thirdspace

volume three issue two, March 2004

Special issue on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities

editorial
Representing transgressive sexualities - Kim Snowden, Natalia Gerodetti, and Sharon Larson
4-7

articles
Not Just a Leg Show: Gayness and Male Homoeroticism in Burlesque, 1868 to 1877 - Michelle
Durden
8-26
Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster - Patricia MacCormack
27-40
Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Difference - Kim Toffoletti
41-54
"Something's Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female": Transgressive Sexuality and
Discourses of Reproduction in Ginger Snaps - Bianca Nielsen
55-69
Representing the Negative: Positing the Lesbian Void in Medieval English Anchoritism
- Michelle M. Sauer
70-88
Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque
- Yael Sherman
89-107
"Still me on the inside, trapped": Embodied Captivity and Ethical Narrative in Leslie Feinberg's
Stone Butch Blues - Monika I. Hogan
108-125

essay
One Hundred Years of Transgression: A Tribute to Anna Rling 1904-2004 - Natalia Gerodetti
126-127

new books in print

128

issn 1495-8513 thirdspace 2004

thirdspace is a peer-reviewed journal published twice per year, in March and November. It is
maintained solely as an open-access electronic journal, without fee. Our mandate promotes
the publication of work from emerging scholars (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, new
independent scholars, and junior professionals). See www.thirdspace.ca for more information.
The support of the Centre for Research in Womens Studies and Gender Relations,
University of British Columbia, is gratefully acknowledged.
Indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/).

Chief editors:
Jena Tallentire - University of British Columbia, Canada
Kim Snowden - University of British Columbia, Canada

Co-editors:
Stephanie Austin - York University, Canada
Jessica Blaustein - University of Pennsylvania, USA
Karen Dias - University of Minnesota, USA
Souad Eddouada - Mohammed V University, Morocco
Lucie Glineau - Universit Laval, Canada
Natalia Gerodetti - Institut d'Etudes Politiques et Internationales, Switzerland
Sharon Larson - Brown University, USA
Sophie Levy - University of Toronto, Canada
Elley M. Prior - Carleton University, Canada

Advisory board:
Leonora Angeles - Department of Women's Studies and Community and Regional Planning,
University of British Columbia
Jean Barman - Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia
Susan B. Boyd - Chair in Feminist Legal Studies, University of British Columbia
Mary Bryson - Department of Education, University of British Columbia
Dorothy Chunn - School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University
Joy Dixon - Department of History, University of British Columbia
Isabel Dyck - Occupational Therapy, University of British Columbia
Erika Evasdottir - Postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender
Relations, University of British Columbia

Carol P. Herbert - Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western
Ontario
Helen Hok-Sze Leung - Department of Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University
Ann McKinnon - Department of Women's Studies, University of British Columbia
Shelly Moore - Department of Women's Studies, University of British Columbia and
Department of Psychology, Douglas College
Marina Morrow - Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre of Excellence for Women's Health and Centre
for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations, University of British Columbia
Dianne Newell - Department of History, University of British Columbia
Valerie Raoul - Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations, University of
British Columbia
Fiona Robinson - Department of Political Science and Institute of Political Economy,
Carleton University
Leslie Roman - Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia
Maureen Ryan - Department of Art History, University of British Columbia
Charlene Y. Senn - Department of Psychology, University of Windsor
Cannie Stark - Department of Psychology and Director, Organizational & Social Psychology
Research Unit, University of Regina

editorial
Representation and Transgressive Sexualities
Kim Snowden, Natalia Gerodetti, and Sharon Larson
Welcome to the thirdspace special issue on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities.
This is our sixth issue - our first fully dedicated to a special theme and our second to feature
some of our new editors at the helm! This issue has been put together by Kim Snowden,
Natalia Gerodetti and Sharon Larson - we worked together to select and work with the great
papers that make up this issue on the theme of transgressive sexualities in representation. As
always, we would not be able to produce anything at all without our fabulous co-editor and
resident web goddess, Jena Tallentire. She now has coding help in the form of our newest
editor - Elley Prior. Elley comes to us with a background in advertising and web publishing.
She is currently working on an MA in Canadian and Women's Studies at Carleton University
where she is focusing on women, technology and communication and the use of blogs by
Canadian women in the active construction and re-construction of their social and cultural
worlds. We are looking forward to working with Elley and we are excited about the
experience and scholarship that she brings to thirdspace. We'd also like to take a moment to
say goodbye and thanks to Bianca Rus, a member of our co-editing team who has now moved
on to other projects.
This issue of thirdspace is dedicated to emerging feminist work in the area of sexuality
and representation. This issue is precisely what we hoped in founding the journal - an
excellent range of quality work from emerging feminist scholars. The call for papers that went
out for this issue asked for work that dealt with monstrous women, femmes fatales, future
landscapes of sexualities, and issues around deviant, transgressive and subversive sexualities.
Specifically, we were interested in work that focused on how these issues of sexuality were
conceived, produced, constructed and created in all forms of representation. We had an
incredible response - many of the papers we received are representative of new feminist
scholarship that crosses disciplines and pushes the boundaries of academics in new and
exciting ways.
The seven articles in this issue contribute in many ways to the representations of
sexualities and gender and develop ideas about the political potential of transgression and
transgressive sexualities in both contemporary and historical contexts. They approach the
themes of the special issue from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and
while they are each scholarly pieces of work in their own right they also, taken together, give
an idea of the variety and complexity in which the theme of sexualities, transgression and
representation is being approached in contemporary research. We are also pleased that
although all the articles are in English, the contributing authors to this journal come from
various continents, making another source of inspiring interest to our readers.
4

Michelle Durden's article looks at the context of burlesque theatre in performances,

performers, and audiences to argue that the forms of sexuality represented are much more
diverse, complicated, and fluid than has previously been suggested. Durden's look at
burlesque theatre shows that it was "not just a leg show" but also entailed spaces for male
sexual transgressions. The author also addresses the vexing question in the history of male
sexual dissidence as to whether or not subcultures of men with sexual and emotional ties
existed in the nineteenth century in the United States. In focusing on male drag in burlesque
shows, often imported from London of the period, the author makes a convincing case for the
existence of a group of writers, performers, and audience members who shared a campy
amusement in references to sexual desire and play between men. At the same time as signs and
representations of sexual dissidence were recognizable in burlesque theatre the general public
was not necessarily aware, or wanted to be aware, of different sexual cultures. Durden
examines how representations and interpretations are dependent not only on one another but
also, particularly in the case of sexual dissidence, on deeply encrypted and sometimes highly
complicated cultural signs and narratives.
Patricia MacCormack's article on perversion takes a different look at the configuration of
socio-sexual limits than Durden's. Departing from a traditional understanding of the term,
MacCormack proposes to use perversion as a political strategy to renegotiate how we think
the body and subjectivity. She uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "becoming
minoritarian" to think through how occupying a non-dominant position does not necessarily
align one with being pervert; rather perversion could be used as a means by which those in
othered positions, and indeed all subjects, can volitionally explore the position of the other. In
this way, MacCormack calls upon Braidotti and Weiss to modify Deleuze and Guattari's
philosophical ideas into a sexual-political project, through which "becoming" becomes a
feminist transformation.
The theoretical work of Rosi Braidotti is also taken up in Kim Toffoletti's paper about
images of musician and performer Marilyn Manson. Toffoletti argues that in a particular
series of Manson images, he is represented as "posthuman" - a figure that destabilizes how we
perceive gender, race, sexuality, and the body. The coherence that we seek in an image,
specifically of a human, is completely disrupted through a process of reproduction, artifice,
imitation, and simulacra. It is precisely Manson's inauthenticity, his hybridity and
"posthuman" self-representation, Toffoletti suggests, that challenge the viewer to think about
difference in another way and to question the codes and constructs of subjectivity and culture
that make us uncomfortable with Manson's imagery.
Bianca Nielsen's paper on the film Ginger Snaps deals with subjectivity in another way.
She argues that Ginger Snaps should be considered beyond the teen-oriented horror flick that
it was marketed as and, instead, deserves a close reading in the context of issues of female
sexuality and cultural and medical discourses of women's bodies, sexuality and menstruation.
5

Nielsen argues that Ginger Snaps is consciously re-articulating the conventions of horror films
and, using Barbara Creed's theory of the monstrous feminine and other feminist
psychoanalytic approaches, Nielsen suggests that the film demands feminist scrutiny.
Michelle Sauer's paper considers medieval English anchoritism as a site for the "lesbian
void," a term she applies in examining the intimate relationship between the anchoress, "a
woman devoted to God and self-confined to solitude," and her servant "maiden." Sauer
claims that the exclusion of men from the anchoress's cell, a symbolic representation of her
own body, created a privileged space where she and her maiden could privately engage in
sexual acts that were otherwise publicly regulated. Although the functions and structure of the
anchorhold were generally regulated by the heteronormative and phallocentric laws of
medieval society, Sauer maintains that it is precisely the gaps in the phallocentric paradigm
that allowed the anchorhold to potentially become a site for female sexual expression and
exploration.
The cult television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been a popular subject of feminist
scrutiny and scholarship. Here, Yael Sherman looks at BtVS in the context of Bakhtin's
notion of the carnival and posits that the liminal space created by the carnival is a
transformative one, one that requires a contradictory and incomplete body at its centre. Using
Gloria Anzaldua's allegory of the Borderlands and Donna Haraway's myth of the cyborg,
Sherman traces the "carnival spirit" in BtVS and examines how these figurations of the
grotesque can be read in BtVS as a means to challenge conventional notions of race, gender
and sexuality.
These issues are also central in Monika Hogan's paper about Leslie Feinberg's novel,
Stone Butch Blues. Hogan argues that Feinberg's novel has long been considered to be a
groundbreaking and provocative work with a transgendered protagonist at its centre.
However, Hogan suggests that Stone Butch Blues has rarely been discussed for its literary merit
and she explores Feinberg's novel within the context of women's literary traditions,
specifically how Feinberg incorporates and resists these traditions in her work. Hogan focuses
on the ways in which Feinberg reconstructs the literary genre of the captivity narrative and, in
the process, creates a literary space for "ethical contact," an exploration of embodied captivity,
and a discourse that shifts and disrupts contemporary debates around transgender issues.
In a final historical note, one of our editors, Natalia Gerodetti, has prepared a tribute to
Anna Rling, held to be the first lesbian activist on record in the modern fight for GLBT
rights.
What all these articles highlight very clearly is that transgressions are never static, stable,
or finished. Rather, the emphasis is on the continuous processes that these acts,
representations, and performances imply. While these have certain material effects, be they

temporary or more permanent ones, much of the emphasis is on movement, on the doing,
creating, resisting, or any other "ing" in the verb and investigation.
We hope you will agree that this issue has some of the best work yet seen in thirdspace,
and we look forward to this continued high level of excellence from our contributors. This
issue we are also experimenting with a .PDF version of the journal for ease of printing and to
determine pagination of articles. For now, we also continue to offer our web-print version of
each piece. We are also giving chora a new look in the near future, so bear with us as we
renovate that side of the site. As always, let us know what you think about these changes or
any other suggestions at info@thirdspace.ca.

Kim Snowden, Natalia Gerodetti, and Sharon Larson, "Representation and Transgressive
Sexualities" thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 4-7 (print), 13 pars. (web).
[http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/ed3-2.htm].

articles
Not Just a Leg Show: Gayness and Male Homoeroticism in
Burlesque, 1868 to 1877
Michelle Durden
On September 28, 1868 the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe, comprised of star
1
burlesque actresses from the top theatres in London, made its New York debut. Both
contemporaries and historians credit the Thompson Troupe for starting a burlesque mania
that would sweep the nation. These performances combined burlesques traditional aspects of
satire, parody, travesty, and caricature with pantomimes cross-dressed dame and principle
boy roles. In the burlesque performances of the era, male actors performed female roles in
drag, while actresses played male characters attired only in thigh-length tunics and tights, the
masculine costume of the ancient world, which some people found scandalous by the
standards of the day. In these cross-dressed roles performers flirted and fought with one
another, while speaking in witty dialogue full of topical allusions and sexual double-meanings.
As a theatrical genre, burlesque in the post-bellum era could be described as musical
comedy. Popular playwrights of the 1860s and 70s, including Henry J. Byron, F.C. Burnand,
and William Brough, wrote burlesques in rhyming verse, peppered with puns and energetic
song-and-dance routines. Burlesque differs from the American Musical, a genre it helped
create, in that burlesque writers adapted pre-existing popular tunes rather than creating
original musical scores. To this music, burlesque actresses sang parodies and performed a
variety of dances, including the quadrilles and waltzes that graced society balls, breakdowns
borrowed from minstrel shows, and ethnic folk-dances such as polkas, hornpipes and clog
dances. For the grand finale, the entire company would often perform the French can-can,
titillating audiences with high kicks that revealed the female dancers legs in tights.
Burlesque playwrights and performers often parodied other theatrical productions, either
whole or in part. For instance, Thompsons burlesque 40 Thieves parodied and punned the
still-famous scene in Augustin Dalys drama Under the Gaslight, where Joe Smokey is tied to a
railroad track in front of an oncoming train (Appelbaum 66). An 1871 playbill for the Lydia
Thompson Troupe described it as an intensely thrilling scene, during which [] a real train
will cross the stage at the rate of 70 miles per hour [] (Woods Museum, 40 Thieves).
According to one spectator, while the sleeping Ali is rescued from instant destruction by the
passing train, it was not a locomotive that threatened him, but the train of his wife's dress
(The Burlesque Mania).
The main effect of these burlesques was to make topical subjects or well-known figures
appear ridiculous or absurd by displaying them in an incongruous style that juxtaposed high
8

and low culture. Dressed scantily in flesh-coloured tights under a short tunic or trunks,
burlesque actresses parodied masculinity and femininity, and joked about everything from
politics to popular culture. Burlesque actors generally wore more clothes, but they also
parodied gender, donning dresses and wigs to caricature society belles and strong-minded
women, including well-known womens rights advocates such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy
Stone, and Amelia Bloomer.
While both contemporaries and historians construct burlesque as a female leg show
designed for mens sexual pleasure, I argue that burlesque was also an arena for representing
and disseminating ideas, coded references, and collective social types associated with an
2
emerging gay male subculture. While historians suspect that American fairy subcultures of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries somehow evolved from the English molly
subcultures eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, they are still working to make concrete
3
connections. There are a few things historians do know, however, which are significant for
my arguments. While a history of gay subcultures in the United States before 1890 has not
yet been written, according to George Chauncey, sufficient evidence exists to establish that
the fairy was recognized as a distinct cultural type by the 1870s (Chauncey 385).
Additionally, if there were communities of gay men in New York and other U.S. cities in
the late 1860s and 1870s, burlesque performances would be a likely place to find evidence of
them. Burlesque was an Americanised version of an English theatrical tradition which for
centuries had been associated with love between men. According to John Franceschina,
between the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century English theatrical
productions represented various evolving homosexualities (Franceschina). Similarly, Rictor
Norton argues that as early as 1650 English theatres were denounced [] as the haunts of
sodomites (32). The genre of burlesque is specifically connected to these gay male
subcultures through playwright and actor William Foote, the man known as the English
4
Aristophanes. Aristophanes was the classical Greek writer credited with inventing burlesque.
While historians such as George Chauncey, Douglas Shand-Tucci, and Nan Alamilla
Boyd have demonstrated the existence of gay male subcultures in several American cities by
1890, including New York, Boston, and San Francisco, we still know little about the culture
of these groups between 1868 and 1877. The gay and homoerotic allusions in burlesque
combined with the social contexts that give them meaning fill in the cultural contours of this
era. These allusions include stock characters like the dandified swell and the fashionable belle,
which represent fashionable gay young men and effeminate, cross-dressing fairies. They also
include narratives of male love from Greek and Roman mythology, and slang-filled
homoerotic songs. Burlesque writers would not have included these allusions if there had not
been an audience for them, an audience comprised of gay men and those who knew them.
More specifically, the evidence of burlesque indicates that many of the subcultural codes gays
used after 1890 - the words, personal appearances, and mannerism used to indicate
membership in gay life - were established during or before the post-bellum period.
9

Burlesque as a Leg Show and a Sexual Case Study

Despite its comic diversity, the popular press of the day interpreted this new burlesque
hybrid as a leg show, meaning a spectacle of feminine nudity designed for a masculine
audience. For example, The Spirit of the Times claimed that shapely legs were the essence of
burlesques success: At our two burlesque theatres Niblos and Woods it is certain that
hair and legs only are required, and even the former of these might be dispensed with unless
of the lightest golden hue (The Burlesque Mania). The New York Clipper agreed, after all
there is nothing like legs, good legs, to keep a place running (City Summary italics
original). In a similar vein, the New York Tribune suggested that the managers of Niblos
Garden erect an emblem to their success the Female Leg, cut in symmetrical effigy and
clothed in nothing but its natural loveliness (General Notes).
If burlesque is depicted as a leg show by the popular press, burlesque actresses are nothing
but legs and body parts: they are reduced from talented performers to sexual objects. For
example, The Clipper describes Elise Holts performance at the New California Theatre in San
Francisco as a titillating spectacle of legs, hair, breasts and shoulders. Rather than comment
on her acting, singing, or dancing abilities, The Clipper describes Holts yellow hair and 14
calves, and her revealing attire: Were the poor little girl to lose her lace collar during the
performance she would have nothing left to cover her but her boots (Dramatic; Of
Theatrical News). Male actors were never described in this manner, as sexual objects, even
when they portrayed women. Instead they were rated on how much laughter they received
from the audience.
While female sexual display is not the only characteristic of burlesque, it came to define
the genre for middle-class Victorian audiences because of economic and cultural reasons.
Robert Allen and Faye Dudden argue that between 1866 and 1900 burlesque managers and
performers emphasised female sexual display in order to boost audience attendance in
response to an increasingly competitive market, gradually transforming it into a business that
sold access to womens bodies for mens visual consumption. In addition to these market
influences, this display of near naked women held powerful meanings for middle-class
Victorians, inverting their notions of female modesty and propriety (Allen; Buckley).
According to Peter Buckley, the burlesque actresses who showed their legs in tights soon
became a metaphor for a more general transgression of the boundaries of class and gender
in the post-bellum era (116). In response, the New York popular press created an antiburlesque discourse to maintain the moral and geographical distance between the Bowery
and upper Broadway, sites of working-class depravity and middle-class respectability in the
great city (125). These symbolic meanings of naked women help explain why viewers and
historians of burlesque have tended to frame burlesque as a spectacle of female nudity or a leg
show.

10

By constructing burlesque solely as a female leg show, however, writers have ignored
other transgressions of the genre, erasing them from the historical record. For example,
theatre historian Tracy Davis notes that in 1890s Britain the discourse against burlesque
focused on the indecency of womens bodies and the immorality among the highest paid
[male] customers who solicited sex with actresses from the most expensive parts of the
playhouse (149). This discourse neglected other public transgressions of the sex/gender
system, namely the sodomites who frequented the low-cost gallery seats (Davis 149).
Similarly, while historians of American theatre argue that between 1868 and 1877 burlesque
actresses displayed their bodies and told ribald jokes to entertain and titillate men, their
inquiry has focused on relations between men and women, ignoring evidence that many
burlesque stage-types, songs, jokes, and comic narratives also alluded to sexual relations
5
between men (Allen; Buckley; Dudden).
Because of its sexual content, the evidence of burlesque serves as an historical repository
of popular knowledge about sexuality, in the form of jokes and comic situations. It therefore
makes an excellent choice for an historical case study. As anthropologist Mary Douglas notes,
jokes are funny because they invert or exaggerate some aspect of the socio-cultural order. To
understand a jokes punch line, a person must be familiar with the society and culture from
which it comes. This aspect of humour provides a unique opportunity for historians. If
scholars can piece together enough information to find out why a joke is meaningful or funny
in a particular era they can reconstruct aspects of the culture at that time.
Robert Darnton uses this method in his classic analysis The Great Cat Massacre. Darnton
argues that in the process of trying to understand why people of another time found
something funny, such as the grisly murder of cats, researchers can recover the cultural
contexts that made it humorous to those involved. Outlining the logic of his method he
writes: When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a
valid point of entry into an alien mentality. And once we have puzzled through to the natives
point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world (262). To accomplish
this, historians tease meaning from documents by relating them to the surrounding world of
significance, passing from text to context and back again, eventually reconstructing a
foreign mental world (Darnton 6). Similarly, by comparing burlesque comedy to other
historical evidence of gayness and homoeroticism in Victorian urban culture, culled from a
variety of primary and secondary sources, I partially recreate those aspects of the Victorian
symbolic world which give it meaning. The result is a glimpse into the sexual underworld of
Victorian America.

The Gay Young Swell and the Fashionable Belle

As a stage-type, the swell is recognisable from his highly fashionable and affected
appearance. He is generally depicted wearing an evening jacket, kid gloves, walking stick,
monocle, and top hat. For instance, as the swell Genarro in Byrons burlesque Lucretia Borgia,
11

M.D., Miss Holt appears dressed in male attire in a pair of rich purple velvet pants, white
satin coat, vest, and white silk hat [] (in Croghan 207). In another of Byrons plays the
character Abdallah, played by Pauline Markham, describes men like himself as lightwhiskered dandies, with eye-glass and curls, / And drawling lisp, like sentimental girls (Ali
Baba 12). In addition to his drawling talk, the swell has an affected walk or mincing
gait (Mistress Jinks 51; Woods Museum). Young Albert in Byrons William Tell
demonstrates this affected pose. He twists his moustache into two thin spikes, wears his
hat cocked to one side, holds his cigar at the traditional angle, and wears his eye glass so
(6, italics original). According Albert this style and pose make him a man despite the fact that
he is still young enough to be at that age, when, too oft, one must confess, / Mans attained
everything, but manliness (Byron, William Tell 6, italics original).
The Cheeky Little Cove and The Pet of the Girls, sung by Elise Holt, exemplify the
typical swell. The Cheeky Little Cove is always ready for a spree, Champagne or Eau de
Vie, and basically does just as [he] please[s]. He gets in fights, drives a fast team of horses,
and brags that hes the girls favorite because hes small. His father thinks he is rather fast
and very forward, especially when he spends money, but the Cheeky Little Cove isnt
worried about finances, because hes one of the festive lads of Harvard and a man who can
turn his hand to anything (Wall). While the Cheeky Little Cove is a rowdy, noisy swell,
The Pet of the Girls is butterfly dandy, a type still associated with The New Yorker
6
magazine. According to the lyrics, The Pet speaks with a lisp and consciously moulds his
actions to imitate the dandies he sees around him: To be a swell is weally gay, I pwactice it
both day and night! He learns to be a butterfly, quite distingue in his dress and air,
including dainty ringlets and a gay mustache all twisted to a hair. Dressing with the
gweatest care, his appearance is designed to attract looks from both the ladies on Broadway
and the fellows at his club, who envy him and copy his style. He is rich, with Lots of
friends and lots of cash to spare. Unlike more rowdy swells, who smoke cigarettes and look
for fights, he hasnt got the nerve to smoke, his walking cane weally tires him, and he
avoids physical confrontations with others because he is afraid of spoiling his good looks: A
Wrow! Why! it makes me shudder! Suppose I should get a discolored optic? (Cooper 5).
This fashionable style is associated with young upper-class men. In his 1869 book about
New York social life, Junius Henri Browne describes men of this sort as members of the most
elite New York clubs, always wearing the sleekest hats, the shortest of sack-coats, the most
elegant of pantaloons, and the daintiest of gloves [] (46). Verses From the Harvard Advocate
also contains several descriptions of this type. One is a Nobby Sophomore, who wears
A Vandyke collar, long and sharp,
Without a fold or spot;
A radiant scarf of all the hues,
Drawn through a golden knot;
Thin ladies-gloves upon his hands, -Sixes, perhaps, not more;

12

[]
And nobby trousers, tight as skin
On slender legs he wore (11-12)

Another is described as A youngish student fellow who is dressed up to kill, -- Hat, new;
tie, blue; gloves, yellow (105).
The swells female counterpart is the fashionable belle, also called the queen of society
or the girl of the period. Quick-change artist William Horace Lingard specialised in skits
about the belle. Pictorial sheet music covers for The Grecian Bend, Im Not a Gossip,
On the Beach at Long Branch, and The Gay Masque Ball, depict Lingard in wigs and
stylish dresses. In each, he assumes a stereotypically elite feminine pose, such as coquettishly
holding a fan or attempting to walk in the new Grecian Bend corset. However, Lingards
impersonations of fashionable women are not overly exaggerated, as he could easily pass as
one of them.
The practice of actresses playing dandies and actors mimicking belles enhanced the
gender ambiguity of these characters and invited several ways of perceiving them. In other
words, burlesque humour was polysemic, meaning that the caricatures, puns, and comic
situations were open to a variety of audience interpretations. The creators of burlesque did
not expect audiences to get every joke, but the ones they did get made up for those they
missed. Most of the jokes were unimportant to the overall plot anyway, since burlesque plays
did not attempt to create a coherent storyline or provide narrative closure at the end. Rather,
by presenting spectators with a series of absurd scenes loosely connected by a well-known
story, these burlesques worked to destabilise cultural assumptions and to question the existing
social order. Ironically, burlesque performers realistic acting style helped this endeavour by
blurring the boundaries between theatre and reality. What I mean is that these actresses and
actors burlesqued modern life, but they also demonstrated that modern life was itself a
burlesque. For example, an actress smoking a cigarette was both burlesquing masculinity and
simultaneously referencing women who smoked. The image of smoking women was often
used by the popular press of the day to represent and ridicule emancipated women, playing
on what some saw as the absurdity of middle-class women smoking, voting, and wearing
pants. Similarly, by playing a society belle an actor burlesqued the cultural trappings of elite
femininity, and perhaps even a specific woman. But he also, at the same time, realistically
portrayed a man who burlesqued femininity by dressing in drag. While some people would
only get the first meaning of the burlesque, others would understand the second meaning as
well, particularly if they had seen women smoking or men wearing dresses in other social
contexts.

Gay as a Double-Entendre
Burlesque writers and performers used double-entendres and other sexual allusions
strategically, in order to signify sexual topics to one portion of the audience while at the same
13

time allowing another part of the audience to remain in ignorance, or pretend ignorance, of
the sexual content. In other words, people unfamiliar with popular sexual terminology and
social categories like the gay dandy, fairy or prostitute would not understand the allusions,
and would not get the jokes. On the other hand, people who were familiar with sexual slang
and knew what prostitutes, fairies, and other social deviants looked like would understand
the allusions and hence the humour as well. Audience responses included laughter,
embarrassment, and offence. However, to get the jokes people would have to interpret them
in a sexual manner. Because of this, some people probably pretended not to get the jokes, in
order to preserve the appearance of being well-bred. According to etiquette expert Mrs.
Duffy (1877), when confronted with a double-entendre or slang term A well-bred person
always refuses to understand [...] (39-41). Certainly, as stage-types the swell and the belle
ridicule the fashionable youth of the period. But when played in drag these urban dandies and
fashionable belles would also connote gay men and fairies to some portion of the audience.
For example, the dandified swells represented in burlesque look gay, act gay, and go to
gay places. In the song Im Such a Winning Man, the protagonist brags, I look so fine and
gay (Great Lingards 110). The Pet of the Girls, wears a gay mustache all twisted to a
hair, spends his time promenading gay Broadway, and refers to the gay life, singing to be
a swell is weally gay, I pwactice it both day and night! (Cooper 5). The swells not only look
and act gay, they are gay. Rackety Jack informs his listeners:
I like a lark, I do of course
I cant help being gay,
I follow in my fathers steps,
So at least the people say. (Mistress Jinks 86)

Humpty Dumpty Joe exclaims, Im the gayest chap in Boston (Mistress Jinks 19).
Similarly, a fashionable girl describes her beau thus: When hes dressed up I do declare, /
youd say hes a gay young swell (Great Lingards 34). The word gay has significantly
different implications today than in the years following the Civil War. What connotations did
it hold for burlesque audiences, writers, and performers during this era?
In the late nineteenth century gay held several meanings. Chauncey traces the historical
implications of this term and its appropriation by the gay subculture. He argues:
Originally referring simply to things pleasurable, by the seventeenth century gay had
come to refer more specifically to a life of immoral pleasures and dissipation (and by
the nineteenth century to prostitution, when applied to women), a meaning that the
faggots could easily have drawn on to refer to the homosexual life. Gay also referred
to something brightly colored or someone showily dressed and thus could easily be
used to describe the flamboyant costumes adopted by many fairies, as well as things at
once brilliant and specious, the epitome of camp. (17)

These definitions of gay as a life of immoral pleasures and dissipation, as something

brightly colored, brilliant or specious, and as someone showily dressed accurately
14

describe the lifestyle and attire of fashionable urban swells. Moreover, in the late nineteenth
century gay also meant impudent, cheeky, socially forward or overly-familiar, adjectives
often used to describe these audacious young men (Green 470). Most audience members
would understand gay in these ways, even the swells themselves.
However, as Chauncey argues, for those involved in the subculture the term gay
acquired additional significance, referring to a specific lifestyle, a mode of dress, and a camp
sensibility. According to Chauncey, by 1890 gay was used as a double-entendre to signify
membership in the subculture:
Because the words use in gay environments had given it homosexual associations that
were unknown to people not involved in the gay world, more circumspect gay men
could use it to identify themselves secretly to each other in a straight setting. A
properly intoned reference or two to a gay bar or to having a gay time served to
alert the listener familiar with homosexual culture. (18)

However, while men used the term gay to indicate their membership in this subculture, it still
referred to things pleasurable and desirable rather than to a homosexual identity (16).
According to Chauncey these alternative meanings of gay were commonly used by 1890.
Burlesques consistent use of the term suggests that it was used by members of the gay
subculture as early as 1868, and in burlesque theatres every evening, writers, performers, and
audiences members helped establish and disseminate these coded references to gay life.

Fashion, Effeminacy, and Sex Between Men

In addition to these gay descriptions, the swells fashionable dress would also connote
sexual interest in other men. According to Randolph Trumbach, fashionable men became
associated with effeminacy and sodomy by the beginning of the eighteenth century when the
queen emerged as a social type. In response, many men rejected the trappings of fashion in
order to disassociate themselves from the queens perceived femininity and criminalised sexual
practices. According to fashion historians, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
were characterised by a great masculine renunciation of fashion, when typical male dress
become more sombre and uniform (Kuchta 55-67). In the United States by the 1830s, dark
suits and stovepipe hats had replaced the knee breeches, bright ribbons, and floral waistcoats
worn by the founding fathers.
This association between fashion, effeminacy, and sex between men continued in the
nineteenth century with dandyism and the aesthetic movement. The dandy emerged as a
social type at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The archetypical dandy, the legendary
George Bryan Beau Brummell of Regency England, became the model of dandified
masculinity in England, France, and the United States for decades. According to Ellen Moers,
Brummell began cultivating his exquisite style of dress during his education at the elite
institutions of Eton and Oxford, where he met and is thought to have had sexual relations
with the Prince of Wales, the later King George IV (17-38).
15

By the 1850s, dandyism and male love became entwined with the cult of aestheticism, a
doctrine that affirmed beauty as a prime value and whose members cultivated good taste and
refinement in all things (Dellamora; Dowling; Shand-Tucci; Sinfield). Aesthete men were
closely associated with elite colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Oxford,
Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale. Shand-Tucci notes that at Harvard College and the nearby
city of Boston during the 1860s and 70s, young men drew on the opposing styles of the
athlete/warrior, characterized by Walt Whitman, and the artist/aesthete, later associated with
Oscar Wilde, to understand their masculinity and sexual attraction to other men. By the
1890s, the connections between dandyism and male love were obvious enough in some social
circles for historian Marylene Delbourg-Delphis to claim that while all homosexuals might
not be dandies [] the majority of dandies were homosexual (in Franceschina 291).
Burlesque performances in the post-bellum period relied on and re-presented this connection
between dandyism and desire for other men through the trope of the fashionable swell.
Some people might argue that the swells obvious interest in girls negates this
interpretation. However, sexuality at this time was not organised into a strict hetero/homo
7
dichotomy, and many gay men also married or expected to marry (Shand-Tucci; Chauncey).
Moreover, the usage of feminine terms like girls and ladies could easily be a camp
reference to other gay men (Chauncey; Boyd). Additionally, not everyone in the audience
would make these connections between dandyism and love between men. Instead, many
Victorians would have considered the effete dandy to be a ladies man because of his interest
in things considered feminine (Sinfield 2). For instance, even close friends of the dandified
Oscar Wilde did not know of his sexual relationships with men until he was accused of
sodomy in 1894 (Sinfield 2). Moreover, while many people considered the swells effeminate,
they most likely saw dandification as a masculine rather than feminine style. For example,
Byrons character Albert Tell characterised the swell pose as a way for adolescents to achieve
the privileges of mans estate, despite their lack of manliness (William Tell 6).
Similar to the dandified swell, the society belle, when performed by men in drag, also
referenced the gay subculture in the U.S., particularly the effeminate fairies that sometimes
dressed as women. According to George Chauncey, sufficient evidence exists to establish that
the fairy was recognised as a distinct cultural type by the 1870s (Chauncey 385). He notes
that although most gay men did not dress in drag due to laws prohibiting it, the male
transvestite was the emblematic symbol of the subculture. When men such as W.H. Lingard
dressed as fashionable belles, they not only commented on young women of high society, but
also simultaneously referenced these fairy men. Nan Alamilla Boyd makes a similar argument,
claiming that in San Francisco as early as the 1860s and 70s, female impersonators
transported the language and gestures of the nascent queer culture to the popular stage (34).
To anyone familiar with them, burlesque transvestite actors obviously referenced these other
men in drag.

16

But readers should understand that except for members of the gay subculture, most
people probably did not connect dressing in drag with sex between men. Jeffrey Weeks notes
that in 1871 male cross-dressers who solicited sex with men were tried in London not for
criminalized sexual activity but rather for transvestitism (in Sinfield 6). The New York
Times article, A Man Arrested in Female Attire Justice Perplexed, shows a similar pattern.
The man, William Hamblin, successfully passed as a woman when observed by the
Thirteenth Precinct Sergeant, but was arrested later that evening when his disguise was
penetrated by a Tenth Precinct Officer. The article makes no mention of sexual activity, but
instead focuses on the Justices perplexed reaction to seeing a man dressed as a woman.

