Teresa de Lauretis

Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation (1988)

“The psychoanalytic discourse on female sexuality, wrote Luce Irigaray in 1975, outlining the terms of what here I will call sexual (in)difference, tells ‘that the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual.’ Within the conceptual frame of that sexual indifference, female desire for the self-same, an other female self, cannot be recognized. ‘That a woman might desire a woman “like” herself, someone of the “same” sex, that she might also have auto- and homo-sexual appetites, is simply incomprehensible’ in the phallic regime of an asserted sexual difference between man and woman which is predicated on the contrary, on a complete indifference for the ‘other’ sex, woman's. Consequently, Irigaray continues, Freud was at a loss with his homosexual female patients, and his analyses of them were really about male homosexuality. ‘The object choice of the homosexual woman is [understood to be] determined by a masculine desire and tropism’ — that is, precisely, the turn of so-called sexual difference into sexual indifference, a single practice and representation of the sexual.

“Lesbian representation, or rather, its condition of possibility, depends on separating out the two contrary undertows that constitute the paradox of sexual (in)difference, on isolating but maintaining the two senses of homosexuality and hommo-sexuality. Thus the critical effort to dislodge the erotic from the discourse of gender, with its indissoluble knot of sexuality and reproduction, is concurrent and interdependent with a rethinking of what, in most cultural discourses and sociosexual practices, is still, nevertheless, a gendered sexuality. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to work through these paradoxes by considering how lesbian writers and artists have sought variously to escape gender, to deny it, transcend it, or perform it in excess, and to inscribe the erotic in cryptic, allegorical, realistic, camp, or other modes of representation, pursuing diverse strategies of writing and of reading the intransitive and yet obdurate relation of reference to meaning, of flesh to language.

Gertrude Stein, for example, ‘encrypted’ her experience of the body in obscure coding, her ‘somagrams’ are neither sexually explicit or conventionally erotic, nor ‘radically visceral or visual,’ Catharine Stimpson argues. Stein's effort was, rather, to develop a distinguished ‘anti-language’ in which to describe sexual activity, her ‘delight in the female body’ (38) or her ambivalence about it, as an abstract though intimate relationship where ‘the body fuses with writing itself’ (36), an act ‘at once richly pleasurable and violent’ (38). But if Stein does belong to the history of women writers, claims Stimpson, who also claims her for the history of lesbian writers, it is not because she wrote out of femaleness ‘as an elemental condition, inseparable from the body’ (40), the way some radical feminist critics would like to think; nor because her writing sprung from a preoedipal, maternal body, as others would have it. Her language was not ‘female’ but quite the contrary, ‘as genderless as an atom of platinum’ (42), and strove to obliterate the boundaries of gender identity.” (159)

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