told her audience, quite a few people chose to seize on this unexpected, colloquy with a
stranger as an opportunity to discuss some intimate secrets of their own lives--their own sexual fears and desires. Somehow the presence at their
doors of a real, live lesbian, a person whose very existence implied that she must at least think about sex, provided an opening they didn't even
know they'd been waiting for.
I thought often about Hollibaugh's talk while reading The Stranger Next Door, in which sociologist Arlene Stein describes her efforts to
understand why in 1993 a rural Oregon town with no visible presence of lesbians or gay men became the site of a bitter fight over an anti-gay
ballot initiative.
The measure's framers, a right-wing Christian organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, had lost at the state level in 1992 when Oregon
voters defeated an anti-gay initiative known as Measure 9. The next year they regrouped and formulated a new strategy. Rather than try for a
statewide win, which required carrying urban centers like Portland and Eugene, OCA would concentrate on consolidating the state's more
conservative rural areas. In 1993, OCA succeeded in passing anti-gay ordinances in 26 small towns. One of these was the place Stein calls
"Timbertown." She spent two years there interviewing people who had participated in this fight. She spoke with pastors of many of the town's
more than forty churches; with schoolteachers and principals; with the mayor and members of the city council; with working men and women;
with owners of small businesses; and with many of the people who found themselves unexpectedly thrust into activist roles on both sides of the
issue.
The Stranger Next Door has an ambitious agenda. Stein wants to do more than retell the story of a bad year for gay rights in Oregon. She hopes
that the particularities of the Timbertown battle will illuminate larger questions about how communities draw the line between inside and outside,
between self and other. "This book," she says, "is about much more than the gay rights debate. It explores how sexuality became a resonant
symbol upon which a group of citizens projected a host of anxieties about the changing world around them, how it divided a small community,
and what that tells us about our ability to live with difference."
Stein succeeds in drawing a complex, nuanced picture of the initiative fight and the town where it took place. Indeed, if the book has a flaw, it is
that it presents too many theses, some better developed and supported than others. In a brief 200 pages, Stein runs through: sociological theories
of boundary-drawing in communities; Freud's explanations of European anti-Semitism and their relevance for semi-visible gays; how the rugged
individualism of conservative Oregonians prevented them from recognizing the macroeconomic causes of their personal misfortunes and led
them to project their shame onto homosexuals instead; and how evangelical Christians have been able to transform themselves in the eyes of the
public from aggressors to wounded victims.
Any one of these topics could have served as the key thesis of this study. It would have taken a much longer book to develop all of them fully. In
"general, The Stranger Next Door also seems to suffer from having been rushed into print. It's full of unfortunate word-processing artifacts; the
same phrases, and even entire paragraphs, appear in more than one place. These quibbles aside, it's a fascinating look at a painful subject.
As is often the case when a community seeks a scapegoat, in Timbertown the need to draw the line between insider and alien emerged during a
period of economic disruption and cultural uncertainty. Since the 1940s, the town had thrived on the lumber business. Young men could count on
going straight from high school to the forests and mills, where they worked at good union jobs and earned what is now quaintly called a
breadwinner wage--an income sufficient to support children and a stay-at-home mother.
By the beginning of the 1990s, a number of factors, including foreign competition, over-foresting and environmental concerns, had brought the
lumber business to its knees. Between 1987 and 1990 four of the seven mills in the Timbertown area shut down. By 1993, the remaining mills
employed a mere 600 people. Minimum-wage service sector jobs replaced mill jobs--for those who were lucky enough to find jobs at all.
Cultural upheavals attended these economic changes. Hard times pushed women into the workforce, which destabilized familiar gender roles:
"The decline of the male breadwinner prompted confusion and discomfort because it called into question many of our culture's most deeply held
beliefs about manhood and masculinity. If men do not share a distinctive identity based on their economic role as family providers, then what is a
man?"
At the same time that Timbertown's lumber-based economy entered free-fall, it began to lose its long-standing homogeneity of class and race.
Two very different groups of outsiders began to appear on the streets and in the stores. A cohort of comparatively affluent urban refugees, many
from southern California, were attracted to the area by cheap land prices and the beauty of rural Oregon. Immigrants from Asia and Latin
America also arrived, disturbing Timbertowners' expectation that they would always recognize their fellow citizens as being in some essential
way like them.
Timbertowners reacted to these unwelcome eruptions of difference, says Stein, by focusing their anxiety on a shadowy, invisible enemy within--
homosexuals. Gay people made a perfect target for the Right, she suggests, because they were a threat that "seemed sufficiently outside the
community to be alien, but that simultaneously represented familiar (and therefore doubly scary) urges that were accessible to anyone."
Stein develops this theme in her critique of the response of the newly-minted activists who formed the Community Action Network (CAN) to the
anti-gay initiative. In its campaign against "special rights" for homosexuals, OCA drew a distinction between "essential" markers of minority
identity, such as race or ethnicity, and what it saw as the exercise of individual choice, in particular, homosexual behavior. CAN, on the other
hand, presented the view that gayness is an essential quality, based in biology, and that gay people should be protected from discrimination that is
based on something they can hardly help. Stein notes that the "essentialist model of homosexuality was appealing [to anti-OCA organizers]
because it drew upon commonsense notions of sexuality as innate, rooted in biology and bodies rather than choices and understandings of the
world."
It is not only rural Oregonians who subscribe to an essentialist understanding of gayness. The construction of homosexuality as an innate, even
genetically determined, trait also underlies the gay civil rights strategies of national organizations like the Human Rights Campaign. It forms the
basis of the consistently pro-gay pronouncements of advice columnists like Dear Abby and Ann Landers, who recommend tolerance and
acceptance to their millions of readers.
Ironically, the voices that argue that gay people are biologically, different from heterosexuals often are the same ones to counsel a more complete
assimilation of gay people into heterosexual society. From this point of view, it is the essential nature of our difference--one little biological
switch thrown up instead of down--that makes us the same as everyone else. An alternative view--that same-sex passion is one of a whole range
of possible sexual feelings humans may choose to act upon--is much more disruptive to straight society, and I would argue, more liberatory. That
view would hardly have led my "gay leaders" to the conclusion that the two things I want most in the world are to join the army and get married!
The Stranger Next Door is most interesting in its account of how the anti-gay campaign led some Timbertown residents to grapple with exactly
these questions. Stein quotes a woman she calls Janice Trump. Trump is actively heterosexual, but does not fit the Timbertown norm. She and her
sister have lived with their boyfriends, have had kids out of wedlock, don't shave their legs. "Homosexuality isn't simply a gay issue. You have to
take a stand--it affects your sexuality," said Janice. "You have to think about what it really means. Even if you're straight, it means that you have
to make that decision for yourself. You can't just sort of not think about it.... It scares people."
Stein also introduces us to Linda Mabley, a "frumpy" 35-year-old housewife who is part of an underground subculture of Star Trek fans. Mabley
attends conventions of Trekkies, who among other things publish 'zines devoted to the saga of a long-standing love affair between Captain Kirk
and Mr. Spock. "Linda attends conventions where hundreds of people, mainly heterosexual women who live [in] a very active, often homoerotic
fantasy world, meet and exchange these publications," Stein reports. It comes to her that in an odd way, Linda, too, is queer. "On the surface she
may be heterosexual, but deep down, there's a lot more going on: unwieldy desires and identifications that defy simple description, which lead her
to identify with queer people in a more profound fashion than, many of those around her, and know that they are not simply a minority group
'over there'."
Like Amber Hollibaugh 25 years earlier, Arlene Stein has scratched the straight world of Timbertown to reveal a universe of unsettling sexual
possibility--right next door.
REBECCA GORDON is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center in Oakland, California. Recent publications include Cruel
Usual: How Welfare "Reform" Punisbes Poor People, and Race and Education: A Handbook for Journalists, both available for download at
www.arc.org.
Gordon, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gordon, Rebecca. "Dealing with difference." The Women's Review of Books, Sept. 2001, p. 12. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A78902024/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f283fb57. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A78902024
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small
Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights
Vanessa Bush
Booklist.
97.13 (Mar. 1, 2001): p1213.
COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Stein, Arlene. The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights. Apr. 2001. 266p. Beacon,
$27.50 (0-8070-7952-9). 305.9
In 1992 religious conservatives succeeded in getting rural Oregon communities to agree to a measure denying civil rights protection to lesbians
and gays, setting off a firestorm of animosity. Stein, a sociologist--and an urbane, agnostic, lesbian Jew--examines why those isolated
communities, which she collectively calls Timbertown, targeted people who were barely visible to them, given how few homosexuals lived
among them. She spent two years talking with activists and residents to explore the nature of the dispute and get at the underlying anxieties about
general social changes affecting them, from loss of jobs in the timber industry to the influx of outsiders interested in high-tech careers and
environmentalism. She found that Timbertown was ripe for agitation by an outsider who formed a citizen's group and targeted gays as the source
of the problems. Sexual orientation, race, and feminism eventually figured in the rising resentment fomented among religious conservatives.
Despite having a totally different perspective, Stein sympathetically portrays an area made anxious and frightened by change.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bush, Vanessa. "The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2001, p.
1213. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A72733033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=97b5b923. Accessed 19 Aug.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A72733033
The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small
Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights
Mark Bay
Library Journal.
126.3 (Feb. 15, 2001): p188.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Stein, Arlene. The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights. Beacon, dist. by Houghton.
Apr. 2001. c.266p. index. LC 00-064158. ISBN 0-8070-7952-9. $27.50. SOC SCI
Stein (sociology, Univ. of Oregon) provides a gripping, detailed, and very readable study of politics in rural Oregon. Stein spent several months in
"Timbertown" (not the town's real name), a small town in central Oregon caught up in the battle of liberals and conservatives over a proposed
amendment to the town's charter prohibiting "special status" for homosexuals. While the battle seemed to center on the issue of gay rights, Stein
reports that this was only a proxy battle between longtime residents and newcomers over the change from a reliance on the old ways of the
timber-based economy and the new service-based economy of the state. Stein provides detailed examinations of the conservative Oregon
Citizens' Alliance and the more liberal Citizens' Action Network, exploring the belief systems driving each group. Her in-depth analysis of the
evangelical Christian movement in America is also particularly noteworthy and broadly applicable beyond Oregon. This book is very highly
recommended for academic and public libraries.