Greco-Roman Love: Ixion, Jupiter, and Ganymede

Many burlesques also relied on stories from Greek and Roman mythology to connote
love between men. The burlesque of Ixion; or, the Man at the Wheel performed by the Lydia
Thompson Burlesque Troupe in the fall of 1868 exemplifies this tendency. Written by H.C.
Burnand, the burlesque is loosely based on the Greco-Roman myth of Ixion, the king of
8
Thessely. According to the myth, Ixion married and then refused to pay the bride price to his
father-in-law, who he then pushed into a pit of fire. To free Ixion of the consequences for his
wrongdoing, Jupiter invited him to visit Olympus, where Ixion fell in love with Juno,
Jupiters wife. Jealous, Jove punished Ixion by sending him to Hades bound to a fiery,
revolving wheel.
While the burlesque version follows this basic plot, it also incorporates the myth of
Ganymede. According to Greek mythology, Ganymede was the beautiful son of Tros, king of
Troy. Attracted to the boy, Jupiter, disguised as an eagle, carried him to Olympus to be the
cupbearer of the gods. In some versions Ganymede was transformed into the Zodiac
constellation of Aquarius. According to theatre historian John Franceschina, during the
European Renaissance this myth became the paradigm for same sex relationships and
was the origin of many homosexual allusions that exist into the twentieth century (3).
These connotations included: the cup, which referred to sodomy; the term catamite, meaning
boy-lover or boy prostitute, which is derived from Catamus, the Latin name for Ganymede;
and the Age of Aquarius, which connoted social and sexual freedom (Francheschina 3).
Thompsons burlesque of Ixion uses the character of Ganymede to suggest sexual relations
between him and Jupiter. In this version Ganymede is cupbearer to the gods, albeit in the
form of a Victorian servant. Those familiar with the myth would recognise the sexual
connotations of Ganymede the cupbearer, namely that Ganymede is Joves boy lover. The
playbill further establishes this meaning through additional word play, describing Ganymede
as Jupiters beautiful Buttons; a nice active lad, the original Fat Boy. Button is derived
from the French word bouter, whose meanings include to thrust or to pierce, suggesting
penile penetration. This message is also communicated through the description of Ganymede
as an active lad. At this time the term active is used to describe a sexual partner who
17

penetrates or takes the dominant, masculine role in sex, while passive refers to a sexual
partner who is penetrated, or assumes the subordinate or female sexual role. While this
interpretation violates the hierarchical organisation of classical sexuality, which requires that a
higher-status or older man penetrate a lower-status or younger man, it corresponds to more
egalitarian forms of male love which emerged in England at the end of the eighteenth century
and the United States during the nineteenth century. Fat also carries sexual connotations,
including pleasures of the flesh and uncontrolled appetites (Rowe 25-49). These meanings
may over-ride the dominant meaning of fat as large, corpulent, or fleshy, since in this
burlesque a thin man plays Ganymede (Appelbaum 107). Moreover, Ganymede is the
original Fat Boy. This makes sense if fat boy refers to a boy lover, because Ganymede is
the classical archetype of boy-lovers. Ganymede also fraternises with Bacchus, drinking wine
and whiskey stolen from Jupiters cellar (Burnand 16-17; Woods Museum, Ixion). In Roman
mythology, Bacchus is the god of wine, and Bacchanalian festivals are characterised by
orgiastic sexual revelry in addition to intoxication. Those familiar with the myth would
probably find it hilarious that Ganymede the boy lover, played by tall, wiry Sol Smith Jr.
towers over Jupiter, performed by petite actress Ada Harland.
Additionally, the burlesque combines the storyline of the Ganymede myth with the myth
of Ixion to suggest sexual relations between Jove and Ixion, played by actress Lydia
Thompson. According to the playbill, it is Ixion, not Ganymede, who is taken up by
Jupiter and flies to Olympus on the back of the Eagle (Woods Museum, Ixion). In Burnand's
script, Jove invites Ixion to live with him in Olympus, to which Ixion responds:
Great Jove, of all queer tastes how queer and odd is his

Who would refuse to dwell with gods and goddesses? (12)

Jupiter and Ixion proceed to sing a duet to the tune of Come live with me and be my love.
Jupiter sings:
Come live with me, with me above,
And you shall all our pleasures prove. (12)

And Ixion responds:

Yes, tis the sort of life I love;
Such a rise would be a good move. (12)

Jove leaves and sends Mercury, the celestial messenger, to transport Ixion on the back of a
giant anthropomorphised Eagle. Mercury tells Ixion to mount the bird dont fear.
According to the stage directions, Ixion strokes Eagle, who resents the familiarity, while
responding Ive got the courage and my peckers here (italics original).
All of these allusions have double-meanings, one innocent and one sexual. Ixion is
taken up by Jupiter, meaning on that Jupiter will support him financially. The quotation
marks, however, suggest that Jupiter has taken Ixion sexually as well. In the line about
18

queer tastes the word queer can be read as odd, meaning that only a fool would refuse Joves
offer. However, queer is also used to suggest love between men (Shand-Tucci 30). The line by
itself -- Great Jove, of all queer tastes how queer and odd is his -- connotes that Jupiter has
queer tastes in sexual partners. The duet and the scene with the Eagle further support this
interpretation. The duet refers to the pleasures Jove and Ixion will have together, and the
word rise could be interpreted as an allusion to penile erection. Additionally, the tune and
some of the lyrics come from the popular song Come Live With Me and Be My Love, and
while neither actually sings this line, because burlesque only uses popular tunes the title would
be familiar to many audience members. Those who know the original myth would also
remember that Eagle is Jupiter in disguise. Ixion strokes Eagle and is asked to mount him,
both of which can be read as sexual innuendos. When Ixion claims that his peckers here, he
is using a triple-entendre. Pecker refers to the Eagle (a bird who pecks), but is also a slang
term referring to Ixions courage and to his sexual anatomy (Green 910). The italics mean
that the actress performing Ixion should stress this word to ensure that the audience both
hears and understands these puns.
The majority of audience members would have some familiarity with Greek and Roman
culture and mythology through a variety of popular sources, including childrens books, art,
statuary, popular theatricals, and even pornography. However, men with elite preparatory or
university educations would have the most extensive knowledge of Greek and Roman culture.
In the United States, Harvard and Yale required their students to learn Greek or Latin and to
study the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome (Bagg; Rudolph; Shand-Tucci). At
Harvard, the curriculum in 1877 even included Greek pederasty, the practice of grown men
loving adolescent boys (Shand-Tucci 37). Historian Linda Dowling argues that in the last half
of the nineteenth century Greek studies at Oxford served as a homosexual code, providing
aesthete students with a counter-discourse that recognised and legitimated love between men.
Most likely classical studies in the United States served a similar purpose. Like their English
counterparts, Harvard and Yale fostered close, even sexually intimate relations among their
all-male student body and between students and male faculty (Shand-Tucci).

Homoerotic Songs: New Music of the Lydia Thompson Troupe, 1877

In addition to gay stage-types and Greco-Roman narratives of male love, burlesque also
referenced and addressed gay men through homoerotic songs. Sheet music from the 1877
series New Music of the Lydia Thompson Troupe, On the Strict Q.T. and He Always Came
Home to Tea, exemplify this tendency. Lyrics from On the Strict Q.T. discuss people who
deceptively indulge in pleasures forbidden by middle-class Victorian propriety. The fourth
verse is particularly interesting:
Just take a pretty miss,
And offer her a kiss,
When theres anybody standing by to see.
Shell say shed rather die,

19

But you may snatch it on the sly,

And shell like it on the strict Q.T.
Now theres a needy swell,
Who calls a girl a gell,
Wears an Ulster quite a yard below his knee.
Then comes an ancient beau
Upon whose cheeks a-glow
That we think is on the strict Q.T.

Both stories describe secret sexual encounters, the first between a woman and man, the second
between two men. The second story refers to a wealthy old man who pays a young, working
class fellow for sexual favours. The phrase ancient beau, has multiple meanings: a boyfriend,
a dandy, and a man who loves men. The old mans cheeks a-glow with a sex flush, the
result of a recent sexual encounter. The other partner is a working-class dandy. The song
indicates this directly by calling him a needy swell, and indirectly though his improper
English: he calls a girl a gell. Despite his financial situation, he still plays the dandy, wearing
9
the new fashion for long coat tails to its extreme, a yard below his knee. These lyrics also
suggest that the sexual encounter was paid for a needy swell with large tailors bills would
need a way to get money.
Another burlesque song, He Always Came Home to Tea, also suggests sexual relations
between men, relying on double-entendres to convey this message. The first verse and the
chorus of this song are particularly interesting.
There was a man whose name was Dan
And a travller gay was he,
And evry day he was away
But he always came home to tea
And the people knew
That whatever he might do,
And wherever he might be,
In India or China, or in South Carolina,
He always came home to tea.
Chorus
He always came home to tea.
Wherever he might be.
This man calld Dan
This regular man
He always came home to tea. (sic)

From our contemporary perspective this seems to be a nonsense song, a common type in the
burlesque musical repertoire. How is it possible for Dan to return home every day when he
is on the other side of the world? However, to people familiar with code words from the gay
subculture, the song takes on entirely new meanings. Subcultural meanings of the word gay
20

have already been discussed above. Tea, according to Chauncey, is a reference to tearoom
trade, meaning anonymous bathhouse sex between two men. This practice was noted in San
Francisco in 1890 and was common among New York gays by the turn of the century (Boyd
27; Chauncey). The phrase regular man connotes a manly or normal man, a fellow who
does not act or dress in an effeminate manner (Chauncey 15-16). Normal men are
frequently sailors or soldiers who have sex with both female prostitutes and fairies (Chauncey
16, 219).
The songs narrative makes more sense when interpreted through these subcultural
meanings, indicating that they were used as early as 1877. Dan is described as gay, which in
this case does not refer to dissipation or fancy clothes, but is used as a coded reference to his
sexual practices with other men. He is a regular man who always comes [] to tea,
meaning that he is a masculine fellow who visits bathhouses to engage in sexual relations with
other men. While Dan is not a sailor he travels as if he was, visiting exotic ports all around the
world, everywhere from North Carolina to India or China. Like the sailors, he knows where
to find sexual partners in all of these ports of call, for wherever he might be he always came
[] to tea. Additionally, it is significant that the author chose to use the word came,
which also means orgasm, rather than a synonym such as goes, went, arrived, or returned (The
Pearl 29; Green 259).
Later verses also contain inferences to Dans preference for sex with men. In the third
verse Thompson sings, Oh, didnt he spoon / In the mountains of the moon. Readers may
assume that this is another nonsense verse, since Dan has no way to travel to the moon, but
careful consideration suggests otherwise. Spoon is a common slang term meaning to engage
in ostentatious lover-like displays, such as kissing in public, while moon means buttocks.
To spoon in the mountains of the moon, then, suggests sexual practices involving the anal
area. Moreover, by the late nineteenth century the verb to moon was slang for anal sex
(Green 801). While anal stimulation is practised and enjoyed by people of both genders, it is
strongly associated with sexual relations between men. Lines from the fourth verse also imply
that Dan is part of the gay subculture: Then in Tipperary / He would trip it like a fairy.
Despite his status as a regular or manly man, in some situations Dan engages in camp
behaviour, acting like a fairy. Tipperary is a county in Ireland, but it is also a reference to
the anal area (Green 1207). The quotation marks in the lyrics call attention to this second
meaning, suggesting that the performer should emphasise it. In this context Trip it like a
fairy could also refer to anal sex.

Conclusion
Historians know very little about the organisation of sexuality in the United States before
1890. As a site of commodified sexuality, burlesque is important for understanding gendered
sexual practices during the post-bellum era. These burlesque performances provide evidence
of gay subcultures in New York and other urban centres before 1890, and demonstrate that
21

many of the gay semiotic codes of the 1890s were established during or before the
Reconstruction era. The gay subtexts found in burlesque stage-types and coded homoerotic
narratives would not have existed if there had not been an audience for them, an audience
comprised at least partially of fairies and other gay men, as well as the working-class men and
women who lived close to their establishments and knew their cultural symbols.
Through stage performances, publicity photographs, sheet music, and songbooks, the
creators of burlesque helped to establish a national popular culture, including a national gay
subculture. Burlesque troupes were among the first entertainers to travel across the country on
the newly completed trans-continental railroad, bringing with them gay stage-types and
narratives of male-male love, and connecting the gay subcultures of New York, Boston, San
Francisco, and other cities in ways that were previously impossible. These gay subcultures
became much more visible to outsiders by 1890, partially through their representation in
burlesque. Burlesque was much more than a leg show: it was an arena for exploring and
representing a diversity of sexual relations and social types in the post-bellum era.

Notes
1

Thompson and other burlesque managers of this time were the first to produce shows with
predominately female performers, leaving only a few roles for their male counterparts. While my
contemporaries and I generally prefer the term "actor" to refer to a female performer, I have decided to
retain the gendered terms "actress" and "actor" for this paper because they conveniently mark the
performer's gender without additional words. Moreover, these are the terms used by people of the
time.
2

I use the term "gay" to reference a subculture of men who love men because it appears frequently in
the evidence of burlesque. By "subculture" I am referring to a culture within the dominant culture,
with its own morals, values, argot, and modes of dress. While these cultural codes may vary somewhat
between the gay subcultures of New York, Boston, and San Francisco, burlesque troupes traveling
between these cities on the recently completed trans-continental railroad helped to establish a national
gay culture through their performances, publicity photographs, sheet-music and song-books.
3

Randolph Trumbach argues that in England around 1700 effeminate men became associated with
"the emerging role of the exclusive adult sodomite - known in the ordinary language of his day as a
molly, and later as a queen" (134, italics original). Rictor Norton traces the emergence and
development of these molly subcultures in England from 1700 to 1830. Both authors claim that in
their clubs or "molly houses," these men cultivated feminine airs, called each other by feminine or
"maiden" names, and dressed as women for special social occasions, similar to nineteenth century
"fairies" in the United States.

This connection between English theatre and homosexual male subcultures continued through the
nineteenth century. Rictor Norton and Tracy Davis note that gay men could be observed in and
around English burlesque theatres. These same theatres produced the burlesque plays and trained the
burlesque performers that arrived in the United States in the fall of 1868. These historical links
between English theatre and homosexuality suggest that the Americanised British burlesque of the
post-bellum era would likely reference gay male subcultures in the U.S., and provides some historical

22

connections between the English molly subcultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
and the gay male subcultures which emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century.
5

It is important to note that the evidence of burlesque also suggests relations between women,
however, this topic needs to be investigated further.
6

The New Year's cover illustration generally depicts a butterfly dandy. Rictor Norton notes that in
1784 "butterfly" also meant "catamite" or boy-lover (223). Similarly, Jonathon Green argues that
"butterfly" was used by the 1940s to refer to homosexual men.

For instance, Oscar Wilde, the most infamous gay man of the nineteenth century, had a wife and
children.
8

In Burnand's version some of the characters have Greek names, others Latin. For clarity I retain his
mixed usage.
9

Readers might notice that the swells described in the earlier section wore short coats, not long ones.
This is explained by changes in fashion between 1869 and 1877.

Works cited
Primary Sources
Amusements. Theatrical. Woods Museum. The New York Times 1 Oct 1868: 6.
Bagg, Lyman Hotckiss. Four Years at Yale: By a Graduate of 69. New Haven, 1871.
Browne, Henri Julius. The Great Metropolis; a Mirror of New York. Hartford, 1869.
The Burlesque Mania. The Spirit of the Times 13 Feb 1869: 416.
Burnand, F.C. Ixion; Or the Man at the Wheel. London, 1863.
Byron, Henry J. Ali Baba: or, the Thirty-Nine Thieves, In Accordance with the AuthorsHabit of Taking
One Off! London, 1863.
Byron, Henry J. Lucretia Borgia, M.D.; or, La Grande Doctress. London, 1868.
Byron, Henry J. William Tell, With a Vengeance; or, The Pet, The Patriot, and the Pippin. New York,
1867.
City Summary. The New York Clipper 18 June 1870: 86.
Cooper, George. The Pet of the Girls am I. Elise Holts Songs. Sheet music. New York, 1868.
Harvard Theater Collection, Cambridge.
Dramatic. The New York Clipper 14 Aug 1869: 150.
Duffy, Mrs. E.B. The Ladies and Gentlemens Etiquette: A Complete Manual of the Manners and Dress of
American Society. Philadelphia, 1877.

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General Notes. The Spirit of the Times 13 Feb 1869: 416.

th

The Great Lingards Drum Major of the 9 Songster. New York, 1871.
Lingard, William Horace. Im Not a Gossip. Wm. Horace Lingards Songs and Sketches. Sheet music.
San Francisco, 1874. Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Lingard, William Horace. The Gay Masque Ball. Sheet music. New York, 1870. Harvard Theater
Collection, Cambridge.
Lingard, William Horace. The Grecian Bend. Sheet music. New York, 1868. Harvard Theater
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Lingard, William Horace. On the Beach at Long Branch. Serio Comic Songs Written, Composed, and
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A Man Arrested for Female Attire - Justice Perplexed. The New York Times 19 May 1869: 5.
The Mistress Jinks Songster. New York, 1869.
Of Theatrical News. The New York Clipper 14 Aug 1869: 150.
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Sever, Charles, ed. Verses From the Harvard Advocate. Cambridge, 1876.
Thompson, Lydia. He Always Came to Tea. New Music From the Lydia Thompson
Troupe. Sheet music. 1877. Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge.
Thompson, Lydia. On the Strict Q.T. New Music From the Lydia Thompson Troupe.
Sheet music. 1877. Harvard Theater Collection, Cambridge.
Wall, Harry. Cheeky Little Cove. Elise Holts Celebrated Songs. Sheet music. 1869.
Harvard Theater Collection, Cambridge.
Woods Museum. 40 Thieves. Playbill. 6 Jan 1871.
Woods Museum. Ixion; Or the Man at the Wheel. Playbill. 28 Sept 1868.
Woods Museum. The Spirit of the Times 3 Oct 1868: 112.

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Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003.

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Buckley, Peter. The Culture of Leg Work: The Transformation of Burlesque after the Civil War.
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Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940. New
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Croghan, Leland. New York Burlesque 1840-1870: A Study in Theatrical Self-Criticism. Diss. New
York University, 1967.
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York:
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Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1978.
Norton, Rictor. Mother Claps Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830. East Haven:
Inbook, 1994.
Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1995.
Rudolph, Frederick. Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1977.
Shand-Tucci, Douglas. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American
Culture. New York: St. Martins Press, 2003.
Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment. London: Castell,
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Story, Ronald. The Forging of An Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class, 1800 1870.
Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1980.
Trumbach, Randolph. The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in
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[http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_durden.htm].

26

Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster

Patricia MacCormack
No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition
that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim.
-- Freud, "Three Essays on Sexuality," 74
In this article perversion will be posited as a tactic towards transformation of ways of
thinking sexuality and subjectivity. This article introduces traditional definitions of perversion
and the dominant paradigms by which they are named. Perversion challenges the subject as a
defined and reified entity which reflects rather than creates the personal and social expression
of self. The article foregrounds the temporal aspects of subjectivity as continually
transforming. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1987) will be used to discuss
the relationship between the temporal subject, desire and perversion a relationship they
term becoming. The aim of reiterating subjectivity as fixed, reliable and easily defined
through frequently binarised established subject positions such as male, female, straight, gay,
black and white allows only for either/or options. These binaries most often reflect a
dominant and non-dominant position. Perversion in this article will call for the
reconfiguration of binarily defined and fixed subjectivity, so that all subjects are
acknowledged as unstable and metamorphic. Thus any one position cannot be privileged.
There are implications in celebrating both non-dominant subjects and subject positions, such
as woman, which have been subject to oppression and are yet to achieve equal recognition.
The burgeoning feminist work on becoming-monster as a potentially subversive subject
position what I have termed feminist teratology is introduced in order to acknowledge
the problems and powers implicit in utilising formerly marginalised subject positions to
challenge established ideas regarding perversion and the desirability of the normal. The role
of discourse in relation to teratology concludes the article, emphasises the difficulties in
rethinking paradigms of being, becoming, and naming oneself differently without falling into
established ontological patterns.

Perversion and Becoming

In its clinical definition perversion simply means any non-procreative sexual act or
heterosexual act which mimics the procreative act.
The elements of a comprehensive definition of sexual perversion should include sexual
activity or fantasy directed towards orgasm other than genital intercourse with a
willing partner of the opposite sex and of similar maturity, persistently recurrent, not
merely a substitute for preferred behaviour made difficult by the immediate
environment and contrary to the generally accepted norm of sexual behaviour in the
community. (Scott 88)

27

Recent definitions are more liberal, however, the basic paradigm of Scotts definition remains.
Perversion relies, for its definition, not on what it is or includes, but what it is not. In its most
rudimentary definition culture defines perversion as primarily whatever is not traditional
heterosexuality. Although traditional heterosexuality is no longer primarily procreative it
continues to mimic the reproductive act where subjectivity is defined through the
reproductive capacity of the opposed genders performing the act, rather than exploit the
infinite potentials of the body thought through unbound desire where the gender of the other
may or may not be the most important aspect of thinking the act. Thus heterosexuality refers
less to acts of sex which occur between two people of the opposite sex as to the phantasy of
heterosexual intercourse that is automatically presumed as inevitable if someone is normal.
Perversion is more the perversion of presumptions of subjects conforming to established
subject positions, genders and sexualities rather than simply a deviation from heterosexual
intercourse. Perversion is not a repudiation or celebration of certain acts but ways of thinking
such acts.
Perversion is also beyond homosexuality. Traditionally studies of perversion have taken,
as their first departure point, any desire beyond socially sanctioned forms of heterosexuality,
but as homosexuality is increasingly accepted in both society and biology it is important to
move beyond the binary of hetero and homo. Perversion encompasses a particular space in
what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming minoritarian. Becoming-minoritarian implies
two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the
majority, an another by which the term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority
(Deleuze and Guattari 291). Perversion is the minority of normal sexuality because it exploits
minority ways of thinking desire, not because it is necessarily different (and it may not be) to
common sexual practice. Subject positions, particularly gender, are withdrawn from the
configuration as the only important terms by which to define sexuality. Defining desire
through the term desire rather than through male and/or female destabilises the reduction
of desire to heterosexual or homosexual. Desire is an amorphic term and all moments of
desire are unique, not necessarily repeatable and hence a series of minor sexualities. If we
utilise perversion as an agent toward becoming-minoritarian we withdraw from
acknowledging paradigms of majority as the only, compulsory or most attractive positions
available. This withdrawal is an active withdrawal. Perversion combats the normative force of
dominant paradigms with the force of deliberate resistance through thinking and doing desire
differently. Desire configured within a heterosexual matrix affirms gender as oppositional.
Subjectivity which is defined as an object rather than a series of acts is always defined not
simply as what it is but through the value given it within social hierarchies. The power of
situating certain positions within that hierarchy can be resisted through perversion. Perverse
acts challenge subjectivity as spatially fixed, thus the capacity to fix the subject within a larger
social hierarchy becomes difficult. This also challenges the notion that the value of certain
subjects is always undesirable because it is named as such by dominant discourse. Actively
naming ones project as perverse acknowledges that within all relations of power here the
power to name and value there is the potential for resistance through changing the meaning
28

and hence value of terms. More than just altering the meaning of pervert, temporal
subjectivity elucidates the primary paradigm of the spatial fixing of terms which dominant
discourse relies on in order to define and value those terms.

Alterity and the Power of Discourse

The noun perversion is frequently taken as a means to making the noun pervert rather
than as a verb. Because bodies are seen as finished once they exhibit adult sexual drives, the
rigidity of the term pervert is affirmed upon intervention from other discourses: medicine,
psychoanalysis, genetics. Theorising the body as existing not purely as a spatial subject, but in
time as a series of open reconfigurations and constant change suggests other ways of
understanding the self and the subject as being in permanent flux. Normalised subjectivity is
itself a constant re-enactment of the constellation of what one wants to be, believes oneself to
be, and societal expectation. For this reason all subjects are open to the potential of perverting
themselves and each other through act, the force of relation, and affect, but none are pervert
in an ontologically static sense. To actively seek to pervert the predictable pattern of subjective
enactment, here beginning with the paradigm of sexuality, is to challenge the enactment of
subjectivity as necessarily a re-enactment, but a possible place for transgression.
Culture most often defines sexuality through the presence, absence and place of the penis.
Feminine sexuality is, by its existence in relation to the isomorphic signifier of the phallus,
perverse if it is independent of or configured differently against the phallus. Masturbation is
often considered a substitute for real sex, foreplay considered preclusion to the real act, and
lesbianism remains an enigma in terms of sexual representation. Woman, according to Luce
Irigaray, is relegated
the hole, the lack, the fault, the castration that greets the little girl as she enters as a
subject into representative systems. This is the indispensable assumption governing her
appearance on the scene of presence, where neither her libido nor her sex/organs have
any right to truth except the truth that casts her as less than, other side, back side, of
the representation thereby perpetuated. (Irigaray 83)

Womans flesh can act as metaphor for discursive holes in representations of perversion. This
metaphor is ambiguous however. The discursive hole as absence of representation or
independent desire is also the hermeneutic hole in which woman is enclosed and named as
other. The hole is empty and yet terminates the need to think woman further by relegating
and defining lack of representation to representation of other as unknown or enigmatic. The
enigma itself becomes the representation rather than signifier of something yet to be
represented. Her genitals, defined as holes, and labial fault lines, are not empty spaces but
spaces empty only in reference to sexuality defined through phallic sexuality. Both woman
and perversion are less-than or the other side of the neutral sexual (male hetero) subject.
Both constitute a lack or hole in sexual discourse. Thinking this hole refuses it as being
defined as absence alone. Exploring this place creates a volitional tactic of positive perversion,
rather than an externally enforced definition or lack of definition. This hole becomes, literally,
29

an entrance point for feminists and all minorities interested to challenge ways in which
discourse constitutes gender and pleasure.
Similar to the idea that for something to be feminist, it must be different to cultures
dominant homogenised and homogenising structure, perversion is something different;
reading a different way, comprehending a different way, and also, rendering the subject as
different with each affect. It would be unethical to use perversion tactically without
acknowledging issues of power, control and oppression in relation to sexuality clinically or
socially defined as perverse. Power as mentioned earlier, resides in the power to name, and to
define that name through its value and place in striated society. The power of discourse both
constitutes bodies and desires and reflects their position in relation to the dominant.
However, resistance does not need to oppose the dominant with one alternative. Perversion
does not define itself, it simply resists the discursive power of the dominant to denigrate it.
This project reflects the resistance feminism has expressed toward dominant patriarchal
culture. Feminism is constituted as a political continuum rather than a static methodology,
and feminist subjects are not a certain kind of subject, rather multiple subjects who resist the
dominant as a refusal to being discursively known or adamantly denied recognition. This
seeming contradiction of refusing recognition but not wishing to be recognised as anything
confuses binaries of presence/absence and knowledge/silence. Like feminism, perversion
exploits such ambivalences and ambiguities, highlighting the anxiety any form of ambiguity
arouses in projects of power which involve naming, knowing and valuing.
The histories of various perverse subjects locate them as objects of scientific research,
their status of abnormal sexuality given them by scientific and social ontology. By making
perversion a tactic of becoming otherwise - a line of flight from established sexual paradigms those bodies, and all bodies, claim the power to enact and define their own perversion.
Perversion is an ethical tactic towards transformation as much as it is a subversive one,
because it refutes the desirability of being accepted within dominant discourse, without
refuting its own history or forgetting the accountability of the dominant. Becoming
minoritarian does not know its own end; it does not become fixated with the rigid
romanticism of marginals within a social system. Deleuze explains the difference between
becoming pervert and romanticising marginality. He states,
I share Michels [Foucaults] distaste for those who consider themselves marginals; the
romanticism of madness, delinquency, perversion, and drugs is less bearable for me.
But for me lines of flight are not created by marginals. On the contrary, they are
objective lines that cut across a society, and on which marginals install themselves here
and there in order to create a buckle, a whirl, a recoding. (Deleuze 189)

Deleuze emphasises perversion is not an aim or a final product of subversion. In this article
perversion refers to a tactic, not a subjective mode of existence. To pervert ones static self is
the aim, not to become pervert. Perversion is found in the way a subject functions rather than
what a subject is. Perversion describes the open circuit of the flow of desire (existence as desire
not with desire). This is contrary to desire defined through lack which demands object choice.
30

Perversion thinks existence as a series of processes rather than a spatial position (a or the
subject, available for clinicians as an object).
Becoming is an aspiration for change in thinking the material self. Becoming
deterritorialises subjectivity, mobilising rather than reifying the way we think self. The
familiar territory of subjectivity resonates with sexual territory but more importantly with the
familiar territory of how we think our subjectivity. Deterritorialising subjectivity embraces the
risks and powers of leaving familiar territories of thought and act. Becoming has a lot in
common with my use of the term pervert because both are a setting off of the subject without
a final aim (but with an idea toward what one becomes, which in turn insinuates that from
which one is perverted). However, it is also more than thinking the self through what the
subject does rather than is. Acting is not performed in order to achieve attainable goals.
Becoming is thinking the enacting body through the connections it makes which reassemble
it. Traditional sexuality is defined by object choice same object = homosexual, different
object = heterosexual. This demands that the primary subject/object terms are immobilised in
order to define them in proximity to one another. But sexuality is defined through the
relation of movement (intensities, transformations, affects) between subject and act, and the
affects produced from this relationship. Deleuze and Guattari state that natural history can
think only in terms of relationships (between a and b) not in terms of production (from A to
x) (234) and that perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an
object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation in the period
associated with that subject and object (282). Hence utilising a perverse object or act to
become otherwise is not about the essential perversion of object or act but the limits the
relationship pushes. Perversion cannot be subsumed under prescriptions of how to be
perverse. Perverse sexuality can be found in the quietest onanistic moment or during
intercourse as much as outrageous acts or objects. Perversion is found in how the constellation
of sexuality, desire and the flesh are thought, not the way this constellation fits into
established sexual definitions and meanings. Perversion is contingent on the extent to which
limits of paradigms of affect, subjectivity and power are renegotiated.

Feminist Transformations
Becoming resonates around the multiplicity of proximities that effectuate and transform
any individual at any point in existence. Becoming is not a metaphor of being or thinking
differently, it is not a linear activity whereby one simply turns into an identifiable something
else. Deleuze and Guattari assert that becoming is certainly not imitating or identifying with
something; neither is it regressing nor progressing becoming is a verb with a consistency all
its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, appearing, being, equalling (238-239).
Elizabeth Grosz discusses the points of contention and the points of usefulness where
feminism intersects with Deleuzio-Guattarian thought. Grosz advocates Deleuze and
Guattaris explication of desire because it departs so violently from the traditional

31

psychoanalytic definition of lack or idealisation of the Other as a motivation for desire. Grosz,
following on from Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza, posits desire differently,
Instead of understanding desire as a lack or a hole in being, desire is understood by
Deleuze - again following Spinoza and Nietzsche - as immanent, as positive and
productive, a fundamental, full and creative relation. (Grosz, A Thousand Tiny Sexes
195)

Grosz goes on to quote Colin Gordon as saying desire is a relation of effectuation, not of
satisfaction (195). Rather than a body affected by desire, desire is effectuated through the
flesh. Desire roams about the flesh, reorganising the stratification of the hermeneutic body.
Grosz quotes Deleuze and Parnet to further her insistence that the body is to be
analysed and assessed more in terms of what it can do, the things it can perform, the
linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, [my italics] the machinic
connections it forms with other bodies, what it can link with, and how it can
proliferate its capacities - a rare affirmative understanding of the body: [quotes
Deleuze and Parnet] Spinozas question: what is a body capable of? What affects is it
capable of? Affects are becomings (Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion 74)

Rosi Braidotti makes an important distinction between Deleuze and Guattaris becoming and
the Bataillian concept of figuring desire as a radical change hence sacrifice of the subject. She
states:
Deleuzes becoming is rather the humble apprenticeship to not being anything/where
more/other than what one is capable of sustaining and tolerating. It is life on the edge,
but not over it; [or against its perpetuation, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in their
discussion of becoming in the drug-addicted or suicidal mode] it is excessive but not
in the sacrificial sense (exit Bataille). (Braidotti, Meta(l)morphoses 68, my parenthesis)

Because my discussion of perversion privileges its capacity to transform the subject,

notions of an integrated subject are challenged. Through the destabilising effects of pleasure
and perversion subjectivity shifts away from being defined through what it is (key to
integration is the notion that borders and boundaries of the integrated self remain intact) and
is more appropriately addressed through what it does and what is done to it. Choosing to use
the body differently not only welcomes the transformations of pleasure and perversion but
also acknowledges the instability of the integrity of the subject. Through challenging integrity
perversion asks why integrity is such a mandatory quality of subjectivity. Transgression can
suggest the assertion that post-rupture will be followed by nothing (complete annihilation or
sacrifice) or by a return of integrity, the subject changed but intact. What I think Deleuze and
Guattari wish to emphasise is that becoming is about a different form/kind/articulation and
species of subject. Nothing is killed off in favour of non-existence. (Deleuze and Guattari
specifically point out that the becoming-annihilation is almost antithetical to the reasons why
becoming is good for you.) In becoming there is no death, it is life on the edge, but with the
emphasis on life, not edge. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the temporal subject becoming in
32

time (life) rather than the annihilative spatial subject in the location of annihilation (edge,
also Deleuze and Guattari state it is not movement - neither regressing nor progressing).
No matter what the deterritorialising affect of perversion, if reterritorialisation the
reestablishment of a subject as fixed is the aim, perversion is not a line of flight but a
reaffirmation of acceptable axes of society. Subjectivity conventionally reiterates itself as
stable. Even perverse subjects risk using perverse acts to signal their being pervert, thus
although they deterritorialise from traditional sexual positions, wishing to belong to a new
territory reterritorialises the subject. The subject may be different from others, but it is
different in a fixed way. Because pleasure deterritorialises us, alters us from the moment
before, the object we choose to be involved with during that change (the object of desire, or of
sexual or any other interaction) is often used to assure continuity of our being when, after the
pleasure has ceased and we return to our known version of self, it is able to reaffirm who we
are. The body-in-pleasure is repressed after the act, and the object choice is seen as the cause
of pleasure. The cause of the pleasure is the body, is in the body and is experienced as the
body. After a transformative affect has occurred, the object choice becomes stand-in for the
body S/he caused me pleasure rather than my body was/is pleasure. So, even to utilise a
perverse object choice as the only subversive element in a theorisation of different bodies
limits the presence of corporeality implicit in and extricable from immanent self.
The body is itself more potential than articulate-able. There are more things a body can
do than we can ever suggest, and certainly more than we are able to linguistically describe.
Beyond this is what culture sees the body as able (and sanctioned) to do. Grosz states: There
is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact that the body is what it is capable
of doing, and what any body is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given
culture (Grosz 214). The body is capable of doing much more than it is theorised as capable
of, in medicine, in cultural and sexual theory, in all discursive fields. Deleuze and Guattari
emphasise how one can tactically define the sexual body: We know nothing about a body
until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot
enter into composition with other affects (257). They are not asking the body to perform
super-human feats of transformation but only to attempt an encroachment on the limits of
the body to push the body further out into its potentials. This means pushing the body away
from being defined through correspondence with established ideas of what our subjectivity
is/means/does. When thinking the body through the relations it makes the body itself must
be continually defined otherwise. We do not need to become extraordinary monsters to
become. Only to traverse, rearrange, exceed and decrease the rigid limits culture allows us to
exist within and as our bodies. That is all, but at the same time that is mind-blowing enough.
Becoming is harnessing the instability of the body, so whatever causes instability could be a
useful moment of entry into becoming. Desire causes instability. Perversion destabilises the
social mores that help check the instability implicit in desire. These suggestions have many
problems, not the least of which is the fear that privileging the experiencing of ones own
body in new and different ways is another form of limit and not entirely estranged from
33

biological essentialism. This is neither clearly bad nor good as yet, but it highlights boundaries
and limits which themselves are against the point of becoming as limit-less and boundary free.

