The Canon – A Proposal

This year has been an educational one for innumerable reasons, but one of the more unexpected outcomes was an exposure to lesbian literature as it has evolved over the past century. Beginning with Carol by Patricia Highsmith, I have since ploughed through The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown and am looking forward to The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, as I haven’t yet got my hands on Tipping the Velvet.

As I slowly make my way through The Canon, I’m starting to realise there is an unfortunate dearth of some of the more niche books due to limited print runs. After searching in vain for a copy of Stone Butch Blues for under $100  (I’m going to have to make do with a pdf copy, though not for lack of searching), it struck me that there is no structured approach in place for approaching the books as a cohesive series. *

I realise it’s problematic to try to pull disparate books into a complete collection under a single theme. This is particularly true as such a collection may appear to frame the works as inherently separate from the greater body of literature, as Rita Mae Brown points out in her 2015 forward to Rubyfruit Jungle. I suggest, however, that such an exercise may have its benefits.

I am thinking here of the potential for a structured, chronological and yet personal insight into the evolution of lesbian culture and its changing reception within society. While this is already the unofficial role played by the books, they are not currently organised and easily accessible for the reader and an official format and method of reading would likely increase clarity.

I am also considering the opportunity to leverage the reputation of more common books such as Carol (and of course to take advantage of publicity from the upcoming film adaptation) to increase reader interest in less accessible books purely by association. In doing so, one would hope that the publishers might bring out-of-print books back into circulation.

Of course I have no means with which to begin such a process, but I would propose that the first step is to begin with a cohesive and compelling graphic style that runs across the collection. To this end I have begun my own project of creating such a graphic style, which I will be updating as I slowly progress through my reading.

The first, lonely entry, and indeed the possible entry point to the series, is a reworking of the cover of The Well of Loneliness.

 

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Edit: I’ve since realised that Leslie Feinberg deliberately withdrew Stone Butch Blues from print in order to take it off the capitalist market, but I think there is still merit in promoting the books as chronicling the evolution of lesbian culture.

Thoughts on the Body as a Textual Device

I have been struggling with the idea of autoethnographic reflection / writing, trying to understand its purpose beyond the immediate exploration of space through the medium of the senses and the body. It is understandable that an accurate discussion around sensorial encounters can only be explored comprehensively from a personal perspective, however I have not been able to grasp the full implications of the use of the body as a storytelling device. Indeed, the writing style seems highly indulgent at surface level. As I continue to read, however, it is becoming clearer that one of the primary purposes of the style is to situate the discussion within the world and so make obvious the agency of the writer in telling the story and influencing the reader toward a biased, or simply a particular, perspective.

[R]esearch should be framed as the exploration of situated knowledges where the researcher is accountable to their positionality and acknowledges their role in knowledge construction… (Ruming 2009, 455)

In light of this argument the use of a personal narrative of experience seems reasonable; perhaps even a more honest method of presenting a concept or research to an audience. I do not know whether this is the underlying premise behind use of the body within feminist literature. Haraway argues ‘for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity’ (Haraway 1988, 589), however this view from a body only seems applicable in certain situations that look to engage partiality. By arguing from outside the god’s eye perspective it is both awarding agency to the writer and removing their authority to speak beyond their specific experiences.

While I am beginning to understand the implications of parallel/partial/situated stories/knowledges in relation to an object or event (an actant?), there seems to be the problem of the core of the object. If it is not possible to ever actually see an object without a framework of preconception, is there a true object? Is it worth considering it at all, or is it just an idea to be discarded because of a lack of access to an answer? This is related to the idea of correlationism discussed by Sheldon; as she quotes from Meillassoux, correlationism is ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (Sheldon 2015, 193), or are forced to ‘dramatically limit the range of theoretical speculations to things that fall within human knowledge systems’ (Ibid., 194). So we use the body as a device for making evident the restrictions placed on our thoughts?

References:

Haraway, D. (1988). “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.

Ruming, K. (2009). “Following the Actors: mobilising an actor-network theory methodology in geography.” Australian Geographer 40(4): 451-469.

Sheldon, R. (2015). Form/Matter/Chora: Object-Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism. The nonhuman turn. R. A. Grusin. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 193-222.