Queering Female Jealousy
Anna Mills / SUMMER 2001
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN ARE consistently drawn to images of other women? Mainstream female America can’t get enough of half-naked, conventionally gorgeous women sulking or smiling out from magazine covers, TV sets, and movie screens. Look at the magazine rack in your local drugstore or supermarket—without the words, can you tell
Maxim
from
Cosmopolitan
? Can you tell if the “luscious” women on the covers are supposed to entice a man or a woman? I can’t. As feminists, we charge the media with using female bodies to sell everything from soap to beer to Palm Pilots. As often as not, though, these campaigns target women, not men. How do we explain straight women’s susceptibility to these images?
Here’s the traditional feminist explanation: In a patriarchal society, women’s worth is based on attractiveness to men. Women are drawn to images of women who fit the “beautiful and sexy” mold because we want to fantasize about the desire, love, attention, and respect we would get from men if we looked like them. “Land that man, ace your job, and look your sexiest ever!” screams a typical women’s-magazine cover line. Sexiness is all about status. Fascination with other women is all about admiration, competition, and envy. Right?
It follows that mainstream American culture expects women to be riveted by each other’s beauty. Straight women are often acutely aware of and
affected by each other’s clothes, jewelry, makeup, and body size. Women are notoriously—stereotypically—competitive and jealous of each other’s looks. The cliché that women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women, passes without comment. But no one bothers to ask if sexual attraction has anything to do with it—not even feminists. We should. How can the sensual, the erotic, and the sexual not be woven into those complex and intense emotions that women feel when they compare themselves to each other? How can women’s intense interest in other women be totally divorced from sexuality?
It’s time to queer our views of women’s fascination with other women, to free them from assumptions of heterosexuality, and to look at the ways their meanings escape and wreak havoc with heterosexual, sexist norms—and the ways this fascination gets played out in envy, self-hate, female friendships, and women’s preoccupation with eating and body image.
An article in the sex section of
Women.com
—an umbrella site that hosts, among other things,
Cosmo’
s web presence—describes a woman’s relationship with her ex-husband’s new wife: “One afternoon, I breezed over early for the designated pick-up [of my children]. There, sitting in [my ex-husband’s] living room, was a young woman in shorts with the most beautiful legs I had ever seen. Legs are a big deal for me; I’m convinced mine look like storm-uprooted tree trunks. I was glad I was wearing a long skirt.”
Read the passage again, this time imagining that the narrator is bisexual. Might one wonder if she was attracted to her supposed rival? The encounter can be read as erotically charged until the narrator turns her reaction into an attack on her own body.
Women are expected to admire, comment on, and gush over each other’s appearances. Straight women regularly do so with warmth, enthusiasm, and sensual appreciation. Imagine two women, let’s call them Jane and Mary, greeting each other after a separation. “Oh, it’s good to see you!” says Jane, giving Mary a warm hug. “You look so beautiful!” Mary exclaims as she leans back to smile at Jane, hands still on her friend’s waist. She touches Jane’s blouse to feel the material and looks up and down her body. “That skirt makes your butt look so cute!” she adds. Are these women friends, lovers, or flirting? Imagine how shocked you might be if you saw two straight men behaving this way. Once the question of sexual orientation is raised, the scene becomes much more difficult—and interesting—to read.
For many of us, thinness is one of the major qualifications for sexiness. Feminists have documented many of the deeper meanings of women’s obsession with body size and eating, including messages about self, desire, entitlement, nurturing, and rage; one of the ways these obsessions function is as a point of intense connection, pain, and envy between women. Obsession with weight makes women hyperaware of each other’s bodies—always measuring and comparing, coveting and judging. Is your lunch partner eating a burger or a salad? Did your closest friend gain a few pounds? Many women are similarly obsessed with the various diets and exercise regimens employed by weight-conscious celebrities—thus we have Monica Lewinsky’s Jenny Craig diet and Sarah Ferguson’s tenure as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.
On Oprah Winfrey’s video about her own dieting process,
Make the Connection,
she rhapsodizes about Goldie Hawn’s butt and announces, “I’m now working out with Goldie’s behind in my mind.” Later, when Cindy Crawford appears in a skimpy leotard, there’s an awkward moment when Oprah openly looks Crawford up and down, taking in her figure with intense admiration. She leans back and announces, “There’s a body!”