Monsters
I have already pointed out that perverse desire is positive only in so far as it resists the
formation of the noun pervert adhering one form of perversion onto the subject as the being
and essence of its desire. Here I will use the term monster to describe the perverse subject.
From hysterical women to homosexuals, perversion has a strong relationship with the naming
of social-sexual monsters. Perversion can be described as monstrous sexuality, hence those
becoming-perverse clearly risk being named monsters. What is politically liberating, and what
is risked, by embracing the monstrous?
Braidotti defines monsters as: human beings who are born with congenital
malformations of their bodily organism. They also represent the in between, the mixed, the
ambivalent as implied in the ancient Greek root of the word monsters, teras, which means
both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects
77; my italics). Modern scientists, those who assist in the social naming of monsters, can
themselves be seen as monsters in their determined drive to see further, pathologise more
rigidly and adhere normality to the integrity of an organism, they are themselves enough of an
object of wonder for Braidotti to include them in her argument. The Frankenstein story is
reversed. Axes of wonder/horror are integral to monstrosity as a, if not the, primary site of
ambiguity. At the primary level of monstrosity, the very first departure from the white
integrated subject is the woman. In this way, any woman is a monster to begin with, and has
been for as long as can be historically traced. A body of difference, while being (especially in a
compulsory hetero normative culture) an object of fascination, is simultaneously that of
disgust. Inherent in fascination for something is distance from it, so that if the monster is
object of fascination or even desire, the fascinated must oppose rather than align himself or
herself to the monster.
The monster is that which abjectly pushes us outside symbolic integrity, either back, in
psychoanalytic terms to the primary monster, the mother, or in a more Deleuzio-Guattarian
sense that which pushes us away from what we think we are. In order to accept Braidottis
suggestion to become monster we must desire monsters. One cannot want to become what
one does not desire. This kind of desire positions the self differently to heterosexual (i.e.,
implicitly oppositional) desire where one can only desire what is other to and othered from
self. If we read desire as abundance, the desire for a monster changes both the subject desiring
and the monster of desire. In a Lacanian frame, in order to desire a monster one cannot be
monster. One is fulfilling the monstrous lack in the hitherto normal subject. That is why
woman is the primary monster because man is the primary non-monster and desires only
what he lacks. If we read desire for monstrosity without or after Lacan it is clear that there is
less of an enforcement of otherness in the desire for monsters. The monster is not necessarily
34

any longer the antithesis of self; rather monster simply becomes a category that wilfully refuses
desire within a system of normal versus monster. To become monster is necessarily to begin at
a point in repudiation of any anxiety about a loss through monstrosity (loss of subject, loss of
power aligned with subjectivity).
Vital in thinking monstrosity is to contextualise that if women are the first monsters,
what do we lose by becoming (or embracing our already existent) monstrosity? Two problems
arise here. The first is that by naming ourselves monsters women are in a way accepting the
terms of their bodies given to them by phallologocentric culture. It may be mimetic; it may
be to utilise phallologocentrisms weapons against itself. But it is still affirming a condition for
women (and all subsequent monsters) that was not chosen by women. The second problem is
the glamorisation of conditions of subjugation in society. If glamorisation involves defining
one position from another (dominant) position, the best of intentions risks reaffirming
traditional discursive paradigms, both because it spatialises what the monster is, and invests a
certain value in the definition.
It is well to claim that becoming-monster is a positive way to radicalise the place to which
the term monster commits such monsters. Gail Weiss takes Braidotti up on this by firmly
planting her contrary arguments within the context of Braidottis anxieties about reproductive
technology and the teratology the formation of cultural or sexual monsters as objects of
ontological analysis of genetically defined homosexuality and perversion. Desire is here not
configured as dissipating the subject through which it ranges toward becoming-minoritarian,
but desire, which takes knowledge as its object (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 90). This risks
being a desire that dissipates the subject into a reformulation, or reiteration, of majoritarian
subjectivity. The formulation of a becoming body is not without negative implications,
especially from a feminist perspective where a re-negotiation of subjectivity is occurring in
post-structuralism before the subjectivity to be negotiated has been sanctioned for subjects of
difference, such as women, non-white races and others. This flaw only emphasises the
importance of feminist intervention in new ideas about being and becoming in order that
post-subjects, perverse subjects and other subjects of post-modern difference will be ethical as
well as culturally transformative. What is transformed here are issues around a singular ability
to define subjects (including ones own ability as the only valid one) and subjects as defined
only through what they are, which is both nostalgic of their history and establishes their
future (spatialising subjects contracts the temporal aspect of subjectivity into a single
moment). Seyla Benhabib defines ethics as interaction rather than legislation, and
temporalised subjectivity demands continual interaction because a moving, changing entity
cannot be defined and thus legislated against. Feminisms interventions are not exchanges of
one mode of thinking for another, but an interaction with the legislative thought that reifies
subject positions.
Weiss asks is this mixture of horror and fascination advantageous for those who are its
objects, that is, is this a mixture of passions we want to privilege? (Weiss 108) In order for
35

old monsters to be replaced by new monsters there will always be a form of monstrosity
devalued beyond all others. This makes the demand for advantage impossible; for those
advantaged others must be disadvantaged through their alterity. Weiss emphasis on those
rather than we is telling. The call to become minoritarian through monstrosity first
challenges primary differentiations between we (non-monster) and those (monsters).
Becoming-monster is a challenge to the bifurcation between monster and not-monster, and
the discursive act of defining these separately not to the definition of monster.
But then, what exactly constitutes a real monster that appropriating the term monster
will harm and make light of its pain? Are not women already monster enough that to call
themselves the new monsters will constitute an ownership of the derogatory term given them?
What would Weiss define as a real monster? Is the act of defining an incitement to the
reification of another other or type of minoritarian subject? Both Jennifer Terry and Rosi
Braidotti state we are only monsters in reference to those who call us monsters. Braidotti
juxtaposes the self-proclaimed monsters, be they culturally evident as monsters, against the
monsters technology creates and names precisely because monstrosity is devalued in terms of
that which names the monster monsters. The political nature of monsters seems to come
directly from the acts of naming and defining (and the reasons for the acts), not the nature of
the object named. There is no essential non-contingent thing named monster. Weiss discusses
the use of the word monster as metaphor and the way in which metaphor devalues the
meaning of terms. Monster then loses its necessary subversive potential. I do not think
Braidotti is advocating using monster as metaphor. I think she means it as a literal
becoming, in the same way Deleuze and Guattari do not want us to act like in becoming.
All acts of naming, metaphoric or not, have the capacity to compel the corporeal
performance of the name given, so even metaphor is not incapable of material effect.
Sexuality, corporeal de- and mal-formations, skin colour, female and hermaphroditic genitals
and even tattoos and piercings are all material conditions of the human body that are far more
than metaphor both in their inability to be cast off and also their definition within culture.
They also somewhat resist any singular definition of subjectivity, reflecting the holes of
discourse enclosed simply as other which I discussed above in relation to Irigaray. If they
were metaphor experienced suffering and real triumph would be irrelevant when thinking
monstrosity. Weiss asks does this fascination and horror in Braidottis corresponding
reification of these passions, serve to intensify, in oppressive ways, the monstrosity of the
monstrous? (Weiss 108) She emphasises the intensification of the term monster through the
passions of fascination and horror. By intensification I think she means some form of
othering, the thing we call monster and the desire for it. This intensification is not of visibility
or equality but precisely of discourse. Monsters appear only when discourse about them
appears, which is why discourse and speech are as urgent issues as the bodies and acts of those
addressed. If Braidotti is advocating a becoming-monster, or a proclamation of monster then
the first desire we must have for monsters is for our own monster-isation, claiming (or
stealing) the immanent discourse that threatens to define and other us. Weiss point is an
36

important and valid one which comes from the anxiety I think Braidotti exhibits herself in
her theorisation of monsters, that becoming monster is fraught with the threat of being
named monster by someone else in the wrong terms, as the wrong kind of monster within the
wrong discursive episteme. But what becoming monster does successfully achieve is the
emphatic refusal of phallologocentricisms categories and boundaries that have been set up for
monsters, semi-monsters and the rare normal subject. Braidotti emphasises that we need to
learn to think of the anomalous, the monstrously different not as a sign of pejoration but as
the unfolding of virtual possibilities that point to positive alternatives for us all (Teratologies
172). The virtual here refers to the instability in thinking possibility without establishing a
limited and limiting series of pre-set possibilities. Braidottis explicit refusal of the sign is a
refusal of signification within systems of knowledge and discourse. Even monsters as signs of
celebration use signification as a stabilising act, rather than the infinite potential of thinking
the monster as continual unfolding.
There is, it seems, no safe concept of monster that does not threaten to slide back into
more traditional exercises of naming as power. Discourse reifies through analysis and
affirmation of (hierarchical) place, of function, form and nature. Monsters challenge all of
these categories by being both resistant to and ambiguous within them. Whatever the joys of
becoming-monster, the risks are great, both towards our expectations of what becomingmonster will mean in a real sociological context and also the risks we take by appropriating a
concept that, like woman, is dangerously linked with degrading and power-embedded
practices. The seeming contradiction in becoming something that by its very nature, cannot
be described as any one thing enhances the risks. This reflects a similar argument that
Braidotti, among other feminists, poses to Deleuze and Guattaris theories of becoming as
always having to first become-woman. There is, perhaps, an issue with two white men
advocating becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating
an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming
(276). In the same way that to become-monster means an appropriation of the lives of
monsters which reduces the pain of being monster to a momentary transition in order to be
subversive or transformative, Deleuze and Guattari have been accused of reducing and
ignoring the material lived reality of women in posing a becoming-woman as a transitory
practice towards becoming a presumably better something-else. Also that woman, like
monster, is a level easier to attain than higher levels of subjectivity, any man can becomewoman but no woman can become a man, because man is majoritarian par excellence,
whereas becoming are minoritarian (291). A conundrum occurs when the minoritarian is
denied access to majoritarian social power, including the power to negotiate and formulate
discourse, while men are becoming-women, potentially ablating this denial of access. Deleuze
and Guattaris urgent ethical devaluation of majoritarianism, however, remains convincingly
resonant in addressing trajectories of active divergence and rehabituation from
majoritarianism beyond the hermeneutics of immobile subjectivity.

37

To become monster implies something to lose by becoming monster (in the same way
that becoming-woman is something to lose for man). But what is lost? How valuable is it?
Within a Deleuzio-Guattarian frame what is lost in becoming is that which anchors the
subject indefinitely to the very world from which becoming is a line of flight. Wanting to
become is in this instance desiring and exploiting the excesses of that which culture values.
They state there is no subject of the becoming except as deterritorialised variable of the
majority (292). Thus the parameters of majoritarianism are affected by becomingminoritarian and possibilities of becoming-minoritarian shift through alterations in axes of
majoritarianism. The restraint culture imposes on normal subjectivity is the very thing
becoming disavows. By shedding these restraints, or taking flight from them, becoming
expresses a deep suspicion of them. Someone who wants to become monster could already be
seen to disavow the system that has pushed monster outside of normal subjectivity. Becoming
here is a means to get outside, which is perhaps what Deleuze and Guattari meant in their
insistence of becoming-woman. Monster and woman are specific groups but intersectional
specific groups that refuse, or are denied, discourse to a certain extent, in opposition to the
definition of, and defining by man. The terms themselves are ambivalence, in the same way as
Braidottis passions of wonder and horror are ambivalence. Normal subjectivity is not
ambivalence nor ambivalent, and its very existence is through its separation from everything it
is not. The compulsion to name is a compulsion to know, and ambivalence excavates the
endless nature of knowledge rather than focussing on what is known. It is difficult to
vindicate silencing those who have yet to speak. This could suggest that, at worst, feminism is
just another discourse. However, as feminists know, each discourse of feminism is a multiple
proliferation of a variety of discourses. Most of these aim to open discussion, investigating the
gaps and holes in the discourse of humanity, essentially manity or more correctly
majoritanity. Monster theory may be a silencing of monster defined through dominant
discourse, and, like perversion, as fluid and temporal, should acknowledge the silences or
unspoken within all speech, or the desire to not speak as a refusal to define.

Toward Feminist Becomings

All becoming is becoming monster; even the desire to want to become is monstrous,
because all becoming is about becoming an ambiguity between, but never attaining either of,
two points. Becoming is about negotiating the discursive constitution of bodily limitations
seen in the stratified, signified body, the values attached to those significations and the sources
of the constituting discourses. Discourse is corporeal because we are enfleshed versions of the
speech that constitutes us from culture without and from self-regulation or identification
within. We can, of course, only live the body to which we have access. In order for there to
ever be a potential for actual becoming, the potential of the body we are now must be
recognised. Our bodies present enough of a potential for change and transformation. The
limitations our cultural and biological body represents, the so-called already perfect subject
body, or scientifically described and hence finished body, is a body that is experienced or
lived through being discursively situated. The body as a material discourse or discursive
38

materiality, is a site where flesh and speech or knowledge fold within and through each other
as an expression of self. The body as continuum is important as the primary vehicle to change
and of change, and desire as the current through which the body is regulated and transformed
is an essential aspect of thinking this vehicle. For feminism, desire is problematic as having
been either denied or annexed to masculine desire, and thus it is a key axis by which to
rethink the body, also victim to this lack or annexation. From here the potential is limitless.
The line of flight does not fly off into the distance but rather flies inside our own bodies in
transformation and redistribution of fleshly intensities, spatially static we fly from what we
were before and become something otherwise.

Works Cited
Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
---. Meta(l)morphoses. Theory, Culture and Society 14/2 (1997): 67-80.
---. Teratologies. In Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian
Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles Desire and Pleasure. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. In Foucault and his Interlocutors. Ed.
Arnold Davidson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997: 183-192.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. London: Penguin, 1984.
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on Sexuality. [1905] In The Penguin Freud Library. Ed. James
Strachey. Vol. 7. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
Grosz, Elizabeth. A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics. In Gilles Deleuze and the
Theatre of Philosophy. Eds. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski New York: Routledge,
1994.
---. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Scott, P. D. Definition, Classification, Prognosis and Treatment. In The Pathology and Treatment of
Sexual Deviation. Ed. Ismond Rosen. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Terry, Jennifer. The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity. In
Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995.

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Weiss, Gail. Body Images; Embodiment as Incorporeality. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Patricia MacCormack, "Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster"

thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 27-40 (print), 23 pars. (web).
[http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/maccormack.htm].

40

Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman, and

Difference
Kim Toffoletti
Rosi Braidotti argues that late postmodern, postindustrial society has a fascination with
borderline figures, situating such formations in the context of an increasingly technologized
cultural climate where classical iconographic representations of monstrous others cross-over
and mutate with contemporary techno-cultural artifacts (Teratologies 157). Typical of the
popular cultural trend toward the freakish, alien, and mutant is goth-rocker Marilyn Manson.
As depicted on the cover of the 1998 album Mechanical Animals, Manson embodies the
1
fusion of the organic and the machinic. Here Manson is a digital construct - a distended,
artificial, and posthuman body that eschews the natural. The smooth contours of his seamless,
plastic flesh betray the familiarity of the organic body. This malleable sheath of rubbery skin
stretches firmly, yet comfortably, over a figuration that is neither male nor female, biological
nor technological.
This article reconsiders feminisms affinity with the monstrous Other through an analysis
2
of the Manson figuration. I argue that posthuman forms such as Manson create new
possibilities for feminist engagements with subjecthood that exceed dialectical thought,
residing beyond an identification with the monstrous Other. Neither organism nor machine,
Manson destabilizes the status of the image as representing either self or Other, displacing this
binary in favour of the ambiguity of a transitional state that defies a natural order. It is
through his status as a digital simulacrum that Manson erases difference, eroding the
self/Other distinctions that the monster simultaneously refutes and upholds. In what Jean
Baudrillard terms a catastrophic process (Fatal Strategies), this disavowal of difference operates
to occasion a range of differences beyond an economy of dialectics that upholds a politics of
identity.
In many respects, posthuman figurations such as Manson may be situated within the
genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms - the centaurs of classical myth, Francisco Goyas
ghoulish depiction of Saturn devouring one of his children, and Max Ernsts surrealist manbird creation. One of the defining features of the Mechanical Animals sleeve notes centrefold
is Mansons metamorphosis into a hybrid of animal, human, and machine. Most striking is
the transformation of Mansons lower limbs into pincer-like hoofs that define him as the
Mechanical Animal of the CD title. Clumsy and cartoonish in their presentation, these
bovine appendages challenge the integrity of the organic body, teasing and taunting the
viewer to make something of Mansons morphogenesis into animal. Like many other
boundary creatures, Manson signals a breakdown in the system of meaning that programs the
distinctions between animal and human, organism and machine.

41

The posthuman, like the monster, is a boundary figure that occupies potentially
contradictory discourses and signifies potentially contradictory meanings (Braidotti, Signs
of Wonder and Traces of Doubt 135). It is this ambiguity that typifies the monster, eliciting
anxieties concerning the boundaries and borders of the body. Monsters simultaneously
threaten and uphold the integrity of the human, serving as a deviant category or marginal
extreme through which the limits of normal, natural, human identity are defined and secured.
Various theorists have observed that the monster functions both as Other to the normalized
self, and as a third state or hybrid entity that disrupts subject constitution understood in
terms of hierarchical binary dualisms (Braidotti, Signs of Wonder 141; Cohen 7; Shildrick
78). Part feline, part bovine, part hominid, Manson is one such hybrid form. Resplendent
with red glowing eyes, a metallic sheen, and elongated fingers, he invokes the terror and
fascination of the alien-vampire-monster. As a boundary figure who resists classification
within the natural order of things, Manson may accordingly be located within the field of
teratology - the scientific discourse of monsters.
In a reclamation of the association between the monstrous and the feminine Other,
feminist revisionist projects have indicated the ways in which monster discourse offers
productive and subversive means of challenging humanist subjecthood. In Nomadic Subjects:
Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Braidotti associates the organic
monster with maternal powers of desire and imagination. Against the perception of the
monster as an anomaly or freak of nature to be derided, monstrosity is reinterpreted as a site
of wonder and fascination that challenges a masculine symbolic order (85). In this schema,
the efficacy of the monster lies in its constitution as a feminist metaphor for difference that
threatens to disrupt phallogocentric models of selfhood, reclaiming Otherness as a site of
female subject identification.
Yet the artifice of Mansons posthuman, post-gender formulation corrupts the sanctity of
the organic monster celebrated by Braidotti. More akin to Donna Haraways cyborg (A
Manifesto for Cyborgs), Manson emerges from a culture of increasingly prolific technology
in everyday life, constituted at the site where the material and the mechanical collapse.
Haraway has suggested that the monsters of technoscientific worlds may offer the promise of
new and productive affiliations between the feminine, the non-human and the technological
(The Promise of Monsters 327). Despite the kinship Manson shares with the technohybrid, I propose that he cannot be seamlessly accommodated within a feminist formulation
of the inorganic Other. While the cyborg and the monster operate as identificatory figures
through which women may better understand the self in the context of changing
technologies, the posthuman is mobilized as a figure that disavows identity. The posthuman
body, as Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone explain,
is not monstrous simply by virtue of its status as a non-species: posthuman
monstrosity and its bodily forms are recognizable because they occupy the overlap
between the now and then, the here and the always: the annunciation of
posthumanity is always both premature and old news. (3)

42

Baudrillard makes the point that in a simulation culture overrun by the speed and
proliferation of digital technology, our experience of being a subject is fundamentally altered.
Postmodernisms fractured and dispersed subject in crisis no longer suffices as a model
through which to articulate subjective experience. Instead, for Baudrillard the subject is
understood more appropriately in terms of catastrophe. Catastrophe is the excess,
acceleration, and precipitation typified by contemporary society. Its potency resides in the
unmaking of the subject and the triumph of the object. By rendering all difference obsolete,
this catastrophic subject threatens a politics of identity dependent on self/Other relations,
disturbing feminist readings of the ideological construction of the monster and cyborg as
strategic Others in the service of a feminist identity politic. Figuring Manson as a catastrophic
subject offers a mode of engaging with posthuman figurations beyond the limits of monster
theory.
Underpinning an engagement with posthuman, post-gender entities is a shift in relations
between the real and representation within an economy of simulation. According to
Katherine Hayles, the posthuman can be understood as unfolding along an axis of multiple
cultural and technical locations, emerging from complex, highly specialized discourses such as
artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and biotechnology, as well as popular culture sites
including science fiction literature and popular film (247). This confusion of categories
through which the posthuman emerges reflects the postmodern breakdown of the divide
between high and low cultural forms, signaling the intermixing of biotechnological narratives
with science fiction fantasy. This, of course, is the order of the hyperreal - a Baudrillardian
concept understood as the point where fact and fantasy are no longer distinguishable
(Simulacra and Simulation 212). As the distinctions between autonomous spheres no longer
hold, the production of meaning within particular categories and genres is made impossible.
Meaning instead resides in multiple locations, beyond the fixity of signifying practice.
The collapse in the distinction between scientific fact and science fiction fantasy thus
forces another mode of engagement with images of the monstrous, for when highly specific
fields of knowledge and specialized discursive practices, such as biotechnology, converge and
intermix with popular cultural sites, representations demand to be negotiated differently.
Approaching the image in terms of simulation ruptures finite distinctions between what is real
and what is illusion. By contesting a value system predicated upon binary difference,
simulation encourages fluid, contradictory, and partial engagements with images,
complicating a model of the self as either entirely resisting or complying with particular
aspects of culture. As a product of simulation culture, the posthuman figuration has no
Other, no referent from which to constitute the self. Mansons image on the CD is not a
representation of Manson in real life. Rather, Manson here is a simulacrum, unhinging the
dichotomy between self and Other, original and representation. There is no original
Manson to be located outside of the image. While the monstrous inhuman of ancient myth
retains the Otherness of alienation, remaining locked in a dialectical relationship with the self,
the posthuman figuration cannot be contained in such terms. Otherness disappears in a
43

culture of simulation, Baudrillard argues, when all becomes transparence and immediate
visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and
communication (The Ecstasy of Communication 130).
Where Baudrillard speaks of the transparency of the subject, he refers to the moment
when electronic media and communication proliferate and accelerate to the point where the
subject is no longer visible in the relay of information. Not only does the subject disappear in
a hyperreal cacophony of visual signs and information overload, the social system is said to
exceed its limit point, to approach an ecstatic state through the endless proliferation of
information and signs. Baudrillard observes that:
Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to
bore them: by proliferating indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding
themselves in an ascension to the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their
immanent finality and senseless reason. (Fatal Strategies 7)

By exploring what resides beyond the extremities of the social, Baudrillard is attempting to
pass from a dialectical system of interpretation into a space where referential values are
impossible. It is at this point of saturation by the precession of simulacra that the social is
pushed beyond its limits to the point where it inverts its finalities and reaches its point of
inertia and extermination (Fatal Strategies 10-11). This form of inertia is, however, not an
empty void that is drained of all meaning, but a fatal site of excessive over-multiplication that
results in a reversion or implosion of dichotomous value systems.
Baudrillard refers to the accelerated growth of the world pushed beyond saturation point
as hypertelic. Like a cancer, hypertely functions as a strategy to refute origins in a process of
endless proliferation. Finality is denied by hypertelic process, whereby all value is
exterminated in an overdetermination of forms (Fatal Strategies 13). This overdetermination
is of the order of the hyperreal, where reality is no longer opposed to falsity, but accumulates
to become that which is more real than real. Accordingly, Baudrillard maintains that:
To the truer than true we will oppose the falser than false. We will not oppose the
beautiful to the ugly, but will look for the uglier than ugly: the monstrous. We will
not oppose the visible to the hidden, but will look for the more hidden than hidden:
the secret. (Fatal Strategies 7)

This excess of positivity is radically different to the struggle of dialectics that sees the beautiful
oppose the ugly and the true oppose the false. Meaning is no longer a question of opposites,
but of excesses that obliterate stable oppositions by collapsing inward. Manson enacts this
proliferation and disappearance by exceeding the limits of the natural body.
The centre spread of the Mechanical Animals CD sleeve notes shows Manson languidly
3
outstretched out on a sofa. This furniture upon which Manson reclines is grey and synthetic,
a metallic sheen reflecting off its surface. Its tubular shape and long frame appears distorted
and artificial, much like Mansons own plastic form. The surface of his skin and the surface of
44

the sofa display the characteristics of artifice and technological construction. These forms
appear to merge into one other, demanding that the viewer consider where the inanimate
object ends and Manson begins. The plasticity of the two forms implies process, a stretching
beyond the boundaries of the subjects body and the sofa object upon which Manson reclines.
To borrow a phrase form Baudrillard, Manson appears as more mobile than mobile:
metamorphosis (Fatal Strategies 7). During metamorphosis fixity and mobility are not
opposed. Rather, the play of surfaces disturbs the distinction between subject and object.
Mansons metamorphosis into a mechanical animal is made possible through the fatality
of reversion, whereby his skin pushes beyond its limits, imploding in on itself to annihilate
the difference between subject and object, and the structure of signification that differentiates
the two. It is this process of implosion that ensures Mansons plastic body eludes rupture. His
taut, plastic mould indicates containment and flexibility. His elongated limbs and distended
fingers further signal an elasticity that threatens to morph, mutate and shift into something
else, yet never rupture. Absolute fragmentation of the subject is made impossible by fatality,
which ensures the subject disappears at its limit point. The subject does not explode outward,
but disappears; its form reverses inward in an act of metamorphosis that produces something
else.
Mansons skin can therefore no longer function as a boundary site that differentiates self
from Other, nature from technology, and the organic from the artificial. Instead, skin signals
the point of transformation and liminality where self becomes Other, nature fuses with
technology and the organic cannot be discerned from artifice. Judith Halberstam has written
of skin as at once the most fragile of boundaries and the most stable of signifiers; it is the site
of entry for the vampire, the signifier of race for the nineteenth-century monster. Skin is
precisely what does not fit (163). In a discussion of Jonathan Demmes 1991 film The Silence
of the Lambs, Halberstam argues that contemporary images of the monster locate horror at the
level of the skin, thereby disrupting the established gothic model of horror as one of surface
and depth. Referring to several scenes in the film, Halberstam illustrates how skin functions
to confuse boundaries such as interior and exterior, consumption and being consumed, male
and female. What ensues, she argues, is a construction of a posthuman gender founded upon
mis-identity that remakes gender and the humanistic assumptions upon which identity is
forged (176-177).
Similarly, Mansons emphasis upon his plasticity of form suggests that he exists only as
surface, as a simulation without any relation to the real. Mansons grey and pasty form is a
flesh that is made synthetic, digitally altered to produce the effect of a plasticine-moulded
construct. The function of skin as a boundary between biological interiorities and the external
invasions of technology is thus rendered obsolete. No longer is the technological/human
interaction configured in terms of a prosthetic extension or invasion of the unified and
organic self by technology. Instead, posthuman configurations contest the separation of the
organic and machinic, the human and non-human in favour of a symbiotic and contaminated
45

interaction whereby interiorities and exteriorities, self and Other, no longer exist. As Manson
proliferates, both in terms of digital image reproduction, and the elasticity and endless
possibilities of the body, he surpasses the finalities of binary oppositions to reside beyond the
fixity of signifying practice. Indeed, Manson is that which Halberstam says does not fit; that
which goes beyond established categories of gendered identity.
Mansons plastic skin also poses a challenge to binary hierarchies of race. Traditionally,
skin was interpreted as a reflection of the inside or mirror of the soul (Benthien ix), hence
the site of identity and selfhood. Racial and ethnic identity, too, was located at the site of the
skin, rendering non-white skin an anomaly, an Other to the dominant, white norm (Gilman
1985). Yet there is nothing authentic or natural about Mansons pliable surface. The plasticity
of his skin emphasises the constructed nature of racial difference in terms of skin colour. His
skin is too plastic and shiny to pass as normal. In parts it is whiter-than-white, with an
unnatural glow that exposes whiteness not as a given but a construct. His contours are grey
and metallic, evoking the artifice of the machine. By suggesting that the bodys surface is a
product of technological intervention, Manson makes us aware of race as culturally and
historically constructed, rather than a biological given. What we are being asked to consume
is not necessarily a homogenised difference that erases racial specificity, but a posthuman
imagining that speculates upon the role of information and biotechnologies in the
constitution of identity and selfhood.
Manson proves disturbing because he destabilizes a coherent identity that is structured in
a binaristic system of meaning determining gender and race and the natural, originary, and
human. Unlike the monster, which functions simultaneously to destabilize and legitimate
human identity, Manson destroys systems of value by exceeding the limits of the body and
signifying practice, and the possibility of forging an identity predicated upon self/Other
relations. Manson exhibits a plasticity of form that emphasizes fluidity and malleability. His
skin stretches over his frame to cover and contain his interior elements. This artificial skin,
like plasticine, begs to be moulded, disrupted, reformed. The processes of repetition and
reproduction evoked by plastic as a substance of artifice, imitation, and inauthenticity
(Barthes 97-98) are evidenced in the figure of Manson. Constituted by plastic, a substance of
transformation and simulation, Manson contests an interpretation of subjectivity as fixed,
essential and originary. Instead his transformative state scrambles the binary codes structuring
conventional notions of identity.
The contrived moulding and casting of Mansons greying form is devoid of the inversions
and extensions of the body that rupture the seamlessness of the skins surface and indicate the
threat of abjection. There is no sign of leaking nipples, coarse hair, the vagina dentata or the
umbilical remnant of birth - markers most commonly associated with femininity,
corporeality, and the threat of otherness (Creed 1993). Moreover, without an umbilicus,
Manson explicitly rejects the maternal and denies the process of birth. The most prevalent
criticism to emerge from the associations among reproduction, technology and feminine is the
46

suggestion that technology displaces the maternal, an argument sustained by Braidotti in her
study of monster discourse (Nomadic Subjects). Zoe Sofia, writing in the context of cybernetic
technologies, also upholds this position by suggesting that the erasure of the female body in
cyberspace signals a flight from the material and maternal conditions of bodily experience
(16). What is problematic about this approach is its enforcement of the long-standing
construction of technology as masculine, contra the feminine and the natural. In this schema,
technoscience and cybertechnologies are masculinist pursuits that control the natural,
maternal, and feminine. Manson disturbs such readings by complicating the distinctions
between nature and artifice, blurring the point between where the body ends and technology
begins. Rather than re-inscribe the myth of technology as erasing the body in favour of the
abstract information of the machine, Manson plays with the notion of origins in an age where
the involvements of medical technologies in the birthing and reproductive processes are
commonplace. Like the cyborg before him, Manson reminds us that a state of nature contra
the artificial is fast collapsing.
Manson eludes such limitations by contesting the idea that bodily markers construct
gender. His barely-discernible breasts and ambiguous genital bulge defy the natural order.
These amorphous grey lumps suggest that Manson is no androgene, but a more complex
figuration than either male or female. Mansons sexually indeterminate status destabilizes
identity predicated upon the oppositional dualisms of man or woman. Rather, the
transexuality displayed by Manson exemplifies the excessive proliferation of the signs of sex
within media culture. According to Baudrillard, transexuality is a mode of play between the
signs of sex - a negotiation of sexual indifference that inverts the established play upon sexual
difference and its foundation in pleasure (The Transparency of Evil). Sexual indifference
focuses on lack of differentiation between the sexual poles, and on indifference to sex qua
pleasure (Transparency 20). Baudrillard cites Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, and La
Cicciolina as examples of a sexual ambiguity; a lack of gender specificity where sexuality is
lost in the theatrical excess of its ambiguity (Transparency 22). Sexual indifference is
everywhere. The proliferation of sex has ensured its disappearance.
To interpret Manson as simply negating gender difference, however, is to bypass the key
dimension of the technological in reshaping the very status of the human. I argue that
Mansons potency for refiguring a feminist politics of the subject lies not in the negation of
sexuality, but in the opening up of difference beyond binary dualisms. Sexual status is not
denied, but becomes a proliferation of possibilities generated by the posthuman condition.
Anatomical being is thus no longer a stable referent as Mansons sexual markers exceed the
limits of the natural body. By blurring the corporeal signifiers of gender in a context of digital
simulation, Manson not only problematizes gendered difference but the very status of the
body and embodied reality as the sites where identity resides. Gender, like skin, is a surface
effect, rather than a marker of identity locatable in the body. By confusing his status as man
or woman, machine or organism, Manson defies categorization in a regime of binary
difference. Difference, as a marker of sexual, racial, and ethnic identity, is under attack.
47

Manson functions as a fatal site, a place of unstable signification that cannot be contained
within an economy of exchange that relies upon the dualistic nature of difference. The move
toward a multiplicity of subjectivities and bodily experiences is instigated by the interactions
between the organic and the technological. No longer the source of the authentic or natural,
the shifting boundaries of the corporeal in turn refigure sexuality, race, and gender as fluid
and displaced terms. Manson opts for a skin that is neither male nor female, neither organic
nor technological, but something new that refutes essentialist notions of the body and the
natural, occasioning a range of possibilities for what might constitute subjectivity beyond the
limits of the body and identity. The sexual ambivalence displayed by Manson ruptures
semiotic order, so that coherent meaning is not only challenged, but made impossible. For
Baudrillard, this fatal strategy is a catastrophic process.
Baudrillards notion of catastrophe allows us to re-conceive the relations of reality against
representation, and subject versus object, upon which a politics of identity depends.
Subjectivity eludes definition within a self/Other dichotomy, becoming instead a process of
disappearance, catastrophe, and fatality. Moreover, configuring the subject as catastrophic
contests a Marxist-inspired model of the resisting subject. Understanding the subject as
resistant to popular culture is a strategy that secures identity counter to particular aspects of
culture. In this schema, subjects and objects remain firmly opposed. Catastrophe, on the
other hand, operates to ensure identitys disappearance within the acceleration and
proliferation of popular cultural signs and artefacts.
How, then, might the question of difference be negotiated in an order of simulation
where difference is erased? Vivian Sobchacks work on digital morphing provides a
contemporary point of engagement to pursue the question of difference in relation to
figurations of the transformative. Mansons status as a digital image, and his plastic skin,
suggest a reversibility and fluidity of form akin to the virtual morph generated in digital space.
While it is impossible to witness Manson change over time on a CD cover, the potential for
Manson to morph resides in his status as a digital image. Sobchack considers implied
reversibility a key feature of the morph, stating that (w)hether or not one actually sees the
reversal is irrelevant to the lived knowledge of its possibility (Meta-Morphing 44). By
situating the morph within a broader genealogy of mythology, magic, trick films, and
attractions, Sobchack invites the reader to consider the digital morphs continuities and
discontinuities with earlier forms and figures of marvelous transformation (Meta-Morphing
xv). Indeed, the strength of the essays in her edited collection on digital morphing, MetaMorphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change, lies in their awareness of
the historical formation of the transformative figuration before the advent of digital
technologies.
In her own contribution to Meta-Morphing, Sobchack turns her attention to the erasure
of difference as a crucial marker of identity in contemporary instances of digital morphing.
48

Her essay At the Still Point of the Turning World: Meta-Morphing and Meta-Stasis
suggests that the digital morph circulates in popular culture as a figure that is banal and
familiar, but also as a site of fascination and impossibility (131-132). Sobchack in part
celebrates the uncanny and paradoxical qualities of the morph, arguing that:
It calls to the part of us that escapes our perceived sense of our selves and partakes in
the flux and ceaseless becoming of Being - that is, our bodies at the cellular level
ceaselessly forming and reforming and not ourselves at all. (At the Still Point136)

Morphing taps into our own sense of being a subject in flux. Sobchack claims, however, that
the material experience of space and time is rendered problematic by the digital morphs
quick-change qualities and powers of reversibility. Sobchack is particularly critical of the
manner by which the morph functions to assimilate difference and Otherness into a figure of
the same. Taking Michael Jacksons Black or White videoclip as one of her examples,
Sobchack maintains that while Otherness is purportedly celebrated in the parade of multiethnic and racial faces, it is concurrently denied by the morphing of one face into another
(At the Still Point139). And while difference is conventionally understood in terms of
binary hierarchies, whereby man is privileged over woman, black over white and self over
Other, Sobchack suggests that the reversibility of the morph denies the power relations upon
which difference relies, presenting the myth of equality and the democratisation of difference.
Moreover, according to Sobchack, reversibility denies the spatiality and temporality of lived
existence in which difference operates (At the Still Point141-142).
Such a homogenisation of the heterogeneity of difference in the space of popular cultural
consumption is also found in the advertising of Italian fashion company Benetton. As
explained by Henry Giroux, mass advertising adopts a legitimising function in order to
disguise the political nature of everyday life and appropriate the vulnerable new terrain of
insurgent differences in the interests of a crass consumerism (6). The threat of difference
risks destabilizing the unity of white, Western masculinity, thus difference is diffused into
sameness, and denied political efficacy. According to Giroux, Benetton negotiates difference
via a strategy of containment, whereby the potential antagonisms of difference are marketed
in such a way that differences are dissolved into a depoliticised pluralism that invokes a myth
of global harmony.
As a digital morph or techno-mediated mutation, Manson could be interpreted within
such a framework. Barthes understanding of myth as depoliticised speech lends itself to a
reading of Manson as an image that reinforces or naturalizes meaning in a repetitive process of
endless signification (143). His form appears decontexualized; space and time fall away as
Manson hovers against a nondescript grey backdrop that gives no indication of his spatial and
temporal co-ordinates. His body denies any definitive markers of sexual and racial difference.
He shuns adornment or decoration. The body is not natural, not harmonious. Rather, like
the preying mantis of Surrealist iconography, Mansons stick-like form is repellant, posing the
threat of envelopment by his spindly limbs. The very same figuration simultaneously emits a
seductive synthetic sheen from his rubbery form, eliciting an evocative and playful response to
49

the body. Fact and fiction fuse when attempting to make sense of the image. And it is this
ambivalence that complicates an analysis of difference in the posthuman figuration. Beyond
signification, difference is dispersed, annihilated, and opened up, so that identity is not
enforced but destroyed.
Traditionally, the potential threat of difference is contained in a mode of signification
based upon a dualism of self/Other, whereby radical alterity is denied and negated. Braidottis
analysis of monster discourse, Sobchacks study of the digital morph, and Girouxs critique of
Benetton, all expose difference as functioning in a binary dialectic. Even though difference in
these instances is negated, it still operates via a model of dualistic structures of value. Each
example highlights the inability of difference to be conceptualised outside the dominant
regime of dialectical thinking, stressing how it is absorbed and contained in a model of the
self/same. Accordingly, difference in a system predicated upon binary dualisms allays the
threat of the Other, because this type of difference may be controlled and knowable. How
might difference be otherwise negotiated at the site of representation, so as to configure the
posthuman not as the denial of difference, but as a catastrophe and illusion that moves
beyond signifying practice?
Challenging the signifying codes that construct subjectivity, language, and culture offers
the possibility to think about difference in another way. The articulation of difference as an
oppositional posturing between self and Other, reality and representation, is rethought in the
Manson figuration. Beyond dialectics, difference functions as an ongoing process of mutation
that acknowledges the experiences of individual bodies to various technologies, re-writing
how bodies are conceived, experienced, and represented. Manson embodies a difference that
exceeds binary dualisms, threatening how we know the world and make meaning. For a
difference that resides beyond signification or systems of value is no longer positioned as
Other to a primary term. Rather, difference is annihilated so that it cannot be understood as
different to something. It is same.
As I have indicated in my analysis of Mansons skin and sexuality, difference escapes
containment and homogenisation by exceeding signification. The illuminating red glow of
Mansons stare provides another illustration of the play of difference that disturbs dialectics.
Manson is certainly no innocent, no random anomaly produced by the freak mutation of
genetic material occurring naturally in the gene pool. Eyes like infra-red lasers are reminiscent
of the penetrating gaze of the disembodied lens of science, mimicking the all-seeing gaze of
the visual technologies employed by science and the military. Science and medicine have been
understood by Michel Foucault in terms of biopower, in which an analytical, neutral, and
objective gaze fixes and regulates knowledges. For Foucault, visual control is a form of power
deployed in the service of knowledge making practices.
In the tradition of the monster, Manson challenges the scientific rationale of order,
classification and naming. His burning stare sees through an overarching biotechnological
50

narrative of a new world order, refusing to comply with a seamless and controlled vision of a
technological future. Donna Haraway has theorized the New World Order, Inc. as an
imaginary configuration, a way of understanding the global arrangement of culture and
capital precipitated by information technologies and technoscience (Modest_Witness 6-7).
Haraways critique of the term functions along the lines of ideology-effects, whereby
representations both construct and reflect a contemporary cultural landscape. In the instance
of posthuman figurations, it is in a world of biological, informational, and digital technologies
that these representations are operative. I contest an interpretation of posthuman figurations
that rely upon semiotic meaning production and ideology effects. Posthuman figurations do
not wholly operate as a reflection of who we are, or function to define what we are not.
Rather, they circulate beyond the fixity of signifying codes, in a space of simulation that calls
into question conventional understandings of subjectivity, the body, and reality.
Manson poses as an ominous and potentially dangerous mutant monster that threatens to
transform the coding of technology as either threat to, or saviour of, humanity. Manson
illustrates the fear and mistrust evoked by the controlling gaze of science tampering with
humanity, while turning the gaze back upon the institutional structures that strive to fix
meaning: to name, know, and order the world. He is both watcher and watched, confusing
the boundaries that traditionally serve as a limit point between self and Other. The
interconnections and interfaces of the techno-human interaction belie simplistic distinctions,
making it impossible to judge the effects of biotechnology as either good or bad.
Mansons infra-red eyes are no window to the soul. The viewer is not welcome to gaze
into them. Confronting the viewer is a laser-like stare that mimics the scanning devices of
military technology, or the spaces of consumption - the beep of the supermarket scanner. As
perception is made technological, Manson evokes the machine as an aspect of the self (Turkle
1980). He confuses the distinction between bodily interiorities and machinic exteriorities so
that the machine becomes an integral dimension of embodiment. Manson resists signification
as an inert and safe product of biotechnology by simultaneously occupying the position of
the body threatened by the scientific gaze, and a body that exceeds the empiricism of the
scientific paradigm. Manson signals more than the threat of the Other, or the postmodern
subject in crisis.
Posthuman bodies demand another kind of engagement with difference, a negotiation
that eludes binary opposition. The ambivalence of Mansons skin, his sexuality, and his stare,
play with difference in a way that goes beyond dialectics. Manson is, at once, appealing and
repulsive, seductive and threatening. It is this ambivalence that underpins figurations of the
posthuman, a point of slippage that corrupts an understanding of representation as a mirror
of reality. Manson shows us that in an order of simulation, the image can be neither. The
image functions instead as a catastrophic site that challenges hierarchical and dualistic value
systems through the excess of the simulacra.

