The Development of Lesbian and Queer Theory in America

The Development of homo informal and Queer Theory in the StatesAn run of the Advancement of Lesbian Theory Criticism America 1950s-1990s.IntroductionLesbianism in American society is a concept imbued with favorable, policy-making, legal, aesthetic and literary codes and conventions, whether considered in 1950 or currently. In the past half century, sapphicism has not only verbalized itself as specific articulations of innerity and lifestyle, only when also of ideology and governmental aspiration. Sexuality has remained essential to conceptualisations of lesbianism in this time span, with its governmental verbal expressions, societal censures, and sociable accommodations anchored to the vicissitudes of feminist theory and practice. American loving and semi semipolitical morays which pull in ordained fe young-begetting(prenominal) person functionality in post World state of struggle Two years, put one across cast mainstream female individualism element in terms of m early(a)hood, wifeliness and domestimetropolis, a formulation of personhood deeply challenged by advancing lesbian ideology and praxis.In this light, one and only(a) of the significant threads of lesbian theory and criticism to be evaluated pertains to feminist movements examination of female identity in the past 50 years, and the situation and reaction of lesbianism within this paradigm. This process encompasses events and issues pertaining to the biological, versed and complaisant brass of female gender, but also the headual training of modes of discourse pertaining to feminism and lesbianism, as a means of female empowerment, paralleled by considered or ultraconservative replys to wider societal trends.So called second wave feminism, benchmarked by the Stonewall Riots at Greenwich village in New York in 1969, targeted womens liberation not only at the level of law, and concrete denotations of inequality and injustice, (akin to feminisms scratch line wave), but at the more(prenominal) visceral level of societal and political attitudes and values, including the ideological decoupling of female personhood from male knowledgeableity.Since the early 1990s, the ideological and supposititious formulations of lesbianism come been advancing in dispa pose lines, at the bidding of post-structuralist or postmodernist discourses. Some of lesbianisms talented impulses have focused upon notions of inner and personal identity, and in spite of their intellectual sophistication have confused their momentum and coherence, collapsing into an ambiguous polymorphy,1 whilst attempting to dispense with unhelpful binary oppositional definitions of gender or innerity. Conversely, an intellectual strength of triad wave feminism and post 1980s lesbian criticism has been the attention to personhood, the integrity of the self and the integration of exoteric and private moralities.Chapter 1Homo cozyity after World War I was broadly viewed as an scoreence ag ainst the family and complaisant expectations about gender.2 A defines post World War 1 contemporary mirror images noted that it was improper to utter the word homoity, prurient to admit its existence and full-gr avouch to discuss the eccentric.3 The same doctor reflects the radical difference between American and European pagan and cozy values, implying that speckle Europe was perceived by Americans as decadent, European novels could discuss homo sex openly within a European setting, yet American novels could not, since if it existed at all, (as) our soil is unfavourable, our climate prejudicial, our raft too primitive, too pure.4 Furthermore, Fone contends that homosexuality had come to be seen as a subversion of America itself. 5 Fone also observes that since war is a time of idolatry and upheaval-it produces a virulent, xenophobic strain of homophobia tantamount to conceiving sexual difference as a betrayal of American values.6Retrospectively implicit among these a necdotal pre World War II dismissals of homosexuality, is the notable silence concerning whatever feature between male and female homosexuality, or laughable and lesbian sexual phenomenon. The grip of patriarchy was so overarching that lesbianism did not even feature as a notable offence against favorable sensibilities.Be that as it may. The social discourse regarding lesbianism in the 1950s was in part a response to the repositioning of women due to World War II. As war demanded heightened US defences and reconstituted the nations labour force, women formed the Womens Army corps (WAC) and were seconded to non-traditional theorizes, accounting for one third of the work force. According to Kennedy and Davis, World War II had a tremendous impact on lesbian life, by offering lesbians more opportunities for socialising and meeting other women.7 Since the war gave more independence to all