3

Queer Sexuality and the Lesbian Feminist South

Floating on the Yalobusha River in kayaks with my partner and “Big Sexy”—a fifty-eight-year-old, bisexual, cross-dressing construction worker—I begin to believe that the entire state of Mississippi is queer. It’s mainly because of Big Sexy’s patter as we slowly drift:

“Do you know John? He is gay as hell. Of course, he just got himself a girlfriend. I texted him and wrote, ‘What the fuck is up with that?’ ”

“My first marriage ended when my wife told me she prefers women to men. Of course she got married again. I ran into her at a bar with her new husband and she came and kissed me on the mouth. I said, ‘That tastes good but I had it first.’ Ooh, she was MAD at that.”

“Bruce? That town is gay gay. Eupora, too.”

“Have you been to Drew’s Place in Memphis? Nice little neighborhood lesbian bar. I like to go there fully dressed.”

And so on. As the hours pass, I wonder if there is a man in this state who hasn’t had a guy back behind his barn, if all the women have “special friends” in their bridge clubs or sororities or church socials.

There was a reason these stories seemed familiar to me. This is the world of the southern gothic, made flesh: sexual perversion behind every decaying mansion, gender nonconformity bristling behind the magnolias, the landscape pulsing with deviance. Southern gothic literature—with its focus on claustrophobic, dysfunctional family relationships, the supernatural, and sexual deviance that produced an impression of the South, and humanity more generally, as “grotesque”—was made famous by a group of writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. Even before then, abolitionists made accusations of sexual deviance on plantations, of adultery, miscegenation, and even (Harriett Jacobs whispers in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) homosexuality, a precursor to the construction of the South as the nation’s “other.”1 During the Cold War, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote depicted a South bursting with taboo sex, including incest, rape, necrophilia, and bestiality. From Charles Bon’s kimono to cousin Randolph’s kimono, from McCullers’s dwarves to Capote’s dwarves, from Quentin’s Canadian “husband” to Brick’s lost “friend”—all circulated sexual tropes that continue to inform impressions of the South. Sexual deviance is one of the South’s most successful exports; indeed, from the 1930s through the 1950s, the southern grotesque made queer transgressive decadence a key part of the southern literary brand. To be southern was to be, by definition, a sexual freak.

The southern gothic—its sins, its stereotypes, its sexualization of southern identity—has been so extensively studied (by scholars as varied as Louis Rubin, Susan Donaldson, Patricia Yaeger, and Ann Goodwyn Jones) that the editors of the Undead Souths (2015) declared that “old tropes of the Southern Gothic are themselves now decayed, long-standing images and ideas mummified and cracking into dust.”2 The southern gothic has been invoked in criticism in a cornucopia of ways (indeed, in Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire, that variety exists in one chapter), including as resistance, as critique of southern segregation, and as feminist appropriation. Yaeger argues that the grotesque operates differently when women appropriate it, that it becomes a protest and an exposé of the ways that patriarchy makes women’s bodies vulnerable and frames insubordinate women as deviant.

The broader implications and meanings of the southern gothic are beyond the purview of The Lesbian South; what is significant for this study (and for the southern lesbian feminist writers discussed herein) is that the southern gothic provided a mechanism to explore queer sexuality. Sarah Gleeson-White’s 2003 Strange Bodies shows how Carson McCullers’s “grotesque” narratives allowed for multiple explorations of female adolescence, male homosexuality, carnivalesque gender performance, and androgyny. She argues, “McCullers’s grotesque is similarly productive of new worlds, new subjects, albeit strange in the context of the dominant motifs of southern gendered and sexual behavior.… By engaging with contemporary accounts of gender and sexuality, I emphasize and celebrate McCullers’s menacing and ultimately transgressive vision, and its emancipatory and empowering potential.”3 But McCullers did not depict lesbianism directly; it would take southern lesbian feminist writers to cross that final taboo—a challenge they accepted with gusto.

The southern gothic had its queerest iteration in the work of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, whose haunting fictions made queerness central to the South. They didn’t necessarily believe that sexual deviance would transform society, but simply that queerness, unvarnished, was true, and sometimes beautiful. McCullers and Capote championed characters who make others uncomfortable: the drug addict and seeming pedophile Randolph and the sissy boy Joel in Other Voices, Other Rooms; the masculine Amelia, in love with a vindictive dwarf in The Ballad of the Sad Café; the closeted homosexual and animal abuser Major Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye. These characters’ outsider status is clear, their suffering is immense, and their ends are tragic. Compassion and identification fuel their depictions. McCullers stated that perspective most clearly in her essay “Notes on Writing: The Flowering Dream”: “Nature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal. Anything that pulses and moves and walks around the room, no matter what thing it is doing, is natural and human to a writer.… I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ ”4 For McCullers, the human transcended all categories of normality.

McCullers’s and Capote’s commitment to the queer and the grotesque wasn’t simply a perverse pleasure or campy ironic homage. Their identification with cultural others led them to critique the brutal regime of the normal and expose the violent disciplining of the abnormal. The “unspeakability” of sexuality made its role in violent repression invisible. In Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, the gang rape of Zoo, which prevents her migration and freedom, demonstrates the cruel power of “transgressive” sexuality. In addition, both Joel and Idabel are punished for their violations of gender norms: the truck driver in the novel’s opening sequence wants to pull down Joel’s britches and “muss him up” to make him a “real boy”; Idabel is kicked out of public restaurants for her violations of gender norms, and in the end, her beloved dog is killed and she is sent to a gay conversion camp of sorts, where she is forced to wear dresses and endure Baptist sermons. McCullers’s queers are even more embattled. Allison Langdon cuts off her nipples during a depressive episode—an attempt to liberate herself from femininity, apparently—and is committed to an asylum against her will; Major Penderton, longing for the company of men but forced, through convention, into marriage with a woman, kills the voyeur who chooses his wife over him. Miss Amelia’s queer passion for Lymon, her hunchback cousin, leads to her own destruction as a triangle of unrequited love—Amelia’s for Lymon, Lymon’s for Marvin Macy, a former Klansman and Amelia’s husband, and Marvin’s for Amelia—leaves her bereft and isolated in a small-minded southern town. The brutality with which queer grotesques are punished exposes the deeper codes of violence that sustain the normal and guides the reader into sympathy with these outsiders, not in spite of but because of their radical difference. It has taken queer theory decades to articulate and unravel what writers like Capote and McCullers portrayed in their fiction: queerness as a resistance to and exposure of regimes of the normal.5

An exchange between Mab Segrest and Dorothy Allison suggests the importance of the southern gothic for southern lesbian feminist writers. In My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, Segrest had critiqued the southern literary tradition for framing women’s sexuality and agency as monstrous: “Both McCullers and O’Connor were casualties of the war of the female mind with the female body.”6 Feminist southern writers, Segrest believed, would create a new form of southern writing, “seeking new forms and language” (19). This new tradition did not include Bertha Harris and her famous essay on lesbian monsters; “I don’t care to be a monster,” wrote Segrest, who instead advocated “imagining and visioning ourselves out of patriarchally prescribed roles that depend on their power on oppression of the Other” (40). Southern feminist writing, Segrest maintained, would leave the grotesque behind.

Dorothy Allison would have none of it. Segrest’s rejection of the grotesque and her attempt to separate feminist writing from the gothic tradition provoked a sharp rebuke from Allison, who framed the debate in both literary and personal terms: “Grotesque is a buzz word to me and it has taken me years to sort it out. I am grotesque. Do you realize that? Not just me, but my family, all blacks, all poor people, all lesbians. We don’t have to do anything ‘grotesque’—we simply are by definition. Of course if you throw in incest, child abuse, rape, s/m, violence, poverty, self-hatred and homosexuality, we’ve got no argument, right? All those grotesque realities, right?”7 Allison ties the grotesque to the marginal in the South—African Americans, lesbians, and the poor; if the grotesque interpellates all these groups as deviant, then Allison embraces that label, in solidarity with all the South’s cultural others. Allison continues with concrete examples from her own life, suggesting that Segrest’s rejection of the “grotesque” stems from her disgust at the working-class realities of southern women like her. Indeed, she advocates claiming the label “grotesque,” much as queer theorists reclaimed “queer” in the 1990s. “What is grotesque Mab? What is it you think is happening in those novels by Williams, O’Connor and McCullers? Do you know that what I see is compassion and love, a championing of what the world calls grotesque? Do you see how I might believe that a radical act, the only christian act I believe in—loving what the world tells you is sick and hateful and contemptible? For me it is about loving my own life.”8 For Allison, rejecting the grotesque meant rejecting the reality of her own queer life in the South. Her insistence that to write about the deviant is to champion “what the world calls grotesque” frames the southern gothic as an act of queer defiance.

One could argue that southern literary critics developed their version of the southern literary tradition against this notion of southern sexual deviance, embracing tradition, family, and a grounded “sense of place”—in a word, normality. Even otherwise progressive southerners chafed at the image of the southern grotesque as a blot on the honor of the South. But for most of the southern lesbian feminists discussed in this book, the southern grotesque was the only cultural narrative that made visible southern queerness—not just homosexuality or even nonnormative sexuality, but unassimilable queerness, the disturbing, the repulsive, and the true. Indeed, it made queerness central to southern culture.

That radically queer embrace—to “champion what the world calls grotesque”—dominates the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Detailed descriptions of transgressive sexuality are found in the works of nearly every writer discussed in The Lesbian South. These writers were exposing the hidden queer dynamics of literature and culture long before Eve Sedgwick’s complex readings exposed the central role of queerness in the Western literary tradition. They did so, variously, to challenge patriarchy and suggest more empowering sexual roles for women; to shock and invert the negativity surrounding the “decadent southerner”; and to expose the ways that “deviant sexuality” is actually a tool of the status quo. In every case, these southern lesbian feminist writers were committed to explicit descriptions of a wide range of sexual practices, refusing euphemisms and encoding for discomfiting and often distressing depictions of sex. This is perhaps the most notable achievement of the archive of southern lesbian feminism; it is simultaneously traditional (in its linkage of southernness and deviance) and radical (in its insistence on explicit description).