51

A focus upon difference and its function within a political economy of signification is
fundamental to understanding what is at stake for women in a post-material, post-gender, and
posthuman landscape. As a sexually indeterminate, technologically mediated entity, Manson
destabilizes the Cartesian dualisms that underpin the liberal-humanist subject, as well as a
notion of female identity predicated upon positive difference. Against the centrality of the
subject, Mansons catastrophic posthuman form encourages a decentralized mode of figuring
subjectivity. In this sense, posthuman figurations do not pose as objects or subjects unto
themselves, but act as fatal sites that displace the value system upon which subjects and
objects are constructed in relation to one another. In the process of reversion, the possibility
of coherent meaning is denied. The potential of this mode of theorizing for feminism may be
located at the point where the logic of dualistic thinking is exceeded, where disappearance
enables formulations of embodied existence beyond male/female, self/Other, and
technology/nature. Following this schema, subjectivity forged upon identification with the
posthuman is made impossible. Mansons is not a productive difference, as found in the
monstrous hybrids reclaimed by feminism to disrupt the rational order. Rather, subjectivity is
understood as a series of displacements where identity cannot be secured in relation to
popular images in terms of identification or resistance. Identity is abolished by posthuman
figurations in favour of a model of the subject that is unstable, transformative, and
catastrophic.

Notes
1

See image online at: http://www.ilbaluardo.com/Cover/Audio/M%20-%20N%20%20O/MARILYN%20MANSON%20-%20Mechanical%20animals%20-%20Front.jpg

2

The argument I present here is specific to the images accompanying the Mechanical Animals CD and
does not necessarily extend to the other images of and by Manson circulating in the popular media.
This album follows in the tradition of what Mark Dery has identified as "metal machine music" - a
mainstreaming of the once alternative genres of hardcore and electro-industrial rock that
serves as a prism to refract some of cyberculture's recurrent themes: the convergence of human
and machine; the supersession of sensory experience by digital simulation; the subcultural
'misuse' of high technology in the service of perverse sensibilities or subversive ideologies; and a
profound ambivalence, handed down from the sixties, toward computers as engines of
liberation and tools of social control, reweavers of the social fabric shredded by industrial
modernism and instruments of an ever greater atomization. (75)

Some of these ideas will be developed in this paper in relation to gender, technology, and the erasure
of difference. It is also important to approach this image with the knowledge that Manson's shocking
and provocative music, personas, and imagery are a deliberate intervention into debates regarding
media and censorship. Documentary film-maker Mike Moore's interview with Manson in Bowling For
Columbine is a recent and accessible example of Mason's position on free speech and censorship
debates.
3

See http://www.mansonusa.com/img/?src=/photo/promo/98-99/71.jpg

52

Works Cited
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Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture.
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. Fatal Strategies. 1983. Trans. Phillip Beitchman and W.G.J Niesluchowski. New York and
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. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. 1990. Trans. James Benedict. London
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Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World. Trans. Thomas Dunlap.
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Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory.
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Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996. 135-152.
. Teratologies. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 156-172.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1996.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1977.
Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Giroux, Henry A. Consuming Social Change: The United Colors of Benetton. Cultural Critique
26 (1994): 5-32.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1995
Halberstam, Judith and Livingstone, Ira eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
Haraway, Donna J. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the
1980s. Socialist Review 15 no.2 (1985): 65-107.

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. The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. Cultural

Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler. New York and London:
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Feminism

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Hayles, N.Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999
Manson, Marilyn. Mechanical Animals [CD]. Los Angeles: Nothing/Interscope Records, 1998.
Shildrick, Margrit. This Body Which is not One: Dealing with Differences. Body and Society 5 no.23 (1999): 77-92.
Sobchack, Vivian. Meta-Morphing. Art/Text 58 (1994): 43-45.
ed. Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Minneapolis,
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000a.
. At the Still Point of the Turning World: Meta-Morphing and Meta-Stasis. Meta Morphing:
Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Ed. Vivian Sobchack. Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000b. 130-158.
Sofia, Zoe. Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View. Australian Feminist Studies 15 (1992): 11-24.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1984.

Kim Toffoletti, "Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Difference" thirdspace
3/2 (March 2004): 41-54 (print), 33 pars. (web).
[http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_toffoletti.htm].

54

Somethings Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female:

Transgressive Sexuality and Discourses of Reproduction in
Ginger Snaps
Bianca Nielsen
BRIGITTE. Ging, whats going on? Somethings wrong, like more
than you being just female. Can you say something please?
GINGER. I cant have a hairy chest, B, thats fucked.
BRIGITTE. Bitten on a full moon, now youre hairy.
GINGER. Well, thank you for taking my total fucking nightmare
so seriously Oh shit, what if Im dying or something?
-- Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000)
Since the 1970s, many horror films have focused on the body as the site of violent
transformation. Comments on such films as Night of the Living Dead (George
Romero, 1968), Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, and the entire subgenre of the slasher movie make clear the connections
between violent invasions of the body and the role of the body in society.
-- Ernest Mathijs, AIDS References in the Critical Reception of David
Cronenberg, 29
By (re)-articulating and modifying horror conventions, Ginger Snaps depicts the
experiences of young women coming to terms with their sexuality. In many respects Ginger
Snaps contributes to dominant discourses of reproduction, however the film also demands
feminist scrutiny. Ginger Snaps merits a reading through psychoanalytic theories specifically
through Barbara Creeds analysis of transgressive femininity in the horror genre. Creeds The
Monstrous Feminine considers how representations of body horror are connected to Kristevas
theory of abjection. Kristevas psychoanalytic account of feminine sexuality in turn lends force
to a reading of Ginger Snaps that incorporates feminist critiques of reproduction narratives.
Emily Martin, for instance, contends that scientific accounts of reproduction reinscribe
normative femininities by associating passivity with menstruation and activity with
spermatogenesis. Ginger Snaps incorporates both the discursive frameworks of menstruation
in medical texts and the pervasive ideologies of normative femininity that are in operation
in contemporary society.
Ginger Snaps also centres its story on a kind of feminist solidarity experienced by two
teenaged girls and, contrastingly, the rivalry that exists in sisterly bonds. As Ginger Snaps
progresses, the close relationship between the sisters, Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald
(Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins), is increasingly characterized by conflict and jealousy.
At the start of the film, neither of the sisters has begun menstruating. Perhaps due to the late
55

arrival of what they call their curses, Ginger and Brigitte are considered outsiders at their
suburban high school. However, when the elder of the sisters, Ginger, begins menstruating,
she attracts the attention of her male classmates. The interest that Ginger arouses in her male
classmates disgusts her younger sister Brigitte because it represents her entry into a sexualized
world that they had vowed to avoid in a pact to never be average.
Once Ginger begins menstruating a parallel process is triggered in her body, a process
that transforms her into a werewolf. This event is a revision of early hormonal teenhorrors such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler, 1957) which depict teenagers
sexual experiences as resembling a metamorphosis into a monster. Ginger Snaps asserts itself as
a twenty-first century interpretation of the body sub-genre in its references to other
canonical horror texts, such as Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), Rosemarys Baby (Roman
Polanski, 1968), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Fly (David Cronenberg,
1986). Mark Jancovich associates body horror with a supposedly postmodern collapse of
distinctions and boundaries (6). In body horror films the monstrous threat is not simply
external but erupts from within the human body, and so challenges the distinction between
self and other, inside and outside (Jancovich 6).
Gingers experiences additionally approximate those of the eponymous protagonist in
Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), who becomes monstrous after she first experiences her curse
and discovers her telekinetic powers. Shelley Stamp Lindsey emphasizes that the monstrosity
of Carries supernatural angst is accentuated by the onset of her menses:
Prohibitions surrounding first menstruation and menstruating women exist in many
cultures and are grounded in fears that during menses a woman is polluted or
possessed by dangerous spirits. Hovering on the edge of supernatural, such women are
deemed especially treacherous and subject to taboo. Exceptional states like
menstruation and puberty foster taboos, Freud believes, because they elicit
contradictory, yet equally acute sensations of veneration and dread. Poised between
natural and supernatural realms, then, the menstruating adolescent girl occupies a
liminal state, an object of both aversion and desire. Equating Carries burgeoning
sexuality with her newfound telekinetic power, the film hyperbolises this connection.
(284)

According to Lindsey, Carrie is not about liberation from sexual repression, but instead is
about the failure of repression to contain the monstrous feminine (290). Lindsey asserts that
Carrie enforces sexual difference by equating the feminine with the monstrous, while
simultaneously insisting that the feminine position is untenable precisely because of its
monstrousness (293). Carries monstrousness indicates the pervasiveness of masculine
fantasies in which the feminine is constituted as horrific (Lindsey 281). Ginger Snaps
tagline, they dont call it the curse for nothing, also constructs menstruation as other by
implying the abjection of the menstruating woman.
56

In Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed suggests that horror films are
works of abjection because they contain pervasive images of transgressive femininity and
monstrosity. Creed utilizes Julia Kristevas Powers of Horror to detail three key aspects of
horror films that foreground their abjection:
Firstly, the horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the
corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood,
vomit, saliva, sweat, tears, and putrifying flesh secondly, there is, of course, a sense
in which the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the
horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the border is abject the third
way in which the horror film illustrates the work of abjection refers to the
construction of the maternal figure as abject. (71-2)

According to Creeds definitions, Ginger Snaps intimates abjection in all its varying forms: the
films aesthetic is excessively gory, Gingers transformation from adolescent girl to werewolf
transgresses many borders, and finally, the girls mother, Pamela (Mimi Rogers), is
frighteningly unwilling to relinquish control of her daughters.
Gingers lycanthropic transformation also has feminist connotations. In The Cycle of
the Werewolf, Chantal Du Coudray points out that since the thirties, a preoccupation with
the feminine experience of lycanthropy has characterized fantasy fiction, and that such works
of fiction often explore themes that have been a consistent feature of feminist critical
thought (61). Du Coudray explains that on the surface lycanthropy in popular fiction
appears consistent with the equation of femininity with nature in Western culture, and the
systemic degradation and exploitation of both under patriarchy (61). However, as Du
Coudray emphasizes, lycanthropy has also been utilized by women writers in order to explore
a specifically feminine process of individuation, a process that frequently merges feminist
and ecological concerns (60-2). Perhaps the most obvious feminist issue that werewolf
narratives insinuate is that of menstruation, since lycanthropes exist in monthly cycles. In
many cultures the monthly cycles of the moon (the moon itself is recurrently coded as
feminine) are associated with the menses, which is in turn connected to the abject. As Creed
proposes, like witches, vampires, and zombies, the werewolf, with its monthly transformative
cycles and its body that collapses the boundaries between animal and human, belongs to the
category of the abject:
Abjection occurs where the individual fails to respect the law Thus, abject things
are those which highlight the fragility of the law and which exist on the other side of
the border which separates out the living subject from that which threatens its
extinction. But abjection is not something of which the subject can ever feel free the
subject is constantly beset by abjection which fascinates desire, but which must be
repelled for fear of self-annihilation. The crucial point is that abjection is always
ambiguous. (Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine 71)

57

As Creeds comments suggest, Gingers transformation and subsequent demise reveal

1
abjections ambiguities. During her lycanthropic transformations, Ginger persistently refuses
to obey the gendered laws of her small Canadian town. Moreover, her werewolfishness
signals the collapse of the border that separates civilisation from primitivism, animal from
human, child from adult, rational from aggressive, active from passive, and feminine from
masculine. Because she refuses to comply with the norms of her culture, Ginger appears to be
heading for self-annihilation.
Though Ginger Snaps might be analysed utilizing Creed and Lindseys frameworks, the
film also references slasher conventions. Brigitte and Ginger can be usefully compared to
other contemporary horror-protagonists, such as Sidney in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) and
Buffy in televisions Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy discovers at the onset of puberty that she
is not quite human, but instead comes from a long line of female warriors who fight
demons and vampires on earth. Sidney, as she gains knowledge of her mothers sexual
reputation and experiences heterosexual intercourse herself, is subjected to repeated violence
at the hands of ruthless stalkers. Similarly, in Ginger Snaps, Brigitte discovers that Gingers
sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and monstrosity, and that she must attempt to
rescue her sister from her own animalistic and aggressive urges. According to Carol Clovers
definition, Brigitte might be considered a final girl. In Men, Women and Chain Saws,
Clover identifies a trend in horror films of the seventies and eighties wherein virgin teenaged
characters are depicted as strong and resourceful protagonists. Unlike their more sexually
experienced peers, final girls survive the slaughter that takes place in their communities.
With the foresight and intuition of a final girl, Brigitte sees that her sisters transgressions
appear monstrous.
The deviancy of Gingers sexuality is potently contrasted with the banality of the sisters
Canadian neighbourhood. The difference between Gingers sexuality and the towns moral
position highlights the repression that underpins the female experience of adolescence in
general. The opening shots of the film depict a dull and pristine suburban landscape. The
camera passes over streets full of identical houses, coming to linger on a brown tussock field
where many more such houses are planned. A real estate sign reads, Bailey Downs: A Safe
and Caring Community. The ensuing scene is juxtaposed with this image of the safe and
boring Bailey Downs. A woman emerges from her garden screaming having discovered her
son playing with the severed paw of their family pet, which she then finds massacred in a
quaint doghouse. Children playing hockey on the street turn and stare at the hysterical
mother, shrug, and resume play. The violence perpetuated by The Beast of Bailey Downs
has become commonplace, an uninteresting daily reality. Here Brigitte is introduced into the
films narrative explaining to her sister what she has just witnessed outside: Baxters fertilizer
and everyones just standing there, like, staring. Why dont they just catch the thing? How
hard can it be in a place full of dead ends? As the sisters conversation develops what is
revealed is that their fascination with the horrors of death and violence is their one escape
from the dead ends of Bailey Downs.
58

The sisters obsession with the topic of death seems inseparable from their desire to avoid
the grim suburban future that potentially awaits them. Later in the film, their mother Pamela
is also portrayed as fervently desiring an escape from this existence. Ginger explains that she
feels that suicide is the ultimate fuck you and insists that she and Brigitte swore to go
together because that way theyd be together forever. While Brigitte expresses an
understated enthusiasm for Gingers suicidal plans, she also fears that their deaths could be
little more than cheap entertainment because even your final moments a clich in Bailey
Downs. The sisters take gruesomely realistic photographs of each other faking death and these
snapshots form their Life in Bailey Downs school project. Ginger and Brigittes teacher is
disgusted by the macabre slides included their project and his shock reveals the way that
society is repulsed by the violence it at once nurtures and constructs as taboo.
The Fitzgerald sisters fascination with quirky morbidity excludes them from the
mainstream of their school, yet it is their idiosyncratic approach to suburban life that begins
to attract the attention of their male classmates. Boys in the sisters class cheer loudly when
they are shown slides of their gruesome Life in Bailey Downs project. As the sisters play
hockey with other girls from their class they are watched by a group of boys from Bailey
Downs High, who urge them to run and bounce. The boys voyeuristic pleasure is
heightened by their discussion of the girls physical endowments. When one boy comments
that he likes Ginger, she seems impressed by this attention and proudly tells Brigitte that
Jason McCarty (Jesse Moss) checked her. Brigittes response, that high schools just a
mindless little breeders machine and shed rather wait it all out in their room, expresses
her attitude towards being the object of a male gaze. Her disdain for the ritualised
heterosexual exchanges of her high school is focused largely on their adversary, Trina Sinclair
(Danielle Hampton). The sisters fantasize about Trina being DOA at the hair dye aisle,
having perished on diet pills and laxatives. Brigitte labels Trina who symbolizes
popularity and sexual experience in Ginger Snaps as come-buckety date bait, while Ginger
confirms that their dislike for their popular classmate is related to their knowledge of her
sexual experience. Ginger suggests that because Trina screws a drug dealer she must be
begging for negative attention. Brigitte explains that should Ginger also become interested
in boys it would mean that she is going average on her. Brigitte would rather die than
experience the abandonment she believes would be a direct result of Gingers interest in boys.
Although she swears she will not abandon her sister, Ginger becomes sexually interested in her
male classmates when she begins menstruating.
What Ginger desires to be her private experience of puberty is soon the focus of familial
discourse. The first indication that she is about to get her period is a back pain she feels while
eating dinner with her family. The girls mother, Pamela, immediately deduces that Gingers
back pain is connected to menstruation and the girls are embarrassed by her intrusive
comments about their sexuality, as is their father, Henry (John Bourgeois), who expresses his
revulsion at overhearing a discussion to do with female reproductive processes at his dinner
59

table. Revealing her invasive fascination with her daughters bodies, Pamela claims that the
girls are not normal because they are three years late menstruating. Ginger, however,
subverts her mothers curiosity and control by morbidly suggesting that her pain must be
cancer of the spine, and Brigitte comes to her defence with more excessive explanations,
offering that it could instead be tuberculosis or spondylosis. When Ginger responds by
congratulating Brigitte for her creativity she details the pleasure that their grim fantasies give
them.
Once Ginger begins menstruating the film deliberates over the boundaries between
normal and abnormal experiences of teen sexuality. In one of the films opening scenes, a
short line from a television commercial poses the question, can this happen to a normal
woman? Gingers experience of menstruation comes to incorporate two understandings of
female adolescent sexuality. The onset of Gingers menses is simultaneously a sexual
metamorphosis and a violent possession or infection. Creeds The Monstrous Feminine
considers how representations of body horror and possession are connected to Kristevas
theory of abjection:
The possessed or invaded being is a figure of abjection in that the boundary between
self and other has been transgressed. When the subject is invaded by a personality of
another sex the transgression is even more abject because gender boundaries are
violated One of the major boundaries traversed is that between innocence and
corruption, purity and impunity. (32)

It is only Brigitte who understands what Ginger calls her total fucking nightmare her
parallel experiences of menstruation and lycanthropic metamorphosis. Brigitte comprehends
that Gingers body is at once developing sexually and being invaded by an aggressive
werewolf.
A biology documentary that the sisters watch at school suggests that there are parallels
between the processes of Gingers body which she insists are not contagious and some
kind of an invasion or infection that Brigitte wishes to cure her of. The documentary,
which considers the effect of a virus on human cells, contains a voiceover: Preying upon
normal healthy cells, the intruder gradually devours the host from within. Eventually the
invader consumes the host completely and finally destroys it. Because this is placed within
the context of Ginger discovering her sexuality, Brigittes view that her sister is possessed by
an infectious other is dominant in the films narrative. Brigittes perspective is further
emphasized when Ginger begins to behave violently, first killing animals and then people.
Their first encounter with the werewolf is the catalyst in Brigittes growing suspicions about
Gingers sexuality.
The scene where Ginger is infected during the werewolf attack represents a turning
point in the sisters close relationship. At the same time as they discover Ginger has begun
menstruating she is attacked by the lycanthrope, and soon after her body begins to transform
rapidly. While out walking one evening, avoiding the intrusive questions of their mother,
60

Ginger discovers menstrual blood trickling down her leg and expresses her disgust to Brigitte
by commenting that she just got the curse and that she hopes it is not contagious. Ginger
laments what she calls her newly acquired normality by explaining that she has been
killing herself to be different and that her body has now screwed her. Ginger even asks
Brigitte to shoot her if she starts simpering around tampon dispensers, moaning about
PMS. They have barely finished discussing the cultural clich of a teenaged girl getting her
curse for the first time when Ginger is attacked by The Beast of Bailey Downs and
dragged off into the forest. After rescuing her sister from the jaws of the wolf, Brigitte is
certain the animal was attracted to Ginger because she has her period. Having watched an old
werewolf film, Brigitte persuades herself that Gingers aggressive behavior is linked to an
infection she has incurred during this incident.
Brigittes interpretation of her sisters sexual development is accompanied by an
increasing sense of abandonment: she is clearly alienated by Gingers burgeoning adulthood.
As they shop for tampons, Gingers condescending comments about PMS and cramps
demonstrate that her sexual experiences have already begun to disrupt her bond with Brigitte.
Also indicative of this disruption is Gingers acceptance of Jason McCartys invitation for a
toke of a joint, which he explains will help with the cramps. He professes that he should
know because he has three sisters who use this form of pain relief to take the edge off their
period pain. Ginger responds that she likes her edge and does not want to lose it. She
dismisses Jasons knowledge while expressing her pride in her difference, but he eventually
convinces her to smoke a joint with him by calling her chicken. In taking up the invitation
for a toke Ginger not only accepts Jasons understanding of menstruation, but also betrays
her isolationist pact with her sister. Brigitte is clearly offended by Gingers superior attitude
and becomes convinced that her sisters uncharacteristically sociable behavior is not normal.
As Brigittes suspicions and jealousy develop, she insists they see the school nurse.
The conversation the sisters share with their schools nurse (Lindsay Leese) is noteworthy
because it informs the films critique of gendered understandings of reproductive processes.
NURSE. Im sure it seems like a lot of blood its a period.
BRIGITTE. Geyser.
NURSE. Everyone seems to panic their first time. Neither of you have had a
period before and youre how old?
GINGER. Im almost sixteen, she just turned fifteen she skipped a grade.
NURSE. A thick, syrupy, voluminous discharge is not uncommon. The bulk
of the uterine lining is shed within the first few days. Contractions,
cramps, squeeze it out like a pump. In three to five days youll find
lighter, bright-red bleeding. That may turn to a brownish or blackish
sludge, which signals the end of the flow.

61

GINGER. OK, so its all normal.

NURSE. Very, expected every twenty-eight days, give or take, for the next
thirty years.
GINGER. Great.
BRIGITTE. What about hair that wasnt there before, and pain?
NURSE. Uhuh, comes with the territory youll have to protect against
both pregnancy and STDs now, play safe!

While this scene comically contrasts with our knowledge that Ginger is in fact experiencing
other more unusual physical changes, it additionally, and perhaps more significantly, depicts
how foreign and strange these hormonal changes must seem to the teenagers who undergo
them.
The nurses diction also (re)-articulates the scientific discourses of medicine. Emily
Martin explains that medical language describes the process of menstruation as a mechanism
expelling a waste product. Medical textbooks describe menstrual blood as the debris of the
uterine lining which is the result of necrosis or death tissue. Martin suggests that our
scientific explanations for menstruation carry the idea of production gone awry or the
expulsion of products of no use (411). Medical texts and illustrations show menstruation as
a chaotic disintegration of the form which describe it as ceasing, dying, losing,
denuding, and expelling (411). Martin proposes that these are not neutral terms, but
ones that convey failure and dissolution (411). Where the school nurse in Ginger Snaps refers
to a discharge which is squeezed out like a pump, she likens the blood to a kind of
garbage. She further accentuates this by calling the discharge a brownish blackish
sludge. Martin compares these descriptions of menstruation with the language used to
explain male reproductive processes:
In one of the same texts that sees menstruation as failed production, we learn that,
The mechanisms which guide the remarkable cellular transformation from spermatid
to mature sperm remain uncertain the most amazing characteristic of
spermatogenesis is its sheer magnitude: the normal human male may manufacture
several hundred million sperm per day. (411)

In Medical Physiology, as Martin demonstrates, the comparison is even more explicit:

Whereas the female sheds only a single gamete each month, the seminiferous tubules produce
hundreds of million of sperm each day (Martin 411-2). This could explain why both sisters
view the onset of Gingers menses as a threatening, even shameful thing. Contrastingly, their
male classmates view their own sexual transformations as celebratory occasions which give
them confidence.
The sisters confusion and concern over Gingers bodily transformation is further
exacerbated when their mother discovers that her daughter is menstruating. According to
Kristevas definition, Pamela is the abject mother who refuses to relinquish her hold over her
62

daughters and their bodily functions. Creeds comments on motherhood and boundaries are
again apposite here. Creed outlines Kristevas argument that all individuals experience
abjection at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from the mother. For Kristeva,
the mother-child relation is one marked by conflict: the child struggles to break free but the
mother is reluctant to release it the maternal body becomes a site of conflicting desires
by refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its appropriate
place in relation to the symbolic (The Monstrous Feminine 12). Pamela is entranced by her
teenaged daughters sexual development and this obsessive fascination indicates her inability
to relinquish maternal control over their bodies. In response to Gingers first period, Pamela
presents her with a garishly red cake in a particularly comedic moment, congratulating her for
her achievement. That the cake bears an uncanny resemblance to the sisters bloody death
projects is no mistake, and this in turn serves to accentuate Pamelas excessive interest in
Gingers reproductive processes.
Although she celebrates Gingers menses, Pamelas knowledge of her daughters actual
experiences is deficient. Ginger Snaps refutes the notion of motherly instinct, portraying
Pamela as lacking in intuition and as easily manipulated by her daughters. When Henry sees
Ginger and Brigitte behaving strangely, commenting that he thinks they are up to
something, Pamela dismisses his suspicions and suggests theyre just being normal teenage
girls. Pamelas exchanges with her daughters also represent her as nave: by simply asking
questions about boys and body image, Brigitte and Ginger are able to distract her from the
most serious of tasks. It is only when Henry finds one of Trinas fingers while raking leaves
2
that Pamela finally becomes apprehensive. When she discovers her daughters involvement in
the disappearance of their classmate, she pledges her willingness to cover up the terrible
thing they have done because she will not let anyone take her daughters away. Pamela
optimistically tells Brigitte that they can start afresh by setting their home on fire and that it
will be fun. While Pamelas plan suggests that she loves her daughters deeply, it also implies
her obsessive attachment to Ginger and Brigitte, given the unusual lengths she will go to in
order to keep them with her for as long as possible. Pamelas willingness to protect her
daughters from the law extends so far as to endanger her husbands safety, and Gingers
transgressions appear to provide her with a much-awaited excuse to escape her married life.
Brigittes excessive interest in her sisters hormonal changes is presented as very different
from her mothers obsession, more so because she witnesses her sister being devoured by a
werewolf. Brigitte recognizes before anyone else that something is unusual about Gingers
behaviour. What is most frightening for Brigitte is that when she expresses these concerns she
finds Ginger is relegating her hormonal changes and her encounter with The Beast of Bailey
Downs to the category of normal, like everyone else in her town. Ginger condescendingly
tells Brigitte, I just got my period, OK? Now Ive got weird hairs, so what? That means Ive
got hormones and they may make me butt ugly, but they do not make me a monster Did I
change last night, howl at the moon and kill shit and change back this morning? When
Ginger suggests that Brigitte is simply jealous, Brigitte responds by outlining exactly how she
63

finds the sexual aspect of her sisters maturation abhorrent. Brigitte sarcastically tells Ginger
that she wishes she was haemorrhaging and sucking off Jason McCarty. For Brigitte, sexual
3
maturation involves heterosexual experimentation at the expense of female friendships.
Here Brigitte also reveals that she might be jealous of Gingers rapid sexual development.
Brigitte implies the rivalry in her relationship with her sister when she is angered by Gingers
flirtatious behavior. While at the start of the film both sisters agree to remain united against
life, Ginger begins to ignore Brigitte as she comes to reciprocate the attention she is receiving
from her male classmates. Brigittes anger at Gingers interest in these boys implies more than
her isolation. As Pamela deduces, Brigittes separation from Ginger signals that she is
observing her sisters sexual experimentation enviously. This possibility is specifically explored
in one scene where Brigitte describes her sister as monstrous, and Ginger retorts that the
only monster she sees has little green eyes. Ginger summarizes Brigittes jealousy by
exclaiming, Poor B, Im growing up and obviously youre not... you always wanted to be
me. Brigitte herself indicates that her fascination with her sister is envious when she stares at
Ginger with amazement as she attracts wolf-whistles at school. Later, as Brigitte longingly
inspects Gingers razor and shaving cream, she is again enviously in awe of her sisters bodily
transformations. These antagonisms are most explicitly addressed moments after Ginger
murders their schools guidance counselor. Ginger articulates her knowledge of Brigittes
jealousy when she outlines that she believes she was nobody before puberty. As much as
Brigitte retaliates by asserting her disgust at Gingers violent behavior, her expressions of
loathing signal that she resents her sister for her rapid sexual development and social
inclusion.
Similarly, much of Gingers aggression is targeted at men she perceives to be sexually
attracted to her sister. Ginger kills their schools janitor (Pat Kwong-Ho) because she fears he
has been looking inappropriately at her sister. Ginger also aggressively pursues Sam (Kris
Lemche), a local botanist and drug dealer who shows an interest in Brigitte. Sam is aware that
there is something unusual about the Fitzgerald sisters because he is responsible for saving
their lives when his truck hits and kills The Beast of Bailey Downs while it is chasing
Ginger. Though Sam insists his interest in Brigitte is not sexual, and though Brigitte is
adamant that he is just trying to help her find a cure for the infection, Ginger senses that he
4
might have less than honorable intentions. Ginger appears jealous of the attention that
Brigitte is receiving from Sam, but also accurately estimates the potential dangers that her
young sister might face by involving herself with an older man.
Brigitte does not understand her communitys sexual double standards as well as her sister
does, and is noticeably appalled that Ginger is abandoning her in order to partake in
heterosexual rituals. She does not initially realize that Gingers aggressively sexual behavior is
in fact in opposition to the kinds of socially constructed gender roles they had sworn to rebel
against. During her first sexual experiences with Jason, Ginger takes on a traditionally
masculine role, something he finds increasingly perplexing. Jason repeatedly tells Ginger to
64

take it easy, and when she demands that he just lie back and relax he revealingly asks her,
whos the guy here? Gingers masculine sexual aggression is accentuated when the scene
ends with the inference that she has raped him. This is presented as an unusual role reversal
when Brigitte mistakenly assumes it was Jason who was forceful. Ginger explains to Brigitte
that she gets an ache that she thought was for sex, but which she now realizes is a
compulsion to tear things to pieces. She explains that because intercourse with Jason had not
satisfied her she was forced to kill the dog next door instead. She confides to Brigitte that sex
with Jason wasnt at all like she thought it would be, that there was just all this squirming
and squealing and then he was done. Ginger conveys the sexual double standards in their
community by explaining that Jason is likely to be bragging about his encounter with her and
comments, he got laid, Im just a lay.
Gingers prediction about the likelihood of Jason boasting about his sexual exploits is
proven correct, but though he brags to his peers that Ginger Fitzgerald rocked his world, his
claim sours once he realizes that she has infected him. No sooner has he told his friends
about his night with Ginger than they notice he has blood seeping through the crotch of his
trousers, and they ask him if he has his rag. Brigitte witnesses Jasons humiliation as he is
feminized by his peers and confronts Ginger with the possibility that this infection is sexually
5
transmitted. Because Ginger spreads infection and behaves aggressively during sexual
intercourse, her lycanthropic transformation functions as a metaphor for her sexual deviancy
and transgressive refusal to perform within the limits of culturally prescribed gender roles.
When Brigitte deduces that Gingers infection is both sexually transmitted and
influenced by the cycles of the moon, she decides to confront the monster that is taking
over her sisters body. However, Ginger has no intention of having her sexual urges curtailed
by her pre-pubescent sister and regards the men who try to help Brigitte as sexual predators.
When Brigitte tells Ginger that her friend Sam knows stuff and wants to help Ginger
retorts that he just wants to get down Brigittes pants. Ginger also suspects that the school
janitor, a seemingly innocuous man, is having sexual thoughts about Brigitte and tells her that
he was looking down her shirt. As a result of her suspicions Ginger kills the janitor. When
Brigitte is upset, Ginger tells her she killed him because she didnt like the way he looked at
her. In another scene, Gingers taste for tearing up men and her distaste for her own
wolverine tail, an apparent phallic symbol, are explicitly connected: Brigitte finds her sister
trying to cut off her tail. Ginger responds by commenting, nothing helps but tearing live
things to pieces. The implication here is that she associates this pseudo-phallus with her
masculine aggression.
When she kills the janitor Ginger further expresses the sexual aspect of her killing. After
mortally wounding the janitor, Ginger remarks, It feels so good, B. Its like touching
yourself, you know, every move right on the fucking dot, and after, you see fucking fireworks,
supernova, goddamn force of nature. I feel like I could do just about anything. You know,
were almost not even related anymore. Here Ginger explicitly links her violence to
65

masturbation, a sexual activity where men are not necessary. It is Gingers description of the
hyper-exhilaration that she feels while inhuman forces are raging through her that implies her
utter difference from Brigitte. Gingers suggestion that they are not even related anymore is
6
the catalyst that pushes Brigitte towards justifying killing her sister in the films final scene.
The final severing of all emotional, familial, and physical ties to Ginger allows Brigitte to
kill her just as her metamorphosis into a werewolf is almost complete. When Brigitte goes on
to express her disgust at Gingers sexual urges, she indicates that she does not wish to
experience sexuality in the same way. She accentuates this by insisting that shed rather be
7
dead than become like Ginger. Brigitte confirms that their suicidal promise no longer
makes sense to her when she remarks to Ginger, you said youd die with me cos you had
nothing better to do. After Ginger suggests that she was nobody before her sexual
transformations Brigitte is convinced that she no longer shares a bond with her sister. As she
plunges the knife, instead of the syringe containing the werewolf antidote, into her sisters
chest, Brigitte shouts, Im not dying with you. While Ginger exhales her last breath they are
intimate for the last time.
The reasons behind Brigittes murder of Ginger are ambiguous. On the one hand,
Brigitte kills Ginger because she has lost her both to normality menstruation and
heterosexuality and abnormality her inhuman animality and disengagement with their
sisterly bond. On the other hand, Brigitte kills her sister because she has become a grotesque
representation of all that their community loathes about female sexuality. In this wider sense
Ginger is killed because she has challenged her communitys sexual taboos (and also, perhaps,
the prohibitions that surround incest). When Brigitte kills Ginger because she has become
infectious, she emphasizes the sexual nature of her monstrosity. As Creed points out,
The reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different
from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience As with all other
stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her
sexuality. That phrase monstrous feminine emphasizes the importance of gender in
the construction of her monstrosity. (The Monstrous Feminine 3)

Ginger is not simply monstrous because a werewolf bites her and infects her, but also because
she begins menstruating for the first time during the scene where she is attacked. The sisters
confused reaction to Gingers sexual development suggests our cultures ambivalent attitude
towards female reproductive processes.
Martins analysis of the medical descriptions for ovulation used by educational textbooks
and documentaries further explains our cultures marginalization of feminine sexuality.
Martin describes the marked contrast that is set up in medical texts between male and
female: the male who continuously produces fresh sperm, and the female who is faced with
the continuous degeneration of her reproductive abilities. According to Martin, medical texts
explain how femininely the egg behaves and how masculinely the sperm:
66

The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively is
transported, is swept or even, in a popular account, drifts In utter contrast,
sperm are small, streamlined, and inevitably active. They deliver their genes to the
egg and have a velocity which is always remarked on they can burrow through
the egg coat and penetrate it. (412)

This begins to account for Brigittes opinion that Gingers predatory sexual behavior is
unusual or abnormal. Throughout Ginger Snaps, Brigitte has been reading medical accounts
of menstruation and reproduction, and therefore comes to see Gingers active, or masculine
sexual behavior as deviant.
Martin paraphrases our cultural understanding of the eggs function in reproduction,
an understanding that is again informed by socially constructed gender roles, and upheld by
medicines explanation of menstruation as a process by which waste is produced. Within
medical texts, cultural traditions that espouse passivity as a female attribute and activity as a
male attribute are replicated in reproduction narratives. The egg is therefore described as
set apart and above, and dependant on sperm to rescue her. The language of reproduction
Martin analyses sheds light on Gingers characterization in Ginger Snaps because she
represents our cultures ambivalent attitudes about menstruation and womens reproductive
processes in general. When Ginger behaves aggressively during intercourse she becomes an
extension of the hostile environment of the vagina into which the sperm must make a
perilous journey. Gingers sexual violence disrupts the image of the fragile and
dependant young woman.
Although Gingers menstruation epitomizes all that is taboo about femininity, Brigitte
realizes that Gingers true abjection is that the transformation is making her behave like a
man. Brigitte primarily kills her sister because she disapproves of her behavior and thinks
Gingers aggression has gone too far. Despite her own sexual inexperience, Brigitte
eventually develops an understanding of the gendered binaries that are in operation in her
small town and kills Ginger partly to protect her from the ostracism and vilification she
would suffer as a result of her transgressions. Ginger is also dealt this phallic punishment
because she denies the importance of her relationship with her sister. Brigitte does not simply
feel abandoned because she is jealous of her sisters burgeoning sexual maturity, but also
because Ginger is spending time with boys and ignoring the importance of sisterhood.
However, Brigitte herself rejects their sisterly bond by killing Ginger after her transformation
into an animal is complete. When Brigitte murders Ginger she acknowledges all that is
untenable about their sisterly bond: that their desire for an isolated and exclusive relationship
with one another is somewhat incestuous. By simultaneously depicting female bonds as
important and fraught with difficulties, Ginger Snaps portrays the double-binds teenage girls
face. Ginger articulates these ambiguities most convincingly when she explains that a woman
can only be a slut, a bitch, a whore, or the virgin next door. Ginger is an embodiment of
these impossible binaries: she is at once sexually attractive and monstrous, natural and
supernatural, human and animal, feminine and transgressive, a sister and a rival.
67

Notes
1

Since Ginger gradually becomes a wolf after several weeks of transformations, it is implied that she
may never change back into a human being. In this respect, Ginger Snaps differs from many other
werewolf narratives, where those infected are able to control their animal side so long as the moon is
not full. Ginger, however, slowly loses control of her body and eventually becomes an animal lacking
any discernable human qualities.

