From Homoplot to Progressive Novel: Lesbian
Experience and Identity in Contemporary Young Adult Novels
Caroline
E. Jones
Caroline E. Jones. "From Homoplot to Progressive
Novel: Lesbian Experience and Identity in Contemporary Young Adult
Novels." The Lion and the Unicorn 37.1 (2013): 74-93. Project
MUSE. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Teens
have long sought themselves in the pages of adolescent literature, not for
answers, but simply to see themselves there, to remember that they are not
alone. Some teens, of course, find themselves in this literature more readily
than do others. Heterosexual teens, for instance, abound, as do, increasingly,
uber-rich teens, teens consorting with vampires, and teens endowed with magical
or other supernatural abilities. However, teens who identify as lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ), magical, vampiric, or otherwise, are
significantly underrepresented in young adult literature published in the
United States. While increased societal awareness of the relative normalcy of
nonheterosexual orientation and identification has led to increasing production
and marketing of YA novels with LGBTQ characters, these exceptions remind us of
the rule: queer sexual orientations are still an "issue" for
publishers, booksellers, and many readers. In Over the Rainbow: Queer
Children's and Young Adult Literature (2011), Michelle Abate and Kenneth
Kidd recognize that
recent scholarship dealing with more contemporary
"out" queer literature for children and young adults asks . . .: What
are the politics of visibility and affirmation, especially in relation to childhood
and adolescence? How does this literature function socially and pedagogically?
What correspondences can we observe between social history and the literary
record; can queer literature for young readers effect, as much as document,
change? (146)
Like
the scholars Abate and Kidd, I position myself as an advocate for positive,
progressive portrayals of lesbian characters and experience in Young Adult (YA)
literature as a force for effecting positive change for queer young people.
Even though more novels are available than used to be, we must recognize that
presence and inclusion are merely first steps—necessary, [End Page 74]
essential, but not enough. There is still need for critical attention to the
ideological work such novels accomplish. Readers and critics will be more
effective in their roles as readers and critics by surfacing passive
ideologies that surround LGBTQ sexualities, thus calling into question
society's dominant ideological assumptions about LGBTQ individuals—particularly
teens. Several critics, including Esther Saxey, Vanessa Wayne Lee, and Michael
Cart and Christine Jenkins, have developed schemata for assessing and
categorizing texts with LGBTQ characters and content. Building on their
schemata, I here consider the ways contemporary lesbian YA novels stimulate,
challenge, and encourage young lesbian women to affirm their sexual and
personal growth through narrative innovation that reconfigures existing YA
tropes by resisting conventional ideologies that Other nonheteronormative characters.
Being Sexual, Being Lesbian in Young Adult
Literature
Sexuality
itself—not simply lesbian sexuality—is an uncomfortable topic for children's
and adolescent literatures. Ellis Hanson surfaces our societal discomfort by
acknowledging children's "queer[ness]": "[t]heir sexual behavior
and their sexual knowledge are subjected to an unusually intense normalizing
surveillance, discipline, and repression of the sort familiar to any oppressed
sexual minority" (110). The culture manages its discomfort by denying
child sexual desire or by labeling it queer. Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond
Stockton both identify the sexually desirous child as queer, and James Kincaid
notes social tendencies, in our fervor to erase sexual desire from the child,
to erase the child itself.1 For adolescents, Roberta Trites situates
sexuality as a major locus of conflict noting, "we live in a society that
objectifies teen sexuality, at once glorifying and idealizing it while also
stigmatizing and repressing it" (Disturbing 95). According to
Trites, adolescents are simultaneously freed and restrained—while
"[a]dolescents are empowered by institutions and their parents and by
knowledge of their bodies, . . . [but] by offering up rules and holding
repercussions over their heads that limit their newfound freedoms, these things
also restrict them" ("Harry Potter Novels" 473). Both Trites and
Suzanne Juhasz explore the regulation of non-normative sexual expression by
disapproving societal forces (respectively, between young people and between
women). Just as Juhasz stresses that romantic elements overshadow sexuality in
lesbian fiction, Trites characterizes "genital sexual contact" as
"more likely to be depicted interstitially than not in heterosexual YA
novels" and points out that "any gay YA novel as sexually explicit
as, say, Blume's Forever would likely be labeled pornography"
("Queer Discourse" 150 n. 9). Sex and sexuality clearly have a
central, if uneasy, ideological role in adolescent literature, and LGBTQ
sexualities are more likely than heterosexualities to [End Page 75] be
less freely represented. The writers explored here challenge the conventional
attitudes toward sexuality found in much YA literature, pushing the genre
toward more open expression of sexual desire as part of protagonists'
subjective development.
The
intersection of lesbian sexuality and YA literature presents a uniquely
subversive cultural and literary moment. Both have been traditionally
marginalized, both have relatively recently emerged into the mainstream, and
both require active resistance to dominant ideologies to maintain integrity of
identity. Traditionally, neither women nor adolescents have been understood as
inherently sexual beings; in identifying their protagonists not simply as
romantically inclined, but also as sexually desirous, novels of YA lesbian
literature claim a relatively new space for young women. This space has not,
however, opened easily for them. In her chapter on lesbian texts for younger
readers, Sherrie Inness notes:
[w]hen I examined texts aimed specifically at young
women, I discovered that lesbians are some of the most underrepresented and
misrepresented characters in children's literature. Although there have been
significant improvements in the last fifteen years [from 1982-97] and lesbians
are being portrayed more frequently than ever, they still appear in only a
minority of books and their depiction is apt to be stereotypical.