This chapter frames southern lesbian feminist depictions of transgressive sexuality within contemporary queer studies and the gay and women’s liberation commitment to liberatory sexuality, but traces their distinctive contribution back to the southern grotesque. I argue that their embrace of transgressive sexuality emerges from a specifically southern conversation, one which queer theory helps us articulate and appreciate. Southern lesbian feminists’ combination of the southern gothic and sexual liberation informed their insistence on frank depictions of specific sexual acts and gender identities purposely transgresses community norms. In the sections that follow, I explore Harris’s, Allison’s, and Florence King’s explicit invocation of the Southern Gothic; women’s liberation’s interest in sexuality as a means of empowerment and revolution; and queer theory’s investment in the disruptive power of nonnormative sexuality. Weaving these strands together, I then analyze the archive of Southern lesbian feminism’s varied interrogation of sexuality, through a variety of specific examples: sex scenes, polyamory, intergenerational sex, female incest, prostitution, and rape.

There is little consensus among Southern lesbian feminist writers about these sexual pratices; some are celebratory, some outraged, some embrace certain practices as liberatory, while others condemn those same practices as a tool of patriarchal oppression. But what these writers share is a commitment to discarding euphemism for explicit, frank description. Not for them the shadowy insinuations of the Cold War southern gothic. Whether it exposes the hidden workings of a homophobic and misogynist culture or champions the grotesque, the archive of southern lesbian feminism makes transgressive sexuality, described in explicit detail, a central focus. Taken collectively, the archive of southern lesbian feminism is still astonishing in its capacity to shock, to challenge, to outrage, and to inspire.

Grotesque Camp: Bertha Harris, Dorothy Allison, and Florence King

No southern lesbian feminist writer was more committed to the southern grotesque than Bertha Harris, whose devotion was inflected as camp. Her 1972 novel Confessions of Cherubino made that embrace clear. The description on the cover of a 1978 reprint explains:

Under one Southern gothic roof, Bertha Harris packs the most comic and outrageous family ever assembled in fiction … then sends its members into the world to drive the rest of us crazy with desire.

The temperamental little genius of love, Cherubino, is as gifted with disguise as with sexual delight: Cherubino is

—A baby-faced soldier gone AWOL

—Sanctissima with her passion for pianos, airline stewardesses and prima donnas

—Robert, the postman, who specializes in Special Delivery

—Miss Nina, with her ambition for the perfect perversion

—and clairvoyant Venusberg, musical May-Ellen, deaf Beloved, heroic America: Margaret, the born-again sweetheart[.…] But especially Cherubino is Ellen, who is all the dreams made flesh.9

Confessions of Cherubino contains virtually every stereotype of the southern gothic—rambling southern manor, queer elder sons, adulterous husbands, incestuous mother/daughter and sister/sister relations, cross-dressing, decadence—but it goes much further than other novels of the genre. It is the southern gothic on crack: the characters are crazier, the sexual liaisons are more outrageous, and the queerness is not shadowy but explicit. Harris’s open embrace of the queerness of the southern gothic becomes a particularly effective literary weapon that merges sexual otherness and humor.

References to famous southern gothic novels abound in Confessions of Cherubino. Ellen’s sexual liaison in the garden with Venusburg, the black daughter of the “servant” and probable half sister, is reminiscent of the Judith/Clytie liaison in Absalom, Absalom!; Miss Nina’s too-close relationship with her gay son—even living together with him and his lover—suggests the refrain “Violet and Sebastian, Sebastian and Violet” from Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer; Ellen’s drag performance of her father evokes Frankie’s cross-dressing in McCullers’s Member of the Wedding; America’s rape by Ellen’s father, Roger, depicted as a visitation by an angel, alludes to Zoo’s narration of her gang rape in Other Voices, Other Rooms.

The South’s “sense of place” takes on new meaning when Ellen, after a night of walking the streets in her father’s clothes, writhes against the earth in the garden of her southern home. That garden is later the site of her sexual liaison with America’s daughter, the clairvoyant Venusburg:

She took off the cape with a flourish that Roger had never accomplished and spread it over the girl. Venusberg huddled; then she relaxed and waited. The cape’s heavy braided collar covered nearly all her face; one of her pigtails, bristling into a rotten tomato, was becoming soaked in yellowish juice[.…]

With two slow movements, with one harsh clumsy movement, Ellen went beneath the cape.

Venusberg whispered, through her sighs, into Ellen’s shoulder: “… Sincerely yours, Venusberg. Book, Castle, Music, Piano, Drum Marjorette, Valedictorian, Up North, Good Eye, Dresses, Beauty, Home … home … home … Ellen, Ellen, Ellen,” finally she gasped.

Ellen’s feet jutted from beneath the cape; her toes dug into the gray vegetable earth. Before long, their pink wetness became thick with dust. The cape rocked.10

Hiding the actual sex under a cape, Harris toys with explicit images including the “yellowish juice” oozing under the cape and the “long, pink wetness” of her toes in the dirt, Erskine Caldwell–esque. Sexual deviance ties all these outrageous flights of fancy together, and the southern setting gives Harris cover to depict queer sexuality.

Harris’s campy embrace of the gothic as decadent lark influenced her most famous student, Dorothy Allison. Allison’s collection of stories Trash (1988) uses the southern gothic to celebrate lesbian lust. The narrator of “Monkeybites” describes having sex with her butch lover in the lab where she worked, with monkeys in cages as voyeurs:

She grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands behind my back, holding them there with one hand while she used the other to rip the snaps of my blouse open and unzip my jeans slowly.… I heard my sobs like they were echoes in a wind tunnel. She inched my jeans down over my butt until I was whining like a monkey strapped to a metal table. “Oh, fuck me. Goddamn it! Fuck me!” I begged. Toni slid me on to the edge of the table and my hair swept the floor. When her fingers opened my cunt and her teeth found my breast, I started to scream and the monkeys in the wall cages screamed with me.… When I finally started to come, I swung my head until the cages blurred and the monkeys became red and brown shimmering cartoons.11

Allison toys with dangerous grotesque imagery here, depicting animals and queer desire in tandem. Like Harris, Allison makes queer desire explicit; though significantly less playful, she is equally invested in tropes of the southern gothic.

Indeed, in “Monkeybites” Allison comments on the continuing relevance of the southern gothic as Toni critiques the narrator in a speech that serves as a metafictional commentary on Trash as a whole: “Shit girl, it’s just too much, too Southern Gothic—catfish and monkeys and chewed-off fingers. Throw in a little red dirt and chicken feathers, a little incest and shotgun shells, and you could join the literary tradition.… If you were to work on your stories well enough, someone would be sure to conclude they had something to do with your inverted proclivities, your les-bi-an-ism. Something like you constantly re-enacting the rescue of your little sister. Hell, you could make some psychiatrist just piss his britches with excitement.”12 Allison’s reference to the southern gothic suggests that the gothic authorizes her to discuss sexuality explicitly, using the trope as license for unsettling frankness in sexual depictions. It emphasizes the gothic as a vehicle for critique that inspires voyeurism but also exposes deeper cultural trends.

Another aspect of the southern grotesque suggests that sexual deviance may become a means of social control, and this also has a strong legacy in the archive of lesbian feminism. Florence King has made transgressive sexuality central to southern experience in her devastating satires of denials and double standards in the South.13 King’s 1975 essay collection Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, full of trenchant critiques of the schizophrenia of “normative” gender roles, is a much more accessible version of Judith Butler’s later analysis in Gender Trouble. In one of her most famous essays, King argues that “The cult of Southern womanhood endowed her with at least five totally different images and asked her to be good enough to adopt all of them. She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at the same time. Her problems spring from the fact that she succeeds.”14 Her explanation of the “self-rejuvenating virgin”—the southern belle who is both frigid and passionate—is one of the funniest descriptions of schizophrenia ever penned:

“IT DIDN’T REALLY HAPPEN BECAUSE …”

1. I was drunk.

2. We didn’t take all our clothes off.

3. We didn’t do it in a bed.

4. He didn’t put it all the way inside me.

5. He didn’t come inside me.

6. I didn’t come.

7. … Well, not really. (34)

In King’s depiction of southern womanhood, extramarital sex is both rampant and condemned. She is equally incisive in her discussion of the “Town Fairy” who exists in every town, usually without problem, even as “straight men in smaller towns are always bragging, “We don’t have no queers ‘round cheer’ ” (156). How is possible that “Nobody minds him, and he is no threat to even the worst queer-hater” (157)? King explains, “The reason he isn’t is that Southerners believe in heredity, not environment, and Town Fairy is universally considered to be nobody’s fault: the Lord did it. Town Fairy’s problems are blamed on the fact that he was—are you ready for this? A change-of-life baby. This is perhaps the South’s neatest sleight of mind, one that cheers both men and women” (157). Thus, the South can be both homophobic and accepting at the same time—as long as the “town queer” is single and connected to a prominent family. Tolerance for the eccentric Town Fairy can obscure the rampant intolerance of African Americans and of queers who do not come from well-to-do families. King, a staunch conservative, did not see this penchant for the kinky or the transgressive as progressive or revolutionary. Instead, her essays show how southern transgressive sexuality is essential to “normal” southern life. That awareness of both the transgressive power of sexuality and its potential for cooptation by the ruling power was central to the southern gothic, and it would be central to women’s liberation and queer theory as well. The latter iteration, however, would insist on queer community, a prospect more threatening to the status quo.

Women’s Liberation and Liberatory Sexuality

In the early days of women’s liberation, some lesbians combined their critique of patriarchy with explicit queerness, resulting in a confrontational, cheerful sexual rebellion. Lesbianism was seen as the vanguard of the movement, a site of transgressive and liberatory sexuality. As Bertha Harris explained: “Women’s liberation in New York was, at its onset, about sexual liberation; too many men were not interested in finding out what makes a woman come. Too many women had sedulously anaesthetized libidos. The women’s liberation movement was about the American woman’s American orgasm. It was that simple. Every other thing that the women’s liberation movement was about during the sixties and seventies in New York followed from that, including the fact that I looked out my window one morning and saw lesbians everywhere. It’s easy to recognize lesbians; they look like you, only better.”15 Harris’s explanation of feminism as primarily about sex is incomprehensible in our current narrative of women’s liberation (which tends to characterize feminism as sexless and cheerless), but it reminds us that for one influential group of women’s liberationists, sexuality itself was a prime site of women’s liberation. By remaking the most intimate patterns of sexual life, women would use sexual pleasure to remake the culture as a whole.

