Struggling with gender (book review)

Book review: "S/he", by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1995, 189 pp., US$10.95 paper.

Last fall I went to a reading given by Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg, a couple whose individual writings are well-known. Feinberg’ s largely autobiographical 1994 novel Stone Butch Blues followed a woman through the 1970s and 80s as she was attacked by both straight men and lesbian feminists for her strongly masculine presentation, and who escaped that hatred for a while by taking hormones to pass as a man. Pratt is a poet and essayist, author of four previous books, whose Crime Against Nature won the prestigious Lamont Prize for poetry a few years ago. The two looked like the quintessential butch/femme couple — highly masculine Feinberg in suit and tie, long-haired Pratt in flowered skirt and dangling earrings. As my friends and I had dinner afterwards, one woman voiced scorn at how Pratt’s appearance had — since meeting Feinberg — become so very feminine, calling their highly gendered pairing a kind of confinement, a self-imposed prison, a return to the limitations of female and male.

Had she heard my friend’s disapproval, Pratt would have been unsurprised: she knows this is mild compared to the stronger hostility and judgment that linger from 1970s lesbian feminism and the 1980s "sex wars," when lesbians who identified as butch or femme were viciously attacked as feminist traitors, picketed, harassed with hate calls to their employers and parents. And she has see, on New York subways, how mainstream people stare (and worse), made uncomfortable that Feinberg and Pratt are "so startling there, so obvious, but so obviously what?"

S/he is Pratt’s answer, a richly lyric memoir in which she peels back daily life to reveal how many fears, hopes, desires and expectations wriggle through our consciousness to coalesce as gender. Stone Butch Blues opened many feminist minds to the idea that gender orientation might be no more or less chosen, and no more or less linked to one’ s genitalia, than sexual desire. S/he is an essential companion volume, letting us know what hostility and violence still await someone like Feinberg’s heroine on post-Geraldo streets.

But the book is also far more. In Crime, Pratt heated her past and daily life in a pressure-cooker of intense emotion, brilliant language and complex political understanding, taking us through the experience of being shamed and punished for lesbian desire by being denied custody of her children. S/he uses a similar method, in two- to five-page prose pieces that meander everywhere, written with such lovely attention that one could easily miss, on first reading, the intellectual complexity of their ideas about gender.

Although each piece travels widely through time and point of view, the whole is constructed in a memoir’s roughly chronological order. The first sections take us back to Pratt’s girlhood and post-marital coming-out among Southern 1970s lesbian feminists, who she perceives (despite the era’s theories) as having been often butch/femme, and whose liberationist hopes were often at odds with individual realities. Pratt explores a variety of those contradictions, among them her surprise that many lesbians spurn femininity.

Maybe this would be the safe way to dress as a woman on my own, without a man, no calling attention to myself as sexual prey. Maybe men would leave me alone and other lesbians would say hello. Curious to have to dress "less like a woman" to find the women like you. Is it dressing in someone else’s idea? Is it a belief that a woman who loves women really just wants to be a man, and so surely she will dress like one? (p. 40)

Such observations quickly become less abstract. When her husband finds her lover’s notes, "I panic. I have almost no money of my own. I wheedle and plead with him to give me a few weeks, and decide that one definition of a lesbian is a woman with a job."

What’s most interesting about Pratt’s exploration of gender — touching in this piece alone on power, fear of violence, money and its lack, and that corrosive worry that lesbian desire means we are not "real" women — is how these interpretations and underpinnings shift with experience. Pratt consistently refuses to disembody her ideas into abstractions, insisting that they live within life’s incidents. The book’s power lies not in any individual quote but in the breadth of its meandering, the many tangents, memories, ideas and contradictory feelings down which Pratt pursues gender. What I loved about S/he was the seriousness with which it examines our daily preoccupations, exploring what underlies our gender choices in such ordinary acts as choosing whether or not to wear a skirt, crying with (white, aristocratic, iron-hearted) Scarlet O’Hara, touching in public, or carving a family Thanksgiving turkey.

In this early section, Pratt makes intimate and vivid her discovery that women are not as innately nurturing and loving as "women’s music" once proposed. For instance, in the opening paragraph of "Green Scarf," her first serious woman lover pushes Pratt away from being too sensually uncontrolled as she flirts, naked, with a scarf. In the next paragraph, the lover stops Pratt before they go into a bar and buttons Pratt’s shirt up to her neck so no one else can "’see you exposed.’" Finally Pratt takes a new tack, presumably one with a more "lesbian" gender identity:

In the summer I come to her door with hair freshly cut, shorn short as a boy’s, but with soft tendrils around my ears and neck. With hair this short, in jeans and T-shirt, I’ve been called "Sir" once or twice by those who easily ignored my breasts. Maybe now I look like a young sailor on shore leave, maybe now I look like an adventure. When I step into her hallway, she stares and says, "You’ve cut it so short. Now people will think you’re the butch." She turns away without touching me at all, leaving me motionless in the cool passageway. (p. 58)

By taking us through the failure of these three approaches to displaying her own sexuality, Pratt brings to life what we’ve acknowledged since: some women are as interested in defining and limiting us as men, albeit with less worldly power to impose their control. Thinking of how many lesbians — not just Pratt — lost time to the seductive and dangerous idea that women always treat each other well, readers are quietly led to the book’s larger idea: how can we not question any separatist or essentialist ideology about gender as the source of good or bad behavior?

