Seeping through cracks: Lesbian as a reading practice

Abstract

This thesis takes on “lesbian” as a reading practice, a multidimensional lens through which to read poetry to “recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual” (de Lauretis, iv). Engaging in psychoanalytical close readings of three erotic poems ‘The Gardens’ by Mary Oliver (1983), ‘Echoes’ by Audre Lorde (1993) and ‘Gender Fuck Gender’ by Patrick Califia (1992), I navigate the tension between the unruly, anti-social aspects of libidinal sexuality—which resists categorization under labels like “lesbian”—and the more structured expressions of desire that we might traditionally classify as “lesbian.” I look at how desire circulates through poetry beyond intention, the roles metaphors of/as desire play in such circulation and how that informs the complex relationship between the body, language, and meaning. What emerges from returning libidinal sexuality to “lesbian” beyond identity is the unsettling of perspectives we hold regarding eroticism, desire, and sexuality. My approach seeks not to get to a lesbian core, but to notice and attend to the multifaceted, often conflicting nature of sexuality itself. When reading erotic poems through the lens of lesbian as a reading practice, we are confronted with the reality that our histories of intimacy are also histories of violence; that poetic language can be a site of loss and fracture, as well as one of (re)crafting; that foregrounding wanting over being reveals the porousness of the terms we use to describe our embodiments. Adopting lesbian as a reading practice ultimately helps me attend to the possibilities and constraints of erotic poetic language in both naming and concealing sexuality within its folds.