of The Great Gatsby

Adrienne Rich makes use of this idea when she argues for the existence of what she calls a lesbian continuum. A lesbian continuum, Rich explains, “include[s] a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman‑identi‑ fied experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (239). Woman‑identified expe‑ rience includes, for example, emotional bonding through shared work or play, the giving or receiving of psychological support, and the shared experience of joy in any form. Woman‑identification does not preclude sexual desire or sexual activity, but neither does it require them. A woman can thus move in and out of the lesbian continuum throughout her life or remain within it entirely. From this perspective, women’s romantic friendships during the nineteenth century, whether or not they involved sexual activity or desire, are indeed an appropriate subject for lesbian analysis. Of course, to underplay the sexual dimension of lesbian experience is to under‑ play, some theorists argue, that which is most unique and liberating in lesbian life. In bonding with one another sexually and denying men access to their bodies, lesbians deny patriarchy one of its most powerful tools: heterosexuality. For heterosexuality is not a “natural” sexual orientation for “normal” women but a political institution that subordinates women to patriarchy in that women’s subservience to men is built into heterosexual definitions of feminine sexual‑ ity. In other words, from this point of view, patriarchy and heterosexuality are inseparable. To resist the former, one must resist the latter. For this reason, some lesbians are separatists. They disassociate themselves as much as possible from all men, including gay men, and from heterosexual women as well. They may also disassociate themselves from lesbians who don’t share their views. Recalling the sexism of the male‑dominated Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s and, as we noted above, the heterosexist tendencies of feminism, lesbian separatists believe that only lesbian organizations will give priority to lesbian issues. For separatists, just as for the majority of lesbian femi‑ nists who are not separatists, lesbianism is a political stance, not merely an issue of personal sexuality. Nevertheless, as Marilyn Frye argues, while separatism is a deliberate, system‑ atic political policy, it is not the only form in which women’s separation from patriarchal domination occurs. In fact, separation is enacted to varying degrees across a range of institutional practices that increase women’s power, including, for example, the provision of shelters for battered women, divorce, the increased availability of day care, women’s studies programs, women’s bars, and the legal‑ ization of abortion. Even such apparently personal behaviors as breaking up a close relationship, excluding someone from one’s house or one’s company, withholding one’s support, withdrawing one’s loyalty, refusing to watch sexist

television programs or listen to sexist music, and rejecting obnoxious individu‑ als are all forms of separation from males or from male‑dominated institutions that can increase women’s power. As Frye puts it, “Access is one of the faces of Power. . . . It is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave’s hut. The slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave” (95–96). Thus, although most women do not choose separatist politics, neither should they find them completely alien to their own experience nor be unsympathetic to women who do choose them. Clearly, attempts to define the word lesbian, or even to articulate the full politi‑ cal implications of various forms of women’s separation, are as problematic as they are exciting. Equally difficult and equally rewarding are efforts to answer the question “What constitutes a lesbian literary text?” As we can’t always be sure whether or not a particular writer was a lesbian, especially given the dif‑ ficulties we’ve just discussed concerning the definition of that term, we can’t depend on an author’s sexual orientation, even if we know it, to tell us whether or not we are reading a lesbian text. Of course, how the critic defines lesbian will determine her definition of both lesbian writers and lesbian texts. For example, a lesbian critic might argue that a writer known to have been a sexually active lesbian, such as Willa Cather, coded lesbian meaning in an appar‑ ently heterosexual narrative because she knew that she couldn’t write about les‑ bian desire openly, at least not if she hoped to have her work published and to avoid public censure if not criminal prosecution. Judith Fetterly makes this argu‑ ment in her interpretation of Cather’s My Ántonia (1918). Among other codings, Fetterly argues that narrator Jim Burden, whose characterization is frequently contradictory and whom many critics have difficulty interpreting, can be under‑ stood if we see him as the embodiment of Cather’s own lesbian desire. Fetterly notes, among other evidence, that despite Jim’s frequent admissions of love for Ántonia and of his desire to have her as his sweetheart or his wife, for some unexplained reason he can’t have her. Furthermore, he behaves in ways that are traditionally female. He spends most of his time in the kitchen, in women’s space. We never see him participating in the male world of hunting and fishing. He doesn’t identify with the men of his town and is hostile to the patriarchal privilege they abuse. And when Jim takes Ántonia’s place in the home of Wick Cutter, her sexually predatory employer whose strange behavior is frightening her, Jim doesn’t defend the woman he loves by beating up Wick. Instead, he is apparently raped in her place, for he runs home to his grandmother, repulsed and shamed by what he calls Cutter’s disgusting behavior, and he begs his grand‑ mother to tell no one, not even the doctor. Finally, Jim reveals a loathing of male sexuality, for example in his revulsion toward phallic masculinity evident in his description of “the extraordinarily phallic snake of Book I” (Fetterly 152):