Harris’s claim that women’s liberation was about “the American woman’s American orgasm” was not unusual in the early days of women’s liberation. Sexual pleasure for women was revolutionary. Jane Gerhard argues that “Within second-wave feminism, the female orgasm came to represent women’s self-determination, making ‘the great orgasm debate’ central, not incidental, to the project of women’s liberation.”16 Women’s autonomous desire was unthinkable under patriarchy; any suggestion of it would result in the dreaded interpellation slut. The radicals of women’s liberation embraced slut, but the word they used more often was the worst thing a man could say about a woman: lesbian. This led to a split between the mainstream and the radical. As Harris explained:

The more intimate the women, the higher their consciousness, … the greater their pleasure in one another. That’s how liberation initially worked. But pleasure frightened many women; so did the displeasure of men. Betty Friedan, a social reformer from Peoria and the author of The Feminine Mystique … put the fear of pleasure into words; she accused lesbians of trying to subvert the women’s liberation movement with orgasms. A sexual panic broke out.

When the dust cleared, the movement was roughly divided between the sexual subversives and the rest of the women’s movement—women who feared both the displeasure of men and the pleasure they felt with one another.17

Commemoration of “sexual subversives” and their central role in early women’s liberation is common in memoirs from the era, which are replete with salacious and sometimes hilarious details. Jeanne Cordova, for example, recalled living with a partner but having set “free days” when they could pursue and sleep with other women.18 Karla Jay describes going to a sex party in California that included men and women, featuring gay, straight, and lesbian sex, and having a threesome with a lesbian couple in a sleeping bag; all three got crabs from the sleeping bag, putting a damper on their sexual liberation.19 The San Francisco lesbian community on Valencia Street included not only several lesbian bars but a women’s bathhouse, Osento. Though it functioned differently than men’s bathhouses—the rule for Osento was “no sex, even with yourself”—it still was an essential part of a radical and sexually liberated women’s community. Feminist periodicals from the 1970s detail a full range of transgressive sexual practices.

Sex, then, was serious business in early women’s liberation, a means of liberation and revolution. Blanche McCrary Boyd’s retrospective novel about the early women’s movement, Terminal Velocity, summarizes the perspective succinctly:

“Only radical lesbians, by introducing pleasure and fun into the revolutionary equation, can liberate sex from power, thus liberating women from men.…”

“You see Red Moon Rising as a place where pleasure and fun are goals? Isn’t that, um, decadence?”

“Revolutionary pleasure and revolutionary fun are not decadent,” Ross said primly. “Not in the context of the sexual oppression of women.”20

Such theorizing was common in early consciousness-raising groups, manifestos, and feminist treatises. The notion of a distinctive women’s sexuality liberated from patriarchy and the male gaze became an obsession.

Southern lesbian feminists were often poster girls of liberated feminist sexuality. Rita Mae Brown’s sexual conquests, for example, were as legendary as her activism and her writing. She slept with the actress Alexis Smith in New York; seduced Charlotte Bunch in Washington, D.C., breaking up her marriage; had a relationship with Elaine Noble, one of the first women elected to the statehouse in Boston; and went to Hollywood and stole Fannie Flagg away from her long-term partner, only to leave Flagg for Martina Navratilova. Brown enjoyed her status as lesbian sex symbol; she published photos of herself on her books and encouraged her fans to circulate them and post them.

Brown may have been the most visible womanizer among lesbian feminists, but she was hardly unique. Bertha Harris’s conquests were also notorious; they included Charlotte Bunch, who had terrible luck with partners in the 1970s, and possibly a liaison with June Arnold. Blanche McCrary Boyd’s archive contains letters from distraught former lovers, and Boyd reported an acid-fueled one-night stand with country music star Marshall Chapman. Pat Parker’s commitment to nonmonogamy made her a rakish figure on the West Coast. Minnie Bruce Pratt explored polyamory when she had relationships with both Cris South and JEB (Joan E. Biren, a lesbian photographer who had been part of the Furies collective).

Dorothy Allison became a symbol of this sexual liberation in the 1980s, when lesbian feminism turned from sexual transgression to what many called sexual puritanism. As a member of New York’s Lesbian Sex Mafia and a public advocate for sadomasochism, Allison became a pariah in lesbian feminist circles after the Barnard Sex Conference in 1982, which marked the beginning of the “lesbian sex wars.”21 Those skirmishes over “right” and “wrong” ways to have sex were a dramatic departure from the earlier optimism about the liberatory power of transgressive sexuality, and they made clear an important distinction between southern lesbian feminists and the wider lesbian feminist movement. Southern lesbian feminist writers made the most of the enthusiastic attitude toward sexuality in early women’s liberation, but they were more committed to the strange, the disturbing, and the transgressive than to simple celebrations of liberatory sexuality. Their hybrid of the southern grotesque and the sexual subversiveness of women’s liberation produced a commitment to direct, explicit depictions of transgressive sexuality.

Queer Theory and the Critique of the Normative

Southern lesbian feminist writers understood transgressive sexuality within a larger matrix of power, and their focus on sexuality is an important genealogical link to queer theory, which emerged in the early 1990s. Queer theory made the very notion of “normal” sexuality its primary critique; for queer theorists, the nonnormative and transgressive are exemplary. Grounded in Michel Foucault’s analysis of society’s disciplinary regimes, queer theory surfaced in the fierce political backlash surrounding AIDS, which fueled its suspicion of assimilation and its critique of the status quo. Many queer theorists are wary of the “pride” narrative, exploring shame;22 more broadly, they mistrust the mainstreaming of queer sexuality that has led to the legalization of gay marriage and the “normalizing” of queer relationships.23 Queer theorists are also, Annamarie Jagose argues, skeptical of orgasm as a “register of normativity,”24 and therefore dismissive of feminists’ equation of liberation with the “American woman’s American orgasm.” To mainstream queer relationships for the approval of society at large is to mute their potentially transformative power.

One of the most trenchant critiques of assimilation is Leo Bersani’s influential 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Written at the height of AIDS panic, the essay refutes the “redemptive reinvention of sex” as “lies” we have been telling for political reasons: “The immense body of contemporary discourse that argues for a radically revised imagination of the body’s capacity for pleasure … has as its very condition of possibility a certain refusal of sex as we know it, and a frequently hidden agreement about sexuality as being, in its essence, less disturbing, less socially abrasive, less violent, more respectful of ‘personhood’ than it has been in a male-dominated, phallocentric culture.”25 Rejecting this “refusal of sex as we know it,” Bersani argues that we should understand sex as “anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (215), thus becoming spokespersons for the “anti-communitarian thesis”—a queer intellectual movement that separates queer sexual acts from redemption, group action, political progress, and even identity itself. Bersani believes that sex is so powerful that it destroys society and the very notion of self: “The self which the sexual shatters,” he explains, “provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self” (218). Sex, particularly queer sex, is a disruptive force that undermines the very basis of society itself.

Other queer theorists are so utopian in their understanding of the transformative nature of nonnormative sexuality that “queerness” itself becomes an ideality. In the hands of José Muñoz, one of the most lyric of the queer utopians, the queer becomes almost a koan. In the opening chapter of Cruising Utopia, he writes:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.… Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic.26

Whether dystopian or utopian, queer theory insists on the transformative, disruptive value of the queer. A commitment to unassimilability and rejection of the normal still unites the diverse field of queer theory. Though the roots of its radical suspicion are clearly grounded in the AIDS crisis, it also draws on an earlier faith in the transformative power of sexuality that was evident in early women’s liberation and gay liberation.

Recent work in queer theory has looked at how the mainstreaming of LGBT people can make homosexuality complicit with normative systems of state power. Jasbir K. Puar calls this “the powerful emergence of the disciplinary queer (liberal, homonormative, diasporic) subject into the bountiful market and the interstices of state benevolence”; this move involves “full-fledged regulatory queer subjects and the regularization of deviancy.”27 Puar contrasts homonationalism “against queerness, as a process intertwined with racialization.”28 Gains in LGBT rights, including marriage equality, have raised concerns among queer theorists that the revolutionary potential of transgressive sexuality—its queerness—is being lost. The controversy over “pinkwashing,”29 for example—the charge that Israel touts gay rights to obscure its colonial oppression of Palestinians—suggests that nonnormative sexuality can sometimes be a tool of oppressive dominant power structures.

Queer theory, then, mistrusts the lure of the normative as much as it celebrates the transgressive. The normalization of LGBT sexuality risks losing the transformative power of the queer. Like McCullers and Capote, contemporary queer theorists insist on the transgressive in its disturbing, unassimilable iterations. Southern lesbian feminist writers, a bridge between these two queer forms of protest, similarly rejected normalized depictions of lesbian sexuality for challenging, risky, grotesque textual explorations.

Queer Sexualities and the Archive of Southern Lesbian Feminism

Southern lesbian feminists contributed to a broader critique of heteronormativity in their explicit descriptions of deviant sexual identities. Influenced by the southern gothic, gay pulp, women’s liberation, and gay liberation, these writers were committed to open, explicit descriptions of the specific sexual behaviors and practices of transgressive sexuality. They rejected the transgressive as simply a metaphor, or a shadowy allusion, in favor of describing a broad range of sexual behaviors in language that blurred the line between the literary and the pornographic. The archive of southern lesbian feminism sometimes condemns or critiques these sexual depictions, but it always embraces a politics of visibility.

This tradition described sex between women in exhaustive detail. Not for these writers was the encoded tomboy, adolescent or carefully linked romantically to men, that marked the Cold War southern grotesque. They eschewed Carson McCullers’s heterosexual marriage, which made her baby dyke style safe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Romantic, lustful, sentimental, funny—the styles range, but sexual content remains central.

Bertha Harris’s Lover was so explicit that Harcourt Brace rejected the manuscript. “In a three page letter,” Harris wrote Barbara Grier, “they told me in mincing terms that Lover is perverse (Perverse!).… In simpler language, it is a dirty book.”30 One wonders whether the editors were reacting to passages like this : “Flynn fucks women. All she must do to maintain paradise is to fuck women; and she does; she fucks them behind the arras, the tuppenny stand-ups; and in the rowboats on her river; and in the swimming pool and in the grass and in great four-posters and on fur rugs before fires huge enough to roast a cow. Face-to-face with them, she fucks them.… A vagina is a long, deep swoon.”31 Harris’s often difficult literary style opens up here for a direct embrace of women’s lust. Lover answers the question “What do two women do in bed?” in inventive, glorious detail:

Her fingers bump across the other’s knuckles until her fingers are caught in the other’s palm. It is an irresistible takeover; and then she has three loose fingers and a thumb with which to cup the other’s fist. That is the way she frequently begins—and it could end with only that. But not this time—because, almost immediately, her free hand starts. It takes the other’s waist, it slides around to the other’s back, the small of her back; then enters the clothing, insinuating beneath the waistband and shirt. At this point, the tips of her fingers are resting against the initial curve of the buttock. In this manner, she draws her toward her; until the shoulders, the breasts, bellies, pubi, the knees indent, one against the other.