(103)
Until
the mid-1990s, most novels about girls loving girls included often-traumatic
coming-out scenarios, and/or incorporated negative (sometimes horrific)
consequences to proclaiming oneself a lesbian.2 Some novels simply replaced a male love
interest with a female one, maintaining romantic conventions of boy-meets-girl,
boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, girl-returns-to-boy. Most texts combined aspects
of each of these conventions, and often included a death or serious family dysfunction,
though it is debatable whether those elements function as components of the
lesbian novel or of the young adult genre.3
Within
the twenty-first century, most authors writing lesbian characters for young
readers create an explicit link between girls' sexual subjectivity and their
agency—understanding and embracing her own sexuality opens to a young woman the
possibilities and potential inherent in that understanding. Accepting herself
as a sexual agent, desirous and desirable, empowers a young protagonist to act
on those desires, opening her not simply to the possibilities of sexual
exploration and fulfillment, but also to the possibilities of knowledge, loss,
and pain inherent in any relationship—in growing up. Essentially, empowering
young female protagonists as sexual agents helps them become agents in the
adult world. Thus, a significant element of YA lesbian novels is the
protagonist's self-identification as lesbian. Because female characters tend to
be limited in their representations as active and empowered sexual subjects in
adolescent literature, lesbian characters frequently need a [End Page 76]
catalyst to acknowledge or understand their lesbianism—that is, they need to be
outed to themselves. Girls who defy mainstream norms of heterosexual love and
romance are doubly marginalized: girls who choose girls have no predetermined
place in the social order. After all, "heterosexual love . . . grants a
woman admittance to the 'real world' . . . a place in the culture" (Juhasz 207, 206). By contrast,
lesbian love forces "one [to] assertively recognize and define her
sexuality[;] the very act of 'saying' becomes a force that influences identity
. . . : 'This is who I am: I am a lesbian'" (210-11), making a place for
oneself rather than assuming a place that others have made. Understanding and
respecting one's desire is necessary for insight into making wise and ethical
choices about whether to act on attraction or to defer it; moreover, freedom
comes with telling the truth to oneself. All girls' recognition of their sexual
subjectivity is important, but many lesbian girls face rejection by family,
friends, and their social worlds when they identify as lesbian. The progressive
YA novel conveys that while the risks may be great, so also can be the rewards.
The
sorts of adult gatekeepers who concern Kincaid, Stockton, and Edelman, those
who wish to keep young people ignorant and innocent of sexual knowledge, are
stymied by young lesbians, who do not incur the risks of sexually active
heterosexual or gay male teens: no risk of pregnancy, significantly fewer
chances of disease. Yet young lesbians' sexual agency, sexual intimacy,
pleasure, desire—and sometimes love—are in their way even more threatening, as
these queer theorists intuit. Lesbians step outside patriarchal norms and
control, and when young women, particularly, move beyond those boundaries they
threaten the social/sexual hegemony. Young women's expressions of sexual desire
marginalize them socially because many adults are afraid to allow teenage girls
to claim sexual power, even as they recognize the developmental necessity and
"naturalness" of such growth. Issues of sexual awareness in novels
intended for teens incite discomfort enough among many parents of teen readers;
sexual desire and sexual orientation complicate these already complex issues.
However, if literature for teens can ever accurately reflect and interpret
teens' real lives and concerns, as Abate and Kidd suggest they must, writers
must respect and acknowledge that girls and young women are already aware of
and engaged with multiple varieties of sexual desire, orientation, and choice.
Unfortunately,
authors and publishers of standard YA literature have often resorted to cliché
and formula rather than attempt to depict this variety. The traditional approach
to such stories is summarized in Esther Saxey's Homoplot: The Coming-Out
Story and Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Identity (2008). Saxey outlines the
generic conventions and social intervention of the coming-out story. In the
"homoplot," the protagonist is "most likely [End Page 77]
. . . a troubled teenager" (1), and the plot, resolution, and homoplot
narrative itself "create[] change" and "shape[] new
identities" (7). Saxey posits that "discourses of sexual identity
help to create what they purport to describe. Thus the coming out
story, which purports to describe a pre-existing sexual identity, is
simultaneously contributing to the cultural construction of this identity"
(5). Of course, not all homoplots subscribe to similar ideologies of identity:
the more traditional incarnations are "texts that position lesbianism as a
threat or problem [ . . . and that] do not attend to the formation of a lesbian
identity but are designed to educate audiences unfamiliar or uncomfortable with
lesbianism and/or to eroticize the lesbian as a facet of male heterosexual
pleasure" (152), in Vanessa Wayne Lee's description. These traditional
texts, as I term them, often stereotype lesbians as either butch or femme, as
if those types are the only ways lesbians express themselves; they conflate
issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. In traditional texts the
lesbian character resists accepting or acknowledging her orientation, and she
not only suffers persecution, bullying, or other harassment because of her
sexual orientation, she also fails to question the injustice of that treatment;
finally, the novel's ending is more cautionary than hopeful. Traditional texts
align with, but do not duplicate, Cart and Jenkins' "homosexual
visibility" category in that the absence of gay and lesbian characters is
surfaced, but the manner in which they are included can be more stereotypical
than enlightening. Even when traditional texts affirm lesbians, they may simply
be concerned with making lesbianism "visible" and introducing it to heterosexual
audiences rather than addressing the audience most invested in self-discovery.4
An
advance on traditional depictions of LGBTQ teens, mediating texts negotiate the
terrain between traditional texts of "visibility" (Cart and Jenkins)
and novels that overtly advocate lesbian sexual agency. Lee's second type of
lesbian novel, which "focuses on the formation of lesbian identities"
(152), is another, less detailed, articulation of what Saxey terms the
"homoplot." Mediating texts acknowledge stereotypes, and often engage
and occasionally dismantle stereotypes about lesbians. The lesbian character
may initially resist acceptance of her orientation, but moves into or beyond
acceptance by the novel's end; while she suffers nominal harassment because of
her sexual orientation, the novel's ending is cautiously hopeful. While the
LGBTQ character (frequently not the protagonist) does not fully achieve agency
or subjectivity, she moves closer to a sense of her own identity and
anticipates her own potential for authentic selfhood, including authentic
desires. Jacqueline Woodson's The House You Pass on the Way falls into
this category, as does M. E. Kerr's Deliver Us from Evie. Woodson's
novel features a main character who acknowledges her questioning identity, and
is content with that identity, but who remains closeted for fear of her
family's response. Kerr's [End Page 78] Evie is a secondary character whose
voice is filtered through her brother's and who must ultimately leave her
community in order to be an out lesbian and have an open relationship with her
girlfriend. While these protagonists are comfortable with their own
sexualities, they are not comfortable being out in their familial or social
contexts, necessitating a certain degree of self-censorship. These tropes are
more typical of late twentieth-century YA lesbian literature than of
twenty-first century novels.