women lesbians (were) more like other women and less slowly to identify. Since all women were able to wear pants to work and to purchase them in stores off the rack, dykees who only wore pants in the privacy of their sign in the 1930s could now wear them on the streets.8 Furthermore, in overawe women gained inlet to better jobs since productivity was heightened by war manufacturing. Since the male community of Buffalo was denuded for military service, lesbians had greater liberty to meet in macrocosm and pursue active social lives beyond hearth and home. Extensive social life revolved around the proliferation of gay bars9 and despite the unpolluted presence of homosexualsinterpreted by the distinguish Liquor Authority as constituting disorderly conduct,10 raids on premises were minimal in the 1940s due to the shrewdness of business owners.11Concurrently, enlisted lesbians found a social spot within the male world of military service since enrolment blanket practices for lesbians entering the (WAC) were less stringent than for gay men.12 In this example, the want o f status for women in the military prior to the war resulted in ill- be binding procedures for women recruits, matched by a choice to not investigate the sexual lives of women, as the goal was to optimise the war effort.13 The simplistic and binary designations of sexual predilection in the late 1940s ar noted by the comments from a group of Marine Corps examiners at Camp LeJeune (who) advised their colleagues, that women covering a male manner may be perfectly customary sexually and excellent military material.14 By the late 1940s however, purgation of lesbians from the military became increasingly problematic. Many women were forced to deny knowing any of their friends or marry gay men to pass as heterosexual.15 Ominously, middle 1950s Navy officials secretly acknowledged that the homosexual discharge rate had become much higher for the female than the male. 16When the end of the war brought a resumption of traditional family percentages, there were no hang on social pres criptions for women obscure from marriage, and enduring singleness subjected females to social disapproval, while the aggressive harassment of lesbians and gays was affiliated to this glorification of the nuclear family and internal sphere.Homophobia became a way of reinstituting male potence and strict gender roles that had been disrupted by the war.17 The 1950s remained a social and political milieu of severe oppression,18 yet Roosevelt suggests the reduced harassment of gay bar culture and the desire of public lesbians to reach out to other lesbians, marked a significant transformation in lesbian consciousness. 19The emergence of tough butch lesbian sub-culture in the 1950s, was, according to Roosevelt, a import of gay bar life and working class female job creation during World War II.20 Nonetheless, alcohol, insecurity, and repression, in combination with the tough butch image, made fights among tough and rough lesbians a prominent part of the mid-fifties landscape which increased concern and attention from the largishr culture. 21Furthermore, the prominence of lesbians and male homosexuals holding positions within the American government agencies in the 1950s was a matter of growing consternation, in light of the neo-conservatism and right wing extremism of this period. The political tirade against un-American activities typified by the McCarthy led Senate committal inquiries and public hearings, not only felt virtue was found in the purging of commie allegiances and sentiments, but also coupled homosexuality and lesbianism with such perceived political aberrations. Politically enshrined deviance was aligned with sexually defined deviance. The 1950 congressional point addressed homosexuals in government, with congressman Miller of Nebraska addressing the House of Representatives. In an excerpt, Miller stated,I would like to strip the fetid, stinking flesh off of this skeleton of homosexuality and tell my colleagues of the House approximatelyw hat of the facts of nature tardily the spotlight of publicity has been focused not only upon the State part but upon the Department of Commerce because of homosexuals being employed in these and other departments of Government. Recently Mr. Peurifoy, of the State Department, said he had allowed 91 individuals in the State Department to resign because they were homosexuals. Now they are like birds of a feather, they clunk together. Where did they go? You must know what a homosexual is. It is amazing that in the Capital City of Washington we are plagued with such a large group of those individuals. Washington attracts many lovely folks. The sex crimes in the city are many.22Miller went on to refer to the Sex Pervert institutionalize passed finished Congress that he authored, exposing his chickenhearted view of sexuality by