--Mark Bay, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Lib.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bay, Mark. "The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights." Library Journal, 15 Feb.
2001, p. 188. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A71251444/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=88988bca. Accessed 19
Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A71251444
THE STRANGER NEXT DOOR: The Story of a Small
Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith and Civil Rights
Publishers Weekly.
248.1 (Jan. 1, 2001): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2001 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
ARLENE STEIN. Beacon, $27.50 (266p)
ISBN 0-8070-7952-9
"To conservative Christians, homosexuality was sinful, unnatural, against God and family... but to the vast majority, who believed that religion--
and sex--should be kept private, these words sounded intolerant... even hateful," writes Stein in this astute social analysis of how a small Oregon
community dealt with an early 1990S political referendum to prohibit "special rights" for homosexuals. A Jewish lesbian, Stein (Sisters, Sexperts,
Queers) writes as both a community insider and outsider, drawing upon personal observation, media analysis and interviews with 50 of the town's
residents to sympathetically and critically reveal how both sides, and those caught in the middle, responded to this culture war. She conjures a
complex portrait of people under stress, attributing much of the community's conservatism to the flagging economy caused by the weakening of
the timber industry in the 1980s. Stein is best when articulating and exploring the myriad paradoxes and contradictions of the situation. Her most
strik ing observation is that while conservative Christian organizers from outside Timbertown created widespread fear of a gay takeover, the town
itself had no visible homosexual community, and most of its gay citizens were well integrated and accepted within the social fabric. A careful
observer and writer, Stein uses traditional sociological methodology to reach conclusions about the boundaries of tolerance that are similar to
those in Beth Loffreda's recent work of straightforward reportage on the murder of a young gay man in Wyoming, Losing Matt Shephard
(Forecasts, July 31). (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"THE STRANGER NEXT DOOR: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith and Civil Rights." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2001,
p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A69070226/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6ba6fd7. Accessed 19 Aug.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A69070226
Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation
Karen Kahn
The Women's Review of Books.
15.7 (Apr. 1998): p8+.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
How many lesbian parties have I attended in the last few years
where, somewhere late into the night, the rating game begins? As
individuals rate themselves on a butch-femme scale of one to ten, the
audience laughs uproariously, usually a sign of disbelief at the
self-designator's score. I always give myself a four, a wanna-be butch
whose identity fit neatly into the androgynous seventies, when butch/femme
was relegated to history, and jeans and flannel shins were in. Though I'm
fascinated by butch/femme culture, I know it's not really me. On the one
hand, I wouldn't be caught dead in a dress, I never wear makeup and I have
yet to pierce my ears (in short, I'm not particularly feminine); but on the
other, I don't construct my identity through the use of masculine symbols
nor is my erotic life pursued in a butch/femme context.
I suspect this is true for the other party-goers as well - real hutches and
femmes wouldn't be playing this game at all. Our rating game is really about
how masculine or feminine we feel (as compared to how others perceive us).
Butches and femmes use these feelings, as well as the cultural material of
femininity and masculinity, to construct identities that are the foundation
of a complex erotic culture. But even if the rating game conflates
masculinity and femininity with butch and femme, the game's popularity
points to a keen interest among lesbians in questions of identity and
gender.
Fortunately, we now have two lively and well-written new books to feed our
intellectual imaginations. Arlene Stein's Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a
Lesbian Generation concerns itself with the construction of lesbian
identities among babyboom women who came out during the heyday of the
feminist movement. A final chapter, in which Stein examines the identities
of ten post-baby-boom, or "nineties," lesbians, provides some comparative
perspective. Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, edited by Laura
Harris and Elizabeth Crocker, is an anthology of essays examining the
meaning of femme gender identity and its relationship to feminism,
femininity and queer theory and politics. Among these essays are historical
and contemporary perspectives on femme identity, with a number of interviews
with femmes whose life histories span a period of monumental change for
lesbians, the 1950s through the 1990s.
Stein sets out in Sex and Sensibility to take a new look at the legacy of
lesbian feminism, which in recent years, she argues, has become "highly
contested." Even her own earlier book, Sisters, Sexperts, and Queers (Plume,
1993), she admits, "appears overly critical of lesbian feminists' excesses
and insufficiently appreciative of some of their contributions." Having come
to realize that lesbian feminists powerfully reshaped the meaning of being
lesbian in US culture, Stein wonders what has happened to these women and
their ideas.
In order to find out, she interviews thirty baby-boom lesbians (women born
between 1945 and 1961) from varied race, class and ethnic backgrounds. Forty
percent are working-class; seventeen percent are women of color. Most came
out between the late sixties and late seventies, during the height of the
feminist and gay liberation movements. Though not necessarily self-defined
activists, many of these women belonged to consciousness-raising groups and
conceptualized their "lifestyle" choices in political terms.
Stein believes that in the late sixties and early seventies, radical/lesbian
feminists (she doesn't always distinguish between the two) transformed what
had been a deviant social role into a social and personal identity that was,
among feminists at least, an evolved political position, the mature
development of a woman who had moved beyond compulsory heterosexuality.
Radical feminists took the highly social-constructionist position that all
women were "potential" lesbians. Lesbianism was about sisterhood, about
taking energy away from a male supremacist culture and giving it to women.
This understanding of lesbianism, Stein notes, became increasingly removed
from sexual desire. By blurring the boundaries between heterosexual and
homosexual, radical feminists enlarged the population of lesbians in a way
that had been inconceivable just a decade earlier. Lesbianism became a
viable choice for women who had never considered the possibility.
Middle-class women, in particular, for whom political vision was sometimes
more urgent than same-sex desire, came out in droves.
These new lesbian feminists hoped to create a world in which gender and
sexuality would no longer define identity. They rejected femininity, which
they saw as an oppressive social construct, and celebrated androgyny. They
envisioned a utopian future in which men and women would be more similar
than different, no longer forced to adapt to a binary gender system or
compulsory heterosexuality.
Though all of the lesbians Stein interviewed constructed their identities in
the political context of the sixties and seventies, differences emerged.
Barbara Herman, for example, claims she would have been a lesbian even if
there had never been a feminist movement. She had her first sexual
experience with a girl at the age of fifteen, in 1962. Though the women's
movement gave her permission to claim her lesbian identity - and develop
pride in it - she sees her lesbian desire as "just the way I am." Stein
describes Herman, and others like her, as having lesbian identities that are
"deep, enduring, and unchanging." Not surprisingly, she found that women
like Herman tended toward gender "nonconformity" from an early age.
Uncomfortable with femininity, this group of lesbians found androgyny a
comfortable fit.
Margaret Berg tells a different story. Through feminism, she found herself
leaving behind unfulfilling relationships with men. Margaret "elected"
lesbianism and then, to consolidate this identity, joined a women's
consciousness-raising group that focused on sexually. In the group, she
explains, "There was a normative sense about discovering women and male
domination and how disgusting men could be. Not to be a lesbian was stupid,
masochistic... something called 'lesbian consciousness' developed in our
heads."
Stein calls these attempts to develop lesbian consciousness "identity work."
For many women who came out during this period, social identity preceded
personal identity. They chose to reject heterosexuality because it made
political and personal sense, but they didn't immediately feel like "real"
lesbians. For many, sex with women felt new and experimental. Laura Stone
describes how "after three or four sexual experiences with women, [I]
started to get turned on by it. ... I saw myself changing. I got past all
the repulsion stuff ... and I began to think back to heterosexual sex less
fondly." Stone also describes the process of trying to become more "butch"
in order to fit into the androgynous culture of lesbian feminist
communities. Identity work was a conscious effort to bring new social and
personal identities into alignment.
Barbara Herman represents one end of what we might call an "identity"
spectrum, while Margaret Berg and Laura Stone represent the other end.
Herman experienced herself as having found her "true" identity - an
essential self. Berg and Stone consciously constructed their lesbian
identities, after having rejected the path set out for them in a
male-supremacist social order. Without the women's movement, neither would
likely have followed this path.
Lesbians recognize this difference among themselves, and it often causes
conflict over questions of authenticity. In the early seventies, "old" gay
women who had come out before Stonewall questioned whether the "new"
generation of feminist lesbians was just "playing" with same-sex
relationships. But the split wasn't only generational. Lesbians were divided
by class, race and gender expression, as well as how they experienced and
built their identities.
Stein describes Sue Hammond, "who identified as a 'bar dyke' in the 1970s,"
as "conflat[ing] the terms 'pretend dykes,"political lesbians,"lesbian
feminists,' and 'femme' women, often using them as a coded way to speak
about class privilege." But Hammond clearly felt her difference on many
levels - she didn't recognize herself among these new lesbians who had
turned sexual desire into political choice. Similarly, Shirley Alvarez, a
working-class Mexican American, says: "If you're a brown person, and you're
going out on a limb, out of your little culture thing, to be with someone of
your same sex, it's not just a play thing. It's more of a heart thing. ...
Why put up with all that shit that you get just for fun, for experimenting?"
Lesbian feminists, Stein concludes, found themselves caught in the
contradiction of their own project: on the one hand, they believed in the
concept of "liberating the lesbian in every woman"; on the other hand,
conflict among lesbians and continued homophobia among straight women made
them want to "fix lesbians as a stable group." In their desire to create
stable identities and committed communities, lesbian feminists ignored the
complexities of their own experience. Women were increasingly expected to
conform to certain codes of dress and behavior that promoted androgyny,
vegetarianism and a willingness to survive on the margins of the mainstream
economy. Working-class women and women of color often found these
communities unwelcoming and intolerant of cultural differences. Women with
more feminine sensibilities found androgyny stifling and decidedly unsexy.