"Traditional"
and "mediating" texts introduce and attempt to "normalize"
lesbian identity, but essentially fail to acknowledge, explore, or advocate for
lesbian identity or desire. They address the nonlesbian reader's curiosity
about the lesbian Other, and thus reinscribe lesbian identity as beyond the
norm rather than broadening the norm to include LGBTQ identities. Lesbians tend
to be presented as types rather than individuals, and as support to the
protagonist rather than of primary importance to plot or reader. Traditional
and mediating novels, like Cart and Jenkins' "gay assimilation"
category, ignore the unique experience of females as same-gender-loving people,
including the social handicaps of youth and femaleness that situate them as
passive objects rather than active subjects. Cart and Jenkins' category is
framed neutrally, situating the YA novel as a "'melting pot' of sexual
orientation and gender identity" (xx); my traditional and mediating
categories more actively critique that eliding of experience. Progressive novels
move toward rectifying these failures and omissions, to acknowledge and
celebrate the real differences in the experiences and subject-formation of
lesbian teen protagonists.
Most
YA novels featuring lesbian characters published in the twenty-first century
fall into a category that I identify as "progressive." Progressive
novels suggest Lee's third category, novels that "interrogate received
wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian identity" (152) and Cart and Jenkins'
"Queer Consciousness/ Community." While Lee focuses on "received
wisdom" and Cart and Jenkins focus on cultural and social community, I
focus on individual subjectivity and identity. Progressive texts do not
actively set out to normalize sexual preference—girls can engage each other
romantically in almost the same sense that they do boys, without undergoing a
crisis of lesbian identity. These novels celebrate individuals and
relationships wherein gender and orientation are secondary to personality; a
protagonist's identity-formation may incorporate sexual identification, but is
fundamentally about individual truth, integrity, and joy. These novels work
toward characters who develop sexual and personal agency as well as strong
senses of their own subjectivity.
Lesbian
protagonists continue to be more problematic for conventional readers than
their straight counterparts; often the difficulties posed by their status as
sexually-oriented Other enable them to become stronger, more active
subjects—they are forced to stand on their own, which is fundamentally [End
Page 79] a good thing. The Heart Has Its Reasons (Cart and Jenkins)
creates an indispensable typology for finding and evaluating GLBTQ literature
for young adults, but Lee's focus on lesbian identity in particular highlights
girls' needs to come to terms with themselves as sexual beings before they can
approach sexual agency, whether lesbian or not. In focusing on sexual and
lesbian subject positions, authors depict protagonists who explore their
subject positions as sexually desirous rhetorically as well as (or instead of)
experientially. That is, protagonists may explore their sexual impulses and
desires verbally—with friends or in a journal, for instance—before (or rather
than) acting on those desires. In a late 1990s survey of lesbian
representations in novels, Sherrie Inness praised authors such as Jacqueline
Woodson, Nancy Garden, and Stacey Donovan who "depict lesbianism in far
more complex ways than could be imagined in the 1970s and 1980s. Authors are
exploring the intersections between lesbianism and such issues as race,
ethnicity, and social class, developing a richer and more nuanced portrait of
lesbian lives" (121). As Inness suggests, enlightened societal
understandings and broadened literary perception from the late 1990s on have
led to novels that move beyond the basics of a homoplot. Novels of the first
decade of the twenty-first century have continued to pursue Inness' progressive
program of advocacy and increasing acknowledgment of complexity and difference.
They allow girls to be primary in their own, and others' lives.
Progressive Texts: Sexuality and Sexual Expression
Uncloaked
The
progressive texts I promote here engage the scholarly questions Abate and Kidd
raise about the politics of visibility and affirmation, and do, in fact,
"effect, as much as document, change" (146). When focused on lesbian
experience, they share a majority of these conventions:
·
• The lesbian
character does not hate herself as a result of her orientation:
o deg If she is out when the novel opens, she is at
peace with her orientation, and does not let it limit her own or others'
perceptions of her as a subject;
o deg If she is not out to herself or others when the
novel opens, she finds comfort, relief, and/or joy in acknowledgement and
acceptance of her orientation;
·
• The lesbian
character finds jouissance in physical expressions of her desire; she is
erotic;
·
• If the lesbian
character encounters harassment because of her sexual orientation, the emphasis
is on her resilience rather than her victimization;
·
• The novel ends
by affirming the character's agency and sense of subjectivity;
·
• The novel
offers multiple perspectives of lesbian identity, even within one character's
experience.5
Progressive
novels are well written and offer rich and nuanced portraits of all the
characters; diverse characters are not essentialized into "models" of
[End Page 80] gay- or lesbian- or ethnic- or female-ness, rather, each
character possesses both strengths and frailties. Through their journeys, the
protagonists of progressive novels affirm the possibility of attaining personal
and professional goals. While remaining accessible to their intended audience,
the writing in progressive novels is complex, symbolic, and/or experimental,
allowing readers to stretch and deepen their understanding of narrative or
experience the pleasure of analysis. While sexual orientation is a dominant
motif and self-acceptance an ongoing theme throughout these novels, the plots
do not center on the anguish or confusion (or even delight) of coming out, or
the anxiety of questioning one's sexuality—these elements may be components of
the novels, but they are simply part of these characters' stories. The
narratives encompass a variety of situations, experiences, and points of
self-awareness, providing realistic depictions of teenage life. Cart and
Jenkins begin their study with Lynn Crockett's premise that "A balanced
[library] fiction collection should assuage the fears of gay and lesbian YAs,
assuring them that they are not alone" (qtd. in Cart and Jenkins
xviii). The authors continue, "This belief in the importance
and value of balanced library collections for gay and lesbian teens is foundational
to [this] collaborative text [. . .] we also hope to establish some useful
criteria for evaluating books with GLBTQ content" (xviii). In the
continuing spirit of balance, inclusion, and evaluation, I offer this detailed
discussion of progressive texts about lesbian protagonists.