Then she moves, but only from the hips, and a little to the left. The lover’s right thigh is then between the legs of the beloved. It is a tight fit, and the entire length of the thigh. The lover’s first kiss is on that curve where the neck becomes shoulder. She kisses; then she licks there, then she sucks there. Sometimes she tastes perfume; sometimes she tastes sweat, or soap.

The beloved, too, becomes necessary. Some point is eventually reached at which one cannot tell lover from beloved. A conglomerate of picture, sound, smell, noise charges past her on the red-carpet pavement. There are cloudbursts, dingdong bells, shoo-fly pie, yumyum and the lover’s indrawn breath (taken, now, from within the beloved’s ear). But if she is smart she will neither grab, gesticulate, nor roar. She will take deep breaths. She will close her eyes, and hold on; but not too tightly.

The wizard tongue collects the eyelid, then the mouth’s first corner, then its second, then all its insides—teeth, tongue, gums, palate; while the hands go up and hold tight underneath the arms, and the two thumbs press, once, against the nipples. Once more, then, they touch the hips then leave the body entirely. The lover and beloved are separate now, so the lover says, “I love you.” (61–62)

In an homage to Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Harris refers to the two as “lover” and “beloved,” eschewing gender-specific descriptions of their sexual roles. To claim lesbian sex as a universal act of love is as audacious as McCullers’s framing of a love affair between a mannish woman and a dwarf. Harris’s language pays attention to women’s bodies in exhaustive detail: the unnoticed curve of shoulder to neck, the detailed list of thumbs, hips, nipples, teeth, tongue. Harris replaces specific descriptions of sex for a stream-of-consciousness collection of “picture, sound, smell, noise,” and then lists hilariously ironic metaphors for the act: “cloudbursts, dingding bells, shoo-fly pie, yum yum.”

Other passages give more detail about what two women actually do together: “She has two fingers inside the movie star’s vagina, stroking the round of the cervix; and the stranger is crooning, ‘O, my dear little vagina!’ … I dreamed I was making love to you.… I want you to know that it was me making love to you but not like a husband does, it was with my tongue. And suddenly, in this dream, that little thing that grows at the top of a woman down there, that little bud, turned into two separate little pieces of electrical wire—two little gold electric things” (145). The precision of this description of lesbian sexual acts—stroking the round of the cervix, the “little thing that grows at the top of a woman down there”—puts most pornographic writing about lesbianism to shame, mainly because it does not presume the primacy of the phallus or the necessity of a man. Two women, Harris maintains, are more than adequate for the fulfilment of desire.

Joyful depictions of lesbian sexuality are common in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Indeed, the freedom to write about lesbian sexuality openly often made writers downright giddy. Consider the first sex scene in June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter, which uses the gender-neutral pronouns na and nan:

The carpenter’s hand reached into the cook’s hair, long curved fingers cupping nan skull as if it were most fragile wood, carving so coveted nan hand trembled[.…] Crickets and leaves and the brook’s game with its pebbles and their own breath and motion surrounded them, but that was outside; inside was silent. “I’ve never kissed anyone before except in the presence of thoughts in words. A thousand comments. Do this. Think this. What if.…? What are you doing? My mind is six hours old.” A frog croaked and na smiled and grew serious. “I’ve never done this before.”

On the damp dark earth smelling of summer and insects, the carpenter felt nan nose fill with the smell of the cook’s face and nan mouth with the tang of saliva; nan hand on the cook’s chest tingled[.…]

A sudden rain made the leaves over their heads flap and the sound of the rain reached them before its wetness. They licked the water from each other’s faces, “God thinks sex is dirty,” the cook said.

“Na doesn’t. That was applause. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Your face has changed, “ the cook said. Na stopped at the edge of the trees and stared at the face of a friend two years, now lover.32

The scene foregrounds women’s experience; both women are active agents, not passive recipients. The recurrent natural imagery—crickets, a creek, “damp dark earth,” rain—marks this sexual encounter as a liberated one, free from coercion and hierarchy, and having sex in the garden rewrites Garden of Eden mythology; they are two Eves before the Fall, and the gender-neutral pronoun na makes the “masculine” and “feminine” partner impossible to determine. Arnold confronts the “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” invocation of the garden when at the end of their encounter the rain (uncontrollable wetness) is interpreted by the cook as criticism and by the carpenter as “applause.” Arnold tries to write a new language for sex in this scene, outside of heteropatriarchy—even as her language draws on religious imagery and themes.

On the other side of the cultural hierarchy, Naiad Press sex scenes were distinctive—evocative, euphemistic, and sometimes unintentionally funny. Witness a sex scene between the two lovers in Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me:

Travis emitted a low moan, closing her eyes and tightening her arms around Myrtle’s neck. The kiss was long, deep and exploring, wonderfully new and fresh to them as first lovers’ kisses can be.

Myrtle contoured her face between the groove of Travis’s breasts, inhaling the woman-smell of sweetness and salty dampness.… Tenderly Myrtle began to disrobe her, pausing to kiss, nibble, and lick unexpected places on bare flesh. Travis had a mole on her right shoulder blade which Myrtle now sucked gently. Hands deftly unfastened the flimsy tissue of brassiere to make the pendulous breasts fall freely in view. Myrtle bent, kissed and tongued the eye of each brown nipple. Easing down the sheer lattice of panties, she uncovered the coarse black curly bush of hair securing the Venus of her loving.33

It’s easy to make fun of the language here—“woman-smell,” and “Venus of her loving” are particularly unfortunate—but it is similar to the euphemisms of women’s romances (like “throbbing manhood”). Happy, romantic endings for lesbians were rare, even in the 1970s, and many lesbians wanted their own versions of romance novels. Sex scenes like this one—romantic, euphemistic, and earnest—were the backbone of Naiad’s success in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nevertheless, direct, sometimes disturbing, and transgressive depictions of sex dominate the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Writers risked confirming negative stereotypes about decadent southerners and degenerate queers to depict a wide range of sexual deviance—including polyamory, intergenerational sex, female incest, prostitution, and rape—with a fearlessness that distinguishes the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Polyamory

Polyamory was common in early lesbian feminist texts in the 1970s, and southern lesbian feminist writers continued to explore it in the 1980s. Rita Mae Brown’s irrepressible narrator from the 1973 Rubyfruit Jungle, Molly Bolt, has numerous lovers from the age of thirteen; her rejection of monogamy is part of a devil-may-care lesbian identity. When talking with her lover Holly’s older lover, Kim, she casually answers Kim’s question about her sexual relationship with Holly. Kim doesn’t mind: “Once I got beyond thirty-five I stopped being torn up about those things and I definitely gave up on monogamy. Maybe I can do it but no one else seems to be able to.” Molly answers flirtatiously, “Well, don’t test yourself. Non-monogamy makes life much more interesting”34 That attitude rules over the rest of the novel. Near the end, Molly’s first lover, now “reformed” and married unhappily to a man, asks her if she wants to settle down and what she’ll do when she gets old, and Molly answers, “I’m going to be arrested for throwing an orgy at ninety-nine and I’m not growing old with anybody. What a gruesome thought” (219). Polyandry runs through Brown’s 1978 novel Six of One as well.35 Ramelle has an affair with the Curtis, the brother of her lover Celeste, and insists that she loves them both: “I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel I’ve betrayed her. I feel it’s the most natural thing in the world to love you. Loving you makes me love her more and loving her makes me love you. Do you think it’s possible that love multiplies? We’re taught to think it divides. There’s only so much to go around, like diamonds. It multiplies.”36 Celeste doesn’t confront Ramelle because “it was none of my business. You belong to yourself.”37 When Ramelle becomes pregnant, all three of them raise the daughter collectively.

Alice Walker’s 1982 The Color Purple, one of the best-known novels in the archive of southern lesbian feminism, grew out of a rumination on a love triangle. Walker explained: “I don’t always know where the germ of a story comes from, but with The Color Purple I knew right away. I was hiking through the woods with my sister, Ruth, talking about a lovers’ triangle of which we both knew. She said: ‘And you know, one day The Wife asked The Other Woman for a pair of her drawers.’ Instantly the missing piece of the story I was mentally writing—about two women who felt married to the same man—fell into place.”38 Love triangles structure most of the relationships in the novel, and they are often overlapping: Albert, Shug, and Celie; Albert, Shug, and Grady; Celie, Shug, and Germaine; Harpo, Sophia, and Mary Agnes (Squeak); Harpo, Sophia, and Buster; Corrine, Samuel, and Nettie. As Linda Abbandonato puts it, “Triadic combinations proliferate; characters are constantly realigned in an intricate network of combinations, apparently in a continual state of metamorphosis until the final utopian vision.”39 The novel frames these multiple relationships as, simply, “family.” When Sophia introduces Buster to her husband (who is there with Mary Agnes), she says, “This Henry Broadnax.… Everybody call him Buster. Good friend of the family.”40 All these relationships transcend jealousy; the interlocking triangles unite for the common good. Mary Agnes goes to the sheriff to save Sophia from prison, risking her own safety for her lover’s wife; Sophia cares for Mary Agnes’s daughter when Mary Agnes leaves for Memphis; Grady and Shug, who are married, take Shug’s lover Celie back with them to Memphis; Albert consoles Celie when Shug leaves her; Nettie marries Samuel when his wife dies.

Walker suggests that these complex familial relationships are based on African models. When Nettie arrives in Africa with Samuel and Corrine, the members of the village assume that both women are Samuel’s wives. Walker frames monogamy and jealousy as patriarchal corruptions of human nature. Albert has to unlearn his misogyny, and by the end of the novel he is transformed from an abusive husband to a nurturing member of the larger family; as Celie explains, “When you talk to him now he really listen, and one time, out of nowhere in the conversation us was having, he said Celie, I’m satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man. It feel like a new experience.”41 Celie herself has to learn to love without possessing: “Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don’t take away none of her rights.”42 The “final utopian vision” includes all the friends of the family who love each other, celebrating together on Independence Day with the reunion of Nettie and Celie at the center, a polyamorous party.

Intergenerational Sex

May/December relationships—usually between older men and younger women—are common in American culture. They also are not uncommon in gay relationships, as George Chauncey describes in his discussion of “wolves” and “punks.”43 In lesbian pulp, the intergenerational romance was a plot staple: the older coworker, the teacher, and the coach all serve as mentors in lesbian love. Perhaps the most famous lesbian pulp novel, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, features an intergenerational relationship.