alluding to the peril of homosexuals, as well as the concession that some of them are more to be pitied than condemned, because in many it is a pathological c ondition, very(prenominal) much like the kleptomaniac who must go out and steal.23In increase to the homophobic cringe mentality epitomising the 1950s which also applied to lesbianism, think any form of non-heterosexual sex as non-normative and therefore aberrant, prior to 2003, homosexuality (and by ex tightness lesbianism), was considered a disease, a sin (and) a curse to public order.24 Further reasons why lesbianism was shunned by American mainstream society in the 1950s concerns the belief that (in the absence seizure of research to the contrary), sexual orientation was subject to change and able to be transferred.25 As such, a threat or fear existed that there was the possibility of an epidemic conversion from heterosexual to, homosexual, tractable a perceived need to protect heterosexuals. Since homosexuals and lesbians were perceived to be piquant in indulgent, wayward and aberrant sexual behaviour by choice, kind of than by predisposition, the persecution and stigmat ization they received was not viewed as a interrupt of fundamental kind rights. 26 Furthermore, another potent reason for the social and political aversion to lesbianism was the belief that heterosexual minors could become homosexual by way of seduction, justifying the protection of baberen and youth by means of criminal law.27 acquittal Internationals recent statement addressing the decriminalisation of homosexuality globally, demonstrates that third wave feminist ideological battles (discussed later) are far from won. The paper makes the observation that far fewer countries explicitly illegalize lesbianism than male homosexuality as there (already) exists a raft of legislation to limit, police and control womens sexual autonomy. (The writers explanation that), lesbianism is not generally subject to legal sanctions may be attributed to the absence of women from the public sphere and the resulting absence of awareness of lesbianism.28 This social invisibility29 of lesbianism wi lls to some lawmakers denying that it even exists.Millers attitudes not only exposed the intrench criminalisation of homosexuality (and by association lesbianism), but the second social contrivance of lesbianism which coalesced in American culture in the 1950s, viz. its medicalisation, framing lesbianism as a social pathogen, rather than an issue of sexual difference and diversity, when compared with heterosexuality or monogamy. Such a pathological moulding of lesbianism is foreseen in pre-1950s homophobic stereotypes, where psychic differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals were clothated constructing the homosexual male as a deficit being without will power, perseverance, and peremptory energy.30 These social postulations of male effeminacy nevertheless mirrored manifestations of female masculinisation, such as the butch bar working class lesbian sub-culture, already identified. Instead of current societal violence upon diversity and difference, the 1950s saying of lesbianism underscored deficit and deviance.Roosevelt draws attention to psychiatrists Henry Gay duplicitous motives. Whilst formulating a committee for the Study of Sex Variants in the 1940s, compiling case histories of over ccc lesbians, producing Sex Variants A Study of Homosexual Patters, with the pretext of decriminalising lesbianism, in actuality, the confidential agenda was to legitimise the psychiatry profession, and as a consequence, medicalise lesbianism, merely replace one construct of deviance with another. 31 Lesbianism remained an immoral practice in the regular army until Illinois led the change with its homosexuality decriminalisation law in 1961.32 preceding to this time, criminologists of the 1950s picture lesbian inmates as menacing social types which lead to a conflation between womens prisons and lesbianism.33 The shift to greater surveillance of lesbianism in womens prisons was reflected in U.S. popular and political culture in magazines, pulp magazine novels, and movies where the, previously, comic and benign lesbian gave way to the dangerously aggressive lesbian criminal. By the 1950s the term womens prison was synonymous with lesbian aggression,34casting sexuality as a potential signifier of membership of a criminal underworld, losing class, race, and privilege. 