Fundamental
qualities for progressive texts are individual integrity and jouissance, that
quality of joy that comes from a mingling of pain and bliss, and often comes
with the transgression of traditional norms and the unexpected thwarting of
conventional expectations.6 Protagonists experience jouissance through
understanding and embracing themselves as whole individuals, able to celebrate
sexual and personal agency and subjectivity. Only through honest acceptance of
one's own sexual subjectivity—particularly though claiming one's true
orientation—can one claim full agency either sexually or personally. In these
texts, the pain of identifying oneself as a lesbian in a society that still
defines lesbian or gay as Other and lesser may be acute, but it is a necessary
component of self-discovery, and is imbued with and overshadowed by the joy of
being right with oneself and of claiming oneself in the world.
In
what follows, I trace a selection of progressive lesbian texts, YA novels in
which the young female protagonists gradually come to identify as bisexual or
lesbian, and to understand themselves more completely and authentically as a
result of this identification. I have chosen texts of the twenty-first century,
and I proceed chronologically. Each author offers unique premises, unique
contexts, and unique characters who engage their own sexual orientations from
different places and different subject positions. In short, these novels offer
microcosms of both the experiences of readers and the selection of [End Page
81] books currently available. I open with Sara Ryan's Empress of the
World (2001), the first of this trend that marks lesbian as simply another
way of being in a sexual relationship. Empress explores a relationship
between two young women who discover, with each other, that they are attracted
to girls as well as to boys, and offers a relationship that focuses not on
developing relationships acceptable to the system or categorizing one's sexual
orientation—though those issues are integral—but on loving and respecting someone
else while recognizing and claiming one's own desire.
Julie
Anne Peters's Keeping You a Secret (2003) furthers this transitional
moment in lesbian YA fiction: the plot relies heavily on the 1970s and 1980s
tropes of secrecy and persecution, but Peters's characters are strong enough
not just to withstand such disapproval, but also to own and celebrate their
desires, their sexualities, their self-discoveries. After letting her mother
make most of the important decisions about her life, Holland finally finds both
the reasons and the strength to assume agency in her own life, to see herself
clearly and lovingly, and to make the choices that reflect her own integrity.
She progresses from a good, passive heterosexual girl to a good, active lesbian
woman.
Also
published in 2003, Tea Benduhn's Gravel Queen focuses primarily on
protagonist Aurin's relationship systems rather than on her discovery of her
lesbian identity; her relationship with her mother and friends Kenney (another
girl) and Fred (a gay boy) are as important to the novel and to Aurin's growth
as is her new relationship with girlfriend Neila. Thus, while Benduhn
recognizes Aurin's lesbian identity as an important component of her developing
subjectivity, she also emphasizes the importance of Aurin's self-development
within and beyond all of her primary relationships.
With
a premise familiar to fans of Ann Brashares's Sisterhood of the Traveling
Pants, Maureen Johnson's The Bermudez Triangle (2004) offers three
lifelong friends who, between their junior and senior years of high school,
face their first summer-long separation. Nina falls in love with an Oregon boy,
but Mel and Avery fall in love with each other. Johnson resists the impulse to
neatly tie both girls into a happily-ever homoplot; Mel's is the coming out
story, Avery's is the messy and complex story that resists categorization.
Mel's realization and acknowledgment of herself as lesbian is not a site of
resistance or grief—rather, Mel feels relieved to understand herself more
clearly, and joyful in sharing and celebrating with someone else. Her discovery
of her identity with Avery, a friend who already knows and loves her, offers
her a safe place to foster her newly-emerging sexual desire. All four novels
qualify as progressive because they reinvent both plot and societal conventions
to affirm young lesbians as complexly and fully human. [End Page 82]
Empress of the World
Rather
than approaching her subject as a problem novel, as was typical from the 1970s
to the 1990s, in Empress of the World, Sara Ryan chooses to adapt the
romance convention: her girls meet, fall in love, have a misunderstanding, and
ultimately work through their disconnection and reunite. Ryan alters the
heteronormative trope to fit a romantic partnership rather than the more
traditional pattern that offers one partner more power than the other has. Her
formal subversion of the romance novel reflects her thematic resistance to
categorization of characters, genre, and sexual desire.
Nic
(short for Nicola) and Battle meet at the "Siegel Institute Summer Program
for Gifted Youth" where they and three other kids (Katrina, Isaac, and
Kevin) quickly become friends. Nic is there to study archaeology, because she
likes, in her words, "fitting pieces together . . . Mapping it all out"
(16). Her professor instructs the class to "keep scrupulous track of what
you find, be cautious of your own biases—and always be ready to be
surprised" (25), strategies Nic finds herself applying in her personal
life.