The image of the predatory lesbian was often disavowed during women’s liberation as a male fantasy and a suspect model of exploitive power, yet many southern lesbian feminists explored intergenerational sex in their writing. In Rubyfruit Jungle, when Molly Bolt learns that her coworker Holly is “kept” by an older actress, Kim, she is disgusted, but she discovers that Kim is both lovely and sympathetic. The host of a lesbian party is another matter. Molly imagines that she is “seventy years old, had her face lifted five times, … [and] sleep[s] in an alcohol bath,” (156–57) and she complains to Holly, “I get pursued by the human pickle. Some friend you are, fixing me up with the geriatric ward” (157). The reality is almost as bad—not Chryssa’s physical appearance, but how she treats Molly. Looking at Molly “with as much subtlety as a vulture” (162), Chryssa invites her to lunch and tries to buy her: “The questions from Chryssa—sly and charming but all leading to the same conclusion.… I nearly lost my restraint when she hinted she’d pay my way through film school, if only.… Why did that woman in her well-modulated voice try to buy me off? I know why, I know good and why.… How can I pay for school myself? A semester is $1,000. Goddamn being poor. I got to use my ass to save my head. Well fuck you, Chryssa Hart, I’m not taking your enticing money, and fuck me because I’m going to sit in that rathole and stay proud but poor” (167). Chryssa Hart is an unattractive predator eager to exploit poor attractive lesbians, and Molly feels as humiliated by her as she does by the male chauvinist pigs who prevent her budding directing career. It is noteworthy that among the novel’s archetypal images of New York queer life, Brown includes “chickenhawks.” Lesbian feminists often portrayed intergenerational romances as inherently exploitive and more common in gay culture, but Brown’s casual reference to wealthy older lesbians like Chryssa suggests this was a recognizable feature of lesbian life as well.

June Arnold takes intergenerational sex in a different direction. Su steps out on her middle-aged lover not for a younger woman, but for the ninety-one-year-old Mamie Carter. Her description of the old woman’s wrinkled body challenges the obsession with youth that supposedly undergirds intergenerational sex:

Su sunk her face into the ageless curve of her love’s shoulder and smothered a giggle.… “Your silk is matched only by our exquisite ability to prolong swallowing, our mutual toothlessness allowing for such a long balance on the tip of flavor: I just never imagined that the delights of age would include the fact of endlessly drawn-out orgasms.” … Su saw in her mind her coveted breasts, bound flat to her chest when she was in her twenties to produce a flapper fashion, hanging now from the base of the breastbone like soft toys, too small to rest a head upon, fit for a hand to cuddle very gently like the floppy ears of a puppy. Memory moved her hand to Mamie Carter’s belly—skin white as milk, finely plucked like sugar-sprinkled clabber; memory dropped her hand to Mamie Carter’s sparse hair curling like steel—there was strength between her legs and no dough there where the flesh was fluid enough to slip away from the bone and leave that tensed grain hard as granite and her upright violent part like an animal nose against Su’s palm. The image of memory bruised.44

Arnold provides explicit descriptions of the aging body, with images that are discomfiting and unexpected. The comparisons of Mamie Carter’s breasts to a puppy’s ears and her clitoris to a dog’s nose make her sexual organs seem cute and safe, even childlike, while also connecting her body to animal instincts. Similarly, the description of her body as a dessert—milk and “sugar-sprinkled clabber”—depict the aging female body as both delectable and commonplace. These safe, familiar images contrast with the taboo of this scene—old women are, apparently, capable of inspiring “long drawn-out orgasms.” Arnold’s fearlessness in this scene is distinctive in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

Female Incest

Nowhere is the riskiness of southern lesbian feminists’ engagement with transgressive sexuality more apparent than in its depiction of female incest. It was incest—shadowy, revolting, and vaguely titillating—that defined the southern gothic and enraged scholars in the nascent field of southern literature. In a tradition that began with Faulkner, portrayals of incest have confirmed the harshest stereotypes about deviant southerners, but also served thematic and literary purposes; the threatened incest between Bon and Judith in Absalom! Absalom!, for example, symbolizes the intimacy of racism in the South that separates members of the human family.

In the early days of women’s liberation, incest between mothers and daughters was often celebrated. Rubyfruit Jungle features a mother and daughter, Polly and Alice, with whom Molly Bolt has sex, albeit separately (she also has sex with the mother’s male lover). Polly and Alice have a close relationship, and in fact, Alice is convinced that her mother is sexually attracted to her. But rather than being upset about it, Alice thinks her mother’s “hang-up” is hopelessly square.

“You know Mom wants to sleep with me? … She won’t admit it but I know she does. I think I’d like to sleep with her. She’s very good looking, you know. Too bad it would freak her out. Incest doesn’t seem like such a trauma to me.”

“Me neither, but then I can’t really say much about that because I didn’t grow up with my real parents. But I never have been able to figure out why parents and children put each other in these desexed categories. It’s anti-human, I think.”

“Yeah, parents get freaked out about everything. Mom must have a heavy case of repression going, because she’ll never deal with the fact that she digs my body.” (209)

Molly advises Alice not to sleep with Polly, but not for moral reasons: “Just don’t sleep with your mother. I’m not against incest if both parties consent and are over fifteen, but your mother’s on her own weird trip” (209). When Alice and Molly have sex, it is without “weird trips” and “repression”; earlier, Molly had rejected the need for Freudian fantasies, and this is one encounter that delivers Foucauldian liberation from disciplinary structures: “Alice steamed and shook and sighed, and she hadn’t one sexual quirk in her mind. She loved being touched and she loved touching back. Kissing was an art form to her. She was there, all there with no hang-ups and no stories to tell, just herself. And I was just me” (210). As members of the same generation, Alice and Molly dismiss the incest taboo as just another “sexual quirk” and approach sex with an unromantic interest in pleasure.

It is tempting to see this casual acceptance of incest as a footnote to the era of free love, when all sexual taboos were questioned, but Brown was not the only southern lesbian feminist to explore consensual incest in a positive way. Bertha Harris wrote the most comprehensive treatment in Lover, in which Veronica and Samaria, two widows married to the same man, become lovers and establish an all-female household in which sexuality circulates dangerously. Mother-daughter bonds become the framework for lesbian desire: “There is no intimacy between woman and woman which is not preceded by a long narrative of the mother,” muses Flynn, as her “visitor” shouts “Motherfuck!” and “scald[s] her hand” in “boiling water” (173). This playful toying with the idea of incest, without ever naming it, marks much of the narrative—an homage to a southern grotesque past as well as a campy gesture to a lesbian feminist future. The closest Harris comes to saying the unspoken comes when Lydia, the movie star who has an affair with Flynn, warns off the rest of the family, which leads to a coded conversation:

“I hope you will not try to come between Flynn and I—except with great tact and delicacy of maneuver, of course.”

“She is naked under that bathrobe. It reminds me that I am starving and exhausted,” said Rose-lima. “You mean Flynn and me.”

“I was under the expression that I was the first for Flynn,” said Lydia Somerleyton, “and anyway, you and Flynn would be against the law, what they call insight.”

“That’s what I would call it, too,” said Samaria. (157; emphasis in original)

Rose-Lima’s correction of Lydia—“Flynn and I” should be “Flynn and me”—leads to Lydia’s misunderstanding and malapropism. The playful substitution of “insight” for “incest” suggests Harris’s use of the trope in Lover; female familial bonds—between sisters, mothers and daughters, even grandmothers and granddaughters—provide the motivation and model for lesbian desire. Flynn is obsessed with her mother Daisy, who has left the household for a man. The twins Rose and Rose-lima “pretend to be mama and the new husband” (20) and comfort Flynn in an elliptical and suggestive scene: “They held her tight and kissed her, and helped her cry for their mother.… Then they moved their sweet little hands down her body” (21). Daisy phones Flynn and describes a lesbian erotic dream she had about the two of them, to which Flynn replies, “That’s one hell of a way to talk to your own daughter” (146). And at the end of the novel, Samaria has fallen in love with Flynn, her granddaughter. Harris is careful never to cross the line—Samaria moves out of the house to avoid Flynn; Flynn and the mother never enact the dream; even the threesome between the three daughters might be nothing more than innocent comforting. Embracing incest, one of the most lasting stereotypes of the backward South, was a risky strategy.

Blanche McCrary Boyd, whose investment in southern lesbian feminism was uneven, turned to incest to resolve her 1978 novel Mourning the Death of Magic, which follows childhood sweethearts Shannon and Galley and their diverging paths through the tumult of the 1960s. Galley, a fictionalized version of Boyd, has relationships with women and is in and out of mental institutions. After Galley attempts suicide, she discovers the source of her ongoing turmoil: she is in love with her sister Mallory, a lawyer and feminist involved in NOW. The final scene between the two is more evocative than lurid:

Certainty passed through Mallory like a shiver. She said, “Who do you love now?”

There was a silence. “You,” Galley said.

“I know,” Mallory said. And it was true, she did know. Had known for some time without realizing it.…

Mallory turned her sister clumsily by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. It was strange, soft, salty, kissing her sister.

There was a faraway sound, then Mallory felt light, a revelation. Lust began to open inside her like a door, like a fist unclenching. Her nerves seemed to hang outside her like a web, like lace. It was right, and it was inevitable. She felt a relief, a sadness, a pleasure she had not even known about.

After awhile Galley said, “Don’t hurt me, okay?”

Mallory, who was too full of feeling to speak, shook her head that she wouldn’t.

They went back to the house and sat together in the bright bedroom. Mallory took off Galley’s shirt and then she took off her own. She turned off the lamp. She put her face gently against Galley’s breast and licked the tightening nipple. “I don’t know what this means,” she said.

“I don’t either,” Galley said.45

This “resolution” of Galley’s competitive relationship with her sister draws on a number of stereotypes: that homosexuality and incest go together (Mallory speculates just before this scene that Galley might be attracted to her46), that incest is endemic in the South (Galley is able to integrate into southern life after this sexual encounter, even running Mallory’s political campaign), that feminists are all nascent lesbians (especially short-haired feminists like Mallory), and that sisterly incestuous desire is both the cause of and the natural conclusion to lesbian desire. That Galley’s emotional problems seem to be cured by the consummation of her desire for her sister shows how deeply Boyd embraces the connection of transgressive sexuality and radical transformation.