35Such pulp novels as those published by Ann Weldy under the pseudonym Ann Bannon, included Odd Girl Out, (1957) I Am a Woman (In Love With a Woman Why Must orderliness Reject Me?) (1959) Women in The Shadows, (1959)Journey to a Woman (1960) and The Marriage, (1960) and Beebo Brinker (1962), the prequel to the first four controls.36 The social limitations of same-gender sexuality identification are evident in the narrative outcomes of these early lesbian pulp fictionalisation titles. It was expected that the characters in a lesbian novel would never receive any bliss from a lesbian relationship. One or both usually end up committing suicide, going insane, or leavin g the relationship. Describing the 1950s as the hey-day of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, Bianco noted that while its boom was inspired mainly by publishers pitching successfully to consecutive males seeking titillation, oppressed lesbians found a private outlet and psychic survival through such literary productions denied them publicly by the censoriousness of 1950s repressive American culture. Bianco noted the publicizers irony, since whilecover art of pulp novels always depicted ultra-feminine women, the real lesbians in the stories were often tomboys or bad girls who seduced innocent on-key women. Reflecting psychological theories of the time, lesbian pulp writers often presented lesbianism as the result of a trauma, such as rape or incest. At the end, the innocent straight woman almost always returned to a normal life with a man. If the lesbian protagonist wasnt herself converted to heterosexuality, she usually became an alcoholic, lost her job, or attached suicide. Publishers insis ted on these kinds of moral endings, condemning lesbian sexuality even while exploiting it. In this regard, lesbian pulps followed the formula of torment and sacrifice.37As such, lurid and socially shunned fictionalisations of alternate sexuality merely reinforced the ethical and moral mainstream fabric of neo-conservative American culture. Anne Bannon, as she was publicly known, reputedly led a echo life, a wife and mother who frequented lesbian bars on weekends in Greenwich Village, and strikingly only disclosed her authorship of her lesbian pulp fiction novels in the 1980s, over two decades after they were published. In the view of Bianco, her full treatment made a significant contribution to lesbian identity in the decade prior to Stonewall.38Theoretical perspectives on lesbian and alternate sexuality critical to the exploration of emerging critical paradigms of lesbianism in America in the second half of the twentieth century, do not merely address the enduring and at times o verwhelming dialectical tension between mainstream heterosexual ideology and homosexual reaction but the interior dialectic within the gay fraternity and how it evolved and responded to dimensions of itself throughout this passage of social history. The butch/fem dialectic itself illustrates the governing of sex and psychology. An increase in sexual experimentation and practices, saw a sub-cultural practice emerge, whereby butch/ fem lesbian couples take for granted strictly defined roles, the stone butch untouchable finding sexual pleasure but through giving pleasure to her fem, while the fem interdict to reciprocate, was positioned within the codes of the relationship to only receive pleasure. duration some critiqued this relative dynamic as a mere imitation of conventional masculine approaches to sex, others identified in butches a discomfort of being (physically) touched root in their biology.There was also much importance placed on role distinction, an unwanted vulnerab ility involved in mutual lovemaking, the butch ego, and the butchs ambivalence toward her female body. In the 1950s, Fems approached sexuality from a egocentric perspectiveand lesbians who would not select a role, but changed roles,were derisively referred to as KiKis or AC/DC and were viewed with suspicion by other labor lesbians.39 That Butches apparently disliked switching roles, imposed such rigid relative rules and maintained such static notions of sexual identity, indicated that the delineation of sexual identity within this specific lesbian subculture, was just as restrictive and jaundiced a stance as the homophobic predilections of the 1950s heterosexual community in general. The paralyzing dialectic of shame and shamelessness which more contemporary feminists have used to identify heterosexual impediments in the slow march towards sexual liberation40 is alive in the politics of sex and identity psychology vie out in the binary relations of 1950s butch/fem lesbianism.Whi le many look to the Stonewall Riots at Greenwich Village New York as the defining moment for the empowerment of the modern Gay and Lesbian ignition Movement, others trace the serious beginnings to 1951 in Los Angeles. In the 1950s gay stand firm remained largely bland, apologetic, unassertive and defensive(relying) upon experts- psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, lawyers, theologianswho spoke about us, to us, and at us, but never with us. 41 By 1961, the Homophile Movement, represented in the US by a mere half dozen organizations, yet by 1969, total fifty or sixty such proactive bodies.The origins of