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The full title is Surface Tension: Love, Sex, and Politics Between Lesbians and Straight Women, edited by Meg Daly. I picked it up a couple of months ago at the library book sale, and, like all the books I get there, I didn't actually read it until much later (though this is still better than the dozens of books I've bought there and never read at all).
Right off the bat, I should point out that this is a pretty safe book for straight women who make at least good-faith efforts against their own homophobia. What I mean is that there is little here to make straight women significantly uncomfortable - no hard-hitting accusations of our homophobia or our complicity in institutionalized heterosexism. Also, since the book actively focuses on lesbians and straight women, we get to coddle our privilege-born self-absorption and not feel left out.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This kind of moderation for the sake of the privileged group can be a useful way to get them to hear you out - I fully admit that it was part of the reason I read this book. It's a practical approach, assuming it isn't the only one (i.e., we move beyond Homophobia 101 at some point).
Back to the book itself - the opening two sections, "Best Friends," and "Romantic Love" contain both autobiographical and fictional accounts (I think). A recurring theme is the way that homophobia drives women apart - whether it's a straight woman's homophobia leading her to reject her lesbian best friend (Sylvia Brownrigg's "Like Cutting Off My Arm") or a young lesbian's ignorance about her sexuality that leads her to express her desire for her female friend in destructive ways (Lisa Springer's "Between Girls").
These stories are accessible, which is good; however, they're still quite safe. It's easy for me to read these, feel bad for the lesbian women hurt by homophobia, and walk away without feeling implicated myself. After all, I haven't rejected any of my lesbian friends, so I'm not culpable for their grief, right? I can feel bad for their hardship, but still treat that hardship as a personalized/emotional ordeal that has nothing to do with social patterns. Here's where I started to worry about the book being watered down in order to be palatable.
However, the next sections are more rigorous. "Curiosity, Desire, and Sex" explore straight women's feelings for lesbians, and vice versa. Daphne Merkin undergoes an interesting self-examination entitled "A Closet of One's Own: On Not Becoming a Lesbian" - she has a "passion for women," yet retains sexual desire (only) for men. I especially like how she affirms the fact that sexual desire says nothing about social relationships - as we all know, straight men can desire women while neither loving nor respecting them. On the other (more positive) hand, this also means that straight women do not need to reserve their love and respect for only men.
Merkin's piece is echoed by ideas in the next section, which is called "On Passing and Solidarity." Interestingly, I thought this part of the book would include essays about lesbians passing as straight women, but instead it is about straight and bisexual women passing as lesbians. (That was a bit of my privileged self-centeredness showing.)
The first essay, by Ann Powers, "Queer in the Streets, Straight in the Sheets: Notes on Passing," left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. Her idea of "queering" heterosexuality is one I've read about before - rejecting expectations of heteronormativity and embracing queer attitudes towards gender, sex, politics, etc. But consider this passage from Powers:
Queerness becomes a tool for the author's self-discovery. It sounds an awful lot like cultural appropriation by white people, who try to fix their 'lack of a culture' or 'discover their true identity' by snatching up pieces of non-white culture - claiming Native American deities or wearing 'exotic costumes' or what-have-you. All the while, of course, the privileged appropriator never feels the burden of oppression, and gets to enjoy both her own privilege and the good parts of POC culture.
Powers acknowledges this risk - including the racial parallel - but her defense feels inadequate to me. Why can't she acknowledge the progressive ideas from lesbians and queer culture by respecting them as the rightful 'authors'? Why appropriate the title "queer" and try to pass at all? A more trenchant examination of "theoretical lesbians" comes in the next essay, "Conceptual Lesbianism," which is written by Dorothy Allison, who is not surprisingly a lesbian herself. I'm glad the editor put these two essays back-to-back, so that "queer straights" don't get let off the hook.
Both this section and the next one, "Blurred Boundaries, or Which One Is the Lesbian?" contain essays by bisexual women about being rejected from straight, and especially lesbian, spheres. It's an important issue to give attention to, though I felt a little voyeuristic reading these pieces - I could easily sit back and watch queer women in-fighting, without worrying about the part that homophobia plays in the conflict (again with that feeling safe).
One of the essays I liked best - possibly because it is most theoretical - is in the final section, "Visibility, Community, and Our Separate Spheres." It's "The (Fe)male Gaze," by Elizabeth Wurtzel, and the point of the (somewhat disjointed) piece is to look at how the Indigo Girls, lesbian musicians, manage to escape the male gaze more successfully than other (straight) female musicians, who still respond to it even while rejecting it. Straight women who rebel, Wurtzel says, fall into the trap of rebelling for men even as they rebel from men - they want to abolish standards for what is 'sexy' in women, but, paradoxically, they still require male approval of their unconventional sexiness.
(Wurtzel does risk essentializing here, by talking about What Lesbians Do as opposed to What Straight Women Do. Like Powers, she acknowledges this risk; and like Powers, her explanation is not entirely convincing.)
Overall: recommended for straight girls, though as an introduction to queer issues rather than a self-contained education. As for queer women, I'm sure a lot of this isn't news - I don't know if this would make the book feel comfortably familiar, or just repetitive.