How far am I going with this? Is all envy really attraction? Are all female friendships chock-full of repressed sexuality? Do women with body-image issues just need to come out? For sociopolitical shock value, it would be delicious to make these claims. For the sake of true and useful theory, though, I want to question just that type of absolutism. My point is not that we’re all big dykes, but that the distinctions among sensuality, sexual attraction, and platonic love are not always stable or easy to determine. The erotic is an integral part of the wide range of affection between women. Under a system where women are not encouraged to acknowledge attraction to women—even to themselves—that attraction has to hide somewhere. Where better than in the socially sanctioned obsession with other women’s appearance? Where better than in the supposedly “pure” model of platonic friendship?
I know from my own experience that it’s possible to completely confuse envy and attraction, and that this confusion can go totally unnoticed by both the woman in question and those around her. It was easy for me to use the concept of envy to spend twenty-two years as a straight girl, never realizing that I was attracted to women.
My mother explained to me when I was eight that gay people weren’t
bad, just unfortunate. I understood that gay people were different, and that I would never be like them. It never occurred to me I might be one of them. When my friends and I entered puberty, I became acutely aware of other girls’ bodies. As I hit fourteen or fifteen, this awareness developed into intense envy and competition with other girls. I remember feeling a jolt when I saw a really attractive girl—a feeling that made my insides twist in despair, believing that I could never look like her. I fantasized about the attention, status, and love she got from men. I thought about how much they must want her. This misery led me to focus more and more on my weight as the source of all my problems. If only my body would change, I reasoned, I could be just like that other girl. And so began a cycle of compulsive eating, hating my body, and dieting that lasted for years.
In college, as I joined feminist groups and read analyses of overeating and dieting, heterosexual feminist interpretations seemed to fit my experience to a T. The books I read explained that I was jealous of other women because my attractiveness to men determined my self-worth. I was socialized to attend to men’s desires, not my own. I was focused on keeping my own body attractive and therefore out of touch with what I wanted for myself. Yes, yes, yes.
In my journal, though, I expressed confusion. “It’s not just a body, it’s a horror. My weight means something else about having a shameful body … It started when I started dating. It must have something to do with my sexuality. I always wanted to lose so he would be more attracted to me. I think there’s something going on here I don’t understand.”
No one—not my friends, not the women in my feminist groups, not the theorists writing about body image—mentioned that attraction to women, and ambivalence about my feelings, might be part of the picture. No one suggested that questioning my sexuality might be an option, much less a good idea.
By the end of my junior year of college, I was not eating compulsively, not restricting myself so much, and not beating myself up over what I ate. I was moving toward healthy relationships with men, as well as more body- and self-acceptance. I had read all about lesbian feminism, and I was primed to reinvent heterosexuality in empowering, feminist ways.
And then a strange and wondrous thing happened: A close friend told me she was a lesbian, and I realized I had a crush on her. Over the next few weeks, I surprised myself again and again by noticing that I was, in fact,
physically attracted to women. I felt it in the dining hall, walking down the street, sitting in class. Where I used to feel pangs of envy—followed by self-criticism and despair—I now felt attraction. Girls were pretty, cute, sexy. Looking at them made me hug myself, grin, gossip voraciously, blush, and feel goofy. I acted fourteen. I was incredulous at my good luck.
When I had begun to get my bearings as a queer woman, I rushed to the library to read about body image, envy, and sexual orientation. I found feminist-penned theories linking homophobia and male competition, which cited the homoerotic aspects of the military, athletics, the business world, and power relations among men in general. But I found no parallel analysis of women’s relationships.
Women’s own stories testify that madness, self-hatred, and rage are a few responses to life in a sexist society. The gap between what we feel and what we are supposed to feel is often too difficult or risky to acknowledge; compulsive eating and dieting, starvation, cutting, and abusing our own bodies are all ways women both express and control unnameable feelings. But what feminist theory has not fully explored is the possibility that neuroses, self-hatred, and hostility to other women are responses not only to sexism but also to compulsory heterosexuality (identified and defined by Adrienne Rich in her classic 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” as the system privileging heterosexuality as universal, natural, inevitable, and moral, and denying, minimizing, and shaming the existence of queer desires). Women who have no way to acknowledge queer desires may turn the uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion in on themselves, as I did. The violent denial of queerness may be one origin of the self-directed misery and violence that feed jealousy, negative body image, and eating disorders.