the Stonewall Riots have their foundation in the immigrant, working class neighbourhoods of New York(where) gay sexuality was very much in and of the streetsdue in part to the sparing and spatial limitations of the tenements. Enclaves of lesbians interacted with their gay male counterpunchparts, congregating in the speakeasies, tearooms and drag balls of Harlem and Greenwich Villag e during the 1920s.42 Furthermore, Greenwich Villages bohemian life tolerated sexual experimentation which conferred upon the electron orbit an embryonic stature of erotica unboundlesbian and gay clubs in the Village were founded on the Personality Clubs of the bohemian intelligentsia.43 Writers commonly view Greenwich as a social space freed from the normal social constraints of modern life, a sexual free- zone and a homosexual Mecca for predominantly white homosexuals, as Harlem was for black people.44 The anonymity of the city had become accessible to post war military linked Americans, and the semi public spaces of night caf and bar cultures, served to duad the psychological and spatial divide between the privacy, domesticity and intimacy of the home, and the disclosure and insubordination of public morality played out in the Greenwich sector. As Munt suggests, this cultural transition captured in Lesbian Pulp fiction, tracked the lesbian merchant-venturer inhabiting a twili ght world where sexual encounters were acts of romanticised outlawry initiated in some back street bar and consummated in the narrative sharpness of the depths of maze-like apartment buildings. 45Munt views Bannons heroines as mythologizing the eroticised urban explorer. 46 The value of Stonewalls mythologisation is viewed as a constitutive moment, while admitting its cultural fiction.47 other signposts of lesbians claiming a small cultural space and some public domain in this ensuing decade indicated by Mathison Fraher, included the formation of the Mattachine nightclub in 1951 (founded to aid homosexuals in the process of chronicling their collective histories and mitigate against social persecution) the initial publication of One Magazine in 1953 the foundation of the lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 and the subsequent publication of their first magazine call The Ladder in 1956. Additionally, the Kinsley Report published in 1957 claimed 10% of the population to predominantly homosexual, while in 1961 Illinois became the first US state to criminalise homosexual acts. The Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969 were closely followed by a Gay Rally in Chicago in 1970.48Chapter 2Betty Friedans ground breaking book titled The Feminine Mystique, encapsulated the unexplainable toleration of millions of American women in the 1950s and early 1960s that had exclusively devoted themselves to the mutual socially prescribed roles of wife and mother. Friedans dissertation was that this wholehearted devotion carried a contingent cost and sacrifice beyond the conscious level of comprehension of countless women, oblivious to the enormity of what they were surrendering in the process, as well as the significant parts of themselves they were denying as a result of idolising domesticity. Friedan herself in 1994 retrospectively explained the term feminine mystique as when women were defined only in sexual relation to men mans wife, sex object, mother , housewife- and never a person defining themselves by their own actions in society.49 She conceived of this conceptualisation of women as a stifling barrier to their wider affaire within society and therefore as fully functioning human beings. It was the notion that this existential position of women was so unchallenged and so instinctively accepted that Friedan found to be so perplexing, provocatively couched by the feminist as a feminine mystique to ridicule the notion that the socially maudlin roles had acquired the status of an implacable genetic predisposition. Quidlen acclaims Friedans foresight in the books introduction, as she succeeded in scrutinising ways women had been coaxed into selling out their intellect and their ambitions for the paltry price of a new washing machine(seduced by) the development of labour saving appliances(yet being) covered up in a kitchen federation of denial.50 Friedan empowered women with confidence to reconceptualise their problems origins, lying beyond her marriage or herself.51 Furthermore, Friedan was a keen observer of hypocrisy, contradiction and imbalance, with a caustic view concerning a generation of educated housewives maniacally arranging the silverware and dressing to welcome their husbands home from work.52Friedan as many other feminists and indeed lesbians was a strident sanction of the wider participation of women in society. Typifying ways women were alienated from mainstream society and disenfranchised by males, were prevailing attitudes towards abortion, public censure or ambivalence about a womans right to choose the invisibility of sexual abuse, the lack of acknowledgement of more subtle forms of sexual harassment, as well as the economic and social disempowerment with relation to exit strategies for women to leave bad marriages. Friedan observes the 1990s obsession with defining and crystalising female identity,53 explaining this as a logical file name extension of the break down of the feminine m ystique and the empowerment of women. This obsession manifested itself through a surfeit of womens identity literature and college courses in womens studies. 