Four years later, The Color Purple described Celie’s abuse at the hands of her stepfather in devastating terms, but readers often overlook the ways that Walker depicts lesbian sexuality through implied incestuous bonds. When Shug and Celie first have sex, Celie describes it in maternal terms:

She say, I love you, Miss Celie. And then she haul off and kiss me on the mouth.

Um, she say, like she surprise. I kiss her back, say, um, too. Us kiss and kiss still us can’t hardly kiss no more. Then us touch each other.

I don’t know nothing ‘bout it, I say to Shug.

I don’t know much, she say.

Then I feels something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost babies’ mouth.

Way after while, I act like a little lost baby too.47

This imagery continues in the parallel Shug draws between her relationship with Celie and Celie’s relationship with her sister Nettie. Shug asks many questions about Nettie “ ‘cause she the only one you ever love … sides me.’ ”48 Arguably, this pairing makes the lesbian desire safe, just as the sexual abuse Celie suffers provides a “cause” for it. But it is noteworthy that a book so often credited with exposing the reality and the dangers of incest also incorporates imagery pairing maternal and sisterly incestuous desire as a positive alternative.

In June Arnold’s final novel, Baby Houston, a celebration of her mother and the city of Houston, a daughter’s desire for her mother is the prime mover of the narrative. The novel is narrated in the first person from the perspective of the mother, who describes her daughter’s sometimes suffocating devotion to her. Hallie, the daughter, marries an abusive man, has children, and plans to move away. The dramatic final scene of section four, near the end of the novel, is the only time their erotic connection becomes explicit:

No one would suspect her now, although she is thirty-five, if she decided to kill me: daughter who loved her mother to death.

Now the thunder is in the room, lightning seems aimed at the house, at the kitchen where we stand. I am hugging her, holding her against my body as if we could insulate each other; I am frightened even as I understand that fear is a mask for loneliness.

Holding the candle over the sink she returns my hug with her other arm; her front deflates against my chest; her back is as rigid as ever. I am stroking it. I am kissing her hair, her neck. I feel her youth transfer itself into my age. Thunder vibrates against my ears. Then there is another noise—the sound of a hundred hooves stamping on our roof. We are being pelted from above: hail.

Although one room, one position is as dangerous as another, like babies we choose to huddle together in the bed, drawing the sheet around our shoulders, fixing the candle to a saucer and placing it on the dresser where we can see it. Fear unmasks itself. I am a fire of loneliness: no longer the gluey gray mud of yesterday, loneliness rages through my veins like hot rain, like flesh.

I am kissing my daughter like a lover.49

The scene ends there, before the taboo is breached (the next section jumps forward years, revealing Hattie’s departure to New York and Paris and her return to Houston for her mother’s death). And it is described as an aberrant moment, fueled by loneliness, fear, and a rainstorm. Still, the longing that is expressed in this scene is the animating force of the whole novel: mother-daughter bonds are the model for lesbian desire.

These writers’ sometimes cavalier, even celebratory attitude toward incest can be jarring, especially because work by Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison helped raise public awareness about the ubiquity and destructiveness of incest. Even queer theorists, with their enthusiasm for nonnormative sexualities including public sex, polyandry, and intergenerational sex, don’t touch incest. So why did southern lesbian feminist writers take on such an explosive topic?

The theme of incest in the southern gothic is one factor. Incest was a common literary trope in both southern and queer pulp traditions, and for Brown, Harris, and Boyd, it was a textual strategy, not a real-world endorsement. None of them seem to have had sexual relationships with female family members. The incest trope for these three was a defiant embrace of their innate queerness in a heteropatriarchal society, a provocation. Brown, Harris, and (to a lesser extent) Boyd seemed to be amused by these transgressive literary gestures.

Harris’s love for camp culture and gay pulp made her go furthest in her celebration of female-centric incest, but it was also part of a more sustained queer critique of heteronormativity, traditional reproduction, and “family values.” As Elizabeth Freeman argues, Harris undoes patriarchal descent, constructing all-female genealogy, shifting from downtown New York to an imaginary all-female household, from lesbian grandmothers to lesbian daughters, all while making a mockery of any stable notion of origins: the novel “scramble[es] the logic of family lineage.… Harris’s is a kin diagram turned rhizomatic.”50 Witness Veronica’s disavowal as a mother to her two sons, by providing multiple and contradictory origin stories to free them and her from an Oedipal inevitability:

I can’t be your mother, because I am not. One more time, I’m going to explain. Then I won’t ever again. Now listen: after the revolutionaries shot my parents and siblings, I wandered for a while, incognito. But the revolutionaries grew suspicious of my height, of my Florentine profile; and they quarreled over the royal body count. Somebody, according to some of them, was missing. I found two baby boys beside their mother, who was dying behind a haystack. The mother was an Irish dwarf, grateful for a chance to die in privacy. I strapped you to my back and continued my tortuous way. I escaped. You had grown fond of me—fond of my backbone, I suppose. I let you stay, even into my safety.

“That isn’t what you said, last time,” said Bogart. “Last time you said we were the sons of a blimp pilot whose ship exploded in flames above the state of New Jersey—and that you had us as a widow, by caesarean, like Ceasar.”

“No, that isn’t what she said last time. Last time she said we were the sons of a great Canadian revolutionary. From Canada, the man who led the Canadian revolution to victory. ‘Don’t organize, mourn,’ she said was our father’s dying words.”

“You pays your money, you takes your choice.” (173)

Veronica’s flippant conclusion that “the truth” doesn’t matter (“you pays your money, you take your choice”) suggests that all origin stories are equally irrelevant; what matters is their entertainment, their style, not their truth.

Lest we think Veronica is just being needlessly cruel, she herself is shrouded in mystery. She is a figure without origins, or with so many that any one genealogical version is suspect. After a deeply traumatic depiction of childbirth of both Daisy and Samaria (both “pulled through the lips of her vulva”), we witness a multiple, alpha-and-omega Veronica: “Veronica, however, came out of nowhere, and so she used to go exclusively with Veronica. They were childhood sweethearts. On February 15, 1947, Veronica gave Veronica a red heart-shaped box of candy and then they sat together in the porch swing that warmish February afternoon” (5). Harris goes on another two pages with these strange quasi-biographical details about Veronica, none of which clarify her character or even consistently fit together. She concludes, “Veronica began life as a religious poet composing ecstatic meters about drowned nuns. She began life as a bigamist, as a twin, as a married woman, as a lover. And still, at any moment, she can render herself again into an exact replica of all the creatures she started as” (7). Origins, in other words, are imaginary, the result of narrative, not the cause of it.

Ultimately, Lover positions lesbians as outside an oppressive gender binary. Flynn’s grandmother, Samaria, states the escape explicitly: “The truth is I got myself back in spite of it. In spite of it, I could become a lover and could stop being a woman. What they said, a woman. That’s why I am here, in spite of it, and not in a cage, like the rest of them, in a freak show. I am a lover, not a woman” (102–103). Harris’s rejection of the term “woman” as oppressive opens up a wider range of erotic activity and sexual identity. She rejects traditional kinship bonds; in a sense, the system in which female incest is significant is moot in the world of Lover. In Harris’s particularly queer lesbian feminist imaginary kingdom, familial bonds, like womanly identity, ultimately deconstruct themselves.51

For some other southern lesbian feminists, the embrace of female incest was a way to rewrite Freud’s theories of “normal” psychosexual development. Freud argued that small children sexually desired the parent of the opposite sex (boys, their mothers; girls, their fathers) and felt sexual jealousy toward the parent of the same sex. Freud thus makes incestuous desire the site of “normal” psychosexual development, and does so in a way that disallows any “normal” understanding of queer desire. When such notions of sexuality were commonplace, some lesbian writers—from Adrienne Rich to later feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Teresa de Lauretis and Diana Fuss—wanted to rewrite his notion of psychosexual development to include lesbian desire: if male heterosexual desire began with an intense attachment to the mother, then that model was also true for the lesbian child. Adrienne Rich’s 1978 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” argued that lesbian desire was rooted in the mother-daughter bond, which harked back to the physical connection of breastfeeding.

Southern lesbian feminists were making this argument even earlier. One example is Catherine Nicholson and Harriett Desmoines’s 1976 essay “Sinister Wisdom.”52 In the prologue they link their intergenerational romance with the incest taboo: “Catherine is fifty-three; I’m twenty-nine. We’d been lovers nearly a year when we voluntarily left/were expelled from? a lesbian separatist collective[.…] After nights of confused anguish, I say to Catherine, we’ve broken a double taboo. There’s a taboo against lesbian love, but there’s also a taboo against cross-generational love. No, no[.…] The taboo underlying both is this: it is forbidden for a woman to sexually love a woman old enough to be her mother . . . or young enough to be her daughter.”53 They refer to Freud to explain this taboo: “In the past of every woman, every mother-of-sons, lies a long-buried period of primary attachment to her own mother. The pre-Oedipal period is that time when the whole world seems a matriarchy, and the little girl is pleasurably at home in her body, content with its rightness, pleased with herself and with the mother who is the center of her world.”54 Patriarchy leads to a rupture and disdain between older and younger women, but the solution is clear (to them at least): “For a woman, to become whole is to untwist her past, to begin slowly the reconstruction of her mind and her body, her will and heart. To become whole is to spiral upward in a motion that is also return. Return to mother or to another mother, to an exchange of mothering. What has been used to denigrate lesbianism may constitute the healing power of lesbian love.”55 In this universalizing version of female sexual development, heterosexuality was unnatural for women; lesbianism was the most natural and holistic option for women’s sexuality. Embracing the incest taboo, and inverting the Freudian pattern, becomes a dominant means of theorizing lesbianism. The “lesbian continuum” may have de-emphasized the logistics and physicality of lesbian sex, but it also provided a means of identification that did not involve deviance as a central value.

For southern lesbian feminist writers who engaged this trope, female incest was a symbol for women’s liberation. For Brown, treating incest cavalierly demonstrates the feminist liberation of her respective heroines; for Harris, incest creates an all-female genealogical legacy that liberates itself from heteropatriarchal modes of descent; for Boyd, it extends her exploration of nonnormative sexual desire and provides an innovative resolution to a plot problem; for Walker, it provides a healing solution for Celie’s empowerment and a means to a happy future; and for Arnold, it is a metaphor for lesbian desire, replacing the Oedipal triangle at the heart of Freudian psychology. The southern gothic, which made incest a central trope, was merged with the radical feminism of these writers to create a thoroughly transgressive sexual ethos—a queering of normative sexuality that risks reinforcing retrograde stereotypes about the “backward South” as it refuses to encode the transgressive in shadowy tropes or obtuse language. This body of work continues to challenge both literary scholars and queer theorists.