How can something so insidious be uprooted? What would women’s sense of self, body image, and perceptions of the media look like without it? I can offer only provocative guesses. I have argued that shots of halfdressed models are a secret, unconscious way for women to desire women. Those images might lose some of their power if women were able to acknowledge queer attraction and fully integrate it into their lives. If women admitted openly the possibility of loving women, they might be able to let go of the ambivalent, insecure fascination that sells so many magazines.
Cosmo’
s screaming would begin to fall on deaf ears.
The questioning process allows women to name feelings that span the lesbian continuum Rich describes—the spectrum of sexual attraction, sensuality, affection, and platonic love. Confronting the fear of being a lesbian might open women up for more kinds of closeness with each other, whether or not they choose to be sexual. I know that my own perceptions of women changed after I came out, even with women to whom I’m not sexually attracted. I am warmer, more appreciative, and more affectionate than I was; I enjoy women more. In an openly queer culture, women might let go of some of the critical, insecure awareness of the bodies of women around them. They would likely still enjoy looking at images of other women, but without the edge of fear, self-doubt, and insecurity that denial brings.
The shift to a queer-positive, woman-identified viewpoint would make unnecessary a lot of self-hatred, envy, and self-directed violence. Women might begin to define what they want to look like from within. Women who are used to wishing they could be skinny, clean-shaven, fashionable, and femme might start to ask, “If I were attracted to a woman, whom would I be attracted to?” We might begin to rethink what we find attractive in our own bodies and come to appreciate a round stomach, extra fuzz, or the deep-brown moles on a shoulder blade. Discussions of diets, exercise, and fetish foods could give way to an exploration of what is compelling, attractive, moving, or exemplary in each other. The model’s rigidly sculpted posing might still hold occasional attraction, but it would be just one kind of beauty among many.
Living in a culture that embraces the insidious systems of sexism and compulsory heterosexuality, women will not be living lives of our own choosing until we ask a few questions: Whom do you want? Whom do you want to be sexy for? It will be a queer, happy world when the model’s hungry gaze loses its pull. Women will let go of old obsessions to revel in a dizzying diversity of beauty. We will find joy in each other through a hundred types of sexual, sensual, and friendly connections. Are we ready?
Rewriting Gender in the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction
Noy Thrupkaew / SPRING 2003
The kiss was not at all like Kirk had expected …
“Spock, wait … wait,” he whispered desperately … “I can’t … we can’t … you … God, Spock … I want you. Don’t you understand? I want you so much!” Kirk still couldn’t believe that the Vulcan knew what he was getting himself into. But Spock was pressed tightly against him and Kirk could feel the hardness. Spock’s cock was pushing into his hip, hard as rock and insistent … Spock smiled then, only a short, ghostly smile, but it was there.
“Jim.”
“Yes?”
“You talk excessively.”
—from “Christmas Gifts … or Blue Seduction” by kira-nerys
DON’T WORRY,
STAR TREK
FANS, YOU DIDN’T MISS AN EPISODE. But if you haven’t been poring over fanzines or trolling the web, you might not have come across the juicy encounters, gender play, and fiercely feminist theorizing found in the world of slash fiction.
Named after the punctuation mark between the names of its loverheroes (e.g., Kirk/Spock), slash fan fiction was born at the end of the ’60s, when inventive viewers started penning steamy rendezvous between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in fanzines. But it wasn’t until the ’90s that slash
fiction truly flourished, with the advent of the Internet and its discussion groups, where a growing subculture of writers, editors, and readers could share and critique one another’s work. As the number of stories increased, so too did the range of potential pairings. Intrepid slash writers—primarily women—gleefully found the love that dare not speak its name between just about everyone: Starsky and Hutch, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, even Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (HP/DM authors hasten to assure readers that their stories feature the characters in their late teens.)
