Ugly dykes: pejorative identities and the anti-aesthetics of lesbianism

Restricted until 12 Apr. 2012. This project investigates the connections between ugliness and lesbian identity in the twentieth century. Ugliness names the disagreeable traits that are attributed to lesbianism as part of its cultural formation and describes putatively racist, misogynistic, and homophobic qualities that this dissertation uses to theorize the stakes of political visibility. Framed by early-twentieth-century characterizations of racially and sexually degenerate female bodies, lesbianism in the late-twentieth century, I argue, comes to signify a renewal rather than a recuperation of such negative qualities, which surface in -- and as -- experiential, textual, and corporeal forms. Specifically, I establish ugliness as a politics of gendered, racial, and sexual difference that uses oppositional depictions to critically reassess the status of contemporary lesbian identity. Ugliness ultimately develops as a specific indicator of the pejorative frameworks that shape lesbianism and thus raises vital questions about queer identifications and marginal artistic/textual practices.; Chapter One explores Gertrude Stein’s and Claude McKay’s early-twentieth-century incorporations of primitivism, which capitalized on non-Western art styles, maligned bodily features, and "unrefined" sexual and creative practices. McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) strategically conflates blackness and unattractive physical characteristics, but lesbianism, I contend, becomes the figure of blackness in the text's vernacular configurations of language and culture; this linguistically specific primitivism extends to Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) and suggests a non-ideal, less-romanticized view of lesbian sexuality than the typically affirmative readings of its radical form. Chapter Two continues with an analysis of comix, a contemporary example of primitive art, which I bring together with nihilism, outlined as the mechanisms that restrict opting out of stigmatizing political and representational logics. Examining political incorrectness alongside visual incorrectness in Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Butch (1999) and Erika Lopez's Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997), I read visual discrepancies and identificatory impossibilities as specific issues of depicting non-gender-normative and non-white bodies. Chapter Three considers the connections among lesbian sexual identification, black female identity, and surviving sexual abuse in Sapphire's poetry collections, American Dreams (1994) and Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999). While lesbianism may be used as a way to heal from sexual abuse, this chapter demonstrates that the disavowal of lesbianism ultimately dictates the terms of healing and ultimately associates lesbianism with abuse. In turn, the poems use the theme of rape to construct the "self" in and through a violating language of the violated body.; Chapter Four expands on questions of abuse, and shifts to films that include and represent the tensions between photography's "authenticity" and the midnight movie genre's "fakeness" in depicting sexual and substance desiring practices. Through what I describe as ugly sex and postpunk feminist dystopia in Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982), this chapter investigates the "alienated" lesbian body, which, in the film, literally transmits euphoric chemicals from sexual activity, indistinguishable from those of heroin use, to space aliens. Correspondingly, alienation in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art (1998) comes through as lesbian desire that is bound up with heroin addiction and photographic documentation; I show that lesbianism communicates as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be properly "developed."