His abominable masculinity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn’t crush the disgusting vitality out of him. . . . He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. (Cather –; quoted in Fetterly 1) These narrative problems are resolved, Fetterly argues, when we realize that Jim is a stand‑in for Cather, which makes even more sense when we learn that the tale is autobiographical. Another task a lesbian critic might perform is to argue that a writer’s literary output establishes her lesbian status even when available biographical material posits only a passionate emotional bond, a “romantic friendship,” with another woman. For example, Paula Bennett argues persuasively that Emily Dickinson’s poetic strategies reveal a homoerotic dimension of the author’s poetry that is related, Bennett points out, to the “enormous amount of comfort, both emo‑ tional and sexual,” she drew from her “relationships with women throughout her life” (109). For example, among other poetic strategies, Dickinson associates phallic imagery with fear and revulsion. As we see in “I started Early—Took my Dog” (poem #520), the speaker, pursued by the sea (whose “overflow” of “Pearl” is obviously male and obviously sexual), flees in terror because she fears it will consume her. Similarly, in “In Winter in My Room” (poem #1670), the speaker is disturbed by the presence of a “Worm— / Pink, lank and warm” that terrifies and repels her when it transforms itself into “A snake . . . ringed with power.” Conversely, Bennett observes, Dickinson links female sexual imagery—specifi‑ cally, images associated with the clitoris and vaginal lips—with “Edenic plea‑ sures” (111) that are “typically oral” and described in a manner that is “open, eager, and lush” (110). For example, “All the letters I can write” (poem #334) calls upon a lover (who is represented by the diminutive form of a humming‑ bird and whose gender is referred to, ambiguously, as “it”) to “Play it . . . / . . . just sipped” her “Depths of Ruby, undrained, I Hid, Lip, for Thee.” Similarly, “I tend my flowers for thee” (poem #339) includes such female sexual images as “My Fuchsia’s Coral Seams / Rip—while the Sower—dreams” and “My Cac‑ tus—splits her Beard / To show her throat.” Whether or not the speaker in such poems adopts a male point of view, Dickinson’s “focus is obviously on female sexuality itself” (111) and “bespeaks the poet’s overwhelming physical attraction to her own sex” (110). Significantly, after Dickinson’s death, family members requested that publication of the poet’s letters be edited to suppress evidence of Dickinson’s passionate love for Susan Gilbert, her lifelong friend. Another task a lesbian critic might perform is to show the ways in which a text that is clearly heterosexual in its intention nevertheless has an important lesbian dimension. Using a definition of lesbian that does not require same‑sex desire—for example, the woman‑identified woman—Barbara Smith makes

this case for Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), in which two young black girls bond together to survive the racism and sexism that constrict their lives. In addition to what Smith notes as Morrison’s “consistently critical stance toward the het‑ erosexual institutions of male/female relationships, marriage, and the family” (165), this critic argues forcefully that the only deep and sustained love experi‑ enced in the novel is between two women: the main characters Nel and Sula. Their primary identification is with each other, their primary emotional suste‑ nance comes from each other, and no man, including Nel’s husband, is more influential or important in their lives than each other. In fact, both women’s relationships with men are unsatisfactory. Finally, Sula’s unconventional behav‑ ior—her refusal to marry and have children, her dismissive attitude toward the married men with whom she has one‑night stands, and the like—represents a transgressive sexuality, a violation of patriarchal norms, that resonates strongly with lesbian violations of patriarchy. Indeed, Sula goes to bed with men, not in order to experience communion with them, which doesn’t occur, but in order to learn about her own internal power and experience her own inner harmony. Of course, lesbian literary critics perform a number of other tasks. Among other things, they try to decide what constitutes a lesbian literary tradition and what writers and works belong to it. They attempt to determine what might consti‑ tute a lesbian poetics, that is, a uniquely lesbian way of writing. They analyze how the sexual/emotional orientation of lesbian writers has affected their liter‑ ary expression; how the intersection of race and sexual/emotional orientation has affected the literary expression of lesbians of color; and how the intersec‑ tion of class, race, and sexual/emotional orientation has affected the literary expression of lesbians of working‑class origins. Lesbian critics also analyze the sexual politics of specific texts by examining, for example, how lesbian char‑ acters or “masculine” women are portrayed in literature by and about lesbians. They study canonized heterosexual texts, too, in order to learn what attitudes toward lesbians they embody explicitly or implicitly. And they identify and cor‑ rect heterosexist interpretations of literature that fail to recognize or appreciate the lesbian dimensions of specific literary works. Clearly, these tasks do not exhaust the field. They are intended merely as a rep‑ resentative sample. Only your own reading of the work done by lesbian critics will acquaint you with the breadth and depth of their enterprise, which contin‑ ues to expand and evolve with each passing year. In addition, you might want to acquaint yourself, if you haven’t already done so, with literary works by contemporary lesbian writers, who are receiving much critical acclaim. These writers include, among others, Jeanette Winterson, Glo‑ ria Anzaldúa, Leslie Feinberg, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rita Mae Brown, Paula Gunn Allen, Dorothy Allison, Ann Allen Shockley, Monique Wittig, Jewelle Gomez,