The relationship dynamics in slash have become just as varied as the couples. Initially steeped in first-time male love between two comrades-inarms, slash has developed into a free-for-all, exploring S&M complexities, male pregnancy, and other flights of writerly fancy. Slash also attracts critical attention from social theorists, many of whom ponder one of the more interesting questions about the genre: Why do slash writers, who are predominantly straight women writing for other women, focus so much (though far from exclusively) on male/male romantic relationships? Although theories abound—male relationships are truly egalitarian, female characters are too boring to write about—slash has become so diverse that it easily thwarts anyone trying to find one generalizing principle.
With slash’s steamy combination of gender-bending plots and playful raunch, it’s no surprise that cultural theorists, feminists, and everyday pop culture mavens have found it so intriguing. Like all fan fiction, slash turns pop culture consumers into creators and thrives on a sort of dialogue between fan and character. But it goes one step further than most fanfic by openly interrogating static pop culture notions of masculine and feminine—experimenting with, discarding, or reinventing ideas about gender.
Slash enables its writers to subvert TV’s tired male/female relationships while interacting with and showing mastery over the original raw material of a show (key for all fanfic). Writing male characters as lovers allows a richer sense of possibility than duplicating the well-worn boy/girl romances coughed up by most TV shows.
In addition, slash is steeped in a community that amplifies the feminist qualities of much of the genre. While not all slash is self-consciously political, many slash writers identify as feminists and engage one another in vigorous dialogues about gender. In writing about men and discussing
the process, many women are taking that room of one’s own to another level. They’re not only laying claim to images of men but also reconfiguring male behavior—a powerful way to make men their own.
When they’re not experimenting with the genre, slash authors—a very self-aware, self-analyzing community—are discussing gender, queerness, and feminism in all their different forms. Add this to a lively academic debate on slash, and you have a rich mélange that makes the idea of a grand unified theory of slash seem laughable. One critic may posit that slash is a space where female writers can create the “ideal” human in a misogynistic world: male body, male power, female ways of relating. Another will argue that slash provides a space for women to work out their gender issues, a place where they can dump the unwanted restrictions of “femininity.” Slash is gay. Slash isn’t gay. Slash is neither, or a little of both. Slash lets women assert power over men the way the patriarchy asserts power over women. Slash lets women humanize and redraft masculinity. Slash is about nooky. Slash isn’t about sex at all. Slash allows women ways of writing (collaborative, participatory) that subvert male ways of writing (copyrighted, absolute, and closed).
Evolutionary psychologists Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons, coauthors of
Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality
, argue that the predominantly female-written genre speaks to differences in mating behavior between men and women. According to Darwinian psychology, our hunter-gatherer forebears had different needs—the men to impregnate as many women as possible; the women to find a nice, stable, dependable man to provide for them. Porn reflects the male desire, say Salmon and Symons, and romance novels reflect the female. As for slash, perhaps the erotic fanfic gives modern women a way to have their cake and eat it too. The genre illustrates how “some women prefer the fantasy of being a cowarrior to that of being a Mrs. Warrior,” say Salmon and Symons, but the relationships’ emphasis on friendship, loyalty, and fidelity also reflects Darwinian desires for a responsible guy who will stick around.
To a feminist reader, this analysis has some clear flaws, especially the way it strains to explain the gender unconventionality of slash in such retrograde, traditional terms. It’s frustrating that Salmon and Symons try to reduce the work of female slash writers down to an essentialist baby-making vs. gender-equality conflict, ignoring examples of fanfic that don’t fit into that mold.
More promising is the scholarship of Constance Penley, who argues that female slash authors focus on male/male relationships because they’re the most egalitarian. Basing her theories on Kirk/Spock (K/S) slash, Penley critiques the flat characterization of female TV characters and the limitations of what TV and media culture depict as male/female relationships. But in real life, she also argues, women’s bodies are too often layered with negative meanings—and therefore become the site for political, social, and moral struggle. K/S slash is a rejection of those problematic bodies and of TV’s flat female characters, serving instead as a subversive rewriting of the script in which lovers can share love and work and still be equal. Penley’s analysis does have its limitations, however, in that it doesn’t cover slash other than K/S.
