As Her Hand Crept Slowly up Her Thigh: Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp

Abstract

Lesbian pulp novels are not typically the stuff of literary criticism, even in this time of post-structuralist anything goes. And the methodologies and theoretical approaches common to literary criticism be it reception theory or ideology critique or even deconstruction seem somehow inadequate or inappropriate to so marginalized and low-brow a cultural product. Typically, even cultural analysis that looks at this sort of culture does so with a language and technique that, while often insightful, serves to distance the reader from the popular content of the object. In other words, the potentially subversive stuff of culture is rendered abstract and safe through its aestheticization in high culture criticism. The attempt here is not, of course, to discard criticism altogether but rather to re-position its relevance to the being analyzed. Too often feminist critics, in attempting to keep up with the newest in post-thought, lose sight of our own (feminist) insights about the relationship between theory and methodology: analyzing objects that comes out of our own experience as women. To understand the lesbian novels of Ann Bannon then, we must do more than randomly apply a critical method upon a text. Our critical method should, it seems to me, be developed to ask questions that are linked to the reality of these novels as part of lesbian culture. To instrumentally apply a method of analysis to a lesbian text without at the very least sensitizing that method to its lesbian object is to miss the point. A sensitized and political method might experience these novels as expressive of the textures and tastes that comprise the lived experience of lesbians. For all their wild improbability, these novels are records, traces of an existence deeply submerged and suppressed. The radical sensuousness of these pulps mitigates against an analysis that imposes discrete formal categories on a subcultural artifact that cries out for indiscretion. I am making an argument, clearly, for an original reading of Bannon's books that is guided more by explicit feminist concerns than by a set of formalist codes. That my political interpretation is guided by feminist concerns will be readily apparent in the pages to come. The themes of desire and sexuality are not arbitrary categories of analysis but rather derive from my own positioned and political reading as well as from the social context in which these novels were written as well as received. For a political interpretation means fundamentally that we