Abstract
Using social and queer theory on domination, sexuality and gender, this contribution explores how the queer American author Dorothy Allison celebrates the vilified transgressive lesbian body. As, in the 1970s, the mainstream American feminist movement crystallized around the definition of an acceptable sexuality in the name of femininity, female sexual practices were standardized according to strict identity frames, carnal desire was denied, and transgressive lesbians who play with gender roles were defined as abject. In response to this extreme taming of the body, Allison interrogates the notions of masculinity and femininity, domination and submission in her exploration of sexual pleasure and traumatized sexuality. She celebrates the aggressiveness and masculinity of queer lesbianism, promotes the fluidity of gender roles, and asserts the primacy of the flesh, sensuality, and materiality in sexuality.
Highlights
According to Judith Butler, sexual identity is not freely chosen, the individual’s choices being constrained by social regulations and heteronormativity (Bodies 95). hus the formation, circulation and signiication of bodies are mobilized by the law, which is reproduced by a seemingly free subject in a process that Butler calls “performativity.” She envisions sex as a regulated production which contributes to the deinition of viable bodies and to the preservation of the social order: the reiterated performance of sexual identity, which comes with constraints and a threat of ostracism or death to those who do not comply with the rules, becomes instrumental in perpetuating acceptable sexual practices [23; 95]
In Gender Trouble, Butler asks: “how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify as the ‘human’ and the ‘livable’? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very ield of description that we have for the human?” (xxiii)
Bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force” (Cultural Politics 145). he attraction or repulsion of a body by another deines the value granted to pleasure, in the sense that pleasure is considered valuable only if the body is attracted to a body of a diferent sex
Summary
Using social and queer theory on domination, sexuality and gender, this contribution explores how the queer American author Dorothy Allison celebrates the viliied transgressive lesbian body. In the 1970s, the mainstream American feminist movement crystallized around the deinition of an acceptable sexuality in the name of femininity, female sexual practices were standardized according to strict identity frames, carnal desire was denied, and transgressive lesbians who play with gender roles were deined as abject. In response to this extreme taming of the body, Allison interrogates the notions of masculinity and femininity, domination and submission in her exploration of sexual pleasure and traumatized sexuality.
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