By Lisa Walker
Looks should be deceiving, and in a society the place one's prestige and entry to chance are principally attendant on actual visual appeal, the difficulty of ways distinction is developed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of great import.
Lisa Walker examines this factor with a spotlight at the questions of what it skill to appear like a lesbian, and what it ability to be a lesbian yet to not appear like one. She analyzes the historic creation of the lesbian physique as marked, and reports how lesbians have used the widespread analogy among racial distinction and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny actual distinction. specifically, she explores the results of a predominantly noticeable version of sexual id for the female lesbian, who's either marked and unmarked, wanted and disavowed.
Walker's textual research cuts throughout numerous genres, together with modernist fiction resembling The good of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the Fifties and the Sixties, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory.
In the book's ultimate bankruptcy, "How to acknowledge a Lesbian," Walker argues that ideas of visibility are from time to time deconstructed, from time to time reinscribed inside of modern lesbian-feminist theory.
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Extra resources for Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity
Example text
But social and psychological explanations for homosexuality Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes • 35 run parallel to the novel’s overt argument that homosexuality is congenital, especially in its account of Stephen’s childhood. Most obviously, the family drama that surrounds Stephen’s birth and upbringing could account for her inversion. Her parents’ desire to have a son creates the environmental conditions for Stephen’s male identification. Her father bestows the male name chosen for the expected son upon his daughter, and treats her as he would a boy, setting the stage for her refusal of femininity.
In general, that culture is twentieth-century Western culture, although I make forays into the nineteenth century to consider the historical de- Introduction • 17 velopment of twentieth-century paradigms of the visible. In three of the five chapters, I read novels that can be situated within the modern period. When I say that the novels are part of a modernist moment, I do not want to designate only literary modernism and its techniques of fragmentation, collage, and allusion. Some of the novels can be located within that tradition.
His splendid conviction that being a boy constituted a privilege in life. (1982:46–47) Roger’s male privilege is synonymous with his public school education, and Hall’s equation of masculinity and class privilege with the right to be “perfectly natural” replicates masculinist ideology that many readers have found offensive. 36 • Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes The Antrim children personify Hall’s representation of femininity as artifice and masculinity as natural. Though Stephen resents Roger, she does not disdain his posturing of upper-class manhood the way she disdains Violet’s posturing of the leisured wife and mother as she plays with dolls and gives tea parties.