June Arnold, Valerie Miner, Jane Rule, Bertha Harris, Sarah Shulman, Nicole Brossard, and, of course, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.

Gay criticism

As we noted above, unlike lesbian criticism, gay criticism doesn’t tend to focus on efforts to define homosexuality. Sexual relations between men, or even just the sexual desire of one man for another, is the generally accepted criterion of gayness in white middle‑class America today. Nevertheless, not all cultures share this definition. For example, in Mexican and South American cultures, the mere fact of sexual activity with or desire for another male does not indicate that a man is homosexual. As long as he behaves in a traditionally masculine man‑ ner—strong, dominant, decisive—and consistently assumes the male sexual role as penetrator (never allowing himself to be penetrated, orally or anally), a man remains a macho, a “real” man. As a macho, a man can have sex with both men and women and not be considered what North Americans call homosexual. The same definition of homosexuality was used in white American working‑class cul‑ ture around the turn of the twentieth century: only men who allowed themselves to be penetrated by a man during sex and behaved in a traditionally feminine manner—submissive, coy, flirtatious, “soft”—were considered homosexual. A similar problem for contemporary white middle‑class assumptions about homosexuality is offered by ancient Athens, where there was no polar opposi‑ tion between homosexual and heterosexual behavior. Sexual partners were cho‑ sen along caste lines, not according to their biological sex. In Athens, a member of the elite male ruling class could have legitimate sexual relations only with his social inferiors: women of any age and from any class, free‑born boys past the age of puberty but not old enough for citizenship, slaves, and foreigners. In fact, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the notion of homosexual identity and even the word homosexual were adopted in Anglo‑European and American culture. Before that time, certain sexual acts—generally speaking, all forms of nonprocreative sex—were forbidden by church or state, but they weren’t viewed as evidence of a specific sexual identity. The idea that one could be a homosexual came along with the idea, promoted by the medical professions, that such an identity was a form of pathology. This is why many gay men today prefer to refer to themselves as gay: the word homosexual is associated, for many, with the belief that homosexuality is a medical or psychological disorder. Similarly, “the masturbator” also became a pathological sexual identity in the nineteenth century. An act that the medical professions today consider a nor‑ mal, healthy outlet was considered so dangerous in the nineteenth century that children “suffering” from the “affliction” were tied to their beds at night to

