Tag Archives: lesbian

Activism, Body Image, Feminism, LGBT, Literature, Objectification, Review, Sex, Sexual Assult

Her Body and Other Parties

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Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
Reviewed by Anna Bottrell

Immersing myself in this book took a sharp adjustment of expectations, as at first I almost slipped into mistaking Carmen Maria Machado’s surreal style for a play on the absurd, a beautiful and precise craft where the meaning lies more in the sensation of the sentences than in their larger sum. However, almost violently, at the end of every story a clear vision sets itself into place. Additionally, the stories build throughout the book with their shared theme: women’s bodies. Who has them, who wants them, and what is it like to live in such prime real estate?

The stories cover topics such as dehumanization, objectification, sexual assault, queer and lesbian relationships, and body shame.

Instead of writing women’s experiences through dialogue, Machado paints a vivid portrait with her imaginative descriptions of a world that seems inside out. Its beating heart lies in scenery. Significance is revealed through physical manifestations, and so the body and mind express themselves as one — open to the senses for observation.

It struck me as interesting that few of these stories have an exact setting, in time or in space. They seem to emanate from an archive of common culture, rather than from the manifest world. The stories take familiar elements and setups, and they bind them into Machado’s psychologically thrilling surrealism. However, this borrowing does not make them predictable. When Machado manipulates a familiar scenario, she makes it her own. She does this with a folktale in her story “The Husband Stitch”, post-apocalyptic survival in “Inventory’, and even Law & Order: SVU in “Especially Heinous”. Machado’s voice feels like something that is filling gaps in perspective, something that was always necessary to add.

After reading Her Body and Other Parties , I can re-examine the bits and pieces of common culture that Maghado wove into her stories. As they were untouched, they seem off. Stale, surface level. When Machado writes, she sees her subject matter with a sense of refreshing clarity. A folktale I heard in my childhood may appear to me through her warped vision with a new grain of truth, and suddenly feel urgent and contemporary. It may suddenly feel important.

This book is important. Machado appears to agree. She writes as if to say, “This is the world underneath your world, the world you’ve been told to ignore; but, it exists”.

She drives this point home in the book’s first passage, with a wake-up slap of reverse psychology:

(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with serendipity.

My father: kind, booming; like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, sounding with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband. All other women: interchangeable with my own.)

She has my attention.

See this post in the Clarion magazine as well at bu.edu/clarion

Around Boston, Feminism, LGBT, Literature, Marriage, Pride

Boston Marriage: Historical (Ace) Lesbians

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By Kylie McCuiston

I was first introduced to the term “Boston Marriage” in my first-year English class, Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Literature, when we were reading a short story titled “Two Friends” by Mary E Wilkins Freeman. It was a story about two women who lived together their entire lives independent of any male support. The two were clearly more than friends, but due to the constricting nature of the time period, their romance was only hinted at through veiled descriptions and the story ended with one of them dying (playing in, no doubt, to the “bury your gays” trope).

While this story sounds radical for the time period, it was common enough to merit a term for it. The term “Boston Marriage” derives from Henry James’ book The Bostonians, which was the first account that described this sort of phenomenon that was occurring. Usually the two women that lived together did so out of a mutual benefit, so that they could pool their assets together and live the lives they wanted to live without the limitation that would be placed on them if they were to enter in to a traditional marriage.

Though this term was in use during the nineteenth century, it was meant only to convey the fact that the women were living together, not necessarily that they were lovers, which is why this type of arrangement was accepted with little criticism. Looking back, historians can make conjectures as to whether some of these Boston Marriages were sexual or romantic in nature but we can never be certain. It would be remiss to dismiss them all as platonic however. While some were most likely sexual in nature, some were also simply romantic in nature and could be described as a form of asexuality back then.

Mary E Wilkins Freeman based most of her stories off of personal experiences and was herself in a Boston marriage with a woman named Mary Wales. The two lived together for almost two decades. Within this climate, Mary E Wilkins Freeman was able to write and publish freely and became a successful, independent author. Her disdain for traditional marriage is mirrored in another feminist short story of hers titled “A New England Nun” which tells about a woman who refuses to marry because she is content to live entirely independent for the rest of her life.

Whether or not the women in these Boston Marriages were lesbian or not, they at least demanded an early form of independence that we do not typically associate with the nineteenth century women. Many were independent writers and artists with their own flourishing careers and like Mary E Wilkins Freeman, made works that mirrored this independence.

Awareness, Sex

Sexual Fluidity in Women

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Fluidity
Credit: QCMississippiMud.com via EverydayFeminism.com

In certain circles I have found myself in recently, I have felt a pressure to be so self-aware and self-reflective at such a young age that it seems as though you have to fully know your entire sexuality. While the individuals in these circles certainly recognize sexual fluidity in an academic sense, sexual fluidity in the practical application comes across as naiveté and even ignorant. I have noticed a pressure to define the self –“I’m trans*, I’m pansexual, I’m gay”–granted, there are more boxes to fit into, but a box nonetheless. The vulnerability that accompanies sexual fluidity is real and frightening, and it is not readily acceptable to say “I’m still figuring it out” in regards to your sexuality even among enlightened, educated, seemingly-accepting groups.

Seeing homosexuality as a “phase” is an opinion that has bothered me in the past, but an analysis entitled “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive” by Roy Baumeister may have transformed my thinking. Although it does trivialize and insult the experiences of lifelong lesbians, the “just a phase” notion may have some value. The concept of sexual plasticity indirectly endorses the idea of lesbianism as a phase, but instead of thinking of it as one singular phase, we should think in a more pluralistic sense that our sexualities consist of multiple, intertwined phases.

Ideally, we could restructure our understanding of female sexuality so there is less pressure to define the self and cramp our fascinating, complex, surprising sexualities into little boxes. The concept of bisexuality, especially in regards to long-term relationships, leads to an interesting question. Is bisexuality a phase? It is rare to encounter an individual who identifies as bisexual and who has been in a monogamous relationship for several years or even decades. At what point does a bisexual woman start identifying themselves as gay or straight, depending on their chosen partner? It has been suggested that female erotic plasticity evolved as an evolutionary adaptation. Sexual fluidity is advantageous through periods of life transition such as a romantic separation, having a child, the death of a partner, getting a new job, or general aging, and can help women adjust their sexual needs and expectations depending upon circumstances. A study indicated that from puberty onward, men tend to keep their rate of orgasms relatively constant throughout the lifespan, either through masturbation or partnered sex, while women’s frequency of orgasms tends to reflect her fluctuating sexual desire and expectations and thus erotic plasticity.

Sexual fluidity is even displayed in popular television such as Orange Is the New Black, which is based on the story of Piper Kerman, a middle-class woman sentenced to prison after transporting drug money. In prison, Piper reunites with her drug-dealing girlfriend, despite being affianced to her male partner, out of sheer desperation for human contact and warmth. Piper’s return to lesbianism because of her situation may be termed “gay behind bars”, but other new language has been created to reflect women’s sexual flexibility. Words such as “has-bian”, “heteroflexibility”, and “LUG–lesbian until graduation” are all coming into our current vernacular. A term I heard recently used in relation to a man, but could also be applied to women, is “GIFFY,” meaning “gay in five (fucking) years”. This acronym can be used to describe an individual who identifies as straight but acts otherwise, who the speaker believes will finally come out years later. This language may be seen as degrading or useful. While it only perpetuates stereotypes, reinforces the idea that timing is intimately tied to lesbianism, and forces people into boxes, this language is frequently created and used by the queer community.

Editors’ suggestions for additional reading: