Following with the discussion on marriage Alex and Rue started, I wanted to share a link a friend sent me.
http://gracethespot.com/?p=103 (Grace the Spot: Stuff Lesbians Like Part 6: Looking down at the Unenlightened Lesbian)
Long story short, and putting the irony of the content aside, this blog entry describes the “enlightened” lesbian critique of the fight towards the legalizing of gay marriage, adoption, etc. This blog presents some of the ideas we have been discussing in class, especially with Between Women. Marcus described the ways in which the relationships between women served to strengthen the hierarchal and familiar status of women, instead of being transgressive. I was reading this blog entry and I thought about how the female marriages presented by Marcus exemplify the “enlighetened” lesbian’s point. As Marcus states, female marriages were tolerated in Victorian society because they followed the standards of male-female marriages. They were not the representation of a tolerant society or of transgressive behaviour as one might think. As we previously discussed with Katz, the problem that gay marriage as it is being framed now presents is that it keeps on defining the LGBTQ community in terms of heterosexuality.
Going back to Marcus, she claimed that the theories of sexuality we hold in this century make kinship and family exclusively heterosexual.(12) By framing gay marriage with heterosexual discourse, people in gay relationships are still being defined as the “man” or the “women” of the relationship, assuming that even when the couple is same-sex, gendered roles in the family have to be maintained. Someone has to be the husband, and someone has to be the wife; the hierarchies that have been established historically in the family have to remain. Someone has to take the “head of the family” position. This brings us back to the discussion we had a couple of weeks ago: are all heterosexual relationships oppressive? If so, and by framing gay marriage in heterosexual terms, are we making LGBTQ couples intrinsically oppressive also?
Dan Healey, in Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, also discusses the conceptualization of homosexual relationships in heterosexual terms. Society in revolutionary Russia saw sex drive as universally heterosexual and sexual desire as consisting of “active” and “passive” channels that are decidedly gendered. The active figure in a relationship is masculine and characterized by lust. This has interesting implications for both “passive” lesbians and “active” lesbians. Women who were the partners of masculinized female homosexuals were seen as “normal” women who had only temporarily strayed from their traditional heterosexual trajectory. Psychiatrists in particular viewed them as “recoverable,” since they adhered to their expected gender role, as opposed to masculine women who were more often considered as “sick.” In thinking about female homosexuality in this way, there was no “genuine” feminine homosexual partner (147) – the only true lesbians were those who betrayed their projected gender roles.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Healey talks about the “masculine” woman as a person who worked within the confines of a culture to make their sexuality intelligible. By assuming traditionally male characteristics (such as lust), a woman could be conceived of as “active.” Healey discusses this figure as one exhibiting greater agency within a restrictive and heteronormative society, reworking gender possibilities. Rather than taking issue with the gendered and heterosexual conceptualize of all relationships, he views the women who could be labeled “active” or “masculine” as women who exhibited their sexuality as an affirmation of self, a “badge of emancipation and political consciousness” (73).