prevent their touching themselves, and there are several case histories of doc‑ tors’ burning the genitals of little girls in order to “cure” them. The point here is that attitudes toward homosexuality, like attitudes toward sexuality in general, differ widely from one place to another and from one his‑ torical period to another. The intense antigay sentiment that emerged in an especially concentrated and virulent form in America during the early 1950s and that lingers today does not represent some kind of universally held attitude toward, or even definition of, homosexuality. The kinds of analyses that tend to engage the attention of gay critics often fall under the heading of gay sensibility. How does being gay influence the way one sees the world, sees oneself and others, creates and responds to art and music, creates and interprets literature, or experiences and expresses emotion? In a heterosexist culture such as the one we inhabit at the turn of the twenty‑first century in America, gay sensibility includes an awareness of being different, at least in certain ways, from the members of the mainstream, dominant culture, and the complex feelings that result from an implicit, ongoing social oppression. In other words, part of seeing the world as a gay man includes the ways in which one deals with being oppressed as a gay man. Among others, three important domains of gay sensibility, all of which involve responses to heterosexist oppres‑ sion, are drag, camp, and dealing with the issue of AIDS. Drag is the practice of dressing in women’s clothing. Drag queens are gay men who dress in drag on a regular basis or who do it professionally. However, not all gay people cross‑dress, not all cross‑dressers are gay, and not all gay people approve of drag. But for some, it’s a source of self‑expression and entertainment that can also be a political statement against traditional gender roles. Drag doesn’t nec‑ essarily involve (and perhaps never involves) the fantasy that one is a woman. Rather it is a way for a man to express his feminine side or his sense of the outra‑ geous or his nonconformity. For other gay men, drag is a form of political activ‑ ism used to draw attention to gay issues, criticize homophobic government and religious policies, and raise funds to fight AIDS. Whatever the purpose, drag is a way of refusing to be intimidated by heterosexist gender boundaries and a way of getting all of us to think about our own sexuality by challenging gender roles. Lesbians sometimes cross‑dress, too. In fact, there are some drag kings, such as Elvis Herselvis, who satirizes Elvis impersonators and includes in her act a dis‑ cussion of Elvis’s drug problem and sexual proclivities. However, drag doesn’t seem to be for lesbians the major issue it is for gay men. One reason may be that, at least since the late 1960s, women’s adoption of masculine attire and grooming is not considered outrageous or even unfashionable. Also, in general, the lesbian community’s adoption of male clothing and grooming (for example, butch attire) or of androgenous clothing and grooming (for example, lesbian‑feminist attire

of the 1970s) has tended to be a matter of personal self‑expression and/or quiet political statement that hasn’t had the theatrical quality of gay drag. Therefore, although butch lesbians frequently have been beaten and raped, especially dur‑ ing such repressive periods as the 1950s, their cross‑dressing never drew the national attention focused on gay drag. Camp, of which flamboyant gay drag is an example, is a form of expression characterized by irreverence, artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality. It’s ironic, witty, and humorous and often involves a blurring or crossing of gender lines. It’s subversive in that it mocks authority and traditional standards of behavior by imitating them in outrageous ways, often through the use of exaggerated gestures, postures, and voice. Imagine, as an example of camp, a humorous drag representation of the royal wedding of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip or a drag spoof of antigay activist Anita Bryant addressing Congress on the topic of “family values.” One doesn’t have to be gay to produce camp. Camp is as much, or more, in the eye of the beholder as in the intention of the person who pro‑ duces it. Thus, the flamboyant theatricality of Judy Garland and of former bas‑ ketball star Dennis Rodman—and the flamboyant irreverence of Bette Midler or of Madonna (for example, think of the times that Madonna wore her bra on the outside of her clothing)—are appreciated for their camp qualities by many gay fans. Not unlike drag (which, if outrageous or humorous, can be viewed as a subset of camp), camp is a way of affirming one’s difference from heterosexual culture. It’s a way of disarming heterosexism and healing oneself through laugh‑ ter. And thus it’s a way of transforming victimhood into power. Of course, living with the reality of AIDS, which includes AIDS‑related dis‑ crimination, became part of gay sensibility in the late 1980s. It can’t help but affect the way gay men see the world to know that the federal government was reticent to fund AIDS research until the disease became a threat for hetero‑ sexual citizens as well, to be aware of the lingering reluctance of some medical professionals to treat AIDS patients or to treat them with respect, to encounter discrimination in the workplace against people who have AIDS or who are HIV positive (who do not have AIDS but who will presumably develop the disease at some future point), and to put forth the daily physical and emotional labor of caring for friends and loved ones dying of AIDS. AIDS was first identified in 1981, and by the end of the decade a generation of men had died from it, six times the number of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. The gay community’s response to this national health emergency has been extremely active and positive. They have formed political organiza‑ tions, such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to publicize and gain support for their cause through public demonstrations and protests in an effort to get drug companies, insurance companies, government agencies,