And, Stein observes, even though for many baby-boomers lesbianism had been a
political choice, attempts to fix the boundaries of lesbian identity led to
the denial of the fluidity of sexual desire. Acknowledging that lesbianism
could be a choice became too risky, as it opened the door to choosing
heterosexuality. Lesbians who returned to relationships with men in the
1980s were often ostracized from their communities, their actions seen as
the ultimate betrayal of the true believers.
Stein seems genuinely disappointed that the radical feminist project, which
suggested that gender and sexual identity could be reshaped in ways that
would undermine male supremacy, could not sustain itself in the face of
internal contradictions and political backlash. But she insists that women
who became lesbians in the 1970s, even those who later married men, were as
authentically lesbian as those who felt their identities to be "deep and
enduring." We all construct our identities, she argues, we just bring
different sensibilities to the process.
Yet desire has always seemed more fundamental, to me, than politics when it
comes to sexual identity. That large numbers of "political lesbians" have
returned to heterosexuality only proves that there is something more to
being lesbian than a socially constructed performance.
Performance, however, is the catch-word of the nineties. Judging by the
final chapter of Sex and Sensibility and Harris and Crocker's anthology,
nineties lesbians find the notion of androgyny more boring than radical.
Influenced by queer theory, they have begun to create gendered performances
that seek to resist mainstream constructions of sexuality and gender.
Lesbian feminists rejected the butch/femme culture that had evolved in the
working-class bars of the 1940s and '50s, because they saw "role-playing" as
imitating patriarchal social relations. They didn't understand that butches
and femmes had constructed a complex erotic culture that was also a culture
of resistance, providing those who participated a modicum of safety in a
hostile world. Nor did they understand the persistence of gender as an
organizing principle for individual identity formation. As Mary Sheiner
writes in Femme: "Killing off my femme looked and felt pretty much the same
as throwing off the shackles of patriarchy." Two decades later, however,
Sheiner has discovered that gender identity, like sexual identity, cannot
simply be thrown off like an old dress that no longer fits.
Sheiner is one of fifteen contributors to Femme, most of whom write from
first-person perspectives about the meaning of femme identity in the context
of feminist and queer politics. A relatively diverse group, particularly in
terms of race and age, the contributors hold in common an understanding of
femme "as a contestatory lesbian identity, a radical feminist position, and
a subversive queer model." Historical perspective is provided by an excerpt
from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Liz Kennedy and Madeleine Davis'
ethnography of the Buffalo, New York, lesbian community in the 1940s and
'50s, and by interviews with older femmes such as Davis, Joan Nestle and
Amber Hollibaugh.
In their introduction Harris and Crocker argue that feminism, because of its
rejection of femininity, silenced femmes. As a result femmes have been left
out of much of the discussion of feminist, lesbian and queer movements.
"Femmes have been seen neither as 'real' feminists within feminist
communities nor as 'real' lesbians within lesbian communities," they write.
Once again the question of authenticity emerges as a major theme.
Many writers in Femme express anger at those who would deny the radical
nature of their identities, whether "old butches," lesbian-feminists, or the
new generation of queers: "old butches" never trusted femmes, who often
moved back and forth between the lesbian and heterosexual worlds; lesbian
feminists believed femmes were women who failed to recognize their own
oppression. Similarly, today, Lisa Ortiz writes, "As long as other queers
question femme loyalty to the struggle because we can pass, we must divide
our energy by combating stereotypes within and outside the gay community."
Ortiz acknowledges her ability to pass in the heterosexual world, but she
does not value the privilege. In fact, for many women in this collection,
the presumption of heterosexuality is a form of oppression that they
actively straggle against. In this way, they distinguish themselves from
"lipstick lesbians," feminine lesbians who want to assimilate into
middle-class heterosexual culture.
Femme shows that the relationship between femme and feminine is far from
simple. Traditional femininity represents oppression and powerlessness,
abuse and victimization. Femme is presented here as a form of resistance - a
powerful, transgressive and thoroughly queer identity. Leah Lilith
Albrecht-Samarasinha explains:
Femme women, like MTFs [male-to-female transsexuals], construct their
girl-ness and construct it the way it works for us. At our strongest, we are
the opposite of feminine heterosexual women who are oppressed by their
gender and held to impossible media standards designed to foster hatred of
one's body. According to those media standards, I am ugly. I am a racially
ambiguous woman who is small breasted, small hipped, has glasses. ... But
the more I come into my strong femme self, the more my beauty shines. (p.
142)
Albrecht-Samarasinha shares this highly constructed notion of femme identity
with Amber Hollibaugh, who has modeled her "femme-ness" on drag queens:
The difference between myself and many of the straight women that I know is
that they think that they are normal and natural. They believe in girl-ness,
that girl-ness becomes woman-ness. ... But my role models for being femme
have been drag queens, because drag queens construct female identity. I look
at drag queens and I think, that's how I feel as a woman. ... (p. 215)
Particularly in the sexual arena, femmes reject the notion of female
passivity. Femmes not only "choose the wrong kind of ... 'guy'" but openly
express their erotic desires (hence the allusion to "bad girls" in the
anthology's title). Jewelle Gomez tries to put to rest the anti-feminist
stereotype that femmes are "passive" sexual partners. In an interview with
Heather Findlay, she says: "I believe that lying on my back, in a receptive
position, I have as much power as anyone else, whatever position they're in.
Physically, emotionally, psychologically I hold a lot of power in that
moment of receptivity."
Gomez suggests that when we think of power only in male terms - an attack -
we fail to see the many ways that power can be played out in sexual
encounters. We see some of these in stories such as Madeleine Davis', who
describes her discovery of herself as a femme sexual dominant. But, most
often, it is not so much the way femmes have sex but the way in which they
seek out sexual satisfaction that truly turns the stereotype on its head.
Harris and Crocker believe that recognizing femme sexual agency is of more
than theoretical importance. "The agitation of femmes within feminism was
central to the formation of a sex-radical position out of which the queer
movement grew," they argue. Think about it: Dorothy Allison, Chrystos (whose
voice, unfortunately, is missing from this volume), Joan Nestle, Amber
Hollibaugh, Madeleine Davis, Minnie Bruce Pratt - all femmes. These women
have exploded the boundaries of feminist sexual discourse, placing desire,
power, and gender at the center of the conversation.
The contributors to Femme are highly conscious of having constructed their
femme identities. Though for some "femininity" might feel "natural," femme
is a performance. As Joan Nestle explains, "There is definitely a distinct
fem self that I create in bed, that I worked on for a very long time." But
Nestle acknowledges there is something else. There is desire: "What felt
essential to me was my desire. That I didn't feel I had to learn, I mean I
knew I wanted to be fucked by a certain kind of woman, but who I was around
that fucking, how I would encourage it, what I would do with it, that is
what I was creating."
This is much the same argument that Arlene Stein makes in Sex and
Sensibility. We shape our identities in complex ways that involve both our
internal selves and the social and cultural worlds around us. Queer
identities are ways of organizing our sexual desires, but they are also
modes of resistance that have taken different forms throughout history.
Lesbian feminists created a particular form of lesbian identity which they
hoped would topple binary categories of gender and sexuality. Because they
could not accommodate difference - of experiences of gender and desire as
well as race and class - they failed to accomplish their goals.
Stein has done an important service by reminding us of the radical nature of
the lesbian-feminist vision and of the legacy inherited by today's queer
movement. Lesbian feminists opened the way for the critique of gender and
sexuality that underlies queer performance. Many of the contributors to
Femme acknowledge this debt. They expand the conversation by forcing us to
acknowledge femme as another critique of femininity, a mode of resistance
that acknowledges the persistence of gender while demanding respect for
powerful women with queer desires.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kahn, Karen. "Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation." The Women's Review of Books, Apr. 1998, p. 8+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20633287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f08a0586. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20633287
Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls
Karen Kahn
The Women's Review of Books.
15.7 (Apr. 1998): p8+.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
How many lesbian parties have I attended in the last few years
where, somewhere late into the night, the rating game begins? As
individuals rate themselves on a butch-femme scale of one to ten, the
audience laughs uproariously, usually a sign of disbelief at the
self-designator's score. I always give myself a four, a wanna-be butch
whose identity fit neatly into the androgynous seventies, when butch/femme
was relegated to history, and jeans and flannel shins were in. Though I'm
fascinated by butch/femme culture, I know it's not really me. On the one
hand, I wouldn't be caught dead in a dress, I never wear makeup and I have
yet to pierce my ears (in short, I'm not particularly feminine); but on the
other, I don't construct my identity through the use of masculine symbols
nor is my erotic life pursued in a butch/femme context.
I suspect this is true for the other party-goers as well - real hutches and
femmes wouldn't be playing this game at all. Our rating game is really about
how masculine or feminine we feel (as compared to how others perceive us).
Butches and femmes use these feelings, as well as the cultural material of
femininity and masculinity, to construct identities that are the foundation
of a complex erotic culture. But even if the rating game conflates
masculinity and femininity with butch and femme, the game's popularity
points to a keen interest among lesbians in questions of identity and
gender.
Fortunately, we now have two lively and well-written new books to feed our
intellectual imaginations. Arlene Stein's Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a
Lesbian Generation concerns itself with the construction of lesbian
identities among babyboom women who came out during the heyday of the
feminist movement. A final chapter, in which Stein examines the identities
of ten post-baby-boom, or "nineties," lesbians, provides some comparative
perspective. Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, edited by Laura
Harris and Elizabeth Crocker, is an anthology of essays examining the
meaning of femme gender identity and its relationship to feminism,
femininity and queer theory and politics. Among these essays are historical
and contemporary perspectives on femme identity, with a number of interviews
with femmes whose life histories span a period of monumental change for
lesbians, the 1950s through the 1990s.
Stein sets out in Sex and Sensibility to take a new look at the legacy of
lesbian feminism, which in recent years, she argues, has become "highly
contested." Even her own earlier book, Sisters, Sexperts, and Queers (Plume,
1993), she admits, "appears overly critical of lesbian feminists' excesses
and insufficiently appreciative of some of their contributions." Having come
to realize that lesbian feminists powerfully reshaped the meaning of being
lesbian in US culture, Stein wonders what has happened to these women and
their ideas.