Nic's
first-person narrative is supplemented with her journal entries; the journal
provides Nic with a pseudo-public voice: one that masks some intensely personal
themes with her class findings and language. She uses this journal to make
sense not just of her archaeological discoveries, but of her own emotional
engagement with and responses to her new friends—especially Battle. Nic seems
reluctant to participate in her own life; she tries to makes sense of what she
does not understand by stepping objectively outside herself and analyzing, even
if a particular idea or feeling is beyond analysis. She initially functions as
her own repressor, a moderator resistant to experiencing life with its
concomitant pleasures and pains. Objective analysis functions antithetically to
jouissance, though progressivism is by definition is analytical. Thus, it might
seem ironic that this progressive novel uses analysis as devices both thematic
and stylistic as a point from which to grow rather than with which to grow. Yet
Ryan's deft treatment of her characters suggests that each is able to transcend
the mechanics of analytical language and thought, ultimately making those
strategies work toward jouissance, rather than exclusively relying on them to
rationalize her emotions. That is, they ultimately learn to use analysis as a
strategy for realizing subjectivity, rather than relying on it to structure
their responses to new experiences and feelings.
Ryan's
double narration juxtaposes Nic's present-tense account with her journal's more
distanced processing of the same experience. This narrative style offers
readers two ways of experiencing Nic's perspective. The narration itself, in
traditional texts the more distanced, objective voice, offers a sense of
immediacy and intimacy lacking in Nic's journal, which gives Nic a chance to
rethink, revise, and distance herself from the events she actively experiences [End
Page 83] in the narrative. Nic's first kiss with Battle exhibits the
characteristic features of the device. First, Nic, as narrator, describes the
experience:
Battle walks to the bed, leans over, and very
carefully places the ice-filled washcloth onto my forehead. There's a small
trickle of sweat running down into the hollow of her neck, and her green tank
top is clinging to her. I feel something start thudding more than my headache
and realize it's my pulse. I hear her breathing, and mine, and then her face is
so close and I lift my head just a little and our lips touch.
I close my eyes.
I am kissing her, and she is kissing me back.
I can still feel my head throb, but the pain is
very far away.
(107)
Here
she participates in the experience, describing in detail Battle herself, as
well as Nic's own actions and feelings. She is in the moment, symbolized by the
soprano solo from Carmina Burana: "Sweetest one, I give myself to
you totally" (108). Ryan's use of present tense in Nic's recounting of the
moment emphasizes Nic's awareness of Battle's close proximity, her physical
response to it, her own role in the kiss and her own pleasure in the moment. In
contrast, Nic's journal entry, headed "field notes," does not convey
her feelings about the experience or express her own delight, fear, excitement,
nervousness, or anticipation. The journal, structured as if she were studying
an archaeological site, further distances Nic from the experience of the kiss
with phrasings like "let's discuss this matter clinically" (108). The
entry instead addresses Nic's anxieties about "the next logical step in
this process," and creates a category for "people's reactions"
(108).
Their
first fully intimate encounter occurs almost entirely off-page, as do most
sexual encounters in adolescent literature, regardless of the characters'
sexes; in her narration of the moment, Nic describes not actions, but feelings:
"Everything we've been awkward about, all those steps we haven't taken
yet, all of it gets blurry and soft until all that's left is sensations: cool
night air on skin, hands and mouths moving over each other, the scent of pine
mixed with lavender, the sound of breath" (131). While there is no journal
entry to parallel this narrative, Nic's discussion with Battle just after the
moment serves a similar purpose. Nic recounts to Battle her own process of
discovery, then pelts Battle with questions about how she recognized their
growing attraction. Nic starts: "When did you know? Was there a particular
moment when you realized it? Were you worried? Were you happy?" Battle
responds: "Why do you have to take everything apart?" then Nic:
"So I can figure out how it fits together." Battle has the last word:
"What if it breaks? Don't talk. Shut up and feel" (131). Nic's
tendencies to take things apart, to try to explain the people and things around
her cause the first rift in their relationship—Nic analyzes Battle's emotions and
actions and imposes her own meanings and interpretations, which Battle resists.
[End Page 84]
After
they have been together two weeks, Nic crosses a line: she creates a story to
fit around what little information Battle has shared with her about her abandonment
by her brother (Nick with a "k") and to "fix" Battle
according to Nic's own version of what her friend needs. Nic's reification of
Battle into an object she has constructed breaks the trust that they have begun
to build. Battle pushes Nic away, saying "'Stop—stop trying to explain me.
I can't take this'" (143). In a traditional lesbian novel this could be
the end: Battle starts hanging out with Kevin, who sees her as "a
'babe'" and does not try to psychoanalyze her (194), and Nic kisses their
friend Isaac, restoring hegemonic normalcy. What makes Ryan's plot different,
however, is that neither girl is running away from her attraction; rather, each
is running away from the pain that she has caused the other, and from their
shared inability to deal with it.
When
Isaac, in his turn, tells Nic not to overanalyze him or their relationship, Nic
begins to understand that "words don't always work," something Battle
has told her throughout (113). Nic writes in her journal: "it's too
complicated. i don't even know what i feel anymore. / so maybe i won't always
be able to describe precisely what I'm feeling. maybe i can't pin my feelings
to the wall with neat little labels. / maybe I have to give up on having a
typology of my emotions" (165-66). With this acknowledgment that she has
to simply accept some things, some feelings, some people just the way they are,
she and Battle again become friends, and finally, lovers.
