Abstract:
This thesis comprises a discussion of five texts: Luce Irigaray's "When Our Lips Speak Together," Nicole Brossard's The Aerial Letter, Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, Mary Fallon's Working Hot and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
The introductory chapter addresses itself to issues of definition surrounding the category "lesbian," comparing and contrasting recent articulations of this category with those of the category "women." It makes no attempt to formulate a foundationalist, or even a working, definition of the category "lesbian." It argues instead for the radical incoherence of that category. It demonstrates that theoretical deployments of the category "lesbian" frequently assume for this category the characteristics of the utopic site - alterity, exteriority and an excess of cultural legislation. Elaborating Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis, it argues that "lesbian" is emphatically interior to culture, not only prohibited, but also produced, by the mechanisms of legislative heterosexuality.
Each subsequent chapter examines the various textual productions of a regulatory economy and articulates the ways in which each specific text constitutes "lesbian" as holding, or moving towards, a position outside the mechanisms of that economy. In "When Our Lips Speak Together," Irigaray posits "lesbian" as beyond the phallocentric, hom(m)o-sexual economy of the symbolic order. In The Aerial Letter, "lesbian" enables the production of a utopic space outside the falsity and distortions of patriarchal representation. In Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, the utopic projection is to secure a space for "lesbian" beyond the economy of the closet. In Working Hot, "lesbian" is always aspiring to a position outside the interarticulated systems of gender and genre, to a space beyond the taxonomic systems of patriarchal nomination and heterosexual exchange. In Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, where "lesbian" marks the confluence of male and female, it is the hybridisation of opposites which accesses a utopic space beyond binary opposition.
Through a series of deconstructive readings, each text is shown to undo the logic of its own utopic projection. The readings of Irigaray, Brossard, Hacker, Fallon and Anzaldúa undertaken in this thesis demonstrate that the various utopic exterior spaces produced in these texts rehearse precisely the operation of - and hence are recuperable to - the very regulatory structures they purport to transcend.