In order to find out, she interviews thirty baby-boom lesbians (women born
between 1945 and 1961) from varied race, class and ethnic backgrounds. Forty
percent are working-class; seventeen percent are women of color. Most came
out between the late sixties and late seventies, during the height of the
feminist and gay liberation movements. Though not necessarily self-defined
activists, many of these women belonged to consciousness-raising groups and
conceptualized their "lifestyle" choices in political terms.
Stein believes that in the late sixties and early seventies, radical/lesbian
feminists (she doesn't always distinguish between the two) transformed what
had been a deviant social role into a social and personal identity that was,
among feminists at least, an evolved political position, the mature
development of a woman who had moved beyond compulsory heterosexuality.
Radical feminists took the highly social-constructionist position that all
women were "potential" lesbians. Lesbianism was about sisterhood, about
taking energy away from a male supremacist culture and giving it to women.
This understanding of lesbianism, Stein notes, became increasingly removed
from sexual desire. By blurring the boundaries between heterosexual and
homosexual, radical feminists enlarged the population of lesbians in a way
that had been inconceivable just a decade earlier. Lesbianism became a
viable choice for women who had never considered the possibility.
Middle-class women, in particular, for whom political vision was sometimes
more urgent than same-sex desire, came out in droves.
These new lesbian feminists hoped to create a world in which gender and
sexuality would no longer define identity. They rejected femininity, which
they saw as an oppressive social construct, and celebrated androgyny. They
envisioned a utopian future in which men and women would be more similar
than different, no longer forced to adapt to a binary gender system or
compulsory heterosexuality.
Though all of the lesbians Stein interviewed constructed their identities in
the political context of the sixties and seventies, differences emerged.
Barbara Herman, for example, claims she would have been a lesbian even if
there had never been a feminist movement. She had her first sexual
experience with a girl at the age of fifteen, in 1962. Though the women's
movement gave her permission to claim her lesbian identity - and develop
pride in it - she sees her lesbian desire as "just the way I am." Stein
describes Herman, and others like her, as having lesbian identities that are
"deep, enduring, and unchanging." Not surprisingly, she found that women
like Herman tended toward gender "nonconformity" from an early age.
Uncomfortable with femininity, this group of lesbians found androgyny a
comfortable fit.
Margaret Berg tells a different story. Through feminism, she found herself
leaving behind unfulfilling relationships with men. Margaret "elected"
lesbianism and then, to consolidate this identity, joined a women's
consciousness-raising group that focused on sexually. In the group, she
explains, "There was a normative sense about discovering women and male
domination and how disgusting men could be. Not to be a lesbian was stupid,
masochistic... something called 'lesbian consciousness' developed in our
heads."
Stein calls these attempts to develop lesbian consciousness "identity work."
For many women who came out during this period, social identity preceded
personal identity. They chose to reject heterosexuality because it made
political and personal sense, but they didn't immediately feel like "real"
lesbians. For many, sex with women felt new and experimental. Laura Stone
describes how "after three or four sexual experiences with women, [I]
started to get turned on by it. ... I saw myself changing. I got past all
the repulsion stuff ... and I began to think back to heterosexual sex less
fondly." Stone also describes the process of trying to become more "butch"
in order to fit into the androgynous culture of lesbian feminist
communities. Identity work was a conscious effort to bring new social and
personal identities into alignment.
Barbara Herman represents one end of what we might call an "identity"
spectrum, while Margaret Berg and Laura Stone represent the other end.
Herman experienced herself as having found her "true" identity - an
essential self. Berg and Stone consciously constructed their lesbian
identities, after having rejected the path set out for them in a
male-supremacist social order. Without the women's movement, neither would
likely have followed this path.
Lesbians recognize this difference among themselves, and it often causes
conflict over questions of authenticity. In the early seventies, "old" gay
women who had come out before Stonewall questioned whether the "new"
generation of feminist lesbians was just "playing" with same-sex
relationships. But the split wasn't only generational. Lesbians were divided
by class, race and gender expression, as well as how they experienced and
built their identities.
Stein describes Sue Hammond, "who identified as a 'bar dyke' in the 1970s,"
as "conflat[ing] the terms 'pretend dykes,"political lesbians,"lesbian
feminists,' and 'femme' women, often using them as a coded way to speak
about class privilege." But Hammond clearly felt her difference on many
levels - she didn't recognize herself among these new lesbians who had
turned sexual desire into political choice. Similarly, Shirley Alvarez, a
working-class Mexican American, says: "If you're a brown person, and you're
going out on a limb, out of your little culture thing, to be with someone of
your same sex, it's not just a play thing. It's more of a heart thing. ...
Why put up with all that shit that you get just for fun, for experimenting?"
Lesbian feminists, Stein concludes, found themselves caught in the
contradiction of their own project: on the one hand, they believed in the
concept of "liberating the lesbian in every woman"; on the other hand,
conflict among lesbians and continued homophobia among straight women made
them want to "fix lesbians as a stable group." In their desire to create
stable identities and committed communities, lesbian feminists ignored the
complexities of their own experience. Women were increasingly expected to
conform to certain codes of dress and behavior that promoted androgyny,
vegetarianism and a willingness to survive on the margins of the mainstream
economy. Working-class women and women of color often found these
communities unwelcoming and intolerant of cultural differences. Women with
more feminine sensibilities found androgyny stifling and decidedly unsexy.
And, Stein observes, even though for many baby-boomers lesbianism had been a
political choice, attempts to fix the boundaries of lesbian identity led to
the denial of the fluidity of sexual desire. Acknowledging that lesbianism
could be a choice became too risky, as it opened the door to choosing
heterosexuality. Lesbians who returned to relationships with men in the
1980s were often ostracized from their communities, their actions seen as
the ultimate betrayal of the true believers.
Stein seems genuinely disappointed that the radical feminist project, which
suggested that gender and sexual identity could be reshaped in ways that
would undermine male supremacy, could not sustain itself in the face of
internal contradictions and political backlash. But she insists that women
who became lesbians in the 1970s, even those who later married men, were as
authentically lesbian as those who felt their identities to be "deep and
enduring." We all construct our identities, she argues, we just bring
different sensibilities to the process.
Yet desire has always seemed more fundamental, to me, than politics when it
comes to sexual identity. That large numbers of "political lesbians" have
returned to heterosexuality only proves that there is something more to
being lesbian than a socially constructed performance.
Performance, however, is the catch-word of the nineties. Judging by the
final chapter of Sex and Sensibility and Harris and Crocker's anthology,
nineties lesbians find the notion of androgyny more boring than radical.
Influenced by queer theory, they have begun to create gendered performances
that seek to resist mainstream constructions of sexuality and gender.
Lesbian feminists rejected the butch/femme culture that had evolved in the
working-class bars of the 1940s and '50s, because they saw "role-playing" as
imitating patriarchal social relations. They didn't understand that butches
and femmes had constructed a complex erotic culture that was also a culture
of resistance, providing those who participated a modicum of safety in a
hostile world. Nor did they understand the persistence of gender as an
organizing principle for individual identity formation. As Mary Sheiner
writes in Femme: "Killing off my femme looked and felt pretty much the same
as throwing off the shackles of patriarchy." Two decades later, however,
Sheiner has discovered that gender identity, like sexual identity, cannot
simply be thrown off like an old dress that no longer fits.
Sheiner is one of fifteen contributors to Femme, most of whom write from
first-person perspectives about the meaning of femme identity in the context
of feminist and queer politics. A relatively diverse group, particularly in
terms of race and age, the contributors hold in common an understanding of
femme "as a contestatory lesbian identity, a radical feminist position, and
a subversive queer model." Historical perspective is provided by an excerpt
from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Liz Kennedy and Madeleine Davis'
ethnography of the Buffalo, New York, lesbian community in the 1940s and
'50s, and by interviews with older femmes such as Davis, Joan Nestle and
Amber Hollibaugh.
In their introduction Harris and Crocker argue that feminism, because of its
rejection of femininity, silenced femmes. As a result femmes have been left
out of much of the discussion of feminist, lesbian and queer movements.
"Femmes have been seen neither as 'real' feminists within feminist
communities nor as 'real' lesbians within lesbian communities," they write.
Once again the question of authenticity emerges as a major theme.
Many writers in Femme express anger at those who would deny the radical
nature of their identities, whether "old butches," lesbian-feminists, or the
new generation of queers: "old butches" never trusted femmes, who often
moved back and forth between the lesbian and heterosexual worlds; lesbian
feminists believed femmes were women who failed to recognize their own
oppression. Similarly, today, Lisa Ortiz writes, "As long as other queers
question femme loyalty to the struggle because we can pass, we must divide
our energy by combating stereotypes within and outside the gay community."
Ortiz acknowledges her ability to pass in the heterosexual world, but she
does not value the privilege. In fact, for many women in this collection,
the presumption of heterosexuality is a form of oppression that they
actively straggle against. In this way, they distinguish themselves from
"lipstick lesbians," feminine lesbians who want to assimilate into
middle-class heterosexual culture.
Femme shows that the relationship between femme and feminine is far from
simple. Traditional femininity represents oppression and powerlessness,
abuse and victimization. Femme is presented here as a form of resistance - a
powerful, transgressive and thoroughly queer identity. Leah Lilith
Albrecht-Samarasinha explains:
Femme women, like MTFs [male-to-female transsexuals], construct their
girl-ness and construct it the way it works for us. At our strongest, we are
the opposite of feminine heterosexual women who are oppressed by their
gender and held to impossible media standards designed to foster hatred of
one's body. According to those media standards, I am ugly. I am a racially
ambiguous woman who is small breasted, small hipped, has glasses. ... But
the more I come into my strong femme self, the more my beauty shines. (p.