Prostitution

In the early 1980s Rita Mae Brown took on the disciplinary power of the South and sexuality directly, with a focus on prostitution. In her Southern Discomfort,56 set in nineteenth-century Montgomery, Alabama (the first capital of the Confederacy), Brown tells the story of the South in microcosm through “two first class whores”: Blue Rhonda Latrec and Banana Mae Parker. The prologue sets up the themes of this novel with admirable directness: “Blue Rhonda and Banana Mae looked at Montgomery, Alabama, in terms of sex. The town resembled a stud farm although everybody lied through their teeth about fucking. Maybe the real difference between Blue Rhonda, Banana Mae and the rest of Montgomery’s citizens was that they told the truth. In this world, lying, fornicating and thieving are prerogatives of the sane. Small wonder that the two women, or any prostitutes, for that matter, were regarded as nuts.”57 Many other writers, before and after Brown, wrote about a queer South dominated by nonnormative sexuality, but few approached “fucking” so forthrightly. Brown is clear about the function of all this “secret” fucking: it constructs a disciplinary system that ties the culture together. All this “lying, fornicating and thieving” do not destabilize or undermine the southern patriarchal system; in fact, they are a key part of what makes it work.58

The “stud farm” is a metaphor for the entire South in Southern Discomfort. The whorehouses serve the wealthy male elite in Montgomery; public adherence to social norms of female “purity” and heteronormative families does not prevent men of privilege from visiting prostitutes. Indeed, Carwyn, the wealthy husband of the heroine, Hortensia Banastre, takes his paramour out in his carriage on Main Street. The prostitutes know every kink that prominent white men have, no matter what face they show to coworkers and family. Through prostitutes, Brown critiques the patriarchy in ways both entertaining and profane. Money defines sexual transactions between men and women, whether in marriage or in a brothel.

Whorehouses are allowed to exist because of the hypocritical privilege of white patriarchs. Yet Brown refuses to view prostitutes as victims. She insists on their agency; within an oppressive patriarchal system, they are heroes, with a surprising amount of freedom. In Reverend Linton Ray’s morality campaign against prostitution, he brings a mob of outraged wives to burn down the whorehouses. At first, “every woman in the house was armed” (86), ready for a shoot-out, but to avoid the police, they ask another brothel to send them choir robes:

“Where’d you get all these?” Blue Rhonda buttoned her purple robe with the pale-blue trim.

One of Minnie’s employees whispered, “History night.”

“Huh?” Rhonda fluffed up her sleeves.

“Peter Stove dressed up as a bishop. We had to sing while he desecrated the altar—if you catch my drift.” She giggled.

“Peter Stove?” Blue Rhonda exclaimed.

“Ecclesiastical desires are a patent item,” Leafy sniffed. (87)

Prepared to outsmart the mob, the prostitutes “sing like angels,” and Bunny offers an invitation: “Fellow believers in the forgiveness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus, who died for our sins and rose again from the dead, please come in and join us for our weekly devotional” (88). This “Christian stardust” does the trick. Prostitutes use the existing Christian rhetoric to protect their own nonnormative livelihoods. Note that the white men in power who take advantage of this transgressive space are nowhere to be seen when the prostitutes are challenged—the brothels suffer the public shaming and the danger while the powerful simply exploit them.

This is not to say that such transgressive spaces don’t allow occasional freedom from larger societal prescriptions—the prostitutes do survive the outside threat—but the brothel does not, in and of itself, challenge the heteronormative status quo. When Hortensia Banastre, the wife of a powerful man in town, has a passionate sexual affair with a young African American laborer, Hercules, Blue Rhonda lets them use her apartment in the red-light district for their meetings. Everything about this relationship is a fantasy: that such a woman would risk such a liaison; that she could become pregnant, have a mixed-race child, and raise that child in her own house without being found out; that Hercules’s untimely death results from a train accident (instead of being lynched). However, the scenario does allow Brown to draw a parallel between a woman who occupies the highest rung in southern society, Hortensia, and one who occupies the lowest, Blue Rhonda. Brown frames them as allies of sorts within southern heteropatriarchy:

Hortensia turned to fully face Blue Rhonda. “I wish I had your courage.”

“What courage?”

Rhonda was confused.

“You do as you please and the hell with rules and regulations made by somebody else. Before he died Hercules asked me to run away with him. I said I’d have to think about it. I know now I never would have done it. I lacked the courage and I probably still lack it. I couldn’t break the rules openly.” She laughed at herself. “But I could break them in secret.” Drew in a breath. “But then who doesn’t?”

“Don’t be hard on yourself, Miz Banastre. I’m not so brave. I couldn’t get any lower, if you consider where I came from. You had a lot to lose.” (140)

Hortensia’s transgressions are strategic, and her secrecy (and her lover’s convenient death) saves her. Blue Rhonda may be more courageous and open, but she is also without privilege. For her, the lowest position in society is her only space of freedom, but it is hardly a transformative subject position. Here Brown may be critiquing the “downward mobility” of radical feminists who embraced terms like slut and whore as part of their activism, which was not exactly an optimistic statement about the future of revolution. Hortensia has tea in Blue Rhonda’s house in private, but that does not change either woman’s social position in public, nor does it affect the largely white male privilege that circumscribes both their subject positions.

Nowhere is the implicit link between transgressive sexuality and liberation more unstable than in Hortensia’s incestuous relationship with her son Paris, who discovers the truth about her mixed-race daughter and then blackmails her. His price? She must have sex with him. His demand is depicted as proof of mental illness; her acquiescence is not. After all, sex is just sex in Brown’s fictional universe, and just as the prostitutes’ satisfaction of every imaginable kink of Montgomery’s ruling classes is not shocking, so the heroine’s ability to have enjoyable sex with her son is an unremarkable fact. Paris becomes obsessed with Hortensia, and in the end she shoots him dead to protect her daughter. It is a murderous denouement to the novel that leaves all the secrets of the novel intact. Hortensia’s daughter is still a social outcast, publicly denied by her mother; Hortensia never tells her husband the truth about her affairs with her black servant and her son, and her privilege—and his—remains unchallenged. Brown had written many nonnormative sexual situations, but by 1982 she was arguing that transgressive sex is allowed only if it doesn’t threaten the established order.

One more transgression appears at the end of Southern Discomfort. When Blue Rhonda dies and Banana Mae and Bunny prepared her body for burial, “they discovered she was a man. Her genitals were uncommonly small, but they were those of a man nonetheless” (276). In a last letter, Blue Rhonda had explained: “I was born James Porter with very little, as you know. I never felt like a boy and never want to be one. God played a joke on me and put me in a man’s body, and not much of a man’s body at that. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and passed myself off as a girl. I fooled you all, so I guess I did a good job. I didn’t really want to fool anyone. I just wanted to be a woman and I think I was” (277). Brown’s portrayal of trans identity, and trans sex work, is ahead of its time. Blue Rhonda has used her culture’s twisted sexual politics to construct her own space of freedom as a prostitute. Despite the melodramatic plot of the privileged Hortensia, it is Blue Rhonda and her fellow prostitutes who are the real heroes of this novel, but they are heroes whose transgression supports, rather than challenges, the “stud farm” of southern power systems.

The politics of prostitution is also a central focus in Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me. When minister Myrtle Black befriends two prostitutes, she is “appalled at what she had heard from the women. Stories about police graft, payoffs in money and sex. The clientele of the prostitutes distressed her—pillars of the professional and religious communities.”59 As in Southern Discomfort, prostitution is enabled by the police department and the many men—including ministers—who frequent brothels. Prostitution exposes the hypocrisy of the patriarchy; southern chivalry is simply a tool for categorizing women into groups—“respectable,” “whore”—and keeping them all in their subordinate places. Myrtle manages to save one prostitute from “the life,” employing her at the church; the other remains a prostitute, but warns the church about a planned firebombing by one of the pimps. The reverend undertakes a systemic attack on a corrupt patriarchal system, denouncing from the pulpit “the Police Department, City Hall, pimps, dope pushers, and middle-class hypocrites”60 and then organizing a cross-racial women’s march “to protest vice, crime, and corruption in the city. A March of women of all colors, who would join hands to demonstrate against a male establishment of crooked and selfish lawmakers and lawbreakers.”61 The march ends when a car runs down Travis in the street, suggesting just how entrenched prostitution is in the larger functioning of the patriarchy. But for Shockley, the point of the protests is to create coalitions and alternative communities, as she does with her multicultural, gay-friendly church.

Rape

Just as the “transgressive” sexual act of prostitution sustains an oppressive system of power, rape, too, is a tool of domination under patriarchy in southern lesbian feminist texts. In this, the southern lesbian feminist archive was consistent with the broad critiques of sexual violence in women’s liberation. To be forced into sex and hurt for a man’s pleasure was the antithesis of everything feminism stood for, even for the most insatiable, irreverent, and campy southern lesbian feminists. In the later sex wars of the 1980s, some women defended many sexual practices that had been deemed antifeminist in the previous decade, including butch-femme role playing and S/M, but rape was never seen as acceptable. Previous violence might inform one’s sexual practices, but consent was a bedrock principle, no matter which side one supported in the sex wars.

Southern lesbian feminist writers made the identification of rape as a tool of patriarchy central to their writing. To expose the ugliness of rape was to expose the nasty truth of patriarchy under the veneer of chivalry and benevolent paternalism. Indeed, a shocking frankness about how rape feels, how it wounds, is endemic in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Many of the writers had been raped themselves, and they eschewed trigger warnings for uncomfortable directness about rape. Patricia Yaeger suggests that their focus on bodies, damaged and grotesque, is pervasive in southern women’s writing: “Instead of the grotesque as decadent southern form, I want to examine the importance of irregular models of the body within an extremely regulated society and to focus on figures of damaged, incomplete, or extravagant characters described under rubrics peculiarly suited to southern histories in which the body is simultaneously fractioned and overwhelmed.”62 The disciplining of queer women’s bodies is written in particularly frank terms in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.