Ryan's
setting is not entirely idyllic: there are a few homophobes, and Nic and Battle
have to resist compartmentalization by their friends and even by themselves,
just as Nic must learn to experience and live with her emotions rather than
classify them. Their primary challenge, however, is learning how to love and
respect each other, not how to confront and then "deal with" their
lesbianism or how to establish their lesbian identities. After their break-up,
a newly self-aware Nic realizes that the issue at hand is not whether she is
straight or gay or bisexual, it is that she has lost the person she loves right
now. Just as Nic steps away from her field observations and into her life,
Battle learns that not thinking or talking about the things that hurt her will
not make them go away, and realizes how much she values sharing those things
with someone who cares about her. In the reconciliation scene, Battle
acknowledges to Nic her own difficulties with emotional intimacy, and with
expressing her feelings. She also shares how much she values that Nic cares
enough to ask questions, to learn her history, something she has not earlier
been able to do. As each young woman learns about herself, she opens that self
to her partner; together they find an intimacy that honors them both and
respects each one's individuality. This assumption of emotional and sexual
power is the true theme in Ryan's novel, and the ideology that makes it truly,
progressively, remarkable. Julie Anne Peters's 2003 novel, Keeping You a
Secret, shares this ideology, but expresses it in a more conventional
narrative and generic form. [End Page 85]
Keeping You a Secret
Peters's
Keeping You a Secret can initially appear traditional: the protagonists,
Holland and Cece, keep their relationship a secret for most of the book; Cece,
an out lesbian, is sexually harassed and threatened at school, and Holland's
mother, overburdened with conservative ideologies about LGBTQ people, believes
that Holland will be ruining her life if she outs herself and lives as a
lesbian. Because Holland will not renounce her lesbian identity, her mother
condemns her and forces her out of the family home, recalling Trites's
situation of adolescent sexuality as a site of conflict between teens and their
parents. While Holland has rarely challenged her mother's choices about
Holland's life, her sexual orientation is so fundamental to her identity that
Holland finds the impetus to stand up for herself.
Holland
is a typical, if above-average high school senior. She is popular, has a
boyfriend, is student council president, makes mostly A's, and has a job
working with children after school. Her mother makes sure she applies to
prestigious private schools rather than local or state colleges, and, in
Holland's words, has "plans for Holland Jaeger. And they didn't include
what Holland Jaeger wanted. Whatever that was" (13). Holland has had
neither the opportunity, the impetus, nor the agency to allow herself to want
things that her mother, her boyfriend, or her friends have not sanctioned. In
contrast, Cece is an out-and-proud lesbian who has transferred to Holland's
school, and is the only out gay or lesbian student there. She raises Holland's
consciousness about the culture of ignorance and hate within the school, and,
as they gradually become closer friends, helps Holland to see her own life in a
different light. Holland's visceral physical response to Cece startles her so
much that she needs to rationalize it: "The sensation was stirring. It
aroused me in a way . . . almost as if. . . . As if I was falling for her.
Okay, that didn't shock me. I'd had crushes on girls before. I mean who
hadn't?" (83).
Holland's
recognition of her feelings for Cece force her to acknowledge that what she
feels is not just a crush, that she has, finally, fallen head over heels, body
and soul in love. Physical desire is an integral part of the recognition. When
Cece will not make the first move, Holland finally does, moving from fear to
courage, finally allowing herself to want something just for herself:
"I want—" I stopped. Couldn't say it.
Couldn't take the step. [. . .]
I was shaking so hard. Do it. Do it now. "I
want to kiss you." [. . .]
I closed my eyes. Opened them, reached out, and
removed her hat. Slid it down her back. With my other hand, I threaded my
fingers through her hair. It was all happening in slow motion. My hand
caressing her head, pulling her close to me . . . .
I did it.
Oh, God. Her lips were soft. She was warm, hot. I
wanted all of her. I was falling, falling, with nowhere to land. I had to step
away.
(142-43) [End
Page 86]
Unlike
earlier YA authors, Peters does not shy away from depicting the girls' physical
relationship, which she writes as joyful, comforting, and empowering. Holland's
desire for Cece, both physical and emotional, helps Holland to acknowledge her
own lesbianism and, eventually, to come out to the people who matter most in
her life, and ultimately to the world at large.
Through
Cece, Holland outs herself to herself; she thus discovers and accepts the
nature of her feelings for Cece on her own terms, in her own time; Holland, for
the first time in her life, perhaps, understands who she is and with whom she
wants to be. When, at the very end of the novel, her mother tells Holland she
can come home if she just gives up Cece, Holland has no reason to doubt
herself, to accept her mother's fear and prejudice. When she rejects the offer,
she feels no regret, only "sad for my mother. Sorry for her. Yeah, I'd
made sacrifices; I'd experienced loss. But she had no idea what this was
costing her. Because she was losing me" (245). Holland finally knows her
own value.
Holland
steps out of her mother's vision for her to find that a whole new world has
opened up. While she is thrust into the "real" world where she must
find jobs that will cover her living expenses, she finally has the chance to
explore what she wants to do with her life. Her mother's machinations toward a
college with a good pre-law program no longer bind her; she can think about
studying art, a new discovery that her mother considers a "waste of
time" (101), or teaching, or both. While she will not attend any of the
prestigious schools her mother wanted, Holland's primary concern is that she
controls her own decisions: where and what she will study, what she wants to do
with her life. By claiming her subject position as a lesbian, Holland has
discovered agency that extends far beyond her sexual choices; by the end of the
novel, she has evolved from a passive "good girl" who does what her
mother and friends expect of her into a strong, active, self-aware subject, a
young woman who will make her life into exactly what she wants it to be. Keeping
You a Secret belies its title, advocating girls as independent and active
subjects, and encouraging them to own proudly their sexual identities and
desires. Holland finds strength in her love for Cece, but more fundamentally in
her realization that she is a woman-loving-woman. With this knowledge, she
finds something in her own life worth fighting for. Peters's novel demonstrates
the power of self-recognition, and suggests that young lesbians may find
themselves uniquely positioned to resist adults' conventional expectations for
them.