142)
Albrecht-Samarasinha shares this highly constructed notion of femme identity
with Amber Hollibaugh, who has modeled her "femme-ness" on drag queens:
The difference between myself and many of the straight women that I know is
that they think that they are normal and natural. They believe in girl-ness,
that girl-ness becomes woman-ness. ... But my role models for being femme
have been drag queens, because drag queens construct female identity. I look
at drag queens and I think, that's how I feel as a woman. ... (p. 215)
Particularly in the sexual arena, femmes reject the notion of female
passivity. Femmes not only "choose the wrong kind of ... 'guy'" but openly
express their erotic desires (hence the allusion to "bad girls" in the
anthology's title). Jewelle Gomez tries to put to rest the anti-feminist
stereotype that femmes are "passive" sexual partners. In an interview with
Heather Findlay, she says: "I believe that lying on my back, in a receptive
position, I have as much power as anyone else, whatever position they're in.
Physically, emotionally, psychologically I hold a lot of power in that
moment of receptivity."
Gomez suggests that when we think of power only in male terms - an attack -
we fail to see the many ways that power can be played out in sexual
encounters. We see some of these in stories such as Madeleine Davis', who
describes her discovery of herself as a femme sexual dominant. But, most
often, it is not so much the way femmes have sex but the way in which they
seek out sexual satisfaction that truly turns the stereotype on its head.
Harris and Crocker believe that recognizing femme sexual agency is of more
than theoretical importance. "The agitation of femmes within feminism was
central to the formation of a sex-radical position out of which the queer
movement grew," they argue. Think about it: Dorothy Allison, Chrystos (whose
voice, unfortunately, is missing from this volume), Joan Nestle, Amber
Hollibaugh, Madeleine Davis, Minnie Bruce Pratt - all femmes. These women
have exploded the boundaries of feminist sexual discourse, placing desire,
power, and gender at the center of the conversation.
The contributors to Femme are highly conscious of having constructed their
femme identities. Though for some "femininity" might feel "natural," femme
is a performance. As Joan Nestle explains, "There is definitely a distinct
fem self that I create in bed, that I worked on for a very long time." But
Nestle acknowledges there is something else. There is desire: "What felt
essential to me was my desire. That I didn't feel I had to learn, I mean I
knew I wanted to be fucked by a certain kind of woman, but who I was around
that fucking, how I would encourage it, what I would do with it, that is
what I was creating."
This is much the same argument that Arlene Stein makes in Sex and
Sensibility. We shape our identities in complex ways that involve both our
internal selves and the social and cultural worlds around us. Queer
identities are ways of organizing our sexual desires, but they are also
modes of resistance that have taken different forms throughout history.
Lesbian feminists created a particular form of lesbian identity which they
hoped would topple binary categories of gender and sexuality. Because they
could not accommodate difference - of experiences of gender and desire as
well as race and class - they failed to accomplish their goals.
Stein has done an important service by reminding us of the radical nature of
the lesbian-feminist vision and of the legacy inherited by today's queer
movement. Lesbian feminists opened the way for the critique of gender and
sexuality that underlies queer performance. Many of the contributors to
Femme acknowledge this debt. They expand the conversation by forcing us to
acknowledge femme as another critique of femininity, a mode of resistance
that acknowledges the persistence of gender while demanding respect for
powerful women with queer desires.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kahn, Karen. "Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls." The Women's Review of Books, Apr. 1998, p. 8+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20633288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9d54e18e. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20633288
Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation
Pauline Klein
Library Journal.
122.8 (May 1, 1997): p128.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Stein, Arlene. Univ. of California. 1997. c.270p. permanent paper. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-520-20257-0. $45; pap. ISBN 0-520-20674-6. $16.95.
SOC SCI
These two books are so similar as to be interchangeable; the only significant difference is that one study was done on the West Coast and the other
on the East. Stein (sociology, Univ. of Oregon) interviewed 30 women in the San Francisco area, while Esterberg (sociology and director of
women's studies, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City) interviewed 43 women in an unidentified Northeast community. Focusing on the integration of
feminism, antiracism, and social justice with lesbian lives, both discussions are fascinating, and their portrayal of lesbian identity as changeable
and fluid is valuable.
Although the word bisexual does not appear in Stein's title, her focus on bisexual women is easily as strong as Esterberg's. And Stein's discussion
of separatists may be patronizing when she suggests that "separatism would give the lifelong lesbian some insurance that women she became
involved with would not leave her for men." Despite these minor flaws, these are both important contributions. Recommended for academic
libraries, especially those supporting lesbian, gay and bisexual studies.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Klein, Pauline. "Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation." Library Journal, 1 May 1997, p. 128. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20067983/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7dcd36de. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20067983
The Good, The Bad, and the Gorgeous
Rachel Pepper
Lambda Book Report.
4.9 (March-April 1995): p30.
COPYRIGHT 1995 Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
Lesbian chic was an idea which came to a head about two years or so ago. When kd lang shaved Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair and
Fem-To-Fem posed nude in playboy, some of us were titillated, some of us were outraged, and some of us really didn't give a damn. But all of us
had occasion to wonder whether this was where the lesbian feminist movement had really ended up: Posing with the good, the bad, and the
gorgeous like just so much meat the media could fawn over for a moment or two.
The notion of lesbian chic, and its various ramifications for contemporary queer culture, are what lie at the heart of a new collection from Britain.
The Good, The Band and the Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance with Lesbianism, published by Pandora and distributed in the US by HarperCollins,
sports a sexy gal posing on a striking, metallic-type cover, rubbing her bald head, modelling black bra, Calvins, and a sultry smile. It's an
eye-catching, enticing package, particularly for a topic that was hot way back in 1993.
Trouble is, it's not 1993 anymore. As Sue O'Sullivan writes, in the chapter "Girls Who Kiss Girls and Who Cares?": "[A]t some point during the
mid to late 1980's something shifted in popular media's representations of lesbianism An erotically charged image of a completely different
lesbian began to materialize, coinciding with the older caricatured portrayal. k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford's now famous 1993 Vanity Fair
lesbian-fantasy-come-true-cover and the eulogistic article inside was perhaps this trend's culmination."
Well, exactly. Yet almost the whole text of The Good, The Bad... is concerned with this historical moment, what made this moment happen, and
the types of main-stream media representation which dykes received. There are articles on Martina, Madonna, Jodie Foster, and "The Gorgeous
Lesbian in LA Law." Yvonne Tasker's "Pussy Galore: Lesbian Images and Lesbian Desire in the Popular Cinema" attempts to answer the oftasked
question of what constitutes "lesbian film." But by examining "recent" films like Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct, and Desert Hearts,
younger readers who've well moved past these onto Go Fish and beyond will have trouble maintaining interest.
Rose Ainley and Sarah Cooper, in their essay "She Thinks I Still Care: Lesbians and Country Music," start out by writing, "These days, to be less
than totally enamored by kd lang casts as much doubt on your pride in your lesbian identity as it did in the 1980's to have failed to be interested in
tennis and Martina..." Having never been kd crazy or a Martina freak, such generalizations only make me yawn, as does Clare Whatling's
assertion in "Fostering the Illusion: Stepping out With Jodie," that it's unfair to pressure Jodie to come out, and that "kd is a musical icon for
lesbians in a way different to any previous performer, because she's so dykey, so out." Yeah, sure. Tell that to lesbian magazines like Deneuve,
who still, years later, are unable to secure one single interview with the Queen of Country.
Do I sound bitter, perhaps a bit too jaded for my own good? I apologize. After all, there are some interesting moments in The Good, The Bad, and
the Gorgeous, like Gillian Whitlock's "Cop It Sweet: Lesbian Crime Fiction," although what this has to do with popular culture and lesbian chic is
a bit unclear. And given the cultural and socio-political differences between British and American dykes, it's hard to know just how critical to be
of a book published with all English and Australian contributors. Perhaps the topics under discussion in The Good, The Bad, and the Gorgeous
will still prove exciting reading for British dykes. Unfortunately, though, for US lesbians, what is trendy doesn't last long: Witness that the one
essay which appears in both The Good, The Bad... and Sisters, Sexperts, Queers, a piece on lesbians and popular music, written by Sisters editor
Arlene Stein, was good reading two years ago when her book was published. Today, after taking in the Riot Grrrls, punk bands like Cunts With
Attitude, and a bevy of other out musicians unafraid of the L-word, even that article is sadly dated.
Book publishing is a tricky business. It takes time to cultivate a collection such as this and bring it to fruition. The authors state in their
introduction that they began working on the book in 1991. In the book's introduction they write that "So rapidly has the phenomenon (of lesbian
chic) gathered pace that it has been a challenge to keep this collection up to date." That problem, all too obvious to any dyke reader in 1995, was
obviously - and unfortunately - never resolved.
Rachel Pepper is the Book Editor for Deneuve Magazine and is well over k. d. lang.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pepper, Rachel. "The Good, The Bad, and the Gorgeous." Lambda Book Report, Mar.-Apr. 1995, p. 30. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A16734013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=834cd516. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A16734013
Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography
Judith Kegan Gardiner
The Women's Review of Books.
12.4 (Jan. 1995): p19+.
COPYRIGHT 1995 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
The epigraph to Telling Women's Lives, a poem by Lisel Mueller, states the premise of both these books, that "the story of our life/becomes our
life"; telling a life creates it, and telling it differently creates it differently, so that a woman who writes about another woman wields power over
her, and a woman who enables another woman to tell her own life empowers her.
These two books take complementary approaches and have some complementary strengths. Telling Women's Lives discusses biographies of
women by women, most of whom admire and identify with their famous subjects, Jammed with excerpts from the biographies, it sometimes feels
like an anthology, although Linda Wagner-Martin does assert herself through judgments about the "new" feminist art of biography. Women
Creating Lives is a collection of scholarly essays, primarily by psychologists, that present methodologically self-conscious case studies as part of
a "feminist strategy for studying women's lives," and especially for understanding the formation of identity. In contrast to the biographers, the
psychologists are often more privileged than their subjects, many of whom are poor or abused, and their principal concerns are to show their
subjects' agency even in constraint, to develop egalitarian relations with their subjects, and to give their subjects "voice."
