Marilyn farwell

Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (1996)

“For literary criticism, a lesbian narrative is a problematic category because it involves two contested terms: lesbian and narrative. What would, on the surface, appear to be a simple issue—a lesbian story about women who are sexually attracted to other women—has become over the last twenty-five years a complex theoretical problem dividing current literary critics and theorists, pitting anti-essentialists against essentialists, pronarrative against anti-narrative factions, and political lesbian-feminists from the 1970s and their descendants against queer theorists of the 1990s. In this atmosphere, the word ‘lesbian’ remains an elusive term that, as noted over ten years ago, is ‘plagued with the problem of definition’ (Zimmerman, ‘What’ 456) and more recently has been called the ‘hub of conflicting intellectual and ideological interpretations’ (Palmer, ‘Contemporary’ 60). After the explosion of narrative theory in the last half of this century, theorists also debate the relative worth of popular, realistic narrative structures versus the more avantgarde, postmodern narratives.” (Kindle location 244 of 5413)

“The discursively constructed lesbian subject…undermines gender opposition and hierarchy and also male bonding, structural elements which combine to form the ideology of Western narrative. The lesbian subject refuses and repositions the constricted narrative stance of woman, creating what I call a lesbian narrative space. It therefore works in both a Utopian and a deconstructive fashion…” (Kindle location 607 of 5413)

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