54 By logical extension, feminism did provide leverage for the liberation of lesbians and the sexual politics associated with lesbianism, in spite of Friedans disconnect with lesbianism as a effectual expression of womens rights.Friedan did identify menopause crises, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy fears, child birth depression, passivity, the immaturity of American men, discrepancies between womens tested childhood intellectual abilities and their adult achievements and the changing incidence of adult sexual approaching in American women as issues pertaining to the emergence of a fuller identity and societal participation for women.55It is clear that there was little room in the consciousness of women to process the notion of their sexuality prior to the 1960s sexual mutation, since women drew neuroses was the en ergy needed to juggle the conflicting roles between motherhood, domestic duty and work beyond the home and manage the personal and societal guilt which emerged from this 9at times) impossible process.56 The social and political discourse of the era lionized women who did not lose their man, and balanced service of males, children and home. The wider world was beyond their consciousness and matters of sexual identity were not part of the public domain. Friedan contends that femininity in the 1950s was a social construction, which, if attended to faithfully, was the only means by which women could achieve contentment and fulfilment, having historically made the blunder of trying to imitate maleness , instead of embodying femininity, which was deemed to be characterized by sexual passivity, nurturing maternal love and male domination.57Furthermore, the classification of the political domain as a male intellectual and practical bastion did nothing to facilitate women re-evaluating sexua l politics and notions of political disenfranchisement in the 1950s. In 1960, Friedan recalled that a perceptive social psychologist showed me some meritless statistics which seemed to prove unmistakably that women under age 35 years were not interested in politics.58 Furthermore, a false dichotomy was embedded in American national consciousness regarding female sexuality, with no middle ground, namely, women were approximate who came to the pedestal and whores if they expressed physical sexual desire or seek such pleasure. This dichotomous paradigm disempowered womens sexual liberation.59While the feminine mystique succeeded in precluding women from considering their own sense of personal identity who they were alone from husband, children and home,60 the former emphasis of genetic determinism shaped womens outlook on the path of their lives- plainly, the identity of woman is determined by her biology.61 (Ironically, the same conclusion regarding lesbianism was not reached by A merican society for decades, prior to the 1990s, lesbianism being widely viewed as deviant sexual conduct determined by choice rather than orientation.)Friedan counters the Freudian explanation for the desire of women to depart from the domestic centre, namely the motive of appendage envy propagated by Freud. 62Instead, she presciently identified the objectification of women as a societal flaw, she was, at that time, so completely defined as object by man, never herself as I, that she was not even expected to honor or participate in the act of sex.63 The gay and lesbian revolution gained momentum in the late 1960s, infused the female with a sense of subjectivity, to counter this objectification, poignantly exemplified through the centring of the female orgasm, which emphatically declared that women were sexual beings, overt and entitled to experience sexual pleasure, rather than being victims of abuse or neutral sideline observers of sexual activity while their husbands were actua lising their virility through sex. While Friedan acknowledged that Freudian thought became the ideological bulwark of American of the sexual counter-revolution in America64defining the sexual nature of women, conversely Friedan speculated that an unsated female sexual desire existed due to the vacuum created by the absence of larger life goals for woman. 65 While she countered Freud with this ex