Both books assume that we will be fascinated by their subjects because, in Wagner-Martin's words, "the lives of real people have always been
more interesting than stories about fictional characters." However, both books acknowledge that the boundaries between real people and fictional
characters become blurred when the people are transformed into biographical characters or case studies. As a psychology-oriented literary critic, I
am particularly interested in this blurring between story formation and identity formation. I am also interested in readers' responses. If "telling"
and "creating" are interdependent, it matters who tells what to whom, questions about the relationships between authors and their subjects are
inseparable from questions about the authors' relationships with their readers. Wagner-Martin assumes her readers are identical to herself and so
sometimes simplifies the stories she can tell about biographical subjects. The contributors to Women Creating Lives wish to assume an egalitarian
relationship with their subjects and so sometimes simplify the analysis they can present to us readers.
Wary of pretending to speak for all women, both books concentrate on nuanced portraits of diverse individuals. Wagner-Martin, herself a
biographer of Sylvia Plath, cites over one hundred biographies of women, including political figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, intellectuals like
Simone de Beauvoir, and writers like Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. One category of biography that interests her is daughters who write
ambivalently about their mothers-- Catherine Bateson, for example, daughter and biographer of the dynamic but frequently preoccupied
anthropologist Margaret Mead, who delegated much of her mothering to surrogates. Another is biographies of the wives of famous men-- Hadley
Hemingway and Nora Joyce, for example, who were strong, resourceful women in their own right.
Wagner-Martin decries both negative and sentimental gender stereotypes, and praises biographers who revise them: Ina Taylor overturned pious
legends about George Eliot by revealing her self-absorption when her devoted companion Henry Lewes was dying of cancer, and by describing
her "macabre" second marriage to John Cross, who escaped from their honeymoon in Venice by leaping into a canal. Wagner-Martin feel
women's biographies must be especially attentive to "painful subjects" like "abuse, rape, psychological manipulation," and frank about women's
ambitions, self-deception and sexuality. She faults Eleanor Roosevelt for being "less than truthful," in her autobiography, about her lesbian affair
with the reporter Lorena Hickok and about her special 34-year friendship with her husband's bodyguard, Earl Miller.
Although the biographical subjects she discusses are diverse, Wagner-Martin unfortunately seems to assume that her readers are all alike -- and,
presumably, like her -- which limits the range of her analysis and conclusions. For example, she claims that "what the reader wants to know, of
course," about the author Anne Morrow Lindbergh "is whether she regretted marrying" her famous aviator husband. In the caption to a
photograph of Virginia Woolf, she writes, "it is every woman's dream to appear in photographs" as sensual and intelligent as Woolf appears here,
as though speaking for all her readers' inmost dreams. She claims that people read biographies now, as in the past, to learn about "someone other
than themselves" (rather than, for example, to strengthen their resolve to improve themselves or to inspire them to Christian salvation).
Although Wagner-Martin claims all biographers of women share the aim of "revising history," her own history of biography does not seem
susceptible to revision. Instead it assumes a simple, steady progress toward a feminist truth in which the categories of analysis remain constant
because women readers' interests remain constant. The change is that, now, more women biographers are attuned to these interests and do not fall
prey to old sexist stereotypes. Today's better biographies, she thinks, dig up more evidence about women's perennial conflicts with their mothers,
their weight and their sexual preferences. Thus the better biographies, although more complete, nonetheless go on 'telling and retelling some of
the oldest stories of humankind."
Like Wagner-Martin, the contributors to Women Creating Lives emphasize the uniqueness of their subjects, although their methods are more
sophisticated. They mean to "explor[e] women's lives in their diversity and distinctiveness, one by one." The cases they present range from
prominent figures like the World War One writer Vera Brittain and the popular entertainer Madonna, to middle-class white and African American
professionals similar in background to the contributors themselves -- a social worker, a physician, college student activists, lesbian priest -- to less
privileged women: political exiles, women on welfare, sexually abused women. "Common threads" tie these diverse cases together: "women
negotiating identities; enduring, resisting, and overcoming social forces, societal standards, and personal misfortune, and finding resources for
personal resilience." Another thread is the assumption by the writers that women (and men) find an identity in the process of telling their stories.
Daniel McAdams claims that the psychological task of identity formation is one of "constructing for ourselves and for others a self-defining life
story"; these case studies, therefore, not only report on but help create the identities of their subjects.
The writers in Women Creating Lives charge that mainstream psychological theories "do not permit the construction of women's lives on the
women's own terms"; they advocate case histories that quote their female subjects extensively. Understanding and describing women's selfconceptions
is certainly desirable, though I wonder about the feasibility of restricting descriptions to "the women's own terms." In practice, the
writers have difficulty simultaneously letting women speak for themselves and interpreting their stories for the reader; representing the women
accurately while disguising their identifying characteristics; and respecting their subjects while speaking for them.
Some histories are better at this difficult balancing act than others. For example, M. Brinton Lykes deftly both "co-construct[s]" the story of a
Mayan woman, whose words "re-present the `normal abnormality' of state-sponsored terror" in Guatemala, and shows how the story illustrates
the psychological theory of a "self that posits praxis as central to identity." Others, however, seem too limited by the subject's views and could
have interpreted more. In presenting the case of a woman who became a physician prior to the modern women's movement, for instance, Lillian
Cartwright "do[es] not speculate on unconscious motives and dynamics ... and choose[s] to let the story speak for itself." She thus lets stand
without comment the stereotypes inherent in the physician's belief that her "love of language, high promise, and cosmic drama' came from her
mixed Irish and Russian heritage.
In contrast to the biographers, the psychologists are often more powerful than their subjects, which renders the quest for egalitarian relations
problematic. Deborah Belle speaks of how "our own hidden advantages in life" -- she assumes her readers share her middle-class position --
"distort our perceptions." Women on welfare, too, she reminds us, are "experts on their own lives." Clearly, it is desirable for researchers to
acknowledge their subjects as individuals, as Belle does. However, achieving egalitarian relationships with less privileged subjects may not be a
realistic or even desirable goal, be,cause it may undermine the researcher's relationship with the reader, or her own perspective.
Frances Grossman and Roslin Moore studied an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse who complained that they shared nothing of their own
lives as they delved into her intimate griefs. "She did ask us each a personal question, which we answered," they report, but they don't transcribe
this conversation for us. Thus they present themselves as striving to convince their subject that they are as open with her as she is with them, but
they retain their privileged privacy in relation to us readers. Nor do they trust their subject's version of her own life, since they think more abuse
occurred than she admits. The topic of repressed childhood abuse is currently controversial, and I wish Grossman and Moore had disclosed their
views more fully. Many writers in Women Creating Lives are explicit about their stance toward their subjects, even their emotional reactions to
them; such clarity and openness with the reader, combined with respect for the subject, may be more realistic goals than equality with the subject
or research conducted wholly on the subject's "own terms."
The contributors to Women Creating Lives are especially astute in showing how sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and class interact with gender
in women's lives. For example, Arlene Stein discovered that "coming out" meant different things to different adolescent girls in the sixties and
seventies. Some of them found social affirmation for secret but already well-formulated lesbian identities; others were making a political
statement as feminists and only later explored sexual relationships with women.
Other essays focus on the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Donna Nagata shows that a Japanese American woman coped with internment
during World War Two more successfully than her once-dominating father did because she took a "nonpassive proactive response" to camp life,
and then worked through her experiences by writing a memoir about them. Elizabeth Cole compares two generations of African American
student activists, finding the later group less sexist but more in conflict with the larger African American student community.
Many of the essays illuminate the role of social class in identity formation. Joan Ostrove and Abigail Stewart deduce "a polities of resistance," in
contrast to a British working-lass "politics of envy/longing," from the attitudes of a working-class American college student in the sixties. Here is
one instance where the book's "case study approach" -- which aims to bring the reader "so close" to its subjects that she "gains intimate
knowledge of the women and their modes of resilience, coping, and resistance" -- actually narrows the scope of its conclusions, by basing them
on an individual and therefore perhaps exceptional case. The "politics of resistance" of this particular student, who had the good fortune to go to
an Ivy League college, might have resulted from her unusual opportunities for upward mobility in comparison with other working-class
Americans of the same period. Several essays in the book do helpfully present individual cases in better context, as Ostrove and Stewart
themselves do when comparing their class-conscious student with the majority of her better-off peers, who could not recognize their class
privilege and therefore believed their accomplishments resulted solely from their individual talents.
One of the strengths I find in Women Creating Lives is this redefinition of identity as arising from each woman's entire social context and
practice. "The established theories of psychological development presume an environment characterized by political stability, in which
`environment' is equated with parental behavior," notes Oliva Espin in her study of a young Latin American political exile. I concluded my
reading of these two books wondering how we North Americans might study our own relatively untraumatic political contexts as equally
significant to individual identity as, for example, racial categories for white people and class for the middle class.
By focusing on biographies and case studies of individual women, both Women Creating Lives and Telling Women's Lives uphold American
values of individualism. But they also yearn for, begin to tell and so hope to inspire a collective project of feminist transformation in the
recognition that women's identities are embedded in their social networks and practices. By acknowledging the diversity of their readers as well
as the power relationships between researchers and their subjects, feminist biographers and psychologists will portray women's lives more fully
and fruitfully, ensuring that "the story of our life/becomes our life."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography." The Women's Review of Books, Jan. 1995, p. 19+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A16352073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=67572940. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A16352073
Women Creating Lives: Identities, Resilience, and
Resistance
Judith Kegan Gardiner
The Women's Review of Books.
12.4 (Jan. 1995): p19+.
COPYRIGHT 1995 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
THE EPIGRAPH TO Telling Women's Lives, a poem by Lisel Mueller, states the premise of both these books, that "the story of our life/becomes
our life": telling a life creates it, and telling it differently creates it differently, so that a woman who writes about another woman wields power
over her, and a woman who enables another woman to tell her own life empowers her.
These two books take complementary approaches and have some complementary strengths. Telling Women's Lives discusses biographies of
women by women, most of whom admire and identify with their famous subjects. Jammed with excerpts from the biographies, it sometimes feels
like an anthology, although Linda Wagner-Martin does assert herself through judgments about the "new" feminist art of biography. Women
Creating Lives is a collection of scholarly essays, primarily by psychologists, that present methodologically self-conscious case studies as part of
a "feminist strategy for studying women's lives," and especially for understanding the formation of identity. In contrast to the biographers, the
psychologists are often more privileged than their subjects, many of whom are poor or abused, and their principal concerns are to show their
subjects' agency even in constraint, to develop egalitarian relations with their subjects, and to give their subjects "voice."