Henry's suspicions about his daughters are soon proven to have been justified: Ginger and Brigitte
have indeed killed Trina in a gruesome accident in their kitchen. The girls cover up the crime they
have committed by burying Trina in their playhouse.

According to Karen Hollinger, there is a definable genre of "female friendship" films, and, conversely
a category of films that she labels as "anti-female friendship." Hollinger argues that "manipulative
female friendship films" portray destructive female relationships that mock "the possibility of women
forming the bonds of loyalty and affection that characterize other female friendship portrayals" (In the
Company of Women 207). According to Hollinger, "anti-female friendship films" rely on "conflicts
between women," and therefore "obscure other issues related to women's position in society, relieve
men of any responsibility for women's problems, and suggest, instead, that women should grant men
primary importance in their lives because they are the only ones upon whom women can rely" (207).
Ginger Snaps does not comfortably fit into either of Hollinger's categories.

Trina Sinclair repeatedly indicates that she has had sexual relations with Sam, and her desperation at
the abandonment she faces suggests the sexual double bind many adolescent girls face. Trina
articulates the gendered nature of teen sex in her community when she calls Sam a "cherry hound," a
term which celebrates the achievements of men who seek out intercourse with virgins.

Several academic and critical accounts of Canadian David Cronenberg's early work argue that his
protagonists' transformations symbolically reference the AIDS "epidemic" (Mathijs 32-3). Mathijs
explains the significance of the AIDS metaphor in cinema as a representation of "the human body in
crisis" (33). Just as Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) in The Fly experiences a bodily infection that signals
a global crisis in sexuality during the eighties, Ginger experiences menstruation as an infection that
implies the persistence of these anxieties in popular representations of sexuality. This is highlighted in
Ginger Snaps because Ginger's lycanthropic infection is passed on by the co-mingling of blood.
6

Ginger's comment that they are "not even related anymore" sheds light on the homoerotic aspect to
her relationship with Brigitte. If, as Ginger suggests, they are no longer related, the taboos that
prohibit their incestuous desire for one another are at least partially eradicated.
7

Brigitte's disgust for Ginger's developing sexuality could be read as a loathing of heterosexuality. An
analysis of Brigitte's "queerness," however, is beyond the reach of this essay.

Works Cited
Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1992.

68

Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." Horror: The Film
Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich. New York: Routledge, 2002.
---. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
Du Coudray, Chantal Bourgault. "The Cycle of the Werewolf: Romantic Eulogies of Selfhood in
Popular Fantasy." Australian Feminist Studies 18/40 (2003): 57-72.
Hollinger, Karen. In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lindsey, Shelley Stamp. "Horror, Femininity, and Carrie's Monstrous Puberty." The Dread of
Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1996.
Martin, Emily. "Body Narratives, Body Boundaries." Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson
and P.A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Mathijs, Ernest. "AIDS References in the Critical Reception of David Cronenberg." Cinema Journal
42/4 (2003): 29-45.

Related Works of Interest

Badly, Linda. Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Crane, Jonathan
Lake. Terror and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1994.
Doherty, Thomas. The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Fischer, Lucy. Cinamaternity: Film, Motherhood, Genre. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1996.
Green, Philip. Ideology and Gender in Hollywood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: University of Manchester
Press, 1996.
Skal, David J. Screams of Reason: Mad Science in Modern Horror. New York: W. W. Norton and Co,
1998.
Williams, Tony. The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press
University Press, 1996.

Bianca Nielsen, "'Something's Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female': Transgressive
Sexuality and Discourses of Reproduction in Ginger Snaps" thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 5569 (print), 31 pars. (web). [http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_nielsen.htm].

69

Representing the Negative: Positing the Lesbian Void in

Medieval English Anchoritism
Michelle M. Sauer
While the growth of gender studies has resulted in a proliferation of works on the
queering of texts, moments, and readings, relatively few of these studies focus on early
representations of woman-woman eroticism. Even fewer address woman-woman eroticism in
the Middle Ages. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero touch on the complexity of this
issue: we have had at our disposal the resonant notion that the history of the premodern
[] might, when viewed from the standpoints of the othered, take on some uncanny
shapes (xviii). This view is, in turn, echoed by Francesca Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn,
who state that Writing about female same-sex desire in the Middle Ages requires [radical]
acts of interpretation (34). I propose one such radical interpretation in my reading of the
texts and architecture of medieval anchoritism. Anchoresses were women, either vowed or
non-vowed, who desired to dwell in solitude in order to devote their entire life to
1
contemplative prayer. Yet, theirs was a mediated solitude that allowed, and, to some extent,
encouraged interaction with other women within the confines of the anchorhold. It is within
this liminal space that I suggest investigating the queer possibilities of medieval English
anchoritism. The foundational paradoxes of the anchoritic lifestyle foreground these
possibilities - the anchoress was simultaneously dead and alive; the cell was both secular and
sacred; the life was both mundane and glorious. Thus, I posit that in the early Middle Ages,
both the regulations for and the structure of the anchoritic cell could provide the necessary
space and conditions to create a lesbian void, in which the anchoress could explore womanwoman erotic possibilities. Further, this void was supported not only by the cells
configuration, but also through the religious Rule for anchoresses as well as by medieval
2
theological concepts about lesbian acts.
Conceptually, medieval notions of lesbianism are dependent upon a great deal of
reconstructionist work. As noted by Jacqueline Murray, [w]hile women in general have
attracted increasing attention from medievalists, lesbians remain ignored as subjects. Thus
medieval lesbians have been twice marginalized (193). Therefore, those of us who work on
representations of woman-woman eroticism and the Middle Ages are often forced to work
backwards from studies about later centuries, particularly the early modern era (in British
literature, 1485-1660 CE). The concept of the lesbian void was developed by Theodora A.
Jankowski in her article in the Lesbian Void: Woman-Woman Eroticism in Shakespeares
Plays. Initially, Jankowski refers to the metaphorical space of invisibility where Hermione of
The Winters Tale exists - a space that allows her to be both dead and available for
resurrection, and also a space that she shares only with another woman, Paulina. Jankowski
goes on to frame the lesbian void in two distinct ways: each a kind of female realm, where
erotic relationships between women could occur: within the newly created private spaces of
the early modern aristocratic home and within the mistress-servant relationship (301). She
70

illustrates these options not only through an examination of The Winters Tale, but also by
looking at the relationship between Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, Cleopatras
female-only inner sanctum in Antony & Cleopatra, as well as several other Shakespearean
situations. Both the physical and the metaphorically constructed spaces are related to the
increasing cultural value of privacy seen developing throughout early modern society.
Jankowski points to two specific architectural constructs - the closet and the banquet - that
allowed for increased privacy, and thus potentially for a lesbian void. Jankowskis use of the
term void is also an interesting choice in that void often carries with it negative
connotations. Yet, instead of signifying a lack of some sort, in this case, void means simply
empty, and empty, in turn, implies a greater degree of privacy, and thus a greater degree
3
of erotic possibilities. While the banquet, a hall reserved specifically for important feasts, was
a particular development of the early modern period, the closet, which was a private
withdrawing chamber controlled by the owner, can be compared to the anchoritic cell.
Both men and women had closets, and both men and women had anchorholds; each space
became gendered by its association with an occupant. Anchorholds were small, private,
regulated, and empty - all scarce commodities in the Middle Ages, and all defining features of
the closet.
During the early modern period in England, the population as a whole gained a great
deal of privacy, making Jankowskis lesbian void more feasible. My focus is on the thirteenth
century, the height of the Middle Ages, when entire families spent their lives in close
proximity to one another, often residing together in single-room dwellings. No matter what
social class they belonged to, medieval people had few to no expectations of privacy. Every
function of daily life - including sexual relations - was, at least in some sense, a shared
experience. Raymond Ritter succinctly captures the modern readers sense of discomfort
about the glaring lack of privacy, stating that by the late twelfth century the greatest feudal
lords had just begun to discover how terribly sad [] were the dwellings in which family and
servants lived crowded together in the most peculiar promiscuity (in Barthlemy 406). To
some extent this promiscuity was ameliorated by large hanging tapestries and massive pieces
of furniture; however, these mobile objects could not take the place of walls. Furthermore,
hall and chamber were not strictly opposed spaces in a feudal residence, as bedroom and
living room are in a modern home (Barthlemy 418). If we consider the idea that the bed
both embellishes the room and serves as a couch for conversation (Barthlemy 422), even
functional privacy is removed as the potential for promiscuity is significantly increased.
While aristocratic households might enjoy at least a modicum of private space, the peasant
household had even fewer options for solitude. According to Philippe Contamine, the size of
a peasant house was dependent both upon its environmental setting (isolated, urban, farm,
4
mill, etc.) and upon its inhabitants (widow, nuclear family, extended family, animals, etc.).
Overall, however, the public/private division seems to have been made mostly between the
public space of eating and entertainment, and the private family area used for sleeping,
dressing, and sexual relations. The lower classes would have had even fewer opportunities for
5
unobserved amorous dalliances with any sex within the household confines than the nobility.
71

Even if the household had a private chamber, it was rare that a woman would have had
control over access to it. Young marriageable noblewomen in particular were rarely, if ever,
left to their own devices, and were generally enclosed in a separate area of the household.
Georges Duby notes the cultural constructions of gender at work here:
women, being the weaker sex and more prone to sin, had to be held in check. []
Since females were dangerous, patriarchal power over them was reinforced. They were
kept under lock and key in the most isolated part of the house: the chambre des dames
was not a place for seduction or amusement but a kind of prison, in which women
were incarcerated because men feared them. (77)

The commonly held belief was that women, if left unguarded, would indulge their natural
weaknesses, and give in to the various temptations of the flesh, including lust, greed, and
discord. Duby further clarifies the parameters of this enclosure: Men caught only brief
glimpses of the gynaecium (78). This limited surveillance, though arranged for the moral
well-being of both sexes, did little to ease male anxiety about the inherent immorality all
women possessed:
What, men asked, do women do together when they are alone, locked up in the
chamber? The answer was: Nothing good. [] The moralists were obsessed with
thoughts of the guilty pleasures which, they had no doubt, women enjoyed in the
gynaecium either alone or in conjunction with other women and young children. []
[W]omen, particularly young women, are constantly vulnerable to the pricks of desire,
against which there is no defense, and that they usually satisfy these desires through
homosexuality (suspicion of which was encouraged by the common practice of having
several members of the same sex share one bed). (79-80)

Enclosure was a double-edged sword - female isolation was necessary to preserve masculine
power, but it was also feared because it could lead to challenging the necessity of the male
wielding that power - or to challenging the necessity of the (male) penis.
It would seem that religious occupation could be presumed to ease some of these
concerns, whether it was group prayer led by an aristocratic lady or daily service led by an
abbess. Yet, this was not entirely the case. Roberta Gilchrist examines the impact that
medieval architecture had upon the concepts of gender and sexuality among religious women:
when medieval nuns embraced celibacy theirs was more closely linked to a concept of
chastity shared with secular women of the upper classes. [] Both secular and
monastic women demonstrated constructions of female sexuality which centred on
monogamy and chastity facilitated by spatial segregation. [] The strict, perpetual
enclosure of medieval nuns may be seen as an extension of the segregation of
aristocratic and gentry women within a domestic domain. (19; 169)

In fact, medieval religious women were just as subject to the strictures about too much
privacy as were laywomen. Though the convent was ostensibly an all female world, it was still
72

regulated by men and mens fears about rampant female sexuality. Gilchrist reports that
unlike even the poorest male monasteries, which boasted separate abbots quarters, few female
monastic communities had detached prioress lodges; in fact, prioresses were admonished to
keep common dormitory with their nuns (125). It was believed that excessive physical
solitude allowed women to be subject to increased temptation. Women needed help to
preserve their chastity: The perfect virgin, points out Joyce E. Salisbury, was not to enclose
herself completely with Christ and her prayers; she was to live in a community with other similar
women, dedicated virgins (34, original emphasis). Chastity required constant vigilance, both
6
from herself and from others.
This patristic view held sway for several centuries until the height of the Middle Ages saw
a dramatic rise in the number of women who were drawn to the comparative freedom of
the anchoritic lifestyle. In the otherwise communal medieval world, the anchoress cell was a
rarity in that it offered almost complete privacy. Privacy was the most necessary condition for
a potential lesbian void. Though they varied somewhat in size, most anchoritic cells were
7
relatively small, single-cell dwellings attached to churches. An anchoress lived inside this
chamber, never leaving it during her life. A few noblewomen became anchoresses, and the
vocation was not prohibited to peasants; however, the majority of anchoresses were from the
merchant class. The candidates were expected to be able to read, at least in the vernacular, to
be self-supporting, and to provide for servants. Anchoresses did not subsist on charity per se.
In fact, when a woman requested permission from the bishop to become a recluse, the bishop
8
was obliged to fully investigate her finances in order to determine her fiscal stability. As Ann
K. Warren points out, [w]ealthy candidates for reclusion endowed themselves. The less
affluent needed a promise of support from outside sources to augment their own resources
(42). Still, these funds had to be pledged in advance of the anchoresss vows. Once built, the
cell became hers, and was often willed to her servants upon her death. Moreover, not only was
the cell built specifically for her and controlled by her, but it also became conceptually fused
9
with her body. Ancrene Wisse, the most well known guide for anchoresses, builds upon this
idea, metaphorically linking the female body and an anchoritic cell:
Yes, you, too will go out of both your anchorhouses as he [Jesus] did, without a break,
and leave them both whole. That will be when the spirit goes out in the end, without
break or blemish, from its two houses. One of them is the body, the other is the outer
house, which is like the outer wall around a castle. (Ancrene Wisse, Part VI, 187)

The physical anchorhold was conceived as an extension of the anchoress body; thus unlike
other medieval dwellings, an anchoress cell became a completely female space, one that was
locked from the inside, hidden from all male gazes, and would never be penetrated by a man.
Jankowski suggests that the newly developed female realms of the early modern period
were conducive to the establishment of woman-woman erotic relationships, particularly
between mistress and servant. Instead of open chambers perhaps divided by tapestries,
privileged women gained personal withdrawing chambers that could be locked by the
73

occupant. When these women acquired some ability to control access to their chambers, they
also gained some ability to control access to their bodies. This personal jurisdiction over the
spatial boundaries of the female realm would have been unusual in the medieval world, a time
when, as noted earlier, aristocratic women were kept under constant surveillance. Typically,
the patriarch of the household or his agents controlled access to the womens chambers. These
designated individuals may have included an older, female chatelaine, but could also include
younger, non-threatening men, such as musicians or dancing masters. These visitors never
entered unattended, however, and only a limited number of men ever penetrated the ladies
rooms. The same held true for convents. Gilchrist relates this sharing of physical space among
supposedly isolated and enclosed nuns:
Certain features [of convents] resulted from the frequent contact between nunneries
and gentry society, brought about through the sharing of nunnery churches with
parochial congregations, the close proximity of many nunneries to villages, and the
tendency for secular women and children to visit and board within nunneries. (127)

Furthermore, besides these visitors, nuns were required to admit priests to conduct mass on
the premises. So like their secular counterparts, nuns were occasionally exposed to the male
10
gaze, as these same men penetrated their convent spaces. Although the abbess held keys to
all the rooms within the nunnery, even she could not completely regulate access to the
convents depths. In fact, certain spaces, such as the chapel sacristy, would have been reserved
only for male religious and their functions.
Unlike the typical medieval chambers, both secular and sacred, and more like Jankowskis
closets, the anchorhold was locked from the inside, and the anchoress controlled access into
its depths. Moreover, inside she was safe from any unwanted male gaze - even during mass,
11
she could look out upon the altar, but the priest would have had difficulty looking in at her.
Within this private chamber, women visitors were allowed greater freedom than male guests,
even being granted the privilege of staying overnight, and if the anchoress had servants, they
might dwell with her: To women and children, and especially to the anchoress maidens
who come and work for you, give food to eat [] and invite them to stay with you (Ancrene
Wisse, Part VIII, 201). This freedom would have been a significant factor in the development
of a woman-woman relationship. As Jankowski argues, the closet [private chamber]
represented a secure, private place where a woman could engage in erotic interludes with
another woman without arousing suspicion, [and] I would go even further and suggest that an
upper-class woman could also use her closet as a space in which to engage in erotic interludes
with a lady-in-waiting or a servant (302). Building on this, Jankowski points out that often a
woman servant served the same mistress for many years, allowing long-term relationships.
Furthermore, the comings and goings of a servant would have hardly been noticed.
Judging from the prescriptions in the Ancrene Wisse, the anchoresss maidens served a
similar function as ladies-in-waiting, primarily in that they served as a go-between for the
anchoress and the outside world. They assisted her with the mundane tasks of living, such as
74

dressing, cleaning, bathing, bloodletting, and dining. It is in regards to this last function, food
acquisition and preparation, that the maidens were most often required to leave the
anchorhold: An anchoress who does not have food at hand must be careful to have two
women, one who always stays at home and another who goes out when necessary (Ancrene
Wisse, Part VIII, 204). Despite the privacy gained within the anchorhold, the anchoress is still
never to remain alone. As a weak woman, she must remain guarded. This is why the writers of
most anchoritic Rules assumed the existence of at least one maid, despite the fact that
anchorites were considered dead and sought a life of total isolation. Ancrene Wisse, which
suggests keeping two servants instead of just one, bestows a semi-official status upon these
women, in naming them anchoress maidens. Generally, these maids were considered
12
partially enclosed as well, although there are no records of their consent for this process.
They are not recorded in the burying ceremonies or other anchoritic documentation,
probably because they were only considered enclosed while the anchoress lived. And like the
servants of the early modern era, these maidens served the anchoress for many years.
Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII: The Outer Rule, contains specific regulations regarding the
keeping of these women, the anchoress maidens. Besides completing any manual labour the
anchoress needs, the maidens may also teach some other maiden for whom it would be
dangerous to learn among men or among boys. Furthermore, they were strictly admonished
to let no man in (Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII, 204). The servants served as buffer between men
and the anchoress inner sanctum - they guarded her reputation, and thereby preserved her
chastity. For instance, if the anchorhold was damaged in some way, these women became
crucial: If some great necessity breaks your house open, while it stays broken, have a woman
of pure life to stay with you in it by day and night (Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII, 202). If the
anchoress were to remain alone, her vow would be in peril, because of her own womanly
weakness, the potential damage to her name, and her exposure to possible violence.
In order to keep the anchoress within the religious sphere, and to mitigate potential
13
temptation, anchoritic cells were commonly built adjacent to the nave of a church.
Anchoritic cells attached to churches generally had two windows, both covered by heavy black
14
curtains with white crosses woven into them. One window opened into the nave of the
church so that the anchoress could participate in Mass, as the view was usually that of the
high altar. The anchoress was never to speak to anyone, including her priest, through the
church window. The other window, supposedly the smaller of the two, allowed not for a view
of the outside world, but rather was designed so that the anchoress could converse for limited
periods with visitors. As for the other window, the anchoress was supposed to be wary of
drawing the curtain for a man, though she was allowed to speak briefly through it with
women. For instance, the Ancrene Wisse author explicitly states: When your sisters maids
come to comfort you, come to them at the window, before or after noon, once or twice, and
go back again soon to your spiritual occupation (Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII, 207). Though not
exactly encouraged, regulated speech was expected in the anchoress life, and many of these
discourses occurred via her window.
75

Window violations in general were considered the bane of anchoritism. A large portion of
Ancrene Wisse, Part II: The Outer Senses is devoted to detailing the dangers of peeping,
that is the sins - both major and minor - involved in craving glimpses of the outside world.
The most severe danger in peeping was to the anchoress purity, both in her sending out
enticing looks, and in her exposing herself to the same. As Baldwin states, twelfth century
physicians assigned to the eyes an important role in the arousal of sexual desire (105).
Church authorities espoused a similar view: The theologians had long been aware of the role
of sight in engendering concupiscence (Baldwin 118), a view echoed by romances and
15
courtly love manuals. The fear of the dangers and perhaps the accompanying pleasures, of
sight are echoed by Ancrene Wisse: Take note now what harm has come of peeping: not one
harm or two, but all the woe that now is and ever was and ever will be - all comes from sight
(Ancrene Wisse, Part II, 67). The Rule carefully attempts to address every conceivable
situation. As such, the anchoress receives instructions on how to handle men who want to see
her bed, see her altar, see her clothes, see her hair, and so forth. Among these extensive
directions - which are interlaced with warnings, scripture passages, and quotes from Church
fathers - lurks one single, suspicious phrase: Some have been tempted by their own sisters
(Ancrene Wisse, Part II, 71). This hints at the possibility of lesbian desire incited merely by
peeping.
These hints are intensified by the arrangement and number of the windows themselves.
Though two was generally considered standard, the Rules conflict on the allowed number of
windows. Some insist that one is enough, especially for those anchorites who were not within
direct view of the church. Ancrene Wisse allows for a third window into the servants chamber.
This additional window has interesting ramifications for this discussion. Predominately, it
seems to facilitate woman-woman eroticism, in that it allows for the possibility of a lesbian
gaze. According to Ancrene Wisse, one of the anchoress responsibilities towards her maidens is
watching over them. Though the two maidservants are directed to sleep alone, they both
share the same chamber, and they are both subject to the anchoress gaze. She may draw her
curtain at will, whereas the servants have no corresponding curtain. Thus the anchoress can
see her servants any time she desires, while they can neither hide from her, nor look at her,
without her knowledge and consent.
The anchoress ability to see without being seen is conceptually similar to the panopticon,
which was proposed as a prison model by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, and
16
explored by Michel Foucault in his 1975 work Discipline and Punish. In the panoptic
model, the jailer can see the prisoners at his [sic] discretion, and watch without warning.
Though originally conceived as a way to stem corruption and to cultivate a symbiotic
relationship between the observer and the observed, a sort of benevolent control scheme, the
actual ramifications would have been much different, resulting in the ability to induce in the
inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power (Foucault 201). The resultant uncertainty - the prisoner would never know if s/he
76

were being observed or not - was itself intended to be part of the disciplinary process. No
bodily function was considered too private to watch. In this way, the gaze of surveillance blurs
into the eroticized gaze. Returning to the anchorhold, the anchoress watches over her charges,
and would surely be able to see them throughout the day, during a variety of activities, and in
various stages of undress. The servants are subject to the anchoress watching eyes at and for
her pleasure. In this instance, though she herself is subject to many regulations about being
seen, she is able to use the authority to see to maintain her power within the cell. In essence,
the anchoritic cell acquires panoptic qualities in that the anchoress gaze could be at once
symbiotic, disciplinary, and erotic.
The final section of Ancrene Wisse also delineates the maidservants forbidden physical
activities, which are all related to men: They should not kiss any male friend or relation, or
embrace them out of friendship, wash their hair for them, stare at any man, sport or flirt
(Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII, 205). Not only are these activities related to men, but they are also
specifically sexualized activities, made dangerous through the presence of the masculine body.
Similarly, encouraged spiritual activities, including kissing, are linked to the feminine: If any
strife arises between the women, the anchoress should make each say I have done wrong to the
other, kneeling on the ground; let each lift up the other and finally kiss (Ancrene Wisse, Part
VIII, 205). Many depictions of kissing in the Middle Ages are illustrative of reconciliation.
The kiss in this passage can be linked to ritualized kissing, which was an important part of
both the feudal system, in the ritual of vassalage (osculum feodale), and the kiss of peace,
which was part of the Mass. Yet, as Michael Camille points out, [w]omen were exempted
from this feudal [both vassalage and reconciliatory] kiss for the sake of decency, suggesting
that there existed a clear hierarchy of kisses (133-34). More than that, the phrase for the
sake of decency implies that though men might kiss each other (at least ritualistically) with
impunity, women would somehow sully themselves, perhaps in a sexual way, by participating
in a ritual kiss with men. At the least, both passages illustrate a common theme within
Ancrene Wisse - while heterosexual contact is spiritually damaging, homosocial contact (and
perhaps by extension, homosexual contact?) is spiritually restorative.
In the case of strife between the maidens cited above, the anchoress serves as facilitator, as
spiritual guide, and as elder. She had both power over her women and a responsibility to
them. This put her in a dominant position, a position to exercise desire in the anchorholds
prospective lesbian void. As Donatus of Besanon warned in the seventh century, not only
could particular friendships arise between enclosed women, such as nuns, but there should
also be a particular suspicion about relationships between young girls and older women
(Murray 196-97). This suspicion grew with time, and by the thirteenth century, the same
time period as the height of the anchoritic movement, monastic rules usually called for nuns
to stay out of each others cells, to leave their doors unlocked so that the abbess might check
on them, and to avoid special ties of friendship within the convent (Brown 69). The role of
elder was not the only one the anchoress assumed, however; she was also the maidens mistress
in the sense of relying on them as ladies-in-waiting. Thus, returning to Jankowskis scenario
77

between lady and maidservant, the anchoress and her maidens appear to fit the parameters.
Maidservants not only assisted their lady in dressing and grooming, but also with bathing,
menstrual needs, and female maladies. As Jankowski points out, [l]adies-in-waiting and
ladies of the chamber dressed their mistresses. They were also responsible for other duties
perhaps not so elegant, such as dealing with waste products (314). Thus, the female servant
had assured access to her mistresss body and its intimate secrets. For instance, when assisting
her in bathing, the anchoress servants would have has close contact with her unclothed body.
They would also have emptied chamber pots and washed her hair. The maidens were
indispensable to the anchoress overall existence.
The spiritual comfort provided by the anchoress maidens is mentioned in several places,
including the window visits. But this spiritual comfort is clearly linked to physical comfort as
well. Indeed, Ancrene Wisses author found it necessary to admonish his charges about these
visits, stating: The anchoress and her maid should not play worldly games at the window,
nor should they tease one another (Ancrene Wisse, Part VIII, 207). The loneliness and
isolation of the anchoritic life would have been physically challenging, and periodic visits
would surely have bolstered the anchoress, but what exactly are worldly games? Similarly,
while outlining the need for bloodletting, the author of Ancrene Wisse advises:
When you are finished letting blood, you must do nothing that is difficult for three
days, but talk to your maidens and amuse yourselves together with virtuous stories.
You may do so whenever you feel heavy or are sad or sick because of some worldly
thing - even though any worldly comfort is unworthy of an anchoress. (Ancrene Wisse,
Part VIII, 204)

Female companionship is both allowed and encouraged. Furthermore, this passage helps us
narrow the ambiguous phrase worldly games. Since chatting and story-telling, two potential
window activities, are not forbidden, they must not qualify as worldly games. The structure of
the window itself prohibits many other activities, especially physically challenging ones. One
possibility is gossiping, a sin to which anchoresses were thought to be particularly vulnerable.
In fact, the image of the gossiping anchoress had become proverbial by the thirteenth century,
to the point where an everyday saying arose: From mill and from market, from smithy and
from anchor-house one hears the news (Dunn 20). However, there are other possibilities,
including kissing and enticing glances, for these worldly games.
While the model religious woman in the Middle Ages would have retained her physical
virginity, that is an unbroken hymen, it was not a requirement for living a holy life. Although
virginity was the ideal, chastity was the reality. Thus, married women who kept their vows
and widows who did not take lovers were as chaste as virgins who remained virgins. In fact,
since definitions of chastity were based on sexual relations with a sanctioned man (or no man
at all), even unbreached anchoresses may not have been damaged, or made unchaste, by a
lesbian relationship. Another anchoritic text, Holy Maidenhood, defines virginity in this
17
manner: the seal that binds you both [anchoress & God] together. Her hymen is the mark
of the covenant and the signal of the contract. While Holy Maidenhood initially focuses more
78

specifically on pure physical virginity, the text later upholds the need to remain chaste in
general. This goal is accomplished through horrific descriptions of heterosexual activity:
Every woman who is a slave to her man lives in dung [] they wallow in dung and
rot there [] Lechery, with the help of fleshly will, makes war on maidenhood in this
way. Her first ally is sight. If you look often and pointedly at any man, lechery uses
that to make war on your maidenhood. (Holy Maidenhood, 229-230)

The catalogue continues through each of the senses - women should avoid gazing upon men,
which leads to speaking with them face-to-face, which leads to kissing, which in turn leads to
vulgar touching, which eventually leads to the sorry act at the end. This enumerated list
offers two insights. First, only contact with men is dangerous to maidenhood. Second, it
outlines the perceived progression of an erotic dalliance. Returning for a moment to our
window scene, we can substitute an anchoress maiden for a visiting male: the maid comes to
the anchoresss window to speak to her face-to-face, which will/can, according to Holy
Maidenhood, lead to kissing, which in turn leads to vulgar touching, which eventually leads to
the sorry act. However, this sorry act - as an act between women - still had the potential to
leave the anchoress, and the servant for that matter, with intact hymens and intact chastity,
and therefore with technically intact contracts. Sexual acts outside of marriage were, of course,
considered wrong for a myriad of reasons: loss of honour, loss of reputation, damage to male
(father/husbands) property, succumbing to lust, and breaking secular and sacred laws.
Overall, adultery and fornication disrupted chastity, which was the basis for an ordered,
patriarchal society. In fact, because of medieval theologians lack of understanding about
female desire, even if woman-woman erotic acts were discovered, they might be readily
dismissed simply because they werent considered troublesome. This view is reflected in
debate poetry, such as the Ragionamenth amorosi, in which the female characters debate why
it might be better for a woman to love another woman since she would thus avoid risking her
chastity (Brown 70). With chastity, and therefore male regulation of female sexuality,
preserved, woman-woman eroticism lost the sting of mortal sin.
Church commentators on sexuality from the early Christian to the medieval era on the
18
whole had a very limited conception of female homoerotic activity. This oversight is of great
significance because the Churchs impact on medieval sexual practices and boundaries was
profound both socially and legally in the system of canon law that had equal (or greater)
power as secular courts. Periodically, female homosexual practices are singled out in
penitential manuals, which were confessional guides designed for clerics both to elicit secrets
19
and to assign penances. In most of these instances, the penalties are surprisingly light.
Standard penance included fasting on bread and water, adhering to a set of prayers, and/or
mild ascetic practices. Men who engaged in homosexual activities generally were subject to
harsher penances. Theodore, for example, suggested 10 years of penance. While many
penitentials simply assigned longer periods of time to male homosexuals, a few suggested
stronger punishments such as beatings. More civic punishment of male homosexual activity
included public humiliation, severe beatings, exile, castration, torture, or even death. And
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often, lesbian activity is not addressed, even where male homosexual acts are extensively
delineated.
In his work on Anglo Saxon penitentials, Allen J. Frantzen notes that there is evidence
from the penitentials to support the view that sexual categories were mutable in the AngloSaxon period. It appears that men (more so than women) could occupy various positions
along a continuum of masculine-feminine behavior (268). Men could participate in a wide
variety of sexual acts, even some that edged toward feminine behaviour, without a great deal
of censure. Only when a man became (or made another man into) a passive receptacle did he
invite the most severe penalties, including execution. The Penitential of Theodore, presumably
written by Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 668-690 CE, which demands
lengthy penances for male homosexual acts, simply states, If a woman practices vice with a
woman, she shall do penance for three years (McNeill & Gamer 185). (Interestingly, the
same penance is given for a woman who practices solitary vice.) The ambiguous phrase
practices vice, can be construed either as male ignorance about lesbian activity, or it can be
more sinister in that it could encompass a wider range of acts than the more specifically
detailed descriptions of male-male relations. The penitential ambiguity continues in medieval
England. Bedes Penitential (eighth century) requires male sodomites to do penance for four
years, while requiring only three years for fornication between women, the same sentence
later handed down by later canonists as well. Bedes careful wording of woman-woman erotic
acts is interesting. In describing lesbian activities as fornication, Bede essentially labelled
them as sinful yet conceivable within nature. This distinction becomes clearer when
examining a later passage, in which Bede adds another dimension: women who fornicate per
machina, that is by means of a device, must complete seven years of penance. It is the
unnaturalness of a female who penetrates (active), not is penetrated (passive), which upsets
Bedes sensibilities more than the thought of lesbian activity itself.
The most severe penalties for lesbian activities were reserved for those women who
resorted to unnatural devices. Women who penetrated other women performed a masculine
role, thus displacing men and appropriating masculine power. The prospect of female power,
deviant already, was considered a frightening upsetting of the natural order of the universe.
James Brundage confirms: The penitentials occasionally mentioned female autoeroticism and
lesbianism. They treated female masturbation in much the same way as the male act, although
they were more censorious of female sexual play that involved dildos and other mechanical
20
aids (167). Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882 CE) went one step further, describing a hideous
lesbian encounter: They do not put flesh to flesh as in the fleshly genital member of one into
the body of the other, since nature precludes this, but they do transform the use of that part
of their body into an unnatural one: it is said they use instruments of diabolical operations to
21
excite desire (in Benkov 104). Hincmars statement confirms the unnaturalness not only of
the sexual act between two women, but also of the appropriation of the male role, which was
defined as penetrative and arousing.