P.S. When I started this entry, it was beginning to get dark outside of my window, and I wondered, "Is it almost time for dinner?" But no, it was only 3:30 p.m. D:
Right off the bat, I should point out that this is a pretty safe book for straight women who make at least good-faith efforts against their own homophobia. What I mean is that there is little here to make straight women significantly uncomfortable - no hard-hitting accusations of our homophobia or our complicity in institutionalized heterosexism. Also, since the book actively focuses on lesbians and straight women, we get to coddle our privilege-born self-absorption and not feel left out.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This kind of moderation for the sake of the privileged group can be a useful way to get them to hear you out - I fully admit that it was part of the reason I read this book. It's a practical approach, assuming it isn't the only one (i.e., we move beyond Homophobia 101 at some point).
Back to the book itself - the opening two sections, "Best Friends," and "Romantic Love" contain both autobiographical and fictional accounts (I think). A recurring theme is the way that homophobia drives women apart - whether it's a straight woman's homophobia leading her to reject her lesbian best friend (Sylvia Brownrigg's "Like Cutting Off My Arm") or a young lesbian's ignorance about her sexuality that leads her to express her desire for her female friend in destructive ways (Lisa Springer's "Between Girls").
These stories are accessible, which is good; however, they're still quite safe. It's easy for me to read these, feel bad for the lesbian women hurt by homophobia, and walk away without feeling implicated myself. After all, I haven't rejected any of my lesbian friends, so I'm not culpable for their grief, right? I can feel bad for their hardship, but still treat that hardship as a personalized/emotional ordeal that has nothing to do with social patterns. Here's where I started to worry about the book being watered down in order to be palatable.
However, the next sections are more rigorous. "Curiosity, Desire, and Sex" explore straight women's feelings for lesbians, and vice versa. Daphne Merkin undergoes an interesting self-examination entitled "A Closet of One's Own: On Not Becoming a Lesbian" - she has a "passion for women," yet retains sexual desire (only) for men. I especially like how she affirms the fact that sexual desire says nothing about social relationships - as we all know, straight men can desire women while neither loving nor respecting them. On the other (more positive) hand, this also means that straight women do not need to reserve their love and respect for only men.
Merkin's piece is echoed by ideas in the next section, which is called "On Passing and Solidarity." Interestingly, I thought this part of the book would include essays about lesbians passing as straight women, but instead it is about straight and bisexual women passing as lesbians. (That was a bit of my privileged self-centeredness showing.)
The first essay, by Ann Powers, "Queer in the Streets, Straight in the Sheets: Notes on Passing," left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. Her idea of "queering" heterosexuality is one I've read about before - rejecting expectations of heteronormativity and embracing queer attitudes towards gender, sex, politics, etc. But consider this passage from Powers:
"Yet some straights passing for queer [...] are hoping to lose their straight identity and maybe even find themselves. My own experience started with the not-so-noble wish to be accepted in situations that attracted me because they felt not only less repressive but far more vital than those dinner parties and double dates so common in straight circles [...] Imagining myself as a Queer Straight, I discovered the serious differences I have with the trajectory upon which I'd thoughtlessly been traveling. In these moments, passing became a passage into a whole new conception of the self."
Queerness becomes a tool for the author's self-discovery. It sounds an awful lot like cultural appropriation by white people, who try to fix their 'lack of a culture' or 'discover their true identity' by snatching up pieces of non-white culture - claiming Native American deities or wearing 'exotic costumes' or what-have-you. All the while, of course, the privileged appropriator never feels the burden of oppression, and gets to enjoy both her own privilege and the good parts of POC culture.
Powers acknowledges this risk - including the racial parallel - but her defense feels inadequate to me. Why can't she acknowledge the progressive ideas from lesbians and queer culture by respecting them as the rightful 'authors'? Why appropriate the title "queer" and try to pass at all? A more trenchant examination of "theoretical lesbians" comes in the next essay, "Conceptual Lesbianism," which is written by Dorothy Allison, who is not surprisingly a lesbian herself. I'm glad the editor put these two essays back-to-back, so that "queer straights" don't get let off the hook.
Both this section and the next one, "Blurred Boundaries, or Which One Is the Lesbian?" contain essays by bisexual women about being rejected from straight, and especially lesbian, spheres. It's an important issue to give attention to, though I felt a little voyeuristic reading these pieces - I could easily sit back and watch queer women in-fighting, without worrying about the part that homophobia plays in the conflict (again with that feeling safe).
One of the essays I liked best - possibly because it is most theoretical - is in the final section, "Visibility, Community, and Our Separate Spheres." It's "The (Fe)male Gaze," by Elizabeth Wurtzel, and the point of the (somewhat disjointed) piece is to look at how the Indigo Girls, lesbian musicians, manage to escape the male gaze more successfully than other (straight) female musicians, who still respond to it even while rejecting it. Straight women who rebel, Wurtzel says, fall into the trap of rebelling for men even as they rebel from men - they want to abolish standards for what is 'sexy' in women, but, paradoxically, they still require male approval of their unconventional sexiness.
(Wurtzel does risk essentializing here, by talking about What Lesbians Do as opposed to What Straight Women Do. Like Powers, she acknowledges this risk; and like Powers, her explanation is not entirely convincing.)
Overall: recommended for straight girls, though as an introduction to queer issues rather than a self-contained education. As for queer women, I'm sure a lot of this isn't news - I don't know if this would make the book feel comfortably familiar, or just repetitive.
P.S. When I started this entry, it was beginning to get dark outside of my window, and I wondered, "Is it almost time for dinner?" But no, it was only 3:30 p.m. D: