The Lesbian Rule: Lillian Hellman and the Measures of Realism

Abstract

The invisible lesbian has posed difficulties for writers of queer history and criticism, in part just because she's a woman. We have seen, for example, how historian John Boswell accounted for the relative absence of women in his classic study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Women, he explained, mostly didn't write the history he was talking about, so they were necessarily underrepresented in his book as well. Meanwhile, in literary criticism, texts in which the lesbian is ignored or ambiguously or negatively represented have called for drastic measures, requiring either a political approach, as Diana Fuss has suggested — a measuring stick of "utility" — or a kind of aesthetics of lesbianism which has seemed specious to the utility-minded. Recently, this apparent opposition between essentialism and constructionism in queer politics seems to be breaking down, and this is a good thing for the lesbian, whose existence often has to be posited, because she's not always available in referential terms. The challenge in lesbian representation is also the challenge of feminist theory, namely, to discuss the woman as an effect of the very discourse that names her to affirm a woman who is in some sense not there. Lesbian theory adds to feminism's challenge the question: what difference does sexuality make in the structure of a gendered discourse?