and the medical bureaucracy to respond appropriately to this epidemic. And as lesbians rallied to the support of gay men, joining their protests and playing a significant role in caring for the sick and dying, a new spirit of solidarity emerged between these two communities. As Margaret Cruikshank puts it, “those who had been labeled misfits and un‑American perverts launched a typically Ameri‑ can self‑help movement which was probably one of the largest volunteer efforts in the nation’s history” (182–83). Despite their focus on different theoretical issues, there is a good deal of simi‑ larity in the way gay and lesbian critics approach literary texts. For example, like lesbian critics, gay critics attempt to determine what might constitute a gay poetics, or a way of writing that is uniquely gay; to establish a gay literary tradi‑ tion; and to decide what writers and works belong to that tradition. Gay critics also examine how gay sensibility affects literary expression and study the ways in which heterosexual texts can have a homoerotic dimension. They try to redis‑ cover gay writers from the past whose work was underappreciated, distorted, or suppressed, including gay writers who have been presumed heterosexual. They try to determine the sexual politics of specific texts, analyzing, for example, how gay characters or “feminine” men are portrayed in both gay and heterosexual texts. Finally, gay critics identify and correct heterosexist interpretations of lit‑ erature that fail to recognize or appreciate the gay sensibility informing spe‑ cific literary works. To get an idea of the kinds of insights into literature these approaches can produce, let’s take a brief look at three specific examples: an analysis of Walt Whitman’s poetic voice, a study of the representation of gay identity in the work of contemporary novelist Edmund White, and a defense of the gay sensibility in Tennessee Williams’s plays. In “Walt Whitman Camping,” Karl Keller extends our understanding of Whit‑ man’s poetic project through his interesting analysis of the ways in which Whit‑ man’s poetic self‑presentation is a form of camp. “We see this,” Keller argues, “in the flamboyant gestures, the exaggerated tone, the operatic voice, the inflated role‑playing, the dilation of language” (115) that frequently characterize Whit‑ man’s speaker, for example, the speaker in “Song of Myself” (1855). Keller says, “Those who have bemoaned the contradiction between Whitman’s claim that his poetry . . . revealed his personality well and the paucity of autobiographical detail in the poems have only failed to look . . . at the workings of Whitman’s voice” (115). “The poet is performing” (115), Keller asserts, and the camp qual‑ ity of his performance reveals the seductive “come‑on” (116) in his voice and in his pose that humorously sexualizes his transcendentalist ideals of bonding with nature and with other human beings. Whitman “is not making fun of the things he talks about but making fun out of them,” Keller observes, in order to “intensif[y] his enjoyment of the world around him” (118). Referring to the poet as “the Mae West of American literature,” Keller argues that Whitman reveals

himself to the reader, not by “flashing his entire person at us,” but by “showing the range of possibilities of his personality” (115). Another representative example of gay literary criticism is Nicholas F. Radel’s thoughtful essay “Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White.” “Gay identity,” Radel observes, “is the explicit subject of many of White’s works,” and many of his gay characters “fail to achieve a coherent sense of self,” a failure that “can be attributed to the politics of sexual and gender difference” (175). In other words, White examines the damaging effects of homophobic American culture on the gay men and boys who grow up within it, and its most damaging effect is the internalized homophobia, the learned self‑hatred, of his gay charac‑ ters. Indeed, Radel points out that White’s gay characters experience a distinct split within themselves between what they consider their “essential selves” and “a homosexual self as Other that they themselves conceive as being separate” (176) from them. This experience of being alienated from oneself undermines both gay identity and gay community. How can a man feel he belongs to a gay community if he is alienated from his own gayness? Furthermore, Radel argues, self‑alien‑ ation in White’s work is not due to individual psychological problems but is the direct result of the politics of heterosexist oppression. Therefore, “we might view White’s novels as part of the historical apparatus for revealing a gay subject [self‑ hood] as it responds to political pressure from the culture at large” (176). Finally, in “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” Jack Babuscio argues that gay sen‑ sibility has something to offer everyone: the relevance of its insights is not lim‑ ited, as some critics believe, to the gay community. As a case in point, Babuscio observes that critics have failed to fully appreciate the insights into human life offered by Tennessee Williams’s heroines—the most famous of whom is probably Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)—because these characters represent Williams’s own emotions as a gay man. In other words, Williams’s heroines are Williams himself in drag, so to speak, expressing his own anxieties about being gay: for example, his battle between the demands of the flesh and those of the spirit, his desire to be promiscuous and yet still keep his pride, and his fear of aging in a youth‑oriented, homosexual subculture. Critics have con‑ cluded therefore, Babuscio notes, that Williams’s work is not relevant to main‑ stream heterosexual culture. In short, they believe that gay sensibility speaks only to gay men. In contrast, Babuscio asserts that Williams’s experience on the margins of main‑ stream America, as an object of “fear, suspicion, and, even, hatred” (34), gave him a privileged position from which to understand the conflicts of human life—the same privileged position occupied, for example, by members of racial minori‑ ties—because he had to deal with those conflicts in a particularly intense form. Furthermore, Babuscio notes, the act of literary creation involves, for all good