Gravel Queen
Much
as Peters's Holland makes self-discoveries that give her unprecedented agency
in her own life, the protagonist of Tea Benduhn's 2003 novel, Gravel [End
Page 87] Queen, finds power in herself through changing
relationships with friends, family, and a lover. The novel opens at that point
of perpetual transition for teens: summer, and within the common trope of
friendship in flux. As Aurin's summer winds down, she distances herself from
her best friend, Kenney, finds more in common with their mutual friend, Fred,
and, significantly, finds herself falling for a new friend, Neila. As Aurin
realizes she is a lesbian, it is Fred, who is also gay, she wants to talk with,
not Kenney. Aurin initially wishes to discount the significance of the first
time Neila kisses her, saying "It could have been nothing." Fred
responds, "It doesn't matter if it was nothing . . . does the truth of
your reality dictate that you wanted it to happen?" (119). The realization
that what matters most are your own desires and your own reality, grounds Gravel
Queen firmly in the progressive camp.
Aurin
narrates Gravel Queen in the present tense, offering a sense of
immediacy and urgency to Aurin's self-discoveries, and giving her control over
her story, emphasized by Benduhn's construction of Aurin's narrative partially
as a "mind-film," with Aurin as writer-producer-director-star. Having
no camera, Aurin mentally frames shots, adds music (sometimes making up her own
songs), develops scenarios, describes the colors, and, most importantly,
manipulates events. Like the dual narrative in Empress of the World,
these mind films serve the dual and perhaps contradictory purposes of creating
a sense of objectivity, and giving Aurin intimate control over her worldview
and idealization of life events. Initially this filmic device gives Aurin a
measure of control in her own life, since she feels, much like Peters's
Holland, that when her mother is not directing it, Kenney is. In
"Narrative Resolution: Photography in Adolescent Literature" Trites
suggests: "[t]he metaphor of the camera bestowing on the photographer a
sense of empowerment based on the communicative abilities of photographs occurs
often in literature" (130). She continues: "adolescent novels employ
camera metaphors as a way to explore agency as a linguistic construct that
empowers the adolescent . . . the process of photography engages the fictional
adolescent's agency in a way that enables the character to embrace her or his
subjectivity" (133). The camera is linguistic in that it is a semiotic
system of symbols and signs, though those symbols and signs are here imagistic
rather than verbal. Aurin uses her camera (real or imagined) to develop her own
sense of agency, and thus her own subjectivity. Her film incorporates moving
rather than still images, perhaps emphasizing agency—action and control—more
than subjectivity. She may remove herself from the action of her life when she
cannot cope with it; as director, she may manipulate the other actors in her
life in ways she, of course, cannot in real life, enacting upon them her own
variations of appropriate responses to herself and her choices.
Aurin
and Neila bond over movie-making (Neila actually has a video camera), giving
them a point of connection as their relationship develops. [End Page 88]
Ultimately, Aurin doesn't need a movie of her life to feel that she owns it,
she has learned to be an active agent, to make herself heard and known. Still,
the last chapter is a movie, a happy scene where Aurin gathers and places all
the important people in her life in a celebratory dance, where they are all
beautiful, happy, and graceful, where they have all found someone to love. The
last paragraph of the novel visually embodies this joy: "Camera pans out
as a breeze swooshes in and blows around our hair and dresses. A flutter of
colorful paper gets stirred up. The wind lifts the pile and releases a thousand
paper metallic origami birds. They're bursting into flight all through the
sky" (152).
Notably,
Aurin is, herself, included in this final shot; she is part of the action, not
simply an observer or manipulator; she is both subject and object, an agent
engaging her subjectivity. This last chapter partly reflects Aurin's reality
and partly constructs her cinematic dreamworld—everything is not perfect, of
course, and Aurin realizes that. Her parents' happiness and harmony may be
invented, and the tidiness of Fred and Kenney's happy endings idealized. Her
own happiness is solid (with Neila and with herself), and serves as the
foundation for these dreams for the others. With its protagonist's new sense of
her own agency and subjectivity, with her recognition that there is no single
"gay (or lesbian) experience," and with her willingness to explore
the possibilities that have come with the new parity of her relationships with
her mother and Kenney, and especially Neila, Gravel Queen typifies the
qualities of a an effectively progressive lesbian novel.
The Bermudez Triangle
In
Maureen Johnson's The Bermudez Triangle (2004), Johnson uses the
question: "What are you?" to confound traditional modes of
categorizing people: when Nina goes across the country to a precollege
leadership program, her new roommate asks it of her. Nina, whose mother is
black and father is Cuban and white, responds with "Swedish,"
expanding only with "Yeah" when Ashley asks "On both
sides?" (12-13). Similarly, when someone from school comes across Mel and
Avery in the gay and lesbian section of a bookstore, the girls must come to
terms with Avery's resistance to labeling. While Avery does not embrace an
identity as she does her relationship with Mel, she has been happy to be
with Mel, to share small intimacies, but all along she has "liked keeping
her relationship with Mel a complete secret. She wanted to be the only one who
knew what it was like to be with Mel—to be able to look at her know that Mel
was all hers, and she was all Mel's, that no one else with all their posturing
had any idea what that meant" (121-22). While Avery may consciously
focus on the intimacy, the specialness of her relationship, [End Page 89]
and the "posturing" of the out lesbians at her school, the clear
subtext, which even Mel has sensed, is that Avery does not want to be known
as—or even rumored to be—gay. Her resistance, however, is to the label rather
than the identity or relationship. She feels trapped by the idea that she must
adopt and adhere to a single identity when she intuits that there is more to
her identity than her sexual orientation, and more to her sexuality than any
single relationship could embody. After the first experiences of passion,
desire, and intimacy, the reader realizes that, as Mel becomes increasingly
comfortable in her lesbian identity and with recognizing Avery as her
girlfriend, Avery is increasingly unsettled by the relationship and others'
needs to define it. She finally denies that she is gay, or even bisexual:
"I'm not gay." Avery said, sticking her
free hand into her pocket.