Both books assume that we will be fascinated by their subjects because, in Wagner-Martin's words, "the lives of real people have always been
more interesting than stories about fictional characters." However, both books acknowledge that the boundaries between real people and fictional
characters become blurred when the people are transformed into biographical characters or case studies. As a psychology-oriented literary critic, I
am particularly interested in this blurring between story formation and identity formation. I am also interested in readers' responses. If "telling"
and "creating" are interdependent, it matters who tells what to whom; questions about the relationships between authors and their subjects are
inseparable from questions about the authors' relationships with their readers. Wagner-Martin assumes her readers are identical to herself and so
sometimes simplifies the stories she can tell about biographical subjects. The contributors to Women Creating Lives wish to assume an egalitarian
relationship with their subjects and so sometimes simplify the analysis they can present to us readers.
Wary of pretending to speak for all women, both books concentrate on nuanced portraits of diverse individuals. Wagner-Martin, herself a
biographer of Sylvia Plath, cites over one hundred biographies of women, including political figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, intellectuals like
Simone de Beauvoir, and writers like Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. One category of biography that interests her is daughters who write
ambivalently about their mothers--Catherine Bateson, for example, daughter and biographer of the dynamic but frequently preoccupied
anthropologist Margaret Mead, who delegated much of her mothering to surrogates. Another is biographies of the wives of famous men--Hadley
Hemingway and Nora Joyce, for example, who were strong, resourceful women in their own right.
Wagner-Martin decries both negative and sentimental gender stereotypes, and praises biographers who revise them: Ina Taylor overturned pious
legends about George Eliot by revealing her self-absorption when her devoted companion Henry Lewes was dying of cancer, and by describing
her "macabre" second marriage to John Cross, who escaped from their honeymoon in Venice by leaping into a canal. Wagner-Martin feels
women's biographies must be especially attentive to "painful subjects" like "abuse, rape, and psychological manipulation," and frank about
women's ambitions, self-deception and sexuality. She faults Eleanor Roosevelt for being "less than truthful," in her autobiography, about her
lesbian affair with the reporter Lorena Hickok and about her special 34-year friendship with her husband's bodyguard, Earl Miller.
Although the biographical subjects she discusses are diverse, Wagner-Martin unfortunately seems to assume that her readers are all alike--and,
presumably, like her--which limits the range of her analysis and conclusions. For example, she claims that "what the reader wants to know, of
course," about the author Anne Morrow Lindbergh "is whether she regretted marrying" her famous aviator husband. In the caption to a
photograph of Virginia Woolf, she writes, "it is every woman's dream to appear in photographs" as sensual and intelligent as Woolf appears here,
as though speaking for all her readers' inmost dreams. She claims that people read biographies now, as in the past, to learn about "someone other
than themselves" (rather than, for example, to strengthen their resolve to improve themselves or to inspire them to Christian salvation).
Although Wagner-Martin claims all biographers of women share the aim of "revising history," her own history of biography does not seem
susceptible to revision. Instead it assumes a simple, steady progress toward a feminist truth in which the categories of analysis remain constant
because women readers' interests remain constant. The change is that, now, more women biographers are attuned to these interests and do not fall
prey to old sexist stereotypes. Today's better biographies, she thinks, dig up more evidence about women's perennial conflicts with their mothers,
their weight and their sexual preferences. Thus the better biographies, although more complete, nonetheless go on "telling and retelling some of
the oldest stories of humankind."
LIKEWAGNER-MARTIN, the contributors to Women Creating Lives emphasize the uniqueness of their subjects, although their methods are
more sophisticated. They mean to "explor[e] women's lives in their diversity and distinctiveness, one by one." The cases they present range from
prominent figures like the World War One writer Vera Brittain and the popular entertainer Madonna, to middle-class white and African American
professionals similar in background to the contributors themselves--a social worker, a physician, college student activists, lesbian priests--to less
privileged women: political exiles, women on welfare, sexually abused women. "Common threads" tie these diverse cases together: "women
negotiating identities; enduring, resisting, and overcoming social forces, societal standards, and personal misfortune; and finding resources for
personal resilience." Another thread is the assumption by the writers that women (and men) find an identity in the process of telling their stories.
Daniel McAdams claims that the psychological task of identity formation is one of "constructing for ourselves and for others a self-defining life
story"; these case studies, therefore, not only report on but help create the identities of their subjects.
The writers in Women Creating Lives charge that mainstream psychological theories "do not permit the construction of women's lives on the
women's own terms"; they advocate case histories that quote their female subjects extensively. Understanding and describing women's selfconceptions
is certainly desirable, though I wonder about the feasibility of restricting descriptions to "the women's own terms." In practice, the
writers have difficulty simultaneously letting women speak for themselves and interpreting their stories for the reader; representing the women
accurately while disguising their identifying characteristics; and respecting their subjects while speaking for them.
Some histories are better at this difficult balancing act than others. For example, M. Brinton Lykes deftly both "co-construct[s]" the story of a
Mayan woman, whose words "re-present the 'normal abnormality' of state-sponsored terror" in Guatemala, and shows how the story illustrates the
psychological theory of a "self that posits praxis as central to identity." Others, however, seem too limited by the subject's views and could have
interpreted more. In presenting the case of a woman who became a physician prior to the modern women's movement, for instance, Lillian
Cartwright "do[es] not speculate on unconscious motives and dynamics...and choose[s] to let the story speak for itself." She thus lets stand
without comment the stereotypes inherent in the physician's belief that her "love of language, high promise, and cosmic drama" came from her
mixed Irish and Russian heritage.
In contrast to the biographers, the psychologists are often more powerful than their subjects, which renders the quest for egalitarian relations
problematic. Deborah Belle speaks of how "our own hidden advantages in life"--she assumes her readers share her middle-class position--"distort
our perceptions." Women on welfare, too, she reminds us, are "experts on their own lives." Clearly, it is desirable for researchers to acknowledge
their subjects as individuals, as Belle does. However, achieving egalitarian relationships with less privileged subjects may not be a realistic or
even desirable goal, because it may undermine the researcher's relationship with the reader, or her own perspective.
Frances Grossman and Roslin Moore studied an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse who complained that they shared nothing of their own
lives as they delved into her intimate griefs. "She did ask us each a personal question, which we answered," they report, but they don't transcribe
this conversation for us. Thus they present themselves as striving to convince their subject that they are as open with her as she is with them, but
they retain their privileged privacy in relation to us readers. Nor do they trust their subject's version of her own life, since they think more abuse
occurred than she admits. The topic of repressed childhood abuse is currently controversial, and I wish Grossman and Moore had disclosed their
views more fully. Many writers in Women Creating Lives are explicit about their stance toward their subjects, even their emotional reactions to
them; such clarity and openness with the reader, combined with respect for the subject, may be more realistic goals than equality with the subject
or research conducted wholly on the subject's "own terms."
THE CONTRIBUTORS TO Women Creating Lives are especially astute in showing how sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and class interact
with gender in women's lives. For example, Arlene Stein discovered that "coming out" meant different things to different adolescent girls in the
sixties and seventies. Some of them found social affirmation for secret but already well-formulated lesbian identities; others were making a
political statement as feminists and only later explored sexual relationships with women.
Other essays focus on the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Donna Nagata shows that a Japanese American woman coped with internment
during World War Two more successfully than her once-dominating father did because she took a "nonpassive proactive response" to camp life,
and then worked through her experiences by writing a memoir about them. Elizabeth Cole compares two generations of African American
student activists, finding the later group less sexist but more in conflict with the larger African American student community.
Many of the essays illuminate the role of social class in identity formation. Joan Ostrove and Abigail Stewart deduce "a politics of resistance," in
contrast to a British working-class "politics of envy/longing," from the attitudes of a working-class American college student in the sixties. Here
is one instance where the book's "case study approach"--which aims to bring the reader "so close" to its subjects that she "gains intimate
knowledge of the women and their modes of resilience, coping, and resistance"--actually narrows the scope of its conclusions, by basing them on
an individual and therefore perhaps exceptional case. The "politics of resistance" of this particular student, who had the good fortune to go to an
Ivy League college, might have resulted from her unusual opportunities for upward mobility in comparison with other working-class Americans
of the same period. Several essays in the book do helpfully present individual cases in better context, as Ostrove and Stewart themselves do when
comparing their class-conscious student with the majority of her better-off peers, who could not recognize their class privilege and therefore
believed their accomplishments resulted solely from their individual talents.
One of the strengths I find in Women Creating Lives is this redefinition of identity as arising from each woman's entire social context and
practice. "The established theories of psychological development presume an environment characterized by political stability, in which
'environment' is equated with parental behavior," notes Oliva Espin in her study of a young Latin American political exile. I concluded my
reading of these two books wondering how we North Americans might study our own relatively untraumatic political contexts as equally
significant to individual identity as, for example, racial categories for white people and class for the middle class.
By focusing on biographies and case studies of individual women, both Women Creating Lives and Telling Women's Lives uphold American
values of individualism. But they also yearn for, begin to tell and so hope to inspire a collective project of feminist transformation in the
recognition that women's identities are embedded in their social networks and practices. By acknowledging the diversity of their readers as well
as the power relationships between researchers and their subjects, feminist biographers and psychologists will portray women's lives more fully
and fruitfully, ensuring that "the story of our life/becomes our life."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. "Women Creating Lives: Identities, Resilience, and Resistance." The Women's Review of Books, Jan. 1995, p. 19+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A16352075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9dc7b3b7. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A16352075
Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation
Liza Featherstone
The Nation.
257.10 (Oct. 4, 1993): p360+.
COPYRIGHT 1993 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
Is the pursuit of satisfying sex central to liberation? These books answer with a resounding yes. They describe the present feminist climate that
evolved out of the "sex wars" of the 1980s, when sex radicals challenged the reigning feminist consensus against pornography, proposing that
"sex be innocent until proven guilty." Both, with vision, lustful passion and sound analysis, convincingly cast the early 1990s as a crucial moment
in the history of women's sexual revolution.