writers, the transformation of their own experience into literary form. So when Maxine Faulk, in The Night of the Iguana (1962), says that we all reach a point in our lives, sooner or later, where we must settle for something that works for us, she is speaking not just to the gay community but to the entire human community. Of course, just as in the case of our discussion of lesbian literary criticism, the exam‑ ples of gay criticism provided here do not exhaust the field but are intended only as a representative sample of the kind of work done by gay critics. Your own reading of gay criticism will expand your understanding of this growing body of work. In addition, you might want to acquaint yourself, if you haven’t already done so, with literary works by contemporary gay writers, who are receiving much critical acclaim. These writers include, among others, David Feinberg, Tony Kushner, David Leavitt, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Paul Monette, Mark Doty, Randy Shilts, Dennis Cooper, Neil Bartlett, Allan Gurganus, Andrew Holle‑ ran, Samuel R. Delany, Dale Peck, John Rechy, Paul Russell, Matthew Stadler, and Peter Weltner.

Queer criticism

One of the first questions asked by students new to the study of gay and lesbian criticism is why gay men and women have chosen the homophobic word queer to designate an approach within their own discipline. I think there are several answers to that question, and they will serve as an introduction to some of the basic premises of queer theory. First, the use of the term queer can be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the word from what has been its homophobic usage in order to demonstrate that heterosexists shouldn’t be allowed to define gay and lesbian experience. The act of defining the terms of one’s own self‑reference is a powerful move that says, among other things, “We’re not afraid to be seen”, “You don’t tell us who we are—we tell us who we are!”, and “We’re proud to be different!” Or, as the popular queer slogan sums it up, “We’re here, we’re queer—get used to it!” As gay men and lesbians have learned, the term is a tool for oppression, but it’s also a tool for change. Furthermore, some lesbians and gay men have adopted the word queer as an inclu‑ sive category for referring to a common political or cultural ground shared by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and all people who consider themselves, for whatever reasons, nonstraight. Used in this way, the term tries to reunite the heretofore divided camps that resulted, in part, from the white middle‑class roots of the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the early 1970s. As products of the white middle class, these movements were blind to their own white middle‑class

privilege. As a result, through the 1970s and into the 1980s, the experiences of gay people of color and of working‑class gay men and lesbians were generally ignored, for these groups had little or no opportunity to assume visible lead‑ ership positions within the gay power structure. In addition, certain forms of gay sexual expression were excluded or marginalized, such as the butch‑femme lesbian couples who played such an important role in lesbian culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Butch‑femme couples resemble heterosexual couples in terms of clothing, grooming, and personal style. Although they did not necessarily resemble heterosexual couples in terms of emotional or sexual relatedness, it was usually assumed that they did, and they were therefore criticized for reproducing the same power imbalance generally found in heterosexual relationships. The word queer, then, as an inclusive term, seeks to heal these divisions by offering a collective identity to which all nonstraight people can belong. For the most part, however, the word queer is used to indicate a specific theoreti‑ cal perspective. From a theoretical point of view, the words gay and lesbian imply a definable category—homosexuality—that is clearly opposite to another defin‑ able category: heterosexuality. However, for queer theory, categories of sexual‑ ity cannot be defined by such simple oppositions as homosexual/heterosexual. Building on deconstruction’s insights into human subjectivity (selfhood) as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible “selves,” queer theory defines individual sexuality as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible sexu‑ alities. Our sexuality may be different at different times over the course of our lives or even at different times over the course of a week because sexuality is a dynamic range of desire. Gay sexuality, lesbian sexuality, bisexuality, and het‑ erosexuality are, for all of us, possibilities along a continuum of sexual possibili‑ ties. And what these categories mean to different individuals will be influenced by how they conceive their own racial and class identities as well. Thus, sexual‑ ity is completely controlled neither by our biological sex (male or female) nor by the way our culture translates biological sex into gender roles (masculine or feminine). Sexuality exceeds these definitions and has a will, a creativity, an expressive need of its own. Moreover, heterosexuality is not a norm against which homosexuality can be defined because the range of human sexuality cannot be completely understood in terms of such limited concepts as homosexual and heterosexual. For one thing, these concepts reduce sexuality to the biological sex of one’s partner, or, in psychological terms, one’s object choice. There are a host of other factors that make up human sexual desire. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, the intricacies of human sexuality could be understood just as well, or better, in terms of any number of paired opposites other than same‑sex or different‑sex object choice. For example, the definition of one’s sexuality might be based on one’s preference for someone older or younger, for a human or an animal, for a single partner or