The more slash—and slash theory—I read, the more convinced I became that no one analysis could explain the varieties of slash, the bent of all slash writers, the political leanings, the gender fuckings, the story rogerings that happen daily on the Internet. All my reading—and attempts at writing—suggests to me that the relationships between male characters allow a writer to strike a harmonious balance between working within the framework of a show and spinning a tale of her own imagination. The best slash I’ve read captures the rhythm of the characters’ speech, probes their psychology, and shows a mastery of complicated plots, all while taking the characters in new directions. And although a similar sense of possibility could await a writer delving into unexpected male/female pairings (Scully and Skinner, for instance) or trysts between two female characters (say, Buffy and Willow on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
), male/male pairings add an extra dimension—the opportunity to recraft masculinity itself. And for women—straight or queer—who write slash fiction, this certainly seems to add an extra-enticing challenge, a sense of going where no woman has gone before.
It is precisely that quality of ordered freedom that explains why science fiction has become such fertile ground for slash. Science fiction is deeply concerned with utopias, dystopias, possibilities, alternatives, and fantasies, but it is also deeply bound to the order and logic of science (however fancifully constructed it may be). For all its whimsy and strangeness, science fiction also mirrors our own reality. And slash seems to reflect that combination.
Many slash writers are compelled to make male characters a bit more
communicative and tender—qualities stereotypically associated with women. But there are pitfalls if one goes too far. Some slash stories have lanternjawed guys coming home with flowers every day, tying on pink aprons, weeping over lost football games. These stereotypes, “feminine” or no, are boring despite the genders involved. But more than that, these tales are not sexy. There is just too much sameness to the characters—both men so soft and squishy—that one has no sense of how their differences could be complementary, or how they are different characters at all.
And there’s another reason not to push a masculine character to unbelievable heights of femininity—it violates that delicate balance in fanfic between precedent and imagination. A writer who frills up a butch male character may earn the wrath of someone like Jane at the website Citizens Against Bad Slash, who writes: “There seems to be an overwhelming tendency in the slash community to make masculine characters so feminine that you could change one of the names to ‘Mary’ and it wouldn’t make a difference … Even if we’re writing stories about an alternate universe, it’s always more interesting when the dialogue and actions of the character are somewhat true to life. The neat thing about slash is that you get to see characters act out what you don’t see onscreen, but it loses its appeal when the character is so ‘feminized’ that you can’t recognize him.”
While Jane does seem to buy into static masculine and feminine codes of behavior, in the world of stereotypical TV gender roles, her critique makes sense. For this reason, exaggerated feminine characteristics stick out just as much as masculine ones. Sometimes slash writers err in the other direction, writing reams about stoic, uncommunicative men having hot sex. And while that can be fun for a while, the stories that have received the most acclaim in the slash world are ones that show why these men are with each other and what’s behind the sex. They also flesh out their heroes with qualities that are a combination of traditionally male behaviors (assertive, confident) and female characteristics (nurturing, communicative). In other words, the best pieces feature players who are more like real people than the characters you find on TV.
Interestingly, unexplored female/female TV relationships seem to hold a similar sense of possibility and limitation. The acknowledged lesbian relationship of
Buffy’
s Willow and Tara, like the overt and obvious male/ female relationships, did nothing for me, and indeed there doesn’t seem to
be as much slash about that couple as there is about other pairings left subtextual by the show (like Buffy/Willow). With a relationship that airs in real TV time, there’s just not enough negative space for a writer’s imagination to fill in. The tension between two women who aren’t already in a relationship is much more promising, however—
Star Trek Voyager’
s Seven of Nine and Captain Janeway, for example, have proved quite enticing to many slash writers.
For many, slash has become a potent way to personalize interactions with a show, to lay claim to it by infusing it with sexual fantasy, gendered role-play, and power dynamics. And for those who are politically inclined, writing slash is a creative endeavor with feminist overtones—one that allows people to ponder gender issues in a creative, supportive environment. The world of slash, after all, is populated predominantly by women who are not mere consumers of culture but who have become producers in their own right. Slash writers, along with authors of other fanfic, have changed TV and movie watching from a passive act into a participatory one, allowing for the deciphering and creation of meaning. That a slash writer can grapple with gender and power issues adds extra richness to the already subversive practice of writing fanfic.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of material. Television leaves a lot to be desired—which means more room for slash writers to fill with their imaginations. Even if TV changes dramatically for the better—with more programs that highlight deep, complex characters and show a broader range of social issues, loves, and sexual orientations—I’m sure that slash writers will find their space. They’re too ornery, too independent, and too ingenious to let even the best TV prevent them from finding ways to improve it.