Ellen Willis's No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays places our current sexual climate in the context of a collective conservative impulse to
police desires. Willis passionately participated in both sixties counterculture and seventies radical feminism, and her essays, written over a tenyear
period, document and critically explore the pleasure-hating eighties. She sketches a too-familiar political landscape of drug wars, censorship,
"family values" and the "pro-life' movement-crusades in which the liberties of all individuals seem terrifyingly fragile. Willis is radically
committed to a vision of unbounded love between free people; through that lens, the social-control decade takes on a fresh desolation.
Willis is eloquent about the extent to which fear of the libido has permeated not only the evangelical far right but feminism. She calls feminist
anti-porn crusades "evidence that feminists have been affected by a conservative climate." Noting that "it is a losing proposition for feminists to
compete with the right in trying to soothe women's fears of sexual anarchy she urges women not to "accept a spurious moral superiority as a
substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power."
Willis creates an alter ego for herself and anyone else trying to live by her passions in hostile times--a character called Ruby Tuesday. In "The
Last Unmarried Person in America" a contemporary "notopia" set in 1984, under themorally righteous reign of one President Ray Gun, Ruby
remains unmarried despite the National Family Security Act, which enables communities to prosecute single people as vagrants and requires
gaycouples to sign a celibacy oath. Everyone in America gets married and pretends that they were planning to anyway. Ruby Tuesday is not
having it: "Listen, don't get me wrong. I'm no Communist! No way! But what could be more communistic than trying to get everyone to live with
each other?"
Ellen Willis sees herself as a bit of a Tuesday figure; periodically adrift from a cohesive community or social movement, she asserts her
sometimes deviant desires in a culture that pretends. we all want the same things. Despite an occasional sense of isolation and a libertarian
commitment to the individual, she never loses sight of the importance of political movements: "The struggle for freedom, pleasure, transcendence
is not just an individual matter. The social system that... as far as possible channels our desires, is antagonistic to that struggle; to change this
requires collective effort."
Like Ruby, who ends up seducing the reporters who come to interview her, Willis is boldly and generously optimistic about the transformative
powers of desire, and the threateningly political implications of happiness. "The power of the ecstatic moment," she writes, "This is what freedom
is like, this is what love couM be, this is what happens when the boundaries are gone--is precisely the power to reimagine the world, to reclaim a
human identity that's neither victim nor oppressor."
Arlene Stein's Sisters; Sexperts; QueersBeyond the Lesbian Nation is a collection of essays by lesbians, half of whom came of age in the eighties,
whose political consciousness has been shaped by the in your-face lustiness of AIDS activists, Queer Nation, pornographers and "sexperts?' as
well as by a theoretical and practical skepticism toward the essentialist tendencies of identity politics. The essays reflect the contributors' diversity
of experiences and analyses, all of which converge in the pursuit of a politics shaped by desire.
As the title may suggest, the contributors to Sisters, Sexperts, Queers are, like Willis and Ruby Tuesday, painfully aware that women do not
always find community in the pursuit of erotic fulfillment. Many tell familiar stories of coming out and facing alienation from families, neighbors
and larger ethnic or social communities, but these tend not to be central narratives. Dorothy Allison describes the rifts and misunderstandings
between herself and her rural and poor Southern family, but she also recounts sneaking out of a self-righteous, middle-class feminist collective to
date "sexist" butch girls whose class backgrounds were closer to her own. Alisa Solomon finds herself, and many younger dykes, at odds with
orthodox lesbian feminist taboos on "dildos or lipstick, diet drinks or patchouli oil." Also explored is the hostility of many lesbians to bisexuals,
hutches and femmes. Many of the writers discuss the marginalization of scan lesbians, who have often been accused by feminist essentialists of
having a "male-identified" need to conflate sex with violence. Stein et al. emphasize the impossibility of political consensus around honest sexual
passion.
The Sisters contributors position themselves at the center of a lesbian sexual revolutionary moment, as the articulate voices of a rising generation
of pro-sex queer girls. Solomon describes a "new split in the lesbian community--between women whose analysis of sexuality was based on a
model of oppression and victimization, and women whose model is Madonna: an emblem of autonomy and sexual taboo." These writers seem to
agree that despite AIDS and recent sexist, homophobic and erotophobic political backlashes, lesbians may be enjoying more sexual freedom than
ever before.
Both collections flirt with utopian vision, dropping hints about what freedom might look like. While many of the Sisters writers think they already
know, Willis tends to be somewhat wistful and speculative. In her radical individualism, she purposely keeps her imaginings vague, perhaps so as
not to intrude on your own. When she does indulge in definitions, the result is dizzying: "Dissolution of the ego is the death we fear; the real
sexual revolution, the one no virus can keep us from imagining, is the struggle to face that fear, transcend it and let go?"
Stein et al. tend to be more concrete about alternative lives one can lead. "Lesbian Marriage! (K)nott" is a personal memoir of the writer's
awkward and joyous forays into nonmonogamy. "Parenting in the Age of AIDS" explores lesbian experiments in alternative childrearing
arrangements. These include raising children with gay men, lovers, friends-- sometimes alone, sometimes with several adults. Also examined in
Sisters are the utopian sexual images created in recent lesbian 'zincs, pornography and film. These writers are far more interested in their own
visions of freedom than in a critique of the larger culture.
Given that the sexual revolutions of the recent past have been largely enjoyed by men, how do we know what our own would be like? How male
is freedom? Clearly, women can learn something from post-Stonewall gay male liberation and, to a lesser extent, the sixties counterculture.
However, it is important to recognize that men's experience of sex can be alienating too, and not to assume that our desires should look like theirs.
Willis observes that some women (and some men) found "free love" unsatisfying. She is convinced that this is in part because "the conventionally
masculine dream of pure lust is... as conservative as the conventionally feminine romanticism that converts lust to pure emotion... all are attempts
to tame sex, to make it safe by holding something back."
Some of the contributors to Sisters, Sexperts, Queers come to similar conclusious about following masculine models of revolution. Working
politically with gay men in the Queer Nation/ACT UP eighties, many lesbians came to appreciate and envy the sexual openness of gay male
culture. One lesbian AIDS activist writes, "Even as they battled a deadly sexually transmitted virus, many gay men remained unabashedly erotic
.... their enthusiastic embrace of the sexual made me experience my own gayness as a proud lustful identity?' Another felt that "there was
something in that arrogant energy that we craved?' Vera Whisman, however, warns against "taking other lesbians to task for being less hip, less
sexual, in other words, not like gay men," observing that since "men's ways are also shaped by their situation, it's simplistic to think that some
'authentic,' 'unrepressed' lesbian sexuality would look like male sexuality."
Both Willis and the Sisters authors celebrate women's sexual agency and question the centrality of male violence to past feminist analyses. In this
sense they continue in the vein of the "pro-sex" camp of the eighties sex wars, who, in Stein's words, wondered if "all the attention on sexual
danger had minimized the possibility of pleasure." As Willis observes, when women's liberation is defined as "freedom from violence... the
positive aspect of freedom--freedom for women to act--is at best a secondary concern."
Both of these collections articulately challenge the notion that rape should be a primary metaphor for women's oppression-or the female
experience of sex under patriarchy. At the same time, one of their great strengths is their acknowledgment that real trauma does keep many
women from celebrating their sexuality or seeing themselves as sexual agents. Women are attracted to repressive, sexfearing feminisms for the
same reasons that they join up with the religious right; many have been under attack all their lives, and they are looking for ways to keep male
violence under control. Sexpositive politics need to take account of legitimate reasons for fear, or they risk creating an elite of the self-styled
welladjusted. In an understandable eagerness to abandon reductive and sexist notions of female victimization, some prominent champions of the
female sexual yes have displayed an indifference to suffering that is not only obnoxious but politically unwise. As Stein observes of the eighties
sex wars, "If there was any acknowledgment of the emotional pain which many women: associate with sex, even as they desire it, it was hardly
spoken." Willis, a veteran of these conflicts, admits that like most sex radicals the "pro-sex" camp failed "to put forth a convincing analysis of
sexual violence, exploitation and alienation." She demands that we ask, "Why do fear of sex, and contempt for it, have such a strong grip on
people that these attitudes constantly reappear in covert forms? Why is sex in this culture so closely associated with violence? Unless radicals
engage such questions, they can't effectively refute the conservative answers."
No More Nice Girls and Sisters, Sexperts, Queers begin to articulate the vision of some who are theorizing and working politically to make
feminist sexual revolutions possible, despite right-wing oppression, feminist paradoxes, a dearth of models--and fear. Both books enter, and will
help to shape, a defiantly "sexpositive" historical moment with utopian imagination, political sophistication and an ecstatic belief in pleasure.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Featherstone, Liza. "Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation." The Nation, 4 Oct. 1993, p. 360+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14212671/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=722abf82. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14212671
Sisters. Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation
Publishers Weekly.
240.18 (May 3, 1993): p300+.
COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
This collection, edited by a San Francisco-based journalist, embodies the complexities and contradictions of contemporary lesbian culture and
politics, which, Stein argues, have come a long way from the more dogmatic separatist orientation of the community a mere two decades ago.
Stein has assembled a consistently eloquent set of essays by journalists and academics, distinguished by the resolute refusal of almost all the
authors to be reduced to just their sexuality. This is reflected in the book's best pieces, which combine the personal and the political in a way that
is both poignant and incisive: a moving autobiographical work by Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) about growing up as poor white
trash in the South; Jackie Goldsby's essay on the Vanessa Williams porn scandal and how the black community reacted to it; and a piece by Lisa
Kahaleole Chang Hall on the tension among identities embodied in the politics of being an Asian-American feminist lesbian. Stein has structured
the book intelligently so that the sections lead into one another in a nice progression from the individualism of intimacy to questions of a larger
community of interest, whether with gay men or feminists.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sisters. Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation." Publishers Weekly, 3 May 1993, p. 300+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A13831347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ec654be. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A13831347