80

The entire medieval construct of sexuality was phallocentric. According to medieval

theologians, women simply could not actively participate in natural sexual relations, which
required a passive, female recipient of a phallus; there could be no naturally phallic woman
(Benkov 105). Yet it was conceded that some unnatural women must have resorted to the
use of unnatural devices. As Brooten concisely frames this idea, there was a widespread
ancient view that homoerotic women imitate men: Just as men penetrate either females or
males, so too do homoerotic women penetrate other women (307). This representation of
female homoeroticism was carried into medieval thought. Bernd-Ulrich Hergemoller notes:
Woman was without exception regarded as a being who was sexually intended
exclusively for man. [] If, in the view of medieval man, women enjoyed themselves
with one another, they could only do this if they worked on themselves with a dummy
penis they made themselves. (14-15)

Female lust could only be satisfied by penetration. If their insatiable nature led them to seek
unnatural pleasure, women, it was thought, would have to resort to copying nature in order
to meet their need.
It is the issue of penetration that opens up spaces for potential female homoeroticism in
the anchorhold. Though dildos and other tools of penetration have been excavated and
recorded in a variety of sources, most documentation of openly acknowledged woman-woman
eroticism has uncovered non-penetrative forms of sexual intercourse, such as cunnilingus,
22
tribadism, and mutual masturbation. Bernadette Brooten reports that a wall painting
uncovered in Pompeii, for instance, portrays the woman-woman activity as non-penetrative
(mostly oral copulation), while male-male and male-female sets participate in a broader
variety of pleasures (60; 152-54). Reconstructing such acts in the Middle Ages is more
difficult as sources - literary, historical, and visual - are scarce. As Murray points out, there
were many terminological difficulties encountered by writers who tried to discuss activities
for which no technical vocabulary existed (198). Non-penetrative woman-woman erotic acts
were rarely considered, or easily dismissed, in medieval theological constructs. This oversight
was most likely due to the widespread belief, sustained by Church theological treatises, that
woman-woman erotic encounters did not, and perhaps could not, involve penetration.
However, the penitentials allude to mutual masturbation and rubbing, and by making a
distinction between acts with and without an instrument, we know that medieval
theologians knew something non-penetrative could happen. The poem Le Livre de Manires,
written by Etienne de Fougres in the late twelfth century, expresses lesbian encounters using
non-penetrative images, such as two shields joining, and jousting by thigh fencing. Another
rather famous depiction of woman-woman eroticism is contained in the Bible Moralise (c.
1220 CE). The illustrated couple do not have an instrument of any sort; in fact, as Camille
demonstrates:
the rare depiction of a lesbian couple [in the Bible Moralise] follows more closely
the conventions of courtly art that we have traced, chin-chucking and kissing, whereas
the male couple are more unconventionally intertwined. Even in their sin against

81

nature men who love their own sex are seen as distinct from women who do the same.
The illuminator of this image was unable to imagine female to female sexual
intercourse, which explains why he has presented it in the most conventional terms.
(138-39)

That this Bible Moralise illustration could be presented so conventionally illustrates not
only a lack of imagination; I believe it also demonstrates the acknowledgement of nonpenetrative possibilities. That kissing is central to the lesbian scene is also significant to the
anchoritic possibilities.
Sex outside of the scope of penile-vaginal penetration (or penis-substitute-vaginal
penetration) may have been acknowledged, if not understood, but was not widely seen as
threatening. Non-penetrative pleasure was not technically sex; thus, the medieval view of
sodomy erases women from same-sex deviance - it is assumed they cannot perform sodomy
[since no ejaculation can occur] with each other - or erases the array of techniques they may
use to attain pleasure (Sautman and Sheingorn 23). Womens practices and their desire did
not greatly matter unless - and until - they co-opted the male instrument. These
interpretations of woman-woman erotic acts are more concerned with preservation of existing
heteronormative social structure than with potential sexual corruption. However, this power
(im)balance is directly linked another main problem with female penetration: while the
passive female partner retained her femininity per se, she might not retain her physical
virginity, even if she technically retained her chastity. This would be most damaging in the
case of a young marriageable woman. In this case, the active partner could be doubly liable.
Not only was she guilty of presuming to intrude upon male roles and male power, but she
also devalued her partner. Once the passive partners hymen was ruptured, she was practically
worthless on the marriage market, at least if her ruptured hymen was discovered. Medical
manuals provide remedies for broken hymens, such as concoctions made from egg whites,
alum, apples, and other plants and herbs, and some treatises give advice on fooling ones
23
bridegroom. Again, the disruption of the natural sexual hierarchy is the key. Penetrated
women were less desirable to men, who would then possess not a pure vessel, but rather
physical proof of sinful behaviour - that is that she gave into temptation, not just that she lost
her virginity. Moreover, in taking on the role of penetrator, a woman would not only usurp
the male sexual role, but would also gain the male subject role. Once phallic instead of
regulated, a woman could be seen and heard, and could give and take pleasure.
Thus, enclosure, the most secure way to regulate female behaviour and to mitigate female
disruption, needed to be codified and expanded. At no time in the medieval period was the
importance of enclosure made clearer than in the infamous papal bull of 1298 CE, Periculoso.
Elizabeth Makowski suggests that Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303) harboured a desire to
safeguard nuns from themselves; to diminish, if not completely remove, worldly
temptations (30). As the bull itself reads:
Wishing to provide for the dangerous and abominable situation of certain nuns, who,
casting off the reins of respectability and impudently abandoning nunnish modesty

82

and the natural bashfulness of their sex [] we do firmly decree [] that nuns
collectively and individually, both at present and in future, of whatsoever community
or order, in whatever part of the world they may be, ought henceforth to remain
perpetually cloistered in their monasteries [] so that [the nuns] be able to serve God
more freely, wholly separated from the public and worldly gaze and, occasions for
lasciviousness having been removed, may most diligently safeguard their hearts and
bodies in complete chastity. (Makowski 135)

Though the bull specifically applied to nuns, its sentiment was meant to be reflected in every
facet of female devotional expression. Ultimately, Periculoso and other such decretals proved
difficult to enforce, especially in a uniform manner, and had to be issued several times. Still,
some groups of women found their traditionally sanctioned mobility restricted in the wake of
Periculosos reformist zeal. Laywomen who went on pilgrimages required written permission
from their husbands to be outside the home. Anchoritism was reinforced as the most holy
occupation because of the extreme enclosure. Conversely, less enclosed women were looked
upon with strong suspicion because of their unchecked, rampant sexuality. For instance, in
England, a widespread network of female hermits had once existed, but societys misgivings
about their freedom of movement caused their numbers to shrink. Continental beguines
(women living together in semi-religious communities) would eventually be condemned as
24
heretics, although the two beguinages in England escaped that fate. Moreover, Periculosos
intent was already subverted by the sheer necessity of the interpenetration of convent walls by
male religious as well as abbesses, patronesses, servants, and other authorized members of the
community. Nuns were still subject to visits by priests, bishops, and other men, such as
visiting clerics and patrons. Abbesses were still required to go outside the monastery to
complete business. Hospital sisters still visited patients. Thus, in the language of Periculosos
attempt to impose greater strictures of enclosure onto religious women, gaps immediately
open up that are of great interest.
Representations of medieval sexuality are often our best clues to what might have been
the actual experiences of some womens lives. While prescriptive literature like Periculoso,
Ancrene Wisse, and the penitentials may not be actual reflections of historical events - most
likely they are reflections of what authorities wanted to happen - they are still invaluable tools
in uncovering gaps within our knowledge of the Middle Ages, and it is within these openings
that we can find the potentials for subversive practices and spaces like the lesbian void.
According to medieval authorities, as completely enclosed women, anchoresses should have
been the safest of all from occasions for lasciviousness. Yet, in the anchorhold at least, the
idea behind enclosure had the potential to backfire. Benkov sees the Church hierarchys
refusal to accept the possibility of non-phallic woman-woman eroticism as creating the
possibility of other female homoerotic practices: this very erasure - that is, the elision of
lesbian into sodomite and the emphasis on a material instrument - may well have been the
mechanism that allowed female homoaffective/homoerotic relationships to flourish (116).
This invisible aperture within the prescription of the early Church carried into the medieval
period this same potential. In other words, the very refusal to accept non-phallic woman83

woman erotic activities produced another lesbian void, to return to Jankowskis term, in
which the anchoress and her charges could play. Thus, the solidly enclosed four walls of the
anchorhold, bolstered by phallocentric notions of sexuality, provided the ideal lesbian void - a
safe, private space where women who lived in close proximity could enjoy erotic womanwoman encounters with little fear of discovery.

Notes
1

The word anchorite (f. anchoress) is derived from the Greek , meaning "I withdraw." By
the Middle Ages, anchorite addressed a specific vocation that included vows, though clerical profession
was unnecessary. The anchoritic vows included the following: obedience, chastity, and stability of
abode. In other words, anchorites were expected to follow the directives of their bishop, to refrain
from sexual activity, and remain in one location. Upon their profession, the new anchorite underwent
a burying ceremony during which he/she became liturgically "dead to the world."
2

"Lesbian" is an anachronistic term, but here its use is meant to dehistoricize it, as well as situate my
discussion within current textual practices.
3

Jankowski also discusses the specifically early modern meaning of "void": the expensive dessert course
reserved for the "most important guests at the feast" (303). However, as this definition applies only to
the post-medieval era, it is not as relevant to my discussion.
4

See "Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in A History of
Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1988), esp. 444-460.

Middle English literature has many representations of this lack of private sexual space. In numerous
medieval romances, references are made to "secret niches," presumably castle turrets, spaces under
rafters, unused garderobes, and so forth. In regards to the lower classes, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
records removing the husband from the house (The Miller's Tale), a tryst in a pear tree (The
Merchant's Tale), and a lover hiding in a trunk (The Shipman's Tale) as just a few examples.
6

As Jerome noted: "Now if this [the excesses of hermits caused by extended solitude] is true of men,
how much more does it apply to women whose fickle and vacillating minds, if left to their own
devices, soon degenerate" ("To Demetrias", in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. VI
[http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-06/Npnf2-06-03.htm]). Jerome offers similar advice in "To
Salvina": community living offered all the necessary restraints for women. For instance, to retain
female characteristics of meekness and restraint, the virgin should submit herself to older women.
7

In his Regula Solitariorum, Grimlaic specified a room twelve feet square. Archaeological excavations
have uncovered some much smaller cells. In "An Anchorite's Cell at Letherhead Church," (Surrey
Archaeological Collections 20 (1907): 223-25), Philip M. Johnston reports on a cell that was only eight
feet square, with 21" windows, and in "Compton Church - The Oratory," (Surrey Archaeological
Collections 51(1949): 154-55), J. H. Gibson describes a cell that was 6'8" by 4'4" that also had a tiny
sleeping loft. On the large end, Clay describes a "cell" in Chester-le-Street, Durham, that had four
rooms and two levels, and another two-storied one in York attached to All Saints' North Street that
had windows facing the high altar on both levels (83). See Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and
Anchorites of England (Methuen, 1921).

84

This does not mean that donations were not welcome or accepted, just that they were not necessary
for basic survival. For an in-depth look at anchoritic finances, see Ann K. Warren, Anchorites & Their
Patrons in Medieval England (U California P, 1985).
9

Ancrene Wisse is an early thirteenth century text, produced circa 1190-1220 CE. It survives in four
manuscripts: MS Titus, MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi, and MS Corpus Christi
402, though it is believed that there were originally at least nine more. For an extensive study of the
backgrounds of this treatise, see E. J. Dobson, Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Clarendon, 1976). In this
paper I am utilizing translations of the original Middle English and Latin sources.
10

Screens, grilles, walls, and other devices were erected to prevent too many looks either of or by the
nuns; however, at minimum, the nuns and the priest could have exchanged glances, especially during
reception of communion.

11

Anchorites viewed mass through narrowed angled "windows" chiseled into the stone wall called
squints or hagioscopes. These were barely wide enough to allow a full view of the high altar, and the
angles generally prevented spying on the chamber within.
12

See Warren, Anchorites & Their Patrons, p. 26. Warren also points out that the servants were "quasireligious" themselves.
13

Not all cells were built in this way. Other common locations included city walls and/or gates,
crossroads, bridges, and churchyards.

14

Black symbolizes that the anchoress is "black and unworthy"; the white crosses symbolize "purity
and maidenhood." See Ancrene Wisse, Part II: "The Outer Senses" (Savage & Watson 66).

15

The most famous of these, Andreas Capellanus' The Art of Love, discusses lustful looks in some
detail. For a good edition of this treatise, see Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. P. G. Walsh
(Duckworth, 1983), which contains parallel texts in Latin and English.
16

See Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon Letters, ed. Miran Bozovic (Verso, 1995). Bentham originally
published his ideas in 1787.

17

From Canticles 4:12. Holy Maidenhood is a thirteenth century text that is found in MS Titus and
MS Bodley 34. As with many medieval texts, it is difficult to date precisely. Commonly accepted
scholarship places its production after 1200 CE. Overall, the work is a homiletic piece written to
promote virginity.
18

In the medieval era, theological commentaries were the highest form of scholarship, and considered
to be crucial underpinnings of legal, social, and religious structures. Church teachings were
particularly strong in areas of private matters such as sexuality.

19

One exception dates to thirteenth century France. The law recorded in Li Livres de Jostice et de Plet
(c. 1260; compiled by legal school of Orlans) reads as follows: "The woman who does this
[homosexual practices] shall undergo mutilation (perdre membre) for the [first and second] offences (
chescune foiz), and on her third [conviction] must be burnt. And all the goods of such offenders shall
be the king's." See Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition
(Archon, 1975), p. 142. His translation is from the version found in P.N. Rapetti, ed. Li Livres de
Jostice et de Plet (Paris, 1850), 279-80. Bailey goes on to say: The death penalty is certainly prescribed,

85

but only for a third offence [man or woman] [] and there is no evidence that Louis IX was
particularly assiduous in applying it. For instance, out of over fifteen hundred judgments pronounced
in the Parlement [] during his reign, only one makes any reference to sodomites" (143).
20

Brundage further notes that penances for male masturbation were quite light, even if they involved
"mechanical aids," whereas penances for female autoeroticism tripled if a device was used. See Law,
Sex, and Christian Society, p. 167, n. 193.

21

The physician William of Saliceto discusses, albeit briefly, "lesbianism" that stems from a
protruding growth called a ragadia, which "arises from the mouth of the womb, ands flesh continues
to be added until sometimes it appears outside the vagina in the form of a penis. In this case []
women will sometimes act with other women as they [men] normally do during coitus" (in Bullough
& Brundage 196).

22

In Love Between Women, Brooten states: "Greek vase paintings depict individual women with
dildoes [sic], although I know of no vase painting that shows one woman penetrating another with a
dildo" (153).
23

See Monica H. Green, ed. and trans. The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval
Compendium of Women's Medicine (U Pennsylvania P, 2001), esp. pp. 103-04, 110, and 173-74.
24

For instance, the beguines would be condemned because they were purported to follow the heresy
of the Free Spirit, which among other things, advocated sexual freedom without repercussions. For
more background on this heresy, see Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle
Ages (U Notre Dame P, 1972). For information about the beguine movement, see Herbert
Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the
Mendicant Orders, and the Women's Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the
Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (U Notre Dame P, 1995), and
Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (U
Pennsylvania P, 2001).

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the Medieval World. A History of Private Life, vol.II. Ed. Georges Duby. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1988.
Benkov, Edith. The Erased Lesbian: Sodomy and the Legal Tradition in Medieval Europe. In
Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages. Ed. Francesca Canad Sautman and
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Brooten, Bernadette J. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female
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Brown, Judith C. Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. In Hidden from History:
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Brundage, James. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: U Chicago P,
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Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love. New York: Abrams, 1998.
Duby, Georges. The Aristocratic Households of France, Communal Living. In A History
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Dunn, F.I. Hermits, Anchorites and Recluses: A Study With Reference To Medieval
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Revelations of Divine Love. Ed. Frank Dale Sayer. Norwich, 1973.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage, 1995.
Frantzen, Allen J. Between the Lines: Queer Theory, the History of Homosexuality, and AngloSaxon Penitentials. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26/2 (1996): 255-96.
Fradenburg, Louise and Carla Freccero. Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History. In
Premodern Sexualities. Ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. New York & London: Routledge,
1996. xiii-xxiv.
Gilchrist, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women.
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Hergemoller, Bernd-Ulrich. Sodom and Gomorrah: On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of
Homosexuals in the Middle Ages. Trans. John Phillips. London: Free Association, 2001.
Holy Maidenhood. Trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson. Ancrene Wisse & Associated Works.
Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1991.
Jankowski, Theodora. in the Lesbian Void: Woman-Woman Eroticism in Shakespeares
Plays. In A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2000. 299-319.
Makowski, Elizabeth. Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators, 1298-1545.
Washington, DC: Catholic UP, 1997.
McNeill, John T. and Helena M. Gamer, eds. Medieval Handbooks of Penance [1938]. New York:
Columbia UP, 1990.
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88

Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque
Yael Sherman
While the grotesque body of Bakhtins theory has been taken up in feminist discourse on
both camp and the abject, particular political and potentially feminist dimensions of the
grotesque body as a site of communal transformation and liberation have yet to be elucidated.
Whereas discourse on both camp and the abject imagine the grotesque body as the exemplary
exceptional within the realm of the normal, effectively reinscribing hierarchical dichotomy in
the challenge to it, Bakhtins notion of carnival makes the grotesque body the center about
which the political dimensions of space are reconfigured. This notion of a transformative
liminal space, figured by the contradictory and perpetually incomplete body, finds resonance
and resistance in both Anzalduas liberatory allegory of the Borderlands and Haraways
emancipatory myth of the Cyborg. Using Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) as a platform of
analysis, I trace the connections between Bakhtin, Anzaldua, and Haraway, arguing that a
reconfigured carnival spirit finds its way into the political metaphorics of the Borderlands, the
1
Cyborg, and through them, into BtVS. These three figurations of the grotesque make visible
diverse modes of monstrous reproduction which call into question Kent Onos assertion
that BtVS privileges an antiseptic white culture (Ono 164) and insists that hierarchies of
race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality are normal and necessary (Ono 169). Not all of
these figurations of the grotesque map equally well onto BtVS and where they clash and
contrast, fissures, problems, and the liberatory limits of both BtVS and the theories themselves
are revealed.
Writing in the early twentieth century, Mikhail Bakhtin authored Rabelais and His
World, a work of literary criticism that not only expounded on Francois Rabelais, but also
serves as a treatise on folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Central to both
these projects is the carnival, a ritual time where all ranks and rules of life are dissolved in
contradiction, excess, and laughter. For Bakhtin, the carnival is a profoundly liberating space,
one that is irresistible and life-giving. In A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century Donna Haraway creates the myth of the
ironic and blasphemous (Haraway 149) cyborg, a creature that is both human and
machine, a being who embraces partial perspectives, lived contradiction, and kinship with
machines and animals (Haraway 154). The cyborg expresses disenchantment with grand
narratives, unity, and the dualisms that ensue under such a mandate. For Haraway, the cyborg
is to express socialist-feminism without damning technology or machine skill, a trend that she
worried was entirely too prevalent in feminist praxis. The cyborg is also conceived as a
monster who challenges gender and other natural categories. In Borderlands, La Frontera:
The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua creates a mythopoetic and personal history of colonialism
and endurance in the Southeastern region of the United States. Merging poetry and prose,
89

English and Spanish, Anzaldua details her struggle to lay claim to all parts of herself, against
cultural demands for oppressive (and often racist, sexist, or homophobic) unity. The
metaphor of the Borderlands has been influential in post-colonial and critical theory, shifting
discourse away from the margins as the place where difference is exiled, to thinking about
difference as the place physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other,
where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and
upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy
(Anzaldua 19), that is, as a site of conflict, encounter, and potential transformation.
Like carnival, television is also a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a
world in which allpeople participat[e], more or less, in which they liv[e] during a given
time of year (Bakhtin 6). Like carnival, people enter into the world of television at certain
repetitive and ritualistically determined times, particularly if they are fans, caught up in the
story of a particular show. Though viewership is conditioned by the lens of ones own
experience and worldview, when television watchers enter the story of a show, they leave the
rules that bind their lives behind in their experience of that show. Both television and carnival
represent escape from the ordinary, the humdrum, and from officialdom. During both
television shows, especially one such as BtVS, and carnival, spectators/participants may
experience temporary liberation from the prevailing truths and from the established
order.mark[ing] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions
(Bakhtin10). Although one consumes and participates without regard to rank for both of
these respective activities, there are important differences in the way that lack of rank is
2
experienced. Unlike carnival, people do not participate in television spectatorship in the
bodily sense; they cannot actually enter the realm of the show themselves. While laughter,
particularly in a show like BtVS, is meant to flow in both directions, where the characters
laugh at themselves (and sometimes the audience) and the audience laughs at the characters
and themselves, this laughter does not echo. It is not the degrading and rebirthing laughter of
carnival, but the laughter of spectatorship. The characters on a show may demonstrate their
incompleteness via their destruction and rebirth through laughter, but the show itself is
complete and closed in a way that carnival is not. Nonetheless, television shows, particularly
one such as BtVS, can function as a liminal space and provide a site for the expression and
consumption of the popular, festive, [and] indestructible (Bakhtin 33) carnival spirit. As
a pop culture production, the peoples second world (Bakhtin 6) with feminist aspirations,
BtVS provides a near-ideal postmodern site (Pender 2002) at which to investigate the
resonance of Bakhtins theory in the postmodern and its potentially liberatory politics.
The heart of the carnival, the Borderlands, and the myth of the Cyborg is the grotesque
body. For Bakhtin, as for Haraway and Anzaldua, the grotesque body is always
unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits (Bakhtin 26). In all of these theories,
the grotesque body is structured around the perpetual troubling of boundaries. For Bakhtin,
the grotesque body is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it
represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements (Bakhtin 27). Similarly cyborg
90

politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal
and machine (Haraway 176). The mestiza/queer figure of the Borderlands also represents a
kind of grotesque blending - the familiar blended with the strange, simultaneously
recognizable and transgressive. The grotesque body requires a liminal space outside
officialdom, literally the carnival and the Borderlands. For Haraway the cyborg also requires
an outside space organized around different values in which to exist and resist: the cyborg
does not dream of community on the model of the organic familythe cyborg would not
recognize the Garden of Eden(Haraway 151). Though Bakhtin claims that the realm of
the carnival is extrapolitcal, as this quote signals, the outside of society and what signifies
that outside is itself always already contoured by the political, understood in relation to it.
Though all these incomplete, contradictory, mutable, grotesque bodies are figures of
liberation, as we will explore through BtVS, the politics behind and configuring each
particular grotesque body in each theory are significantly different, though resonant.
In carnival, as in the Borderlands, and the myth of the cyborg, the space of liminality
serves to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different
elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world,
from conventions and established truths, from clichs, from all that is humdrum and
universally accepted (Bakhtin 34). To begin with, BtVS is literally outside the regime of the
normal, as it takes place in a speculative universe where magic and vampires are real. But
besides this initial conceit which it shares with other shows, BtVS uses what Haraway calls
blasphemy and irony (Haraway 149) to invert conventions, truths, and clichs, and thus to
liberate. The premise of the show is a subversion that is both ironic and faithful to a major
clich of horror movies and femininity: Joss Whedon intentionally created BtVS as an
inversion of the horror movie scene in which the blond girl runs into an alley, the bad
guy/monster follows, the girl is killed, and the bad guy/monster walks out victorious. In
Whedons defining image of BtVS, the blonde girl walks out of the alley dusting her hands
and the monster is dead. But rather than become a solitary hero in the Western tradition,
3
Buffy subverts this clich and creates a community to support her in her heroic otherness.
Aside from subversions built into the show itself, individual episodes often feature
turnabouts and reversals of expected events, as when the Mothers Oppose the Occult
(MOO), a group headed by Buffys mother, attempts to burn Buffy, Willow, and Amy at the
stake (Gingerbread 3011) or when the expected training montage a la The Karate Kid
becomes a song of farewell and mourning in the musical (Once More, With Feeling 6007).
Finally, the show even subverts its own clichs. Every episode in the first two seasons, and the
first episode of every season after that, begins with the male bass intoning [i]nto each
generation a Slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the
strength and skill to fight the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their
4
numbers. But after Buffy dies the first time and is brought back to life (Prophesy Girl
1012), there are perpetually two slayers (first Kendra, who joins Buffy and then is killed in
Season Two, thus bringing Faith into her Slayer powers in Season Three), sometimes in
cooperation, sometimes in conflict. The ideology of One girl in all the world is broken, and
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the show itself is shown to be continually incomplete, contradictory and a site structured by
the peculiar logic of the inside out, of the turnabout (Bakhtin 11). Such incompleteness
speaks to the constant unraveling and revelation of truths.
The structure of BtVS reflects another important aspect of carnival: the significance of
laughter and contradiction. Laughter is the sign of the burying and rebirth of the grotesque
body and thus, it is laughter that makes carnival a site of regeneration. This laughter is
profoundly equalizing, for [a]ll that was frightening in ordinary life is turned in amusing or
ludicrous monstrosities(Bakhtin 47). That which is frightening becomes liberating, reflecting
the irony of Haraways cyborg, where what has been deeply troubling to feminists, the
Western lure of technology and promise, is buried and rebirthed as a metaphor of liberation.
BtVS reflects this aspect of the carnival spirit as in the first three seasons, BtVS made monsters
metaphors for the angst and travails of teen life, e.g. steroid abuse is depicted as
transformation into evil fish creatures (Go Fish 2020) and rich fraternity brothers are
depicted as demon worshippers who sacrifice women (Reptile Boy 2005). These monsters
are dealt with seriously, but are made simultaneously ludicrous. Buffy continuously jibes at
monsters and vampires, making comments such as alright, I get it, youre evil. Do we have to
chat about it all day? (Amends 3010) and Im Buffy and youre history (Never Kill a
Boy on the First Date 1005) that disrupt the seriousness of the monsters and render the
fearful characters amusing. Buffy invites us into carnival through her puns and buries the
monsters as such, recasting them as amusing grotesqueries. Such laughter destabilizes the
stable and complete truth of the evil of monsters, upsetting the audiences expectation that
such a monster can only cause fear and obedience and thus, liberating the viewer temporarily
from fear.
However, as in carnival no one laughs from a privileged space protected from laughter:
the main characters of BtVS, Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles (the core group stable through
seven seasons), as well as Spike, Angel, Cordelia, Oz , and Anya, are those who laugh[and]
they too are incomplete(Bakhtin 12) and are also laughed at in BtVS. Contradictions
between what the character should be, were the character to be whole, complete, and stable,
and the truth of contradictory selves is stock amusement for BtVS: ever-competent Buffy
herself becomes a cave-girl after drinking Bad Beer and drags a boy she likes off by his hair
(Beer Bad 4005); Anya, the (mostly) former vengeance demon is shown to be scared of
bunnies and is teased for it; Giles, the professional adult, was out of a job all of fourth season;
the good Giles is turned into a demon and nearly killed by Buffy, much to Spikes
amusement( A New Man 4012); Spike calls himself the Big Bad after he is rendered
impotent as a vampire through technology and is teased in the fourth season; Oz wakes up
naked, defenseless, and outside, after becoming a werewolf during the full moon (Phases
2015); Joyce, Buffys professional and respectable mother, sleeps with Giles after both ate
magically treated chocolate that turned them into their teenaged selves (Band Candy 3006).
The transformations engendered by magic and made real on screen are metaphors for the
changes and transformations of real life. Sometimes these are stabilized, as when the band
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candy or beer wears off or an enchantment is reversed; other times, contradiction is

perpetual, as it is with Buffy, Oz, and Anya. Not only is the audience invited to laugh at these
contradictions and transformations, but the characters also frequently make fun of each other.
Their selves and self-illusions of wholeness are also continually destroyed and reborn in that
laughter, just as the monsters are struck down, by Buffys wit and work, and rise again.
But are all bodies equally grotesque in BtVS? Though the carnival effects of laughter are
evident on nearly all characters, BtVS does not display the equality of the carnival, where
everyone becomes a participant. As Bakhtin writes, even in the Renaissance bodies could not
be considered for themselves; they represented a material bodily whole and therefore
transgress the limits of their isolation. The private and the universal were still blended in
contradictory unity(Bakhtin 23). Bakhtin assumes that all differences between individuals
are immaterial in the unity of the grotesque body, such that the grotesque body of one calls
forth the carnival spirit of another. Because all differences between people become immaterial,
the carnival is an extrapolitical space. In contrast, in the postmodern, the age of
hyperliberalism, bodies are so fragmented as to be only for themselves, and the problem
becomes one of creating a politics that respects difference, but imagines a collectivity that
struggles for justice. As Haraway asks, [w]hat kind of politics could embrace partial,
contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still
be faithful, effective, and ironically, socialist feminist? (Haraway 157) Rather than displaying
carnivalesque equality between all characters on BtVS that would negate the structure of
good/evil and thus be extrapolitical, the main characters form a community together, called
the Scooby gang. As we will see, this community reflects a partial answer to Haraways
question. Where carnival is involuntary and extrapolitical, one must choose to lay claim to all
contradictory parts of the self (human and slayer, witch and computer programmer) in order
to be a true Mestiza in the Borderlands, which, for Anzaldua, necessitates continual growth,
5
the work of coalition and fighting for justice. Similarly, the cyborg, though created by
oppressive power, must chose to engage in the contradictory cyborg politics which similarly
demand coalition with and across differences.
The structure of the Scooby gang is similar to both cyborg politics and a coalitional
model of politics as espoused in the Borderlands, but refuses the carnivals endorsement of an
extrapolitical unity in the grotesque. In the Scooby gang, characters recognize each other in
their partial and contradictory selves, but come together in a collective to fight evil (in figures
frequently metaphoric of patriarchy). The Scooby gang (in various seasons) is made up of
contradictory/incomplete bodies: Buffy herself, both Slayer and high school student (for the
first three years), both a girly girl and a kickboxing action hero. Her valley-girl-isms, a
parodic cuteness of language (If the apocalypse comes, beep me in Never Kill a Boy on the
First Date 1005), combined with her strong punches and kicks, make her amusing,
ludicrous, and grotesque. Further, Buffy chooses to create a community rather than engage in
6
traditional heroics, a contradiction with her role as slayer/hero. Willow, Buffys best friend, is
similarly contradictory, as she is a computer nerd, a social outcast, a witch, and lesbian. Oz is
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a werewolf guitarist; Xander, a sensitive man; Cordelia is both a popularity queen and Scooby
member; Anya is a former vengeance demon, high school student, and Magic Shop Manager;
Giles is a librarian, formerly Ripper, and former black arts aficionado, and Buffys Watcher;
finally, Spike is romantic, violently impotent, a Vampire, and later ensouled. Angel, though
never a full part of the Scooby gang, often fights with or for Buffy and is himself both a
Vampire and ensouled. Though the paradigm of good guys against bad guys is operative in
BtVS, the boundaries between good and bad are consistently broken, and an essential
complete truth of the selves of the characters, refused. Oz is a dangerous werewolf during
three nights a month, but a loyal friend; Anya used to be a vengeance demon and become one
again after Xander left her at the altar, before being turned back into a human as a
punishment. Willow and Xander, conflicted as they are in ordinary life, are shown to be
vampires, the ultimate Other of the show, in a near alternate reality (The Wish 3009), and
Willow herself later becomes evil and attempts to destroy the world (Two to Go 6021 and
Grave 6022).
These contradictions and transformations are accepted, buried, and rebirthed in the
cyborg politics/Borderlands space of the Scooby Gang, which allows the Scooby Gang to exist
as a community in a literal Borderlands between the human/normal and the demonic/other.
What maintains this community is choice; the characters choose - as opposed to the injunction
of carnival - to enter into and maintain community with each other in order to fight evil.
They maintain a contradictory space where they can maintain their conflicted selves entire
and move between worlds, where they can refuse the values of the dominant order even while
fighting for justice. This a political space and a political choice - both the cyborg and the
Borderlands are birthed involuntarily by oppressive regimes, but speak to the possibility of
choosing to actively resist those regimes over time (as opposed to the involuntary and
irresistible opposition of the carnival to the status system) through a politics of hybridization,
7
contradiction, and coalition.
This raises the question of who is excluded from the Scooby Gang: if these renderings of
the grotesque body do not invoke cosmic participation, who is not permitted to enter the
liminal space of transformation? Though this is a Borderlands community, it is also defined
through whom it excludes (or who chooses not to become a part of the Scooby gang). In
BtVS, certain people cannot enter the Scooby gang: those who are fully human and incapable
of seeing the demonic (the Other) and those who are fully Other, the demonic. That these
categories are not absolute and that entrance into the Borderlands community is a choice
based on commitment to justice is shown in the treatment of certain characters. Angel, a
vampire with a soul, is a Champion who enters the community in Seasons One and Two
(before he loses his soul and becomes evil, is resouled, sent to hell, and returned). Similarly,
Spike, another vampire, who is implanted with a chip that gives him pain every time he hurts
a human being (Season Four), is recuperated into the Borderlands community, where he
learns empathy and begins to fight for good on his own. Cordelia, originally a popular girl
invested in the dominant (human) order and blind to the demonic, becomes a part of the
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gang when her eyes are opened. Those who deny the demonic (difference as it is portrayed
here) and those who deny the human world are barred from their own choice from entering
Buffys Borderlands community. While Anzalduas Borderlands is indeed the space of lived
contradiction born of imperialism and colonialism, the politics that emerges from it is one of
coalition and the creation of community situated between worlds. As we see from the
examples above, characters are shown changing, constantly becoming in their Borderlands
community, but they maintain this Borderlands community (as opposed to involuntary and
8
temporary invocation of carnival) through their collective commitment to fighting evil.
If the difference between the carnival and postmodern feminist figurations of the carnival
is that of choice, how does this impact the configuration of the central grotesque body of
each theory? The grotesque body is always already political, set within a particular field of
values within which it must be read. The grotesque body is grotesque because it inverts
dominant hierarchies and ruptures dominant values; it is ambivalent and contradictory.
ugly, monstrous, hideous from the point of view of classic aesthetics, that is the aesthetics of
the ready-made and the completed (Bakhtin 25). For Bakhtin the grotesque image reflects a
phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth,
growth and becoming (Bakhtin 24). Bakhtins grotesque body is quintessentially the
(laughing) birthing hag, the fetishized image of the morbid maternal, womans immanent,
fleshy, excess. For Bakhtin, woman is always already outside, by virtue of her sex, and the
carnival is simply an exaggeration of what is already understood to be female/outside.
Haraway explicitly refuses the morbid maternal, writing that holistic politics depend on
metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest
that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix
and of most birthing (Haraway 181). Similarly, the two quintessential figures of the
Borderlands, the Mestiza, forerunner of a new race,/half and half - both woman and man,
neither - /a new gender a crossroads(Anzaldua 216), and the unraced Queer, for ..[a]s a
lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the
queer of me in all races (Anzaldua 102), both refuse the reproductive matrix.
The latter formulation here echoes Bakhtins cosmic unity, however, for Anzaldua this
cosmic unity is invoked through a queer sexuality, a mode of being, rather than through the
grotesque body of woman, the laughing birthing hag. Haraway refuses the morbid maternal
via a scientific metaphor of regeneration that erases gender, materiality, and historicity, while
Anzaldua refuses the morbid maternal via a shapeshifting (becoming the other) and creation
of community through affinity, both of which are undergirded by a repudiation of
patrilineage and childbirth as the primary mode of reproduction/regeneration. All three
figures mark otherness, but the cyborg and the mestiza/queer represent a political attempt to
reclaim and reinvest otherness with a central place in a new social order. Bakhtins grotesque
body is meant to always be grotesque, it is outside of politics and officialdom and thus does
not change them; rather it signals liberation from politics in a cosmic unity based on an
always already othered female metamorphosis. In contrast, Anzalduas and Haraways figures
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are meant to invite change that will revalue the grotesque and provide a model for an
ongoing politics of the grotesque. All three figures represent liberation and utopia, but the
explicit politics of the latter two also present political possibility, rather than a liminal
liberation which marks release from the political.
Though the main characters of BtVS are incomplete, changing, and contradictory, they
resonate with the grotesque body of each theory differently and to different degrees.
Though a reading of each character in the Scooby gang through the lens of each particular
grotesque body would prove interesting, as Buffy is the central figure of the show, the
investigation will be restricted to her. As Vivian Chen argues in Buffy? Shes Like, Shes Not
Like Me - Shes Rad that while appearing to endorse (and simultaneously campily
undermining) normative whiteness and blondness, Buffy may harbor an inappropriate
other within herself(Chin 102). For Chen, this inappropriate other resonates with racial
difference. The inappropriate other is at the heart of my discussion of the grotesque, and
each theory provides a way to think through the implications of the inappropriate other.
Buffy resonates with the mestiza, the queer, the cyborg, and aspects of Bakhtins grotesque,
but she herself refuses the matrix of the morbid maternal. It is not her fleshy excesses that
make her grotesque; rather the grotesque manifests through her modes of monstrous
reproduction, transgression of subjectivities, and blurring of subject boundaries in a mode of
feminist heroics that render her grotesque.
Originally, Buffys secret identity as the Slayer was meant to stand in for homosexuality.
In the Season Two finale, Becoming, Buffy must come out to her mother, Joyce, after her
mother sees her slay a vampire:
Buffy: Mom Im a Vampire Slayer.
Joyce: Honey, a-are you sure youre a Vampire Slayer?
....
Joyce: I mean have you tried *not* being a slayer?
Buffy: Mom!...

Joyce: Its because you didnt have a strong father figure, isnt it?
Buffy: Its just fate, Mom. Im the Slayer. Accept it.

Joyce: Well I just dont accept that!

Buffy: Open your eyes, Mom. What do you think has been going on for the past two
years? The fights, the weird occurrences. How many times have you washed blood out
of my clothing, and you still havent figured it out?
Joyce: Well, it stops now!
Buffy: No it doesnt stop! It *never* stops! Do-do you think I chose to be like this? Do
you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would *love* to be upstairs
watching TV or gossiping about boys or God, even studying! But I have to save the
9

world again.

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This scene marks Buffy as the Queer in multiple ways. Joyces response is typical of a parent
who does not want their child to be gay: the refusal to validate, the question of choice, and
particularly, blaming the childs queerness on the lack of a strong father figure. Joyce denies
her childs assertion of difference, but Buffy asserts she must have known all along. The ways
that her difference is manifested - fights, weird occurrences, and particularly, stains - bodily
fluids - on the clothes as the aftermath of her hidden activities, read as markers of queerness.
Finally, Buffys assertion that she did not choose to be different, that her difference makes her
lonely and makes the world dangerous for her, reads right out of the coming out script. She
did not choose to be different, but fate chose her and both Joyce and Buffy must deal with
her queerness. As is typical in this kind of confrontation, Joyce orders Buffy to stay in the
house and cease her queer activities or else never come back, but Buffy leaves anyway, in order
to do what she was chosen to do. The final scene in this episode, after Buffy sends Angel to
hell (and after she believes all of her friends have rejected her illicit love for a vampire, for
10
Angel, another trope of queerness ), shows Buffy on a bus with a bag, running away like so
many other queer youth who have been rejected by family and community.
However, in the next episode, Anne, Buffy reclaims her identity as Slayer and returns
to Sunnydale to confront her buried demons. The lack of easy reception, in spite of her own
coming to terms with her queerness, demonstrates that Buffys difference comes with a price
and marks her as Other. As the queer in all races, in Anzalduas problematic assertion, Buffy
represents the possibility of connection with other Others. In order to survive and hold on to
both her (white, American) girlhood and her slayer destiny, she must build a community in
which her queerness is acceptable, thus nonsexually reproducing her difference and creating a
11
liminal space of transformation for both herself and others.
Buffy is also a Mestiza figure, walking the borderlands between the demon world and the
12
human world, between two or more cultures that edge each other (Anzaldua, 19). Her
slayer powers come from the demonic realm, but she herself is ensouled and human. Though
she uses her powers against demons, locating herself on the human side, she nonetheless
belongs to both worlds. While Buffy longs to be fully a part of the legitimate, human world,
when her other side is taken away, she regrets it, longs for her power, and verifies her identity
as the Slayer. In Halloween (2006) and Helpless (3012), Buffy must deal with the world
after her powers have been taken away. In Halloween, her longing to be a pretty princess
leads her to purchase (unknowingly) an enchanted costume, one that makes her into a
helpless girl. She is nearly eaten by Spike (pre-chip insertion) before Giles breaks the spell and
returns her to her Mestiza self. She smiles, says, Its good to be me (Halloween 2006) and
proceeds to fight off Spike and frighten him away. Buffy is bound to both worlds and requires
all of her selves to navigate between them. As this episode shows, though she may want to
periodically escape from her divided self, she also enjoys her powers and recognizes that they
define her self as well.

