Do Clothes Make the Woman?: Gender, Performance Theory, and Lesbian Eroticism

Abstract

sn't it curious that from the time the women's movement first began to carve out a place for itself within the academy, has served primarily as a code word for male-female relations? After all, social constructionists have long argued that gender is the product of culture: certain societies may symbolically incorporate genitalia and other elements of anatomy into gender constructs, but those constructs are in no way determined by bodies or biology. Cross-cultural research lent validity to this claim by demonstrating the sheer variability, from one society to another, of phenomena that Western observers studied under the rubrics of gender and sexuality. 1 But what about the gendering of same-sex relations? What happens when an analysis pushes social constructionism to its limits by factoring anatomy--sex differences--out of the equation to see how gendered differences and continuities become incorporated into relations among women (or men)? At first glance, this shift in focus from looking at genders (man and woman) to the gendering of all social relations would seem to threaten the very project of gender studies. What would gender mean once displaced from the contrast drawn between female and male? Yet the epistemological foundation for gender studies has proved none too secure in recent years. As women of color began to protest their exclusion from hearts and flowers approaches that yielded overarching generalizations about women's specialized capacity to nurture, feel, and intuit, they demanded that feminism account for the ways race, class, and sexual identity have differentiated women's experiences by privileging certain women in certain respects while simultaneously oppressing others. 2 The politics of difference that emerged in response to this critique distinguishes between Woman--the unitary and illusory subject, characterized by a set of qualities largely derived from white middle-class experience--and women, the concrete historical beings who find themselves caught up in gendered relations but manage to go about their everyday affairs, with or without the benefit of gender theory. But if Woman is dead, will feminist studies be forced to abandon theory to resume the projects of its younger days, collecting data about innumerable individual women's lives? Can any aspect of women's experience be characterized