Many memoirs are structured by the discovery of a great love. S/he is among those, but with a twist: the great love is "You," "handsome in silky shirt and tie, hair clipped close almost as skin on your fine-boned head." In the book’s central sections Pratt reconsiders lesbian-feminist ideas about love, sex and gender in which masculinity was the jailer, marriage the prison, penetration the enforcing blow. In pieces with titles like "Marriage Proposal," "Engagement Ring, " "Fuck" and "Cock," she runs down many avenues of resistance, exploring what these and other familiar notions mean when illuminated from the inside by respect, affection, mutual desire, kindness and more respect, as well as an understanding of history and power.

In "Penis," for instance, Pratt looks at different possible attitudes toward, and uses of, that body part. By introducing various responses to the Bobbitt case — factual coverage in the Times, a waking dream about the police searching for the severed penis in a field, women joking about castrating rapists, men shrinking from that lugubrious laughter — Pratt manages to consider several of the penis’s symbolic meanings, as flesh, as weapon, as sex-war dividing line. Then she considers the pleasures possible with a penis, albeit a more naturally detachable one, when desire and consent have a different relationship:

In my ear you whisper, "When will you ask me for it?"… In me the old echo of another voice reverberates, "You asked for it." But now I am standing before you who will never force desire on me, and never despise me for wanting it. Finally I stand at the edge of the dark field of my own body stretched wide, wondering how to traverse its muddy dangers and humid pleasures to reach you. (p. 110)

Many of these central vignettes remind me of a friend’s description of writing as "controlled exhibitionism." Pratt leads the reader into the couple’s erotic life, sometimes arousingly so. But this isn’t one-handed reading: sex and desire are consciously exposed as avenues through which writer and reader see gender anew. When Pratt wonders why "You" finds her touch so wonderful, a friend shakes her head, "exasperated that I miss the obvious: ’You are not only a lesbian, but very, very queer. You love a woman who is manly, and yet do not want her to be completely man. In fact, you desire here because she is both.’" Through powerful, lyrically evoked desire Pratt intends to demonstrate that at this intersection she finds the opposite of "touch that is the fist of ownership" — and, through arousal, intends to make us complicit with this "very queer" desire, gaining both our understanding and assent.

Once she is visible as Feinberg’s lover, Pratt is exquisitely aware of how she is perceived by others, not merely when violence threatens on the subway, but also in conferences, at dances, in homes. "I wonder what judgments are being made of me … at the edge of almost everybody’ s limits, the ones who think I need a real woman, and the ones who think I just need a real man." With Feinberg Pratt begins reconsidering the limits she placed on her appearance as a lesbian feminist, such as her long-time decision to forgo skirts in an attempt to be visible as a lesbian to other women, and invisible as sexual prey to men.

What she manages to convey is not just the danger of exposing one’ s self as female, butch, femme, lesbian, or queer, but of allowing the sexual self to be visible and therefore vulnerable — whether to men who make contemptuous comments about breasts, or men who sneer at a lesbian couple, or women angry at any reminders of a violated past, or butch women who make enragingly sexist assumptions, or one’ s own sneering inner voices for choosing pretty shoes over practicality on a snowy night. Pratt clarifies what a precarious balancing act it is to display openly our gendered, sexual selves, particularly — but not only — when unconventionally partnered.

Pratt takes us with her as she travels through the gender borderlands, where, since she can pass a "ordinary," she knows she has chosen to take her stand. Through Feinberg’s transgender activism, Pratt meets a host of companions, transsexual, transgendered, butch and femme; their stories wind into the final section, becoming as particular and sympathetic as her own. She accompanies one such group to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, notorious for requesting that attendees be "women-born women" only, and listens as they confuse guards with stories that do not fit neatly into the gender dyad. Even more movingly, she lists some of the stories they tell each other later — stories filled with beatings, rapes and other hatreds for their gender deviance, "different and yet like the stories I’ve heard women tell for years."

When, near the end, she writes that she has "no idea how each [of several friends] struggled through to her way of being a woman," the statement reads as anything but cliche. It reveals, rather, how richly she has evoked those struggles — and conveys the lifetime behind that old feminist belief that "womanhood" is no biological given, but rather a social construction intersecting and shaping a host of interior desires.

I do, of course, have some quibbles with the book. Although it intends to be accretive and suggestive, not comprehensive, I did wonder why it focused so primarily on lesbian erotic life, and didn’t explore the gender construction of the supposedly womanhood-defining experiences of motherhood, such as pregnancy or nursing, or how womanhood was imposed in the private moments of heterosexual marriage — using this particular lens to examine experiences Pratt has written about elsewhere with a different goal. I question some of the stereotyping imposed by a butch/femme identity, as when "You" suggests that Pratt’s yelling at a potential attacker was a use of "femme power." Pratt’s introduction was rhetorical and tiresome, best skipped. And I did raise my eyebrows at the occasional oratorical excess, which at times stretches for a trumpeting effect, perhaps losing readers who aren’t already in Pratt’s choir.

But I also find more to praise than Pratt’s gender analysis: I love this book simply as a memoir of lesbian life in a particular place and time. In fact, while reading this, I realized how often Firebrand’ s books — such as Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, Dorothy Allison’s Skin, Jewelle Gomez’ Forty-Three Septembers, Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and many more — serve the extra purpose of documenting how we live, a kind of lesbian herstory archives in the making, and was grateful for this cumulative project. Because however mainstream conventionally-gendered lesbians like myself may feel in Park Slope or Provincetown, even we are still queer in, say, Arkansas, which I visited this week on business, and where I hated myself for keeping my mouth shut while my het male colleagues and clients discussed what a great place it was for their wives and children. What a long project this is, education the world (and ourselves) to how many ways there are to be human! Or should I say, to the fact that none of us is really queer.

Copyright ©1995 The Women’s Review, Inc.
Graff, EJ, Struggling with gender., Vol. XII, Women’s Review of Books, 07-01-1995, pp 25