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In Helpless (3012) Buffys watcher Giles injects her with a potion that deprives her of
th
her abilities, a required test of the Slayer on her 18 birthday. In her ignorance, she panics,
knowing that she cannot act in the demon world. Giles later confesses his act and she reacts
angrily, rightly treating it as a violation of her bodily integrity. When Buffy later goes to
confront a vampire who has stolen her mother away (without her powers), Giles follows her
to help and is fired by the council for his actions. Buffy destroys the vampire with her wits
and saves her mother. Throughout this episode, Buffy constantly evinces desire for her full
powers and regrets that this part of her self was stolen away. She even recognizes that her
Other self gives her powers in the human world, when she realizes that she cannot confront
the boorish men who nearly assault her on her way home. Perpetually torn between cultures,
perpetually incomplete, but powerful in the resources of both her selves, BtVS refuses the
collapse into one essential identity or another, instead illuminating the dilemma and potential
of the Mestiza figure. Although Buffy does build a Borderlands community that supports all
of her multiple selves, she remains essentially Other from the other members of the Scooby
gang, for her ability and their abilities to move competently in the worlds of demon/human
13
are never comparable. The Borderlands are never ending, never unified, never complete:
Buffy is always central and on the margins of her own community. There is no end to the
grotesque, only perpetual growth and ongoing encounter with the grotesque.
For Anzaldua, the Borderlands is both a metaphor to describe a liminal place where
difference is encountered and transformation takes place, as well as a real place produced by a
history of colonialism and imperialism. While the first aspect maps cleanly onto BtVS (see
14
above), the second does not. Acknowledging that this is a polysemous text, I offer some
possible mappings of race as it pertains to the Borderlands in BtVS. One possible reading of
race is to see Buffy as an imperialist, or someone who has defected to the imperialist side,
given that she uses her demon powers against vampires and other demons to further the
aims of the human world, while simultaneously refusing to exact justice on the human world.
15
This reading substantiates the neocolonialist thesis (Ono). However, if we read colonial
relations the other way around, then we see that Buffy has come to an understanding of her
16
demon powers and values that aspect of herself while pursuing justice, an interpretation
discussed in the paragraph above. A recent scene from Angel (Damage 5011), the BtVS spinoff, offers this potential reversal to the neocolonialist narrative:
(After encountering an insane slayer who cut off Spikes hands and killed several men
in her insanity, Spike and Angel (both ensouled) have the following discussion
regarding the disturbed Slayer):
Spike: Shes like us. Shes a monster
Angel: Shes an innocent victim
Spike: So were we all, once upon a time

Here, the demonic itself is portrayed as a colonizing force, one that has victimized innocents
in its drive for blood (the goods), evil, or destruction. Those former innocents are either
killed or infected by the drives and values of the colonizer, an interpretation which also
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resonates to a very limited extent with the history of American colonialism. The lack of a
history of the Buffyverse makes it difficult to determine the definitive narrative of colonialism.
Instead, what is apparent is that the vampire is construed as Other in terms that connote
racist representation, such as excessive and immediate appetite, violent tendencies, and
inhuman, the gameface of the vampire (Ono), while Buffy, mestiza though she is, is
constructed in terms of white, middle-class blondness. But this representation does not
foreclose other possibilities of imperialism and colonialism on both sides of the border. Given
this confusion, we cannot locate cleanly where Buffy herself belongs in this narrative of
colonialism and imperialism, but can only gesture to problems of racism and representation in
BtVS. This mapping of the Borderlands fails to provide an authoritative reading of the text,
but works to trouble the issues of race, representation, and colonialism in BtVS.
17

Given that magic is a form of technology in BtVS, Buffy is also a Cyborg. She discovers
in Season Seven (Get It Done 7015) that the first slayer was made when the Shamans
(somewhere in primitive Africa) chained a young woman to a stone and unleashed
demons on her soul, thus producing a hybrid human/demon: the Slayer. This creation story is
also verified by Dracula in the Season 5 (Buffy vs. Dracula 5001) who tells Buffy that All
these years fighting us. Your power so near to our own and you've never once wanted to know
18
what it is we fight for. Buffys power is the mirror image of the vampires; she has their
extra-strength and amazing timing, but she retains her human qualities. Indeed, Buffy is the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.
But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins (Haraway 151).
Created by the masters of the system, the Shamans, Buffy is illegitimate in the sense that she
was made without her mothers (or her own) permission. She also proves to be unfaithful to
her origins, first by dismissing the Council of Watchers (a patriarchal organization that trains
and gives orders to the Slayer through her Watcher) in Graduation Day (Part 2, 2020) and
thus graduating into autonomy and leadership, and second, by refusing the power offered
to her by the same Shamans who created the first slayer in Get It Done (7015). After she
travels to their time/space through magic, the Shamans chain her to the same rock and
unleash a demon, the source of her Slayer powers, a transformation that Buffy fears will
further destroy her humanity. Buffy fights back, using her Slayer/Cyborg strength to free
herself from her chains. She maintains her cyborg body: demonic power (technology) and
humanity, refusing to give up either aspect.
Two problems with the cyborg theory arise in conjunction with BtVS: the problem of
desire and the problem of power and exploitation. Rather than finding pleasure in the myth
of the Garden of Eden, Haraways cyborg is to find pleasure in the confusion of boundaries
(Haraway 150). This formulation has several effects. The first is to eroticize the cyborg body
itself, while stigmatizing other forms of desire. Buffy herself is unlike a cyborg in that she
pursues heterosexual love and romance (Buffy chooses to save Angel in the Season 3 finale
despite the impending end of Sunnydale) as well as the protection of family against the call to
duty (she refuses to kill her sister Dawn, despite pragmatic arguments to the contrary). Under
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the myth of the cyborg, Buffys actions would be forbidden, rendered Other by the
19
valorization of the grotesque. The second effect of this formulation of desire is to legitimate
rape, an act which could be implied in or result from the confusion of boundaries and the
characterization of cyborgs as illegitimate (Haraway 150-1). The original rape of the first
Slayer by demon power in service of the men in charge, as a metaphor for the production of a
cyborg, is not forbidden by Haraways theory and makes a problematic sort of sense, both in
that rape can be read as a metaphor of exploitation and domination under capitalism, and in
that cyborgs are the desexualized avatars of change. Interestingly, rape is also an aspect of
Bakhtins carnival and the liberation from rules and norms. Needless to say, a theory which
does not problematize the working of power in rape while seeming to legitimate rape is
suspect.
The problem of power and exploitation echoes the problems associated with desire in
general and rape in particular in the cyborg narrative. Adam (the cyborg created by the
Initiative, a military organization) dramatizes these problems in Season 4. Adam, following
Haraways cyborg narrative, does repudiate those who made him and their claims to him, a
perfect blasphemous cyborg. He goes on a killing spree and tries to take power by violently
creating more cyborgs - a problematic resolution that is only indicted by Haraways feministsocialist politics and not her model of the cyborg. Here, we see that whatever kinship Adam
feels for machines and animals (Haraway 154) in no way translates into respect for humans
(and/or a refusal to engage in exploit or oppress them); instead he can only value them insofar
as he violently transforms them into images of himself. Again, this implies that only grotesque
bodies can be valued in the new myth of the cyborg. Indeed, the model of coalition (with
other sorts of non-cyborg people) is much weaker in the cyborg model as the cyborgs own
necessarily perverse desires of contamination and contradiction and this illusory kinship
are the only moral poles that operate to guide the cyborg. We are not pushed to ask about
the workings of history, beyond the history of the individual, as we are in the case of the
Borderlands mapping. In the cyborg model, technology (magic) is the more powerful source
that must be rebelled against or used perversely, a formulation which avoids questions about
20
power and the multiplicity of oppression. When the cyborg is a moral being, such as Buffy,
these questions are not provoked, for Buffy fits the expectations of feminist theory. When,
however, a cyborg such as Adam makes other, what we might consider amoral choices, the
cyborg theory provides no grounding for understanding the dynamics of power behind such a
move. Adam is Buffys shadow-image, deprived of community and incapable of forming one
21
without violence. The cyborg theory offers an ordering of power that Others non-cyborg
bodies, a potentially dangerous move when combined with the lack of attention to the
22
multiplicity of power relations.
The refusal of the morbid maternal is most clearly evident in the question of death and
rebirth/regeneration. Buffy is explicitly not a maternal figure on the verge of death, rather in
her perpetually adolescent girls body, Buffy is nearly anti-maternal. Instead of being reborn
or birthing others, Buffy is regenerated in the manner of a cyborg and reproduces in the
100

manner of the Mestiza/Queer. Buffy actually dies twice and is brought back to life both times
by her friends. The first time she is killed is in the Season 1 Finale, Prophecy Girl (1012.)
Buffy goes to confront the Master (an incredibly old and powerful Vampire) and is killed by
him - humiliated and drowned. Xander and Angel follow her into the Masters caves, too late
to stop her death, and Xander breathes life back into her body. She is regenerated, more
powerful than she was before, without fear. She confronts the Master again, and destroys him.
Read metaphorically, this symbolizes the importance of community and the support of
friends, and represents a regeneration of the self through friendship. The second time Buffy
dies, she sacrifices herself to save the world and her sister, Dawn, a noble world-saving
sacrifice of the kind usually denied women. She is brought back to life months after her death
in a ceremony led by her Wiccan best-friend, Willow, but returns to her regenerated body
confused and unhappy. Though Buffys friends thought she was in Hell, she later explains she
was in Heaven. She is made less, rather than more by her unwilling regeneration: she had
achieved peace, but was brought back by her friends into earthly conflict. Rather than going
down to the degraded realm, Buffy was regenerated after she went up to the realm of
perfection, and thus she could not easily reenter the imperfection of life. This serves as an
example of the necessity of degradation [which] digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not
only a destructive negative aspect, but also a regenerating one (Bakhtin 21). Athough Buffy
can step out of the reproductive matrix and be regenerated after a humiliating, degrading
death in a watery grave to no ill effects, regeneration after a noble sacrifice and journey to
heaven is damaging.
Buffy also reproduces in a queer way via her sister Dawn. Dawn used to be a ball of
energy, called the key, but was turned into a human being by monks trying to save the
world (Season Five). Using Buffys blood, Dawn was created as a genetic replica of Buffy and
became her sister, inserted into Buffys life through magic. After Buffys moms death, Buffy
becomes her sisters caregiver, the maternal figure in her life. The maternal is recuperated, but
only by denying the fleshy elements of birth and thus, death. This is not a cyborg
regeneration, but a mode of reproduction more like that of the Queer - reproduction through
affinity. Though the monks make the key into Dawn, Dawn chooses to stay with Buffy and
be in her family, which can be read as a metaphor of fate, queerness, and the formation of
family or a supportive, nurturing, queer community. Neither cyborg or the morbid
maternal, this example embodies Anzalduas concept of a queer/mestiza nonsexually
reproductive community: As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all
countries are mine because I am every womans sister or potential lover (Anzaldua 102).
In the resonance and differences between these three theories, BtVS provides glimpses
of how the carnival might work in the postmodern and how feminism might take up the
carnival. BtVS exemplifies one of the main differences between the carnival and the
Borderlands/Cyborg space, in that the latter two require the formation of community, a
contradictory whole, with its own standards and a recognized political agenda, while the
former claims to include everyone involuntarily without a political agenda, but which
101

accomplishes the grotesque through the expulsion of woman from the rational. BtVS also
recuperates the place of laughter - not just irony - in destroying and remaking both main
characters and monsters, creating a world that is driven by politics (the injunction to fight
evil), but also becomes extrapolitical in those fleeting moments when fear is destroyed and
complete liberty reigns. Buffy puns and we know that she will pun again, that the cycle of
laughter, killing monsters, and the birth of new monsters will continue. Even in the
Borderlands of Buffys community, the carnival is fleeting. For while Haraway and Anzaldua
imagine the grotesque as the union of contradictory wholes, differentially valued in society,
Bakhtin imagines the grotesque as the exaggeration of that which is already outside society
and which all step into, into a space of ever-renewed order. The carnival is of necessity
instable, impossible to hold on to, but the Borderlands and the space of cyborg politics can be
lived. BtVS balances these contradictory forces in its own parodic and self-contradictory way,
demonstrating what Haraway calls [i]rony [which] is about contradictions that do not
resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically.[and] tension of holding incompatible things
together because both or all are necessary and true(149). BtVS portrays the rupture and
troubling of boundaries through the central figure of the grotesque body (advocated by all
three theories), which embodies this disruption and invites others - perhaps even the audience
- into similar, liberating disruptions. Though BtVS does not pull the audience into bodily
participation, as Bakhtin advocates, it follows Anzalduas call to portray images, words,
stories [which] have this transformative power, [because they] arise from the human body flesh and bone - and from the Earths body - stone, sky, liquid, soil (Anzaldua 97). The
stories of BtVS are indeed rooted in the flesh and in the elements. Finally, BtVS portrays
degradation and nonsexual reproduction, death and nonsexual rebirth, in a way that
combines Bakhtins theory of the carnival and cyborg politics/Borderlands, embodying new
modes of regeneration and pointing to a way that these theories can come together in offering
new visions of transformation that challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality, and
race. Ironically, the carnival itself is an insufficient utopia, as are the political strategies of the
Borderlands or cyborg politics. However, in the play of contradictions between the theories,
BtVS provides a new way to see - and make sense of - the world, sporadically, ironically,
offering a politically-engaged utopian vision.

Notes
1

BtVS has received a great deal of critical attention in the last few years. Three recent anthologies,
Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television; Fighting the Forces:
What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and
Trembling in Sunnydale (see Works Cited) all deal with a range of issues, including gender, sexuality,
feminism, racism, religion, ethics, fandom, watching Buffy, and meaning of dreams. The online
journal Slayage (www.slayage.tv) has also created a site for ongoing discussion and critical appraisal of
the show. Though the issue of community as defining a type of feminist ethics, or what I would call a
new feminist heroics has made appearances throughout this literature (see Wilcox, Who Died and
Made Her the Boss?; Playden, What you are, whats to come; Miller, The I in Team; and
Thompson, Staking it to the Man), only one so far has dealt with the importance of liminality in
structuring Buffy's community. In Slayage 8, Jes Battis uses Bakhtin's theory to analyze Willow as
person in a state of becoming. But where Battis uses Bakhtin's theory (among others) to decode

102

Willow as a character, I engage in a more expansive feminist analysis and use BtVS to interrogate
Bakhtin's grotesque body and contrast it with Anzaldua's and Haraway's similarly monstrous
creatures. See Battis, "'She's Not All Grown Yet.'"
2

Assuming one has the resources to participate in carnival and to own a TV. A new ranking system
might be experienced while watching TV however, just as new ranks are given in carnival. One might
be a devoted fan who enjoys the show much more than a neophyte, since one has the history of the
show to draw on. This difference is marked on various chat sites, notably on Television Without Pity
[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/faq.cgi?show=0&q=567] where ranks are assigned given how
much a person posts on a particular show.
3

The "Solitary Hero" is found throughout the Western canon, but is typified in the Western itself,
where the cowboy rides into town, sets everything in order and rides out, alone, into the sunset. In this
tradition, a hero can only be a hero if he (I use the male pronoun purposely here) has no attachments
to anyone and is unhampered in his duty. In other words, the "solitary hero" exemplifies the perfectly
autonomous self. Buffy's attempts to force her mother away in times of trouble resonate with this
tradition; however, her reliance on Giles and her friends stands in opposition to it. For a more
extensive discussion of the solitary hero and Buffy's subversion of this trope see Wilcox, "'Who Died
and Made Her the Boss?'"
4

Quotation taken from "Backstory" on UPN - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Official BtVS site).
[http://www.upn.com/shows/buffy/backstory/index.shtml].
5

While one may not have chosen to be born into or to live in the Borderlands, for Anzaldua, one does
choose what to do with that fate - deny part of the self in order to fit into either culture, or transcend
dualism and embrace contradiction. In the chapter "La conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New
Consciousness" Anzaldua outlines how one is to find and embrace all parts of the self. This includes
taking inventory, followed by a "conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and
religions" (104), the recording of this, and the creation of new myths. For Anzaldua, this process is
necessarily feminist and anti-racist.
6

To clarify: Buffy becomes the Slayer not through a choice of her own - she is made a cyborg (as will
be discussed later) and forced into navigating between two worlds, one of which refuses to
acknowledge the other, thus making her into a Border figure. Rather her choice is in what she does
with her destiny as the Slayer. She chooses to make friends and create a supportive community for
herself. She chooses to anchor herself in this Borderlands community and refuses to relinquish either
of her two worlds. She chooses to be a cyborg who resists the Watcher's Council, which historically
"made" her. That this is a choice is revealed in the episode "The Wish" (3009) where Buffy, in an
alternative reality, appears as a lone hero only good for slaying.
7

Such coalition is evident in episodes like Becoming 2 (2022), when Spike (still a potent, soulless
Vampire) and Buffy make a coalition in order to stop Angelus (evil Angel) from destroying the world.
8

I should note that border between "good" and "evil" is never secure and never closed down. Simple
essentialism of fixed difference is denied by the fact that even Buffy's best friends, Xander and Willow,
became vampires in the alternative reality of "The Wish" (3009) and Willow herself attempts to
destroy the world in the Season Six finale. Buffy's friend from LA, Billy Fordham, tries to trade the
lives of his cult following and Buffy herself to be turned into a vampire by Spike in "Lie to Me"
(2007) (Buffy saves everyone but allows Ford to become a vampire - one whom she stakes as soon as
he rises). The villains of Season Six are a trio of normal (if geeky) human boys who use magic and
technology to do evil. Even Spike becomes a "good" character and is allowed to sacrifice himself for
the world (and thus redeem himself) in the Season Seven Finale.

103

Quotations taken from AleXander Thompson's transcription, "Episode 34: Becoming (Part 2)" on
the Buffyverse DB site. [http://vrya.net/bdb/clip.php?clip=2046;
http://vrya.net/bdb/clip.php?clip=2049; http://vrya.net/bdb/clip.php?clip=2050].
10

Xander lies to Buffy, saying that Willow said to kick Angel's ass. Willow is in fact supportive of their
love and later comes out as literally, as opposed to metaphorically, gay.
11 Clearly, while coded as queer, Buffy simultaneously occupies other locations of privilege.
Nonetheless, while Buffy is white, blonde, and middle-class, none of these are sufficient to protect her
from the queerness of being the Slayer. Faith, Buffy's dark-haired, lower-class double, reflects where
Buffy might be without such privileges, as Buffy acknowledges when she says "In different
circumstances that could have been me." ("Dopplegangland" 3016). See Tjardes "'If You're Not
Enjoying It, You're Doing Something Wrong.'" While her Otherness does create space for other
Others, as Kent Ono points out, members of the Scooby gang, while marginalized in other ways, are
all white. See Ono, "To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer," for discussion on the neocolonial
politics of BtVS.

12

Multiple dualisms are at work in BtVS: between humanity and the demonic; between good and evil;
and between those humans who know and those who do not. In BtVS, the demonic is not
determinedly evil or destructive (or even good); for instance, Whistler, Clem, Torg (Showtime
7011)) are all neutral to possibly good figures. Humanity, too, is not necessarily good or evil. Further,
in the BtVS spin-off, Angel, demons tend to be less demonized and accorded more recognition.
13

However, the second-to-last episode in Season Four, "Primeval" (4021), Buffy magically merges
with Willow, Xander, and Giles to defeat Adam, the evil cyborg. This could be read as an example of
metaphoric coalition or of literal shape-shifting, leaving behind the ordinary boundaries of the self to
transcend dualisms. Buffy literally changes the shape and nature of Adam's attacks, transforming
reality through her transformation.
14

There are two levels of race in BtVS: the literal and the metaphoric. Here, and throughout the piece,
I work with the notion of race as metaphor, given the importance of the metaphoric as the site of
meaning in the Buffyverse. On the literal level, racism is evident in the treatment of characters of color
and on that level this analysis would fail, as Buffy is clearly white. For a discussion of race on the literal
level, see Ono. Race, insofar as it metaphorically maps onto the human/demonic dualism does not
necessarily map onto the other dualisms present in BtVS. The presence of mestiza figures who bridge
the demonic and the human offer an argument for considering that dualism the privileged site of
metaphoric race. Such figures include Buffy, Angel, other vampires, and Doyle, a character on Angel
Season 1. Doyle, a half-human, half-demon, sacrificed himself to save a group of mixeddemonic/human people from demons with a pronounced resemblance to Nazis ("Hero" 1009). It is
interesting to note that Doyle, Angel, and Buffy are all both mestiza figures and heroes.
15

According to Ono, as a white woman, Buffy becomes a hero by using her power against and
defeating "dark masculinity" (166). In opposition to the neocolonialist interpretation, it is important
to note that the season-long villains of Buffy have often been white males and/or figures of patriarchy:
The Master (Season 1), the Mayor (Season 3), Adam the cyborg, created by the military (Season 4),
the Nerd trio (Season 6), Caleb (Season 7). Episodic villains include not only vampires, but also
fraternities (where they worship a giant demon snake!), the swim team and their coach, and other
places of (human) male domination. While The Master is a vampire (hence racially other in this
formulation), one could argue that he is coded in terms of white masculinity (elite speech, hierarchy,
reliance on books, embrace of mass production). Angel/Angelus, the villain of Season 2 is rather
trickier and perhaps fits the "dark masculinity" thesis. Villains like Willow, Glory, and the First clearly
do not fit either model.

16

Buffy does not trouble demons for simply being demons; for instance, when Faith proposes killing a
demon in "Enemies" (3017), Buffy refuses, saying "Let him go. I don't think he falls into the deadly

104

threat to humanity category." Her treatment of Clem, a demon with whom she is friendly enough to
ask for his services as a babysitter for Dawn, is another case in point. She even tolerates a demon bar
and kitten-stakes poker games. In general, Buffy only attacks demons when they prey on humans and
she does not attempt to profit off of demon activities.
17

James South argues that the Vampires are representations of technological society, where discussion
of the means predominates and discussion of the ends languishes. In other words, he reads Vampires
as the triumph of a discourse of efficiency and immediate needs. Though South applies the language
of science to the Vampires, inasmuch as Buffy makes use of the same powers, the language of science
applies to her. Of course, Buffy is a blasphemous cyborg, who uses her power to quite different ends, a
mode of operation that mixes both technique and empathy. South argues that empathy and protection
of others is magical because such actions can only appear irrational, hence "magical" in a technological
society. See South, "'All Torment, trouble, Wonder, and Amazement Inhabits Here.'"

18

Quotation taken from Ace's episode recap, "Buffy vs. Dracula" (page 10), Television Without Pity
[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=12&story=265&page=10].
19

Edrie Sobstyl offers a different critique of Haraway's cyborg, arguing that being a cyborg does not
protect Seven of Nine (a literal cy/Borg figure on the crew of Star Trek: Voyager) from also being a
woman and thus subject to patriarchy; rather than resistance, her cyborg qualities only make her a
better tool for the patriarchy. In contrast, Buffy is a feeling cyborg who maintains both her human
desires and exercises her cyborg powers under her own agency. Though Buffy can be taken advantage
of as a woman (witness Angel's turn to Angelus after they have sex for the first time), she also rebels
against the authority of the Watcher's Council in order to follow her own feelings and desires to save
Angel. Rather than privileging efficiency or obedience to power, Buffy insists on her humanity (and
femininity, in as much as femininity is identified with affect) as a legitimate and powerful mode of
decision-making. As I have indicated in the paragraph above, this emphasis on the value of feelings,
romance, and heterosexual unions seems to run counter to the cyborg narrative itself, thus echoing
aspects of Sobstyl's critique. Is Buffy then an imperfect cyborg or does she represent another potential
mode of cyborg-feminism? See Sobstyl "We Who are Borg, Are We Borg?"

20

Indeed, despite Donna Haraway's antiracist intentions, there is nothing in the myth of the cyborg
itself that makes race a visible or troubled category.

21

If Adam had been treated differently by his maker and accorded dignity and recognition, rather than
being treated as a tool, would he have become something else? As many have noted, Buffy is an
anomaly among Slayers, both in having lived so long and in having formed a community - and the
latter is responsible for the former. Again, the episode "The Wish" (3009) offers a vision of what Buffy
would have been like without community - impetuous and quickly dead.

22

Only the carnival lacks a political order that translates into Othering some, but this, as we see in the
case of rape, does not in fact guarantee liberation. Other modes of power - physical strength for
instance - are not necessarily overturned in the carnival moment. One could argue that release from
physical boundaries (i.e. rape) can be liberating under these circumstances, but this is a claim that I
would find extremely troubling.

Works Cited
Ace (pseud.) Buffy vs. Dracula. (Episode recap, page 10). Television Without Pity.
[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=12&story=265&page=10].
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Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. 2 ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indian University
Press, 1968.
Backstory. UPN - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Official BtVS site).
[http://www.upn.com/shows/buffy/backstory/index.shtml].
Battis, Jes. Shes Not All Grown Yet: Willow as Hybrid/Hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Slayage 8
(2003): 40 para. [ http://www.slayage.tv/essays/slayage8/Battis.htm].
Braun, Beth. The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Ambiguity of Evil in Supernatural
Representations. Journal of Popular Film and Television 28/2 (Summer, 2000): 88+.
Chin, Vivian. Buffy? Shes Like, Shes Not Like MeShes Rad. In Athenas Daughters: Televisions
New Woman Warriors. Ed. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2003.
Douglas, Susan. Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Random
House, 1994.
Edwards, Lynn. Slaying in Black and White: Kendra as Tragic Mulatta in Buffy. In Fighting the
Forces: Whats at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Fudge, Rachel. The Buffy Effect: Or, A Tale of Cleavage and Marketing. Bitch: Feminist Response to
Pop Culture 10 (1999): 18+.
General FAQ. (Ranks Given in Forums about BtVS). Television Without Pity.
[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/faq.cgi?show=0&q=567].
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Helford, Elyce Rae, ed. Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Television. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.
Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Kaveney, Roz, ed. Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel.
London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2003.
Lynette, Lamb. Media Criticism: The Sad State of Teen Television. New Moon Network VII/2
(November, 1999): 14+.
Money, Mary Alice. The Undemonization of Supporting Characters in Buffy. In Fighting the Forces:
Whats at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Miller, Jessica Pratt. The I in Team: Buffy and Feminist Ethics. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Ed. James South. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.
Owen, Susan. Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Journal of
Popular Film and Television 27/2 (Summer, 1999): 24-36.

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Ono, Kent. To be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Race and (Other) Socially Marginalizing
Positions on Horror TV. In Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Television. Ed. Elyce Helford. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.
Pender, Patricia. Im Buffy, and Youre History: The Postmodern Politics of Buffy. In Fighting
the Forces: Whats at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Playden, Zoe-Jane. What you are, whats to come: Feminisms, Citizenship and the Divine. In
Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel. Ed. Roz Kaveney.
London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2003.
Rutkowski, Alice. "Why Chicks Dig Vampires: Sex, Blood, and Buffy." Iris 45 (September, 2002):
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Samanta, Anamika Franzman. Women in Action. Hues 4/3 (Summer 1998): 28-31.
Sobstyl, Edrie. We Who are Borg, Are We Borg? In Athenas Daughters: Televisions New Woman
Warriors. Ed. Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003.
South, James All Torment, trouble, Wonder, and Amazement Inhabits Here: The Vicissitudes of
Technology in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 24 . (Spring,
2001): 93-102.
South, James, ed. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Chicago:
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Stoller, Debbie. Brave New Girls: These TV Heroines Know What Girl Power Really Means. On
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Yael Sherman, "Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings
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Still me on the inside, trapped: Embodied Captivity and

Ethical Narrative in Leslie Feinbergs Stone Butch Blues
Monika I. Hogan
The captive occupies a liminal position, suspended in the cleavage that divides
one cultural paradigm from another.
-- Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment
The world is not what I think, but what I live through.
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Leslie Feinbergs Stone Butch Blues, while widely recognized and celebrated as a
groundbreaking portrayal of a transgendered protagonist at the time of its publication, has
rarely been seriously considered as a novel. Regularly assumed to be a thinly disguised
autobiography and generally considered too sentimental to rank as a serious literary
accomplishment, Feinbergs text is considered politically and pedagogically effective, but not
literarily or culturally significant. Such assessments, however, take for granted both the genre
of sentimental fiction and its status as unliterary, and, in so doing, obscure the way that
Feinberg both draws upon and revises traditions of womens literature - particularly the
captivity narrative - to produce and alter the genres particular sentimental effects.
Understanding the way that Feinberg has constructed this deeply affective narrative is
1
significant not only for our understanding of hir transgender protagonist, but for our
approach to multicultural literatures more broadly. I would like to argue that Feinbergs
revision of the captivity narrative is a pioneering and significant example of narrative that
manages to represent a minority body without allowing that body to become rhetorical,
symbolic, or displaced. In presenting readers with the opportunity for ethical contact, in
Levinass sense of the word, Feinberg eschews the focus on ethical content that has
characterized, and limited, early approaches to multicultural curriculums and pedagogies,
including the study of minority sexualities.

The Captive Body

American studies scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Lauren Berlant have noted the
way that, in U.S. literature, the at-risk female body has traditionally functioned as a means to
both articulate and undermine nationalistic discourses of racial, sexual, and gendered
2
belonging. This is particularly true of early captivity narratives, such as the puritan
bestsellers produced by Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin, which, as Michelle
Burnham points out, confronted readers with a series of new and radical possibilities (38)
for imagining female subjects. Although these narratives were always presented as religious
testimony, they could not be easily contained as examples of (as Rowlandson titles her
narrative) The Sovereignity and Goodness of God. In order to survive the violent raid on her
108

village and the death of several of her children, Rowlandson must sacrifice ideal standards of
feminine behavior and barter relentlessly (perhaps even sexually) with her captors. Hannah
Dustins popular account of a similar situation, in which she escapes by killing and scalping
her kidnappers, exemplifies this point. According to Christopher Castiglia, the genre of the
captivity narrative has thus afforded white women a symbolic economy with which to
express dissatisfaction with gender roles, to re-imagine those roles and the narratives that
normalize them, and to transform boundaries of genre (4). Departing from the standard
reading of puritan captivity narratives as predictable and artless . . .expressions of voluntary
social conformity (23-24), Castiglia shows that stories of captivity have allowed white
women to document agency and write about culturally unnamable forms of imprisonment,
such as heteronormativity.
Michelle Burnham agrees that captivity narratives, and the sentimental novels that grew
from them, function as escape literature because their heroines so often indulge in
transgressive behavior or enact forms of resistant agency, not in spite of their captivity but
precisely as a result of it (3). However, she goes on to argue that like novelistic discourse,
nationalist discourse relies on the profoundly affective experience of sympathy (43), and the
sentimental response that captivity narratives evoke is one of the deepest and most structuring
of any narrative in U.S. nationhood. Burnham describes this sentimental response as
dependent on an ambivalent struggle between identification with home cultures and with the
Other. As she explains: the captive professes an identity whose fixity is belied by the unstable
and mobile processes of identification that supports that identity and what is sentimental
about the imagined communities novels create is that they are not based on likeness (47). In
other words, it is the close contact with Otherness, and indeed the very slippery boundary
between the Other (captor) and the supposed same (captive, reader) that creates the affective
experience of novel reading (and eventually, of nation-imagining). The heroine of the
captivity narrative holds an ambivalent liminal position between two or more cultures that
undermines her identification with the home culture and, simultaneously, reinforces that
identification. In short, we identify with the heroines rebellious boundary crossing but also
read her stubbornly back into the home culture where she belongs.
Stone Butch Blues clearly and immediately announces its connection to this tradition. At
the opening of the novel, Jess is torn between two worlds. In language that, as Siobhan B.
Somerville has pointed out, accesses the enduring trope of the captivity narrative (171), Jess
describes the ambivalent sense of displacement that attends her moving between two
apartments, that of the Indian family who nurture her and that of her own parents, who do
not. She writes, And so I grew in two worlds, immersed in the music of two languages. One
world was Wheaties and Milton Berle. The other was fry bread and sage. One was cold, but it
was mine; the other was warm, but it wasnt (14). Although Jesss mother was relieved to be
excused from mothering duties for the child she really didnt want, eventually her father
insisted that she be reared at home:

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My father grew alarmed when he heard one of the women say something to me in a
language he didnt understand, and I answered her with words hed never heard
before. He said later he couldnt stand by and watch his own flesh and blood be
kidnapped by Indians. (14)

Jesss rescue - forced removal from the Indian home and full time reinstatement into her
own - does not resolve her narrative of captivity; rather, it sets up a story of lifelong
ambivalence, rebellion, and further captivity. The apartment where her parents police her
clothing, behavior and speech; the mental institution where she is drugged into submission;
and the high school where she is brutally gang raped and then branded a whore by a
witnessing adult all work together to discipline Jess into conforming to the role they deem
appropriate for her age, race and sex. It is small wonder that Jess reports feeling the sticky
sensation of imprisonment (40) and that she concentrated on running away, waiting for the
right moment (23).
Sentiments of captivity continue throughout and profoundly shape Stone Butch Blues. As
Castiglia explains, virtually all captives narrate a profound ambivalence (straightforwardly or
embedded in the textual form) about their eventual return home (in most cases, to white
culture; in Jesss case, to the world of binary gender categories). Because white patriarchy may
not offer women more freedom than nonwhite cultures can, Castiglia explains that Rescue
leaves women not in a state of antesocial liberty but in the moment of articulation arising
between two forms of confinement (129). Jesss inability to find a home - literally, as she
flees or is forced from one living situation to another, or existentially, as she moves between
the categories of man and woman, butch lesbian and transsexual - is typical, then, of the
captivity narrative genre.
However, because nationalistic discourse usually recuperates its transgressive subjects,
using the titillating representation of contact with Others to ultimately reiterate definitions of
identity and alterity and create imagined communities of sameness, Feinberg must revise the
traditional symbolic economies of the captivity narrative in order to break literary ground for
hir transgender subject. Whereas Castiglia identifies a kind of female bonding that can occur
through the creation of textual interventions (116) received by a community of female
readers, Stone Butch Blues assumes no such community readership, and aims for a readerresponse that is far more radical than the subtle counter-cultural expressions that Castiglia
describes as embedded in the captivity narrative genre. Furthermore, Jesss struggle between
competing worlds of gender identity and sexual expression are not meant to eventually
strengthen her identification with one at the expense of the others. Unlike most captivity
narratives, in this novel we are meant to identify with and come to value the liminal space of
in-between - transgender.
To facilitate this reader response, Feinberg seeks to describe a different sort of self/ other
relationship and a different sort of captivity. Although oppressive social forces significantly
contribute to Jesss suffering and inability to find a home, the novel focuses most intensely on
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Jesss captivity in her own body. For example, a great portion of the novel is devoted to
exploring the way that Jesss flesh has become stone and her search for a lover who can
3
melt [her] stone (9), thus freeing her to fully live out her desires in a flesh undivided. This
focus on Jesss embodied captivity is a significant departure from other captivity narratives
and sentimental novels, which oftentimes highlight the heroines body but defer the meaning
4
of that body by making it symbolic, rhetorical, or displaced. As a result, Burnham argues,
America as a political, cultural and national category has in large part been articulated
through the bodies, especially the reproducing bodies, of women (171). The cultural
tradition of reading the female body symbolically could easily translate into the objectification
or displacement of the transgender body; Feinbergs narrative is designed to make sure that
such cooptation does not happen.

