(IN)VISIBLE BODIES: LESBIAN WOMEN NAVIGATING GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND RACE

Abstract

Fifteen feet tall and clad in a three-piece suit, a giant image of Ellen DeGeneres keeps watch over a major highway that skirts Philadelphia. She smiles off in the distance, looking past lines of commuting cars, seated with her knees wide and one arm casually resting on her leg. Advertising her 3 PM talk show, this image is part of a complicated past of lesbians embodying masculinity (Kennedy and Davis 1993; Faderman 1991). At the same time this image is clearly part of this specific historical moment in which gender is increasingly recognized as a malleable project of the body (Butler 1993; Halberstam 1998). This dissertation works to understand the ways that bodies become gendered bodies and conversely to understand the sense-making activities that individuals use to explain their bodies and bodywork. Because lesbian women already sit outside of traditional feminine norms, their femininity is already excised from their bodies. As such, the ways that lesbian women experience gender can be one path of inquiry to the ways that gender and other identities get mapped onto bodies. While academic scholarship has been increasingly addressing issues of sexual identity at a macro level, with particular attention paid to the same-sex marriage debates, there is a lack of consideration of the ways that individual gay bodies, identities, and embodied experiences are affected by the recent social and political attention to "gay issues." This billboard of America's most beloved lesbian is also symbolic of the ever-increasing visibility of the gay body. In this climate of unprecedented gay visibility and social action relying on that visibility, how are individuals assigning meaning to their own bodies and identities? Whose bodies and what identities are able to reap the benefits of this new climate of visibility, and which are still excluded? Drawing from 45 open-ended interviews with lesbians of color and white lesbians, my dissertation examines the ways that non-straight women enact, imagine, re-imagine, and narrate their experiences of gender. I have found two distinct rhetorical strategies used to talk about gendered performances of the body: essentialism and play. Whether women are describing their embodiment of femininity or masculinity, both, or neither, they overwhelmingly draw from one of these two narratives to make sense of their experience. However, I will argue that the choice of narrative is not a neutral or made in the absence of power relations. Instead, my research suggests that women are making these choices within larger webs of racialized political discourses that make available or constrain corporeal possibilities. This becomes most clear when examining the racial differences in the adoption of these narratives. While white lesbians comfortably used both rhetorical strategies, none of the women of color I interviewed invoked narratives that described their gender work as "play." Mainstream LGBT activism has been based on the civil rights model of single-axis politics that relies on subsuming other identities for the dominant strategies and goals (Cohen 1999). This single focus has become crystallized in the past two years as same-sex marriage has become virtually the only issue that gay activism has addressed. Queer politics in theory was a great alternative to these sexual identity politics. For folks experiencing marginality from multiple axes, this shift seemed promising. Unfortunately, queer theory and activism has not been the liberating force it promised to be for many queers of color and non-middle class queers (Cohen 1999; Ferguson 2003). As a result, the libratory promise of identity deconstruction and destabilization that postmodernism has promised appears to be a liberation reserved for white bodies.