This stems from the long history of rape as a means of intimidation and control in the South. The “Southern rape complex,” Deborah Barker explains, “assumes a black male rapist, an innocent white female victim, and a white male vigilante: the innocent white victim is transformed into a symbol of a threatened southern culture.”63 Rape accusations against black men were a key tool of Jim Crow oppression, as the epidemic of white male violence against black women and unruly white women was obscured. White men thought they had the right to take black women’s bodies at any time, but even the hint of black men assuming the same privilege with regard to white women resulted in the sexualized castration/lynching spectacles of the twentieth century. Black women in the South were accustomed to rape as a tool of terror and intimidation, not only by white men but also sometimes by black men (modeling white privilege). In The Color Purple, Celie’s abuser was not a white man, but a man she had accepted as her father. Her rape occurs after Celie’s mother had refused her husband’s advances; it is described on the novel’s first page in graphic, direct language: “He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it.”64 Much has been written about Walker’s depiction of sexual abuse, but what is most noteworthy here is the language—purely descriptive, violent, devoid of titillating images or metaphor. The shock of perfectly frank language refuses to let the reader avoid the logic of this patriarchal system, white and black. Later violence in the novel—the beating of Celie by Mister, the beating of Sofia by Harpo and later by a group of white men, Mary Agnes’s rape by her uncle—is as logical an extension of this system as Celie’s initial rape. Though some critics have protested Walker’s negative depictions of black men, she is depicting and protesting a patriarchal system, primarily white, in which men were encouraged and sometimes required to be brutes. Mister’s rehabilitation at the end of The Color Purple suggests that “rape culture” can be repudiated and dismantled, but only if one diagnoses its ills unflinchingly.

Also notable is the novel’s first-person point of view. Robin E. Field argues that this was a first in narratives about rape: “For the first time, we are placed within the victim’s consciousness, via the use of a first-person narrative voice. It is not the rapist narrating his actions, or a (seemingly) impartial omniscient narrator, or even a sympathetic female friend of the victim. Instead, the rape victim herself gains control of her story, and through her own voice readers learn about her reality of traumatic sexual assault. The use of this first-person narration necessarily shifts the focus of the story to the very personal aspects of rape.”65 If this was not the first instance of first-person narration of rape, it was certainly the most widely read. This point of view underscores the agency and value of the survivor, and it has been employed in other key southern lesbian feminist texts as well.

Poor southern white women, too, were familiar with the workings of rape as a tool of patriarchal oppression, but this came as a surprise to white women of a certain class; their own “purity” was a justification for the excesses of Jim Crow, after all. When white women challenged patriarchal authority, rape was used against them almost immediately; “nigger lovers,” especially, did not deserve chivalry. Many southern lesbian feminists first came to political activism through the civil rights movement and anti-Klan activism, and the use of sex as a weapon against them was instantaneous. Cris South’s description of a brutal rape in Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses makes it clear that sexual violence is tied to other forms of violence, and that rape is a tool of terror, along with beatings and lynching. When a Klansman beats Jesse outside her printshop, “she didn’t see the fist coming. She felt it instead, bony and unyielding against the side of her face. The blow slammed her back and shoulders into the dumpster. Her head cracked against the cold metal. There was blood in her mouth, a ringing in her ears. Her face felt numb; there was no pain in her jaw, only blinding jolts in the back of her head. Tom jerked her to him, his breath warm on her cheek. ‘You’re not talking so big now, are you? Go on. Fight back. I like that.’ All clarity vanished as he hit her again. Dazed, Jesse tried to kick him, to break his grip with her hands.”66 Pounding her with his fists leads, inexorably, to another pounding, and his strange sadistic sexual language quickly leads to a sadistic gang rape:

“I don’t want you to kill her,” Edgar said as he pushed Tom away. “I want a crack at her.”

“We’ll all get a crack at her, old buddy. Don’t you worry about that.”

“Now’s the time then. Why don’t you go first, Tom? After all, you been doing all the work. What about you, Hank? You gonna get in on the fun?”

Jessie heard the voices dimly but the words made no real sense to her. Names. She heard names.

There was laughter, then hands grabbed her and pulled her onto her knees. Someone locked rough fingers into her hair and pulled her head up. She felt cloth brush her face and heard the sound of a zipper sliding down its short track. She tried to raise her arms to ward off what she suddenly knew was about to happen, but she couldn’t move. Keeping her eyes closed, she fixed her spinning thoughts on some blank space she found in her mind. Hold on. Hold on. Choking her, Tom came with the same violence that was in his fist when he hit her. She tried to spit when he withdrew, but she was too weak for even that.

She tried to concentrate on the cold, damp grass against her buttocks as they pushed her down onto the ground and pulled her jeans to her ankles. Pain shifted, changed, lessened, increased, as one man finished and another took his place. She didn’t know how long it lasted or how many times. At one point, she was aware of the heavy pressure of a body on top of her but felt nothing between her legs. Her wonder was brief; she could find no answers. She felt them shift in turn. Time seemed to stop, isolating each thrust into an eternity of fear and agony.

Then a voice spoke close to her ear. “You just got a second chance. You remember what we told you.”67

The detail of the attack is hard to read; the narrative blacks out and dissociates during the rape, as it would have for the protagonist. The men believe they have done her a favor by “just” raping her. The assumptions of rape culture are explicit: all women need to be taught their place through violence. The fact that she survives and triumphs over her attackers by the end of the novel does not erase the violent reality of this disciplinary rape.

The rape scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina is by far the most detailed and wrenching depiction of rape in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Allison makes us experience the pain of Bone’s rape, as well as Daddy Glen’s obvious sexual pleasure in her humiliation and suffering.

“You’re not going anywhere.” He laughed. “You think you’re so grown-up. You think you’re so big and bad, saying no to me. Let’s see how big you are, how grown!” His hands spread what was left of my blouse and ripped at the zipper on my pants, pulling them down my thighs as my left hand groped to hold them. I tried to kick, but I was pinned. Tears were streaming down my face, but I wasn’t crying. I was cursing him.…

“You fucker!” I punched up at him with my almost useless right arm.

“You little cunt. I should have done this a long time ago. You’ve always wanted it. Don’t tell me you don’t.” His knee pushed my legs further apart, and his big hand leisurely smashed the side of my face. He laughed then, as if he liked the feel of my blood on his fist, and hit me again. I opened my mouth to scream, and his hand closed around on my throat.

“I’ll give you what you really want,” he said, and his whole weight came down hard. My scream was gaspy and low around his hand on my throat. He fumbled with his fingers between my legs, opened me, and then reared back slightly, looking down into my face with his burning eyes.

“Now,” he said, and slammed his body forward from his knees. “You’ll learn.” His words came in short angry bursts. “You’ll never mouth off to me again. You’ll keep your mouth shut. You’ll do as you’re told. You’ll tell Anney what I want you to tell her.”

I gagged. He rocked in and ground down, flexing and thrusting his hips. I felt like he was tearing me apart, my ass slapping against the floor with every thrust, burning and tearing and bruising.… He started a steady rhythm, “I’ll teach you, I’ll teach you,” and pounded my head against the floor.… He reared, up, supporting his weight on my shoulder while his hips drove his sex into me like a sword.…

He went rigid, head back and teeth showing between snarling lips. I could feel his thighs shaking against me as my butt slid in the blood under me.… He went limp and came down on me, rag-loose and panting. His hand dropped from my mouth, but the urge to scream was gone. Blood and juice, his sweat and mine, my blood, all over my neck and all down my thighs, the sticky stink of him between my burning legs. How had it all happened so fast? I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue was too swollen. I couldn’t feel my tongue move, just my lips opening and closing with no sound coming out. Red and black dots swam up toward the ceiling and back down toward me.68

This scene is one of the novel’s most notorious, figuring in most of the extensive scholarship about Bastard out of Carolina. Though most articles refer to the incest, few discuss the specifics of how this scene is constructed; usually, scholars quote passages about her rage and avoid the graphic details of the rape itself. Even Ann Cvetkovich, who otherwise discusses incest and trauma with admirable directness, cites with approval Allison’s description of this scene: “In an interview with Amber Hollibaugh, [Allison] says, ‘I wanted you to know that kid’s rage, shame and confusion, but I didn’t even want you to know how he put his dick in.’ ”69 Yet what is most striking is how explicitly the scene describes the rape. Unlike Cris South, who has her narrator black out the details of the rape, Allison doesn’t provide any such relief to Bone or the reader. We may not “know how he put his dick in,” but we know exactly how Bone felt when he did.

Allison insists that we see rape as a specifically sexual form of misogynist violence that isn’t titillating, but revolting. Daddy Glen’s efforts to enhance his own pleasure in Bone’s violation intensify the physical pain she endures: “He rocked in and ground down, flexing and thrusting his hips. I felt like he was tearing me apart, my ass slapping against the floor with every thrust, burning and tearing and bruising.” And Allison makes us see Glenn’s climax; if Bone doesn’t understand what is happening, Allison makes sure the reader does: “He went rigid, head back and teeth showing between snarling lips. I could feel his thighs shaking against me as my butt slid in the blood under me.… He went limp and came down on me, rag-loose and panting.” His physical response—rigid, shaking, panting—contrasts with the blood, bruises, and tears of Bone’s physical response. His pleasure in her pain is clear not just in his physiological responses but in his “sex talk,” which reads like a primer in rape culture (“You’ve always wanted it,” “I’ll give you what you really want”) as he educates her about the reality of the patriarchy: shut up, do what you’re told, suffer all violence in silence and be grateful for it. His chilling statement at beginning of the rape, “Now you’ll learn,” marks rape as a pedagogical tool to give Bone what she “deserves” and, in Daddy Glenn’s mind, really wanted. Bone’s own internal monologue highlights both the self-justification and stupidity of these rationalizations of violence.

There is nothing titillating or delightfully transgressive in either of these rape scenes. Rape isn’t queer because it doesn’t undermine the normative in patriarchal society; it is a primary disciplinary tool for the patriarchal normative. Some sex is clearly irredeemable, even for Allison, who insists on a place for the grotesque in literary expression.

The Southernness of the Queer: Southern Lesbian Feminist Legacies

The archive of southern lesbian feminism explores transgressive sexuality in explicit detail, from the titillating to the horrifying. In all cases, these writers eschew allusion and shadowy metaphor for an often uncomfortable specificity. This tradition provides a key link between the queer grotesque visions of the Cold War southern gothic and broader heteronormative critiques of queer theory. Southern lesbian feminists’ frank depictions of specific sexual acts and gender identities purposely transgressed both community standards and political efficacy. Taken collectively, the archive of southern lesbian feminism is an often overlooked but essential part of the genealogy of queer theory.