The Transgender Body

Jay Prosser and Judith Halberstam have laid out the stakes of this project in their debate
over the most fair and appropriate representations of transsexual and trangender bodies,
particularly within the context of queer theory. Prosser and other transsexual theorists have
objected to the contemporary use of the transgendered body as symbolic for postmodern,
queer theories of performative identities. For Prosser, queer theory seems to circulate the
understanding that transgender=queer=subversive (32), leaving transsexual subjects in the
position of un-subversive, naturalizing (32) or recuperated. He reads queer theorys reliance
on a theoretical notion of transgender as indicative of its incapacity to sustain the body as a
literal category (27). In other words, queer theorists take refuge in the discursive/ theoretical
representation of transgender as a way to avoid the difficult ontological questions associated
with transsexuality, such as: what does it mean to be, or how do we describe the feeling of,
being differently gendered?
Prosser has identified Judith Halberstams controversial 1994 article, F2M: The Making
of Female Masculinity as emblematic of queer theorys tendency to elevate the theory of
transgender over the specificity of transsexual. However, in Female Masculinity, Halberstam
effectively defends her work on the cultural figure she calls the transgender butch, as well as
her theoretical position that it is limiting, probably nave, and possibly even dangerous to
emphasize too much the notion that one who is differently gendered can find a home in a
right body through transsexual transition. She argues: the idea that only transsexuals
experience the pain of a wrong body shows an incredible myopia about the trials and
tribulations of many varieties of perverse embodiment (162). While Halberstam does to a
certain extent recant her early formulation in F2M that There are no transsexuals. We are
all transsexuals (153), she feels that too much emphasis on the experience of gender
transition might obscure the specificity and complexity of the multiple and varied experiences
of being sexed and gendered.
Feinbergs novel has been a touchstone in the debate between Prosser and Halberstam
precisely because it so effectively mediates between their two positions. In some ways, the
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novel emphasizes Halberstams charge that specificity is all (173), as Jess disagrees with
other members of her communities about how best to balance personal desire, body image,
and survival in a hostile world. More to the point, Jesss body itself changes and shifts
throughout the course of the novel, at times feeling like home and at others like a prison; at
times feeling right and at other times feeling very wrong. At the same time, the novels
priority is emphatically not to express the postmodern fragmentation that accompanies these
shifts in identity. Rather, the narrative is designed to articulate what it feels like to move in
and out of embodied captivity, what it feels like to be trapped in your own skin. As Feinberg
has repeatedly stated, s/he chose
to write a novel because of its ability to reach down into emotional truths. [] I had
read many works of gender theory in the early 1990s. Although I may have found a
concept here or there of interest, it was mostly so abstracted from human experience
that it lacked meaning for me. I wanted to write about trans characters, and how their
lives were intersected by race, class and desire. I wanted to write the kind of gender
theory that we all live. (Peters 1)

Beginning with Jesss earliest feelings of difference and continuing through her survival of
torture and trauma, Feinbergs focus is on Jesss experience of herself as a phenomenological
being.
Throughout this novel, Jess is an embodied subject on a horizon of being with the visible
world, including other body/ subjects. Even when Jess is trapped in her own body, she takes
refuge in the phenomenological deferral between body and self that is not a division, but is a
reversible/ reciprocal relationship. As I will show, Jesss deferral or disassociation during
episodes of torture allows her to preserve her self for a future on the horizon of being.
Unlike the self/ other divide that Burnham describes wherein we are titillated by the heroines
contact with Others but ultimately relate to her as like ourselves, Feinbergs embodied
captivity narrative introduces a reversible/ reciprocal self/ other relationship that applies to
Jesss body/ self in the world of the narrative, and ultimately to our own relationship to the
text.
5

This reversibility leads to a reader response that I call ethical contact. I base this
concept on Emmanual Levinass description of ethics as a primordial facing between two
subjects. He explains:
The encounter with the other consists in the fact that despite the extent of my
domination and his slavery, I do not possess him . . .He does not enter entirely into
the opening of being where I already stand . . .To be in relation with the other face to
face is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse. (Basic 9)

This intersubjective exchange occurs because, Levinas asserts, the impossibility of absolute
domination over the Other means that we instead look for ourselves in the Other and find the
Other in us. This is the exchange upon which consciousness is built. Adam Zachary Newton
describes reading as ethical in this Levinasian sense: One faces a text as one might face a
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person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of
contact, not of meaning (Narrative 11). At the same time, as Newton recognizes, racial
alterity can interrupt this intersubjective effect. In fact, I would argue that in the context of
Western culture, in which any racial, gender, sexual or non-normative identity is associated
with, in Victor Burgins terms, the abject body that bleeds (131), reference to or
representation of marked embodiment always interrupts the ethical relationship of primordial
facing that Levinas describes.
I believe that Stone Butch Blues works to construct an ethical reader response that is not so
much primordial as it is phenomenological. In order to read Jesss body without
objectifying it, this ethical contact attempts to translate the affective power of the captivity
6
narrative into something that can actually touch the reader. This means that the reader
should feel not only moved but implicated; should consider him or herself not only a
witnessing consciousness, but a connected and vulnerable body as well.
Maurice Merleau-Pontys theory of phenomenological relation can augment Levinass
7
description of ethical facing to describe this narrative contact. According to MerleauPonty, there is a fundamental reversability between touching and being touched, or seeing
and being seen. To see is to correspondingly be seeable; to touch is to simultaneously be
touchable. As Elizabeth Grosz summarizes, the human body is a being of two leaves, one of
which is an object in a world of other objects, the other of which is a perceiver of these
objects (102). Rather than segregating mind and inside from body and outside, then,
Merleau-Ponty conceives of being as the continuous reversability or folding over of flesh - the
almost simultaneous insideness and outsideness of our corporeal experience is what
8
characterizes our being in the world.
In his famous illustrative passage, Merleau-Ponty writes:
My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things,
but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization . .
. But this incessant escaping . . . is not a failure. For if these experiences never exactly
overlap . . .this is precisely because my two hands are part of the same body, because it
moves itself in the world, because I hear myself both from within and without. I
experience . . .the transition and the metamorphosis of the one experience into the
other, and it is only as though the hinge between them, solid, unshakeable, remained
irremediably hidden from me. (148)

Merleau-Ponty calls this hinge of our being the chiasmus - a space of radical possibility that
takes up no space at all but exists in the almost simultaneous relationship of the body to itself
and to the world. In contrast to the mind over matter basis of most deconstructive theories,
Merleau-Pontys phenomenological description of the constantly reversible chiasmus gives
nature, the environment and the corporeal world a greater potential existence and agency
9
than is typical in most of Western thought.
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Stone Butch Blues seeks to both describe and enact this chiasmic relationship. While
Feinberg shows us the way that Jess uses the space of deferral between body, self and world to
preserve herself during episodes of torture or un-making, s/he also shows the way that the
chiasm can mediate between two Others (usually faces) on a horizon of being to help
remake both subjects. The kind of wordless exchange described here is open ended,
generative, and implicitly ethical, and because of the ever present possibility of this chiasmic
exchange, Feinberg shows, it is necessary to continue participating in the visible world.
Finally, Feinberg outlines the role that literature can play as part of a body/ subjects horizon.
Because literature is described as primarily phenomenological rather than primarily discursive,
Feinberg models a distinctive type of exchange that is available between texts and readers. In
order to share the chiasmic relation that Jess has modeled for us, we as readers must conceive
of ourselves as existing on her horizon of being. The reversible/ reciprocal relationship made
available to us accesses the affective dimension of the captivity narrative without its
sentimental nationalism, and addresses what Kathleen Lundeen has described as the ethical
dilemma inherent in empathy - forever finding oneself either too close or not close enough to
the object of self-identification (91).

Embodied Captivity; or, the Terrorized Body

Descriptions of chiasmic self-relation mediate our reading and witnessing of Jesss horrific
experiences of literal captivity - when she is tortured, that is, in police custody, for the crime
of being a he-she. Jesss embodied experience is similar to the prison narratives of Lena
Constante and Jacobo Timerman that Laura Doyle analyzes in Bodies Inside Out: A
Phenomenology of the Terrorized Body in Prison. Doyle describes a vexed, doubled
condition that characterizes both testimonies: the body is a reserve as well as an inescapable
site of torture - exactly both at once in its doubleness (124). Constante escapes into her
mind (125) and therefore escapes the painful world of solitary confinement in Romania;
Timerman disassociates from his surroundings and the body that inhabits them (125). Yet,
Doyle writes,
what first appears as a mind-body duality in Constantes twoness is in effect a shifting
coupling, wherein one part is continually rescuing or bolstering the other, even if
through a dynamic of repulsion or distancing of one from the other: one goes away,
the other stays, one pursues an elsewhere, the other preserves, painfully, the here that
the other must be able to come back to. (127)

The body takes advantage of the deferral or the hiatus between the touched and the
touching in order to live through torture and eventually come back to itself.
This is precisely the dynamic that Stone Butch Blues dramatizes. During her first
experience of gang rape Jess reports, I couldnt make it stop, I couldnt escape it, and so I
pretended it wasnt happening. I looked at the sky, how cool and placid it was. I imagined it
was the ocean and the clouds were white capped waves (41). Jess goes so far inside that she
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actually starts giggling thinking about what she wasnt missing in heterosexual sex, if this is
indeed it. Jeffry, the current rapist, pulled his cock out of me and slapped my face, back and
forth. Its not funny, he shouted. Its not funny, you crazy bitch (41). Doyle writes that
prison guards or torturers who choose to violently probe bodily cavities force violent
touchings from without on the ontology of constant benevolent touchings, interconnecting
tissues, within. Such violence seeks not only to inflict pain but also to divide the person from
her or his own possibilities, to seize the primal condition of possibility (124). When Jess
distances herself from the pain and humiliation of the rapists violations of her body enough
to laugh at a joke she is sharing with only herself, she is showing Jeffry that he has not
penetrated her deeply enough to dominate the whole of her interiority.
When Jess falls into the hands of more experienced torturers, the violations are more
extensive, but so is her bodys resistance. Lt. Mulroney gives Jess this choice: Eat me or eat
my shit, bulldagger (62). In either case her face becomes the repository for his bodily
excretions; her mouth, which is normally a central conveyer of her humanity (because it
allows her to project her voice) becomes his personal toilet. The Lt. transfers the abject of his
own body - his defecation - onto or into Jess, but the plan seems to backfire after she vomits
his shit all over him. Lt. Mulroney continues his assault on Jesss interiority by raping her
vaginally and anally, while for Jess, Staring at that jail light bulb rescued me from watching
my own degradation: I just went away (62). She continues:
I found myself standing in the desert. The sky was streaked with color. Every shift of
light cast a different hue across the wilderness: salmon, rose, lavender. The scent of
sage was overpowering. Even before I saw the golden eagle gliding in the updraft
above me, I heard it scream, as clearly as if it had come from my own throat. (63)

Unlike the earlier rape, when Jess simply pretended it wasnt happening, on this occasion
she has what seems to be an out of body experience, full of sensual details that are
emphatically not of the police room where her actual body is trapped - even as they are rooted
there (the scream that she hears as if from her own throat probably does come from her
own throat). In going back to the desert, though, Jess is not out of her body but is actually
taking refuge within her bodys memory of that first home where she knew love and
acceptance. By remembering the desert and that different horizon (her body in the desert) she
gives herself the tools to re-member herself if and when the trauma ends. In this way the
shifting and doubled nature of the chiasmus helps Jess to survive and to preserve a future for
herself. Or, as she states while looking in the mirror for the first time after recovering from yet
another attack, Id sent myself a gift - a memory of body, of self (265).
Jesss ability to remove herself from the world through disassociation also effectively
removes her from a horizon of being. This produces an embodied captivity that also threatens
her life. After the first rape, Jess walks home slowly and reports: I didnt feel like this was my
life that I was living anymore (41). After the encounter with Lt. Mulroney, Jess reports [t]he
world seemed distant (67); and in a similar incident with the police I wondered if I was
close to death because I seemed to be drifting away from the world (136). After each incident
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Jess comes back to herself more divided from herself, a state that becomes exacerbated when
she is passing as a man. Even though this period is the only time in Jesss life when she can
walk down the street with no threat of bodily harm, she is never more thoroughly imprisoned
- and it is the very space of her body that she is trapped in. According to Merleau-Ponty:
He [sic] who looks must not be foreign to the world he looks at. As soon as I see, it is
necessary that the vision . . .be doubled with a complementary vision or with another
vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst
of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot. (134)

Jesss experience of embodied captivity when she is passing as a man supports Prossers
assertion that queer theorys dependence on the visual, or on the body as surface, limits its
ability to theorize the lived reality of queer subjects. When Jess is passing, the worlds gazes
pass over her body, misrecognizing it. As a result, her surface and her interiority are radically
divided. Part of her is out in the visible world, while another part tries to preserve the me
that was in the past and will be in the future. At the same time, the survival strategy, though it
proves to be unlivable, does preserve Jess for herself.
In order to survive the various manifestations of imprisonment and torture that she
encounters (and to survive the ever present possibilities that another attack may be coming),
Jess exaggerates the deferral between herself as seer (her inside) and herself as seen (her
outside). The result is a feeling of radical alienation, almost disembodiment - and of further
captivity. Jess is unable to initiate or maintain relationships with other people when they so
fundamentally misunderstand her own self-understanding; she spends years alone, drifting
from job to job, alienated from all communities. What began as a way for Jess to still be me
and survive (148), then, left her feeling buried alive . . . I was still me on the inside, trapped
in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside (173). She
registers her need to close the gap between her inside and outside when she says, I feared
I was disappearing and Id cease to exist if someone didnt touch me (185). Finally, when she
feels she can no longer recognize the more complicated me beneath my surface (222) Jess
decides to stop passing as a man, even though this decision will once again put her life at risk.

Facing Bodies
Jesss embodied captivity, even when she is at her most technically free, illustrates the
absolute necessity of existing on a horizon of being. And, in contrast to the un-making that
can occur on that horizon in the hands of torturers, there are also always forces of re-making human connection and ethical action - available. This is a lesson that Jess learns after her first
experience of torture by the police. Unable to accept the comfort of her friends, Jess feels
herself to be on an entire different plane of being from them. She cant eat - I couldnt bring
myself to bite into flesh - or respond - my face wouldnt move, even to smile. Her friend
Betty finally says to her:

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I know. . . You dont think anyone knows. You cant believe anyone would
understand. But I do know. I shook my head slowly - she didnt know.
Betty knelt down in front of me. As we made eye contact I felt a sudden jolt of
emotional electricity. I saw everything I was feeling in Bettys eyes, as though I were
looking at my own reflection. I looked away in horror. Betty nodded and squeezed my
knee. I do know, she said, getting up to leave. I do understand. (66)

This scene is emblematic of the ethical contact that Levinas describes as facing. The jolt of
emotional electricity that Jess feels with Betty, however, is also constituitive of a mutual
empathy that recognizes and reinforces survivorhood. In this way, their moment of
connection is a non-physical but still phenomenological relation - the chiasmic relationship of
existing together on the same plane of being. It is the need for this kind of connection that
eventually leads Jess to face the world as her true self, as transgender.
These ethical and chiasmic facings occur throughout the text and they describe a mode
of human relations that is primarily phenomenological, rather than primarily discursive.
Urging her union organizer to rescue her friend Jan from a routine arrest, Jess didnt have
time to explain. Duffy took my arm and looked into my face for the answer. I let him see the
fear and shame in a way Id never voluntarily let a man see before. Duffy nodded. He
understood (98). When it comes to expressing the truth of trauma, in Stone Butch Blues
these face exchanges are the only way. Jess receives such a narrative from her new friend Ben
while passing as a man.
And then suddenly it was there, in his eyes, all of his shame. His eyes filled with water.
I waited for the tears to drip down his cheeks, but they didnt. I wanted to touch him,
to lay my hand on his arm. But I looked around at the guys we worked with every day
and I knew I couldnt. I leaned closer to Ben. He looked me in the eyes.
In silence, without words, his eyes told me what had happened to him in prison. I
didnt look away. Instead, I let him see himself in my own mirror. He saw his
reflection in a womans eyes.
I never told anyone, Ben said, as though our conversation had been out loud. (184)

Despite its intimacy, this conversation is a low point for Jess during her passing phase.
Because of her unwillingness to tell Ben any part of her own truth, she sidesteps the ethical
relation that Ben initiates. Theres nothing to tell, I told him. I was closed and protected.
He was left naked (185). Trapped inside her body/ disguise, Jess has lost access to the
benevolent power of being in the world - her fear of those who would strip or un-make her
has unwittingly separated her from the landscape of human faces that can re-make her.
There is another realm of chiasmic relation that the novel describes as integral to Jesss
survival, though: reading. In her childhood captivity in a mental institution, Jess finds her
only real asylum in the Norton anthology of poetry. She says:
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It wasnt just that the words were musical notes my eyes could sing. It was the
discovery that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings,
emotions that I could compare to my own. (22)

When she is at her most isolated, Jess is able to sustain herself through reading. Discovering
the bookstores in New York City as she begins her life as transgendered, I felt as though I
was rushing into a burning building to discover the ideas I needed for my own life (239).
The potential relationship between these texts, ideas, and the women and men, long dead
behind them, is again presented as phenomenological. When Jess finds the obituary of a
butler discovered at death to have been a woman, she describes a chiasmic connection.
Her name was never mentioned. Nothing more: no diary, no clues. All I had were
these few words on a page to know her by. I closed my eyes. I would never have the
details of her life and yet I could feel its texture with my fingertips. (242)

The texture of textual lives is a driving force in Jesss making and re-making of self as she
resolves to find and compile texts about her transgendered ancestors. Ruths gift to Jess
towards the end of the novel is doubly significant then: a book entitled Gay American History
and a watercolor of a face filled with emotion, looking up at a host of stars. It was a beautiful
10
face, a face Id never seen before. It was my face (267). Ruths gift, like Ruths friendship,
opens up for Jess a multi-dimensional horizon of being that includes the past, present and
future; the worldly and the textual or imagined. Although Theresa is Jesss long-lost love, it is
Ruth who is able to enact a truly reciprocal relationship with Jess by showing her the beauty
of her face as seen from without.
Ruth also gives Jess the opportunity to occupy the in-between space of the chiasmus - to
live not at the margins but in the ever shifting dynamic of the moment. This is exemplified
in the scene where Ruth paints Jesss ceiling as a likeness of the sky that seems to be
approaching dawn and dusk simultaneously. Unnerved by the painting, Jess admits:
I really do have trouble not being able to figure out if what youve painted is about to
be day or about to be night.
Ruth rolled toward me and rested her hand on my chest. Its not going to be day or
night, Jess. Its always going to be that moment of infinite possibility that connects
them. (270)

This moment of infinite possibility is the chiasmus, and while it might feel unnerving, it is
also clearly a space of freedom.
By the close of the novel, it is clear that Jesss survival - the resolution of her captivity - is
dependent upon her tolerance of being in-between here and there. As vulnerable to unmaking
as her embodied self is, she must consistently place herself on a visible horizon of being, in
relation to other beings. It is also clear that as readers, we are able and ethically obliged to
catch Jess as she makes the necessary leaps towards self-realization. Jess has modeled this
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chiasmic relation for us: unless we want to leave her naked or stripped in the way that she
reluctantly left her friend Ben, we must complete the ethical relationship that the text
initiates. Even if we cannot do anything to intervene in Jesss world, we can, as she does
helplessly at several points, stand there and witness (270). At best, we can feel the texture of
her life as we read it.
Our role as receivers, and our necessary placement on Jesss horizon of being, is integral
to the text from the very first page when we begin with a letter that cannot be sent to a proper
location. Since I cant mail you this letter, Ill send it to a place where they keep womens
memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big city, you will stop and read it. Maybe you
wont (12). Unlike the letters that accompanied traditional captivity narratives to
authenticate the authorship and explain away any inconsistencies of loyalty to gender, family,
and nation (in other words, to mediate between author and reader) this opening letter puts us
in immediate relation with Jess as we substitute for her absent ex-lover Theresa, and demands
some reciprocity of feeling. The letter also models how not to receive Jess in its immediate
portrayal of a blind date who, Jess says, is looking at me but she doesnt see me (5). When Jess
tries to explain that her transgendered identity does not stem from her own socially imposed
self hatred, I felt myself getting all flushed and my face twitched a little; meanwhile, the
woman got her very interested expression on (6) and their encounter abruptly ends. Unlike
this woman, who meets Jesss honest face with previous assumptions and then a polite mask,
we are moved to receive Jess with an honest, empathetic face, as Theresa would.
We catch the letter and it catches us, and we continue to fulfill our ethical relationship
with Jess as she leaps into the different phases of her life, variously described as: like driving
towards the edge of a cliff and seeing whats coming but not being able to brake (53); like
driving on a single-lane highway and seeing an eighteen wheeler heading right for you (69);
and being chased by something to the edge of a cliff. Im scared of whats coming behind
me; I dont know whats ahead of me. And suddenly I decide Id rather jump than wait for it
to catch up with me (144). By catching Jess - even if only in the chiasmic relationship that
involves being together on the same horizon of being - we enable the birth of this now
established subject, the transgendered person. Signifying our shared journey towards a greater
freedom, the novel closes on an image of flying free: I heard the beating of wings nearby. I
opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the
dawn (301).

The Readers Body: The Implications of Ethical Contact

Stone Butch Blues, as has been widely acknowledged, allowed a wide readership to, for the
first time, see through the eyes of a transgendered protagonist (Pink,1). Because of its
autobiographical and sentimental feel, however, the novel has not been seriously considered as
11
a novel. As Feinberg hirself has stated: an elitist bias has been revealed to me by some who
have conveyed their assumption that a blue collar person, who lacks extended formal
education, could not possibly write about anything except their own life (quoted in Prosser,
119

199). Feinberg has not received adequate credit for hir skill in producing the tremendous
affective power of this novel.
I have argued that Stone Butch Blues cleverly hitches on to the well known (if often
misrecognized) genre of the captivity narrative, but then re-makes the ready sentimental and
affective response to that type of narrative into an empathetic, phenomenological, and ethical
mode of relation. If we enter into a chiasmic exchange with Jess, we dont really see through
her eyes so much as we see into her eyes and the horizon of her life, with the corresponding
understanding that we are also seeable. This connection, like the moments of emotional
electricity described in the novel, may be difficult to rationally defend, but easy to feel. In this
way, the novel seeks to open to us, and to open us to, a shared horizon wherein our own
difference from the protagonist does not confuse or obscure our caring for her. Enacting and
defending an ethical dimension to both being and reading, Stone Butch Blues ultimately makes
a sophisticated argument for the importance, relevance, and approachability of both
12
embodiment and ethics in the formation and relation of subjects.
Feinbergs revision is significant not only for the light that hir embodied captive can
shed on the culturally contested subject position of transgender, but as an example of a
narrative technique of great relevance to other contemporary minority authors. The
multicultural movement has too often deployed its new canonical literatures as select
representatives of the minority experience, and as authoritative providers of ethical content
(i.e., slavery was wrong, the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, the terrorist tactics
used against LGBT subjects was, and is, wrong). Of course, the process of revising dominant
nationalistic narratives and reclaiming these untold histories is extremely important, and
literature is an effective means of circulating these narratives. However, ethical contact has the
potential to go beyond producing a sense that something was or is wrong. Ethical contact is
more immediate, it implicates readers in the wrong, and when it is phenomenological like
Stone Butch Blues, it can undermine the mind/ body split that undergirds most prejudices and
13
phobias. In short, it can help us to revise our very definitions of subjectivity and personhood
in the way that Eva Feder Kittay, an activist and scholar in the field of disability studies, has
suggested:
I propose that being a person means having the capacity to be in certain relationships
with other persons, to sustain contact with other persons, to shape ones own world
and the world of others, and to have a life that another person can conceive as an
imaginative possibility for him-or herself. It is a definition that brings our
relationships (real and imaginative) with others to the center of any conception of
personhood. We do not become a person without the entanglement of other persons their care, as well as their recognition of the uniqueness and the connectedness of our
human agency, and the distinctiveness of our particularly human relations to others
and of the world we fashion. (568)

Kittays definition of personhood dovetails with Levinass ideas of ethical contact while also
asserting that this ethics depends on an entanglement with other body-subjects and
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disembodied-subjects. Redefining personhood to reflect relationships rather than rationality

could bring us closer to our goal of teaching a truly democratic, non-violent, un-phobic
version of U.S. citizenship in which we acknowledge the dependent animals we are (Kittay
576).
In his reading of traditional captivity narratives, Castiglia argues that freedom is a myth;
that there can be no new speaking voice for any subject; there is no newness to be found
in America (11). Speaking discursively, he is right - there can be no escaping the carceral
network of norms that, as Foucault and others have so convincingly described, has
constructed us from our birth. If captivity is a result of discourse, though, then perhaps
freedom can best be found in the un-discursive realms of affect and phenomenology. The
electric, almost tangible existence of empathy and the possibility that we might face the world
with our feelings - pursuing, as Levinas urged, the good rather than the right - is the escape
that this text offers up to each and every one of its phenomenologically connected readers. As
such, it is a radical re-description of a world worth living in, (Feinberg 301) and a hopeful
and practical guide for our inevitable journeys into narratives of trauma that we mourn and,
in a limited way, share.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Laura Doyle for the many hours she spent responding to early drafts of this
essay. She helped me move it forward from its fumbling and inarticulate beginnings, but even more
importantly, her unwavering belief in the worth of the project when it, and I, seemed to be
floundering helped me learn how to fight for my own intellectual life. Thanks also to Kimberly
Costino, Margo Culley, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of thirdspace, for offering insightful
suggestions for revision.

Notes
1

A note on pronouns: I refer to Jess the character as "she" throughout this article, because it is not
until the close of the novel that she embraces the identity category of transgendered (and in fact this
identity is never fully articulated in the space of the novel). I do refer to the author, Leslie Feinberg,
with the transgendered pronouns that s/he prefers: "s/he" and "hir."

In reading Stone Butch Blues through this tradition, it is not my intent to claim the novel's belonging
as somehow particularly or most importantly American. It could be argued that the "territory" this
novel is most concerned with is the shifting terrain that characterizes the cultural definitions of
"transgender." It is important to note the influence that the captivity narrative genre has held over
U.S. conceptions of nationhood, however, to explain the power and rhetorical force of the tradition
that Feinberg has chosen to revise.

As Judith Halberstam and others have pointed out, "success" for a stone butch need not be
conceived as "melting," or the subject's decision to allow herself to be literally touched or penetrated.

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Desire manifests itself in various ways and, as I will go on to argue, there are many ways to be
"touched," physically and even ethically. However, Jess does generally link her own "stoneness" to the
sexual abuse she has suffered and to her difficulty with intimacy in general, and she sometimes
conflates being "stone" with her feeling of being "trapped" in her own skin.
4

Karen Sanchez-Eppler has argued that from the 1830's through the 1860's, sentimental novels and
the corresponding pamphlets that supported the intersecting causes of abolition and feminism used
representations of "hyper-embodiment" to create a rhetorically dramatic symbol of gender and race
oppression. At the same time, the radicalism of those political movements was undermined by those
same representations, which stayed well within racial and gendered norms. As she explains, "The
bodies feminists and abolitionists wish reclaimed, and the bodies they exploit, deny, or obliterate in
the attempted rescue are the same" (49). While supporting political radicalism, then, using
representations of the body "as a means of gaining rhetorical force" (18) can ultimately "exploit and
limit" both the meaning taken from the representation and the reality of embodied experience in
readers. For an early exposition of this problem and its importance to feminist theory, see The Flesh
Made Word by Helena Mitchie, Oxford UP 1987.
5

Some readers may be uncomfortable with the assertion of any conception of ethics, and perhaps
particularly with Levinas' theories of the "primordial." Certainly Levinas uses disturbingly "unprogressive" terms such as "religion," but he always does so in such a way as to describe a mode of
relation far removed from the general meaning we attach to religion. Although he has made his own
religious and political positions clear (and of course they are open to dispute) I still feel that Levinas'
philosophy of ethics is a useful paradigm. Indeed, as a thinker who seems to flirt with essentialism,
Levinas' work has had a remarkable influence on poststructural theorists such as Lyotard and Derrida.
See Derrida and Critchley for more on Levinas' influence.
6

The transgender body/ subject has been subjected to even more objectifying scrutiny by skeptical
investigators who want to learn the "truth" about this liminal (and threatening) position. In Second
Skins, Jay Prosser convincingly reads Stone Butch Blues' "trans-genre" characteristics - its blurred
distinction between autobiography and novel - as a response to these various pressures. Stating that
"Our reading of autobiography embodies and disembodies the human form" (198), Prosser explains
that the fictionalization of Feinberg's own story is essential to making sure the author does not find
hirself "stripped" in the dehumanizing manner that is depicted in the novel.
7

Traditionally, feminists have avoided Merleau-Ponty, perhaps as a result of Luce Iragaray's critique
of the hegemony of the "visible" in his work. However, that critique has been dismantled since
Merleau-Ponty himself extensively critiqued his original use of the term "visible." Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological theories are used by many contemporary feminist theorists as an addition or
corrective to the deconstructive theories that have dominated contemporary criticism. See Sonia
Kruks, Laura Doyle, Christine Battersby, and Elizabeth Grosz for examples.

As Suzanne L. Cataldi summarizes, "As a philosophical expression, flesh includes but means
something more than human embodiment or human flesh. Elementally, it is thought as a generalized
surface of sensibility, a skin or fabric into which our own enfleshed sensitivities - the sight of our eyes,
the taste in our tongues, the touch in our hands - are indivisibly interwoven or enmeshed" (189).
9

The denigration of "the body" in Western philosophical and cultural traditions has been well
documented, particularly by feminist theorists trying to resist the corresponding denigration of
"nature" and/ or "the feminine." See Bordo, Grosz, Battersby, or Kruks. Merleau-Ponty has been
widely critiqued - notably by Luce Irigaray - for offering an explanation of human "essences and
experiences" that does not take into account gender, race, or any other social and discursively
constructed placement that would obviously create a different basis. However, as Rubin, Doyle and

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others suggest, discursive analysis can correct for this absolutism and Merleau-Ponty still has many
useful insights to offer (Rubin, 267).
10

Frequently books and people come together as a positive force for Jess' re-making: Duffy gives Jess
two books on labour activism that signify his belief in her future potential to change the world; Edwin
gives Jess a copy of The Souls of Black Folk in sharing with her the concept of double consciousness.
11

Jay Prosser's work, which forms an important basis for my own, is a clear exception to this
statement.

12

I am making reference here to an expression of constructivist belief by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:

"The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it." (Quoted in Butler, 1).

13

Because all "mainstream" or "normal" identity categories (such as white, male, straight, able bodied)
are based on the myth of the whole, autonomous, non-porous subject, these categories rely upon the
abjection of the body. I am arguing that to ask a reader to acknowledge his, her or hir embodiment as
part of the act of reading significantly undermines this structuring binary system.

Works Cited
Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1998.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861.
Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997.
Butler, Judith P. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.
Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood
from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Cataldi, Suzanne L. "Embodying Perceptions of Death: Emotional Apprehension and Reversibilities
of Flesh." In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh. Eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor. State
University of New York Press, 2000.
Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French
Thought. Phronesis. London: Verso, 1999.
---. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. 2nd ed. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University
Press, 1999.
Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and
Literary Theory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994.

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---. "Bodies Inside/Out: A Phenomenology of the Terrorized Body in Prison." In Bodies of Resistance:
New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture. Ed. L. Doyle. Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 2001.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel. New York: Firebrand, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994.
Halberstam, Judith. "Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum."
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4/2 (1998): 287-310.
---. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Kittay, Eva Feder. "When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation." Public
Culture 13/3 (2001): 557-579.
Kruks, Sonia. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2001.
Lvinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1969.
---, et al. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996.
---, and Sean Hand, eds. The Levinas Reader. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Lundeen, Kathleen. "Who has the Right to Feel? The Ethics of Literary Empathy." In Mapping the
Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Eds. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth
Womack. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968.
Mitchie, Helena. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987.
Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Peters, Julie. "Making Connections: Gender Prac; Advanced Course: Julie Peters Interviews Leslie
Feinberg." Screaming Hyena 7 (1996) [http://home.mira.net/~janie/essays/fenberg96.html].
"Pink and Blue: An Interview with Leslie Feinberg." Curve Magazine (2000): 1-7.
[http://www.curvemag.com/stories/Feinberg.html].
Prosser, Jay. "No Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch
Blues." Modern Fiction Studies 41/3-4 (1995): 483-514.
---. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Rubin, Henry S. "Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies. 4/2 (1998): 263-282.

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Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, feminism, and the Politics of the Body. University of
California Press, 1993.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000.

Monika I. Hogan, Still me on the inside, trapped: Embodied Captivity and Ethical
Narrative in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 108-125
(print), 31 pars. (web). [http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_hogan.htm].

125

essay
One Hundred Years of Transgression: A Tribute to Anna
Rling 1904-2004
Natalia Gerodetti
While the articles in this issue contribute in many ways to the representations of
sexualities, gender and the political potential of transgression, we should not forget that the
year 2004 also marks a centennial of transgressive thinking about women and sexuality,
beginning with. Anna Rlings famous speech What Interest does the Women's Movement
have in Solving the Homosexual Problem? (Welches Interesse hat die Frauenbewegung an der
1
Lsung des homosexuellen Problems?). While Anna Rling, whose real name was Theo Anna
Sprngli (1880-1953), has provoked much writing and response to her famous speech in
lesbian feminist scholarship, (particularly in Germany but also elsewhere), much less is known
about Anna Rling herself, and the context of her provocative juxtaposition in terms of her
politics. As Christiane Leidinger suggests, Rlings radical sexual politics, apart from this one
speech, are oddly absent elsewhere in her political career - leaving a highly remarked and
quoted but oddly isolated piece of political action. Nevertheless, she was posing a pertinent
question that remained relevant throughout the twentieth century, particularly when the gay
liberation movements and feminist movements in the 1970s were defining their boundaries
anew.
Rling (which is almost an anagram of Sprngli) was born in 1880 in Hamburg to a
German mother and a Swiss father. She lived all of her life in Germany where she died
unexpectedly in 1953 from a heart attack at the age of 73, having produced much journalistic
work during her adult life. She wrote for moderate national-patriotic womens journals, often
on music. From the point of view of her writing career as well as her political career, Rlings
lesbian-political speech from 1904 was outside of her repertoire, with the exception of a
2
collection of short stories (of which one has an unusual happy ending for the time!) in 1906.
Her political activity seems to have focused primarily around womens rights as her various
engagements with womens organisations of her time illustrate. Based on the available
biographical information thus far (Leidinger), Rlings political stance has been characterised
tentatively as patriotic and nationalist with a leaning to a militaristic, pro-war stand rather
than predating a more radical lesbian-feminist politics.
Still, her speech marks the beginning of lesbian political public activism in the West, and
as such it has assumed a far greater place in history than even Rling/Sprngli could have
assumed or anticipated. Her proposition of a connection between the womens movement
and the homosexual movement was not necessarily well received at the time, not least because
she repudiated the pathologised model of a homosexual species which was promoted by
sexologists at the time. Equally, her attack on the sexual reform movement (which held that
126

homosexual women were destined to achieve greater things) was also not necessarily
welcomed. This, despite the fact that one of her central arguments was to outline the many
points of possible connection between the womens and homosexual movements. In that
sense, and maybe inadvertently, she proposed a form of coalition politics, which was only to
be resurrected or re-conceived towards the end of the 1980s, when unitary identity categories
were seen to be increasingly problematic and coalition politics was proposed as a basis of more
successful political action. Having given her famous speech in 1904, she never seemed to
return to try and bridge the divisions between the early homosexual movement and a feminist
movement, although alliances between sexual reformers and feminists were much more
successful.
In this sense, maybe our toast should go to the representations and the enduring legacies
of her speech as well as to Anna Rling. One hundred years may seem like a long time but the
histories of lesbian and gay movements prove that nothing moves on a progressively upward
curve; instead, many setbacks have been witnessed by individuals and groups engaged in
sexual politics. Clearly, at a time when world political leaders like the United States make
what seems to be an unprecedented juxtaposition of a war on terrorism and a war on lesbian
and gay marriage, sexual transgression remains a highly politicised issue.
Text of Anna Rlings speech online (English):
http://lesbianalliance.com/content.cfm?cat=legal&sub=legal&file=annaspeech

Notes
1

Original in Jahrbuch fr sexuelle Zwischenstufen unter besonderer Bercksichtigung der

Homosexualitt, (Annual for Sexual Intermediaries with Special Emphasis on Homosexuality) ed.
Magnus Hirschfeld, vol. 7 (1905), pp. 131-51. For more information on Rling and translations into
English and Italian see Michael Lombardi-Nash's tribute and webpage:
http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/uraniamanuscripts/anna.html; or Lillian Faderman, and Brigitte
Eriksson, eds. and trans., Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany: Stories and
Autobiographies (Weatherby Lake, MO: The Naiad Press, Inc., 1980). Her speech is also reprinted in
Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, eds., We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and
Lesbian Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 143-150.
2

This was a volume of gay and lesbian short stories called "Who Amongst You is Without
SinImages from the Shades" ("Wer unter Euch ohne Snde istBilder von der Schattenseite")
(Leipzig: Max Spohr, 1906).

Works cited
Leidinger, Christine. "Theo A[nna] Sprngli (1880-1953) alias Anna Rling/Th. Rling/Th.A.
Rling - erste biographische Mosaiksteine zu einer zwiespltigen Ahnin lesbischer herstory."
Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft no. 35/36 (Dezember 2003): 25-42.

Natalia Gerodetti, "One Hundred Years of Transgression: A Tribute to Anna Rling 19042004" thirdspace 3/2 (March 2004): 126-7 (print), 4 pars. (web).
[http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_gerodetti.htm].
127

new books in print

There are no reviews in this issue of thirdspace. We will be back next issue with lots of great
reviews. In the meantime, here are a couple of books worth looking at. These mini-reviews are
taken from Women In Print's website, with thanks. For more new books please go to
http://www.womeninprint.ca. Please see our bookstores guide for a local, independent
bookstore online/near you.

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2003. $21.00.
A memoir about teaching literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the story of a
community of women whose lives are forever changed through their shared love of books.
After resigning from her last academic post, Azar Nafisi set about making one of her dreams
become a reality. She gathered together some of her brightest and committed female students
to read forbidden Western literary classics. During these weekly meetings, the women risked
removing their veils and immersed themselves in Jane Austen, Henry James, F.Scott
Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov through the shared experience of reading, they unravel
their own stories and their lives in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran takes us on a fascinating
journey into the passionate world of book-lovers and into the hearts and minds of these
remarkable and resilient women.
Anne Kingston, The Meaning of Wife. HarperCollins Canada, 2004. $36.95.
Award-winning journalist and social commentator, Anne Kingston, offers insight and a fresh
perspective on what it means to a wife today. Through research, her own experiences, and an
exploration of contemporary icons both real and fictional, Kingston examines the landscape
of wifehood and analyzes the married womans relationship to sexuality, power and worth.
An engaging, surprising and original look at women and marriage.

128