Morgan, Seraphin Mary. “Reading and Writing Lesbian Identities: the Anxiety of Representation in Twentieth-century Fiction.”

Abstract:
This study approaches the development of lesbian literature by examining how lesbian authors have been both limited and inspired by binary conceptual paradigms that divide gender into masculinity and femininity; sexuality into heterosexuality and homosexuality; and, periodically, lesbian signifying practices into butch and femme. It is established that sympathetic lesbian characters rarely appear in either popular or canonized literature; as a consequence, lesbian authors who strive to contribute to an emerging lesbian literary tradition have worked under the inherently political pressure to create hospitable representations that either corroborate or resist prevailing discourses on the forms of lesbian identity and desire. Thus, it is argued, representations of lesbians in literature incite anxiety, not only among lesbian authors, but also among lesbian readers, who scrutinize each provocative representation in highly charged and often contentious political contexts.

In response to contesting discourses from those representing the medical professions, social sciences, and feminism, Radclyffe Hall, June Arnold, and Audre Lorde wrote fiction through which they endeavored to influence and determine the signifiers of lesbian identity and desire and, thus, to 'correct' those constructions of lesbians they found hostile, inadequate, or misleading. Judith Butler's theory of 'gender performity' is employed to show how the pervasive 'anxiety of representation' under which these, and other, lesbian writers work derives from largely artificial and ultimately reductionist binary categories. Through an analysis of lesbian characters in Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Arnold's Sister Gin (1975), Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and a discussion of the broadly various representations of lesbians appearing in contemporary fiction and media, this study describes the important shifts in strategy lesbian writers have adopted at critical historical junctures as they either corroborate, or, in Butler's terms, 'trouble' binary categories of identity. Finally, this study examines how contemporary lesbian authors, inspired by the very inadequacy of binary categories, destabilize, stretch, or ignore binary conceptual borders in their representations of lesbians, and, thus, are moving a burgeoning literary tradition beyond the anxiety of representation.