"Ave—"
"I'm not gay." Avery said it again, very
clearly and sternly.
"Okay," Mel said, trying to be
conciliatory. "You're bi."
"Stop trying to tell me what I am! [. . .]
This isn't the same as other people," Avery went on. " [. . .] It's
more serious with us. We act like lesbians. Real ones."
"I am a real one," Mel said. "But
you can be whatever you want."
(151-52)
Avery's
difficulties with her own orientation stem from others' perceptions of her as
gay—she resists any label based on sexuality, and, predictably, acts out,
cheating on Mel with a boy (Gaz), ultimately ending the relationship without
even speaking to Mel (Avery lets Nina do it). When she is with Gaz, Avery
recognizes that with Mel she felt a "rush [. . .] a deep sense of
connection" that is missing with Gaz, but that "Gaz had something
she needed right now" (207). As they make out, Avery keeps seeing Mel's
face (as she had seen Gaz's when kissing Mel earlier in the evening), and she
has an epiphany:
She understood now—she had to make everything stop.
It wasn't that she didn't like Mel or even love Mel—she just couldn't date
her. Something had happened between them that summer, something that had felt
right and had maybe even been right. But it wasn't right anymore. It
wasn't who Avery was; it wasn't what she really wanted. And now she needed to
undo it all, turn things back to how they had been before.
(207)
Avery
progressively resists society's labels, but her fear about society's judgments,
and her consequent mistreatment of Mel keep her a realistic—and realistically
flawed—teenager subject to the panopticon of high school. Avery's fear of
society, in tension with her resistance to its labels and her search for sexual
subjectivity, coupled with Mel's increasing confidence in her lesbian identity,
and Johnson's acknowledgment of the ambiguity and fluidity of desire in all the
girls, mark the novel as ultimately progressive. [End Page 90]
The "Politics of Visibility and
Affirmation"
While
it is an unfortunate fact of life in the twenty-first century that many LGBTQ
teens are still rejected by communities, friends, and family because of their
sexuality, it is no longer the only, or even dominant, reality; novels working
within the genre of realistic fiction must acknowledge multiple truths about
being lesbian, just as they do diverse truths about being straight. Since the
1970s, and especially in the last decade, depictions of lesbians in young adult
literature have increased in number and become deeper, richer, and, most
importantly, celebratory. These novels demonstrate the joy of recognizing and
honoring one's own desires and integrity, and the power that comes with those
acts of courage. The number of novels featuring strong, active lesbian
characters continues to grow; more and more of them embody progressive ideals.
Presence is not enough. Inclusion is not enough. Adolescent readers deserve the
highest standards of depth, realism, and complexity in all of their fiction,
including LGBTQ texts. Progressive lesbian YA novels represent sympathetically
and sensibly a variety of authentic experiences of teen lesbians. They stage
and meditate upon female sexuality as girls find ways to reclaim their bodies,
their modes of sexual desire and expression, and their lives as active
subjects—they acknowledge that these processes, are both affirming and
frightening.
Caroline E. Jones is Assistant
Professor of English at Texas State University—San Marcos, where she teaches a
variety of courses in children's and adolescent literatures. Her publications
include "'Jesus Loves Me, This I Know': Finding a Rainbow God in Contemporary
Adolescent Literature" (Children's Literature in Education, 2012)
and "'Nice Folks': L.M. Montgomery's Classic and Subversive Inscriptions
and Transgressions of Class" in Anne Around the World: Montgomery and
Her Classic edited by Jane Ledwell and Jean Mitchell, for McGill-Queens,
2013.
Notes
1. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive (2004); James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of
Child Molesting (1998); and Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or
Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009).
2. In Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike
(1978), one of the girls is brutally raped, then cuts off all contact with her
lover. In Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind (1982), Liza and Annie's
relationship is discovered and outed, and Liza cuts off contact with Annie. The
relationship of the girls' teachers is also discovered, resulting in their
subsequent firing. [End Page 91]
3. In Stacey Donovan's Dive (1994), Virginia's
father falls ill and dies; in Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike
Peggy's mother has recently died. In Bett Williams's Girl Walking Backwards
(1998), both Skye's mother and her new friend (on whom she has a serious crush)
are institutionalized with mental illness.
4. This model "grows out of Christine Jenkins'
[1998] research on YA literature with GLBTQ content," which is based on
Rudine Sims Bishop's "three-part model for African-American inclusion in
children's fiction" (Cart and Jenkins xix).
5. While it might initially seem that this criterion
potentially undercuts the claim that it is possible to have a unified
subjectivity, which is ultimately the task of the young adult, each character
is different, and each expresses her subjectivity, including sexual
subjectivity and agency, differently, and occasionally in multiple ways.
6. According to Néstor A. Braunstein, Jacques Lacan
coined "jouissance" to describe "the other pole" of desire
in a 1958 lecture (102). By 1966, Lacan had developed the concept
significantly: "What I call jouissance—in the sense in which the body
experiences itself—is always in the nature of tension, in the nature of a
forcing, of a spending, even of an exploit" (103). The term has no direct
English translation or correlative, and Braunstein maintains that most
translators use the term without italics because it is "already recognized
by the OED and as a psychoanalytic contribution to the English
language" (103).
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