Rereading Heterosexuality

Front matter

RACHEL CARROLL

REREADING

HETEROSEXUALITY

Part Three: Reproducing heterosexuality

5. ‘First one thing and then the other’: rewriting the intersexed body in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex 111 6. Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 131 Bibliography 149

Index 157

Acknowledgements

Some of the material contained in this book has been published previously; I would like to thank the publishers for permission to reproduce work from the following publications:

e ‘“Becoming my own ghost”: spinsterhood, heterosexuality and Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Genders (Spring 2007), n.p.

e ‘Imitations of life: cloning, heterosexuality and the human in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’, Journal of Gender Studies, 19: 1 (2010), pp. 59-71.

e ‘Retrospective sex: rewriting intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex’, Journal of American Studies, 44: 1 (2010), pp. 187-201.

I am very grateful to my friends Heike Salzer and Ingi Jensson for allowing me to use a still image from their work for the cover of this book.

Introduction: feminism, queer theory and heterosexuality

The ‘invisibility’ of heterosexuality as a normative category of identity is a recurring motif in recent work on heterosexuality; its ‘“unmarked” and “naturalised”’! status is understood as serving to perpetuate its power as an identity which tends to be taken for granted and to pass unquestioned. Indeed, as Linda Schlossberg puts it, ‘heterosexual culture continually passes itself off as being merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm [emphasis added].’* Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction aims to contribute to what Richard Johnson has described as the ‘impetus to render heterosexuality visible to critical scrutiny’. Heterosexuality as an institution continues to have immense normative power; while this power impacts most explicitly on non-heterosexual identities it also extends to heterosexual identities which do not conform to familial, marital or reproductive norms — norms which have a particular impact on female identities, the principal concern of this book. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and sexuality, Rereading Heterosexuality takes as its distinctive focus the representation of female identities at odds with heterosexual norms; more specifically, it explores representations which serve to question the conventional equation between heterosexuality, reproductive sexuality and female identity. In this context, it will offer close readings of six novels published by British and American authors between 1995 and 2005: Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (1995), The End of Alice by A. M. Homes (1996), Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999), Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002), Notes on a Scandal by Zoé Heller (2003) and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The diverse subject matter of these novels reflects contemporary concerns and anxieties about the future of sex, gender and sexuality; some address topics which have been the focus of media attention and social policy debate, including child sexual abuse, human cloning and transgender identity, while others turn to historical periods which have played a pivotal role in the development of modern discourses of sexuality, including the late Victorian era and the ‘sexual revolution’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have selected these texts for the unique opportunities they provide to reflect on the dynamic and often contested relationship between feminism and queer theory in relation to the analysis of heterosexuality.

This introduction offers a selective overview and evaluation of relevant work on heterosexuality in the context of contemporary gender and sexuality studies. Its focus is on the formative contribution of two key theoretical frameworks: feminism and queer theory. Feminist and lesbian feminist theorists have offered an ideological critique of heterosexuality in relation to the gendered and sexual oppression of women; in this way, heterosexuality has been analysed as a patriarchal institution which perpetuates gendered power relations through sexuality. More recently, queer theory has extended the terms by which heterosexuality can be understood through its discursive analysis of heterosexuality as an effect of historical and cultural construction. Queer theory approaches heterosexuality as a normative category of sexed, gendered and sexual identity which serves both to support the binary logic by which ‘hetero-’ and ‘homosexual’ identities are produced and to perpetuate the construction of homosexual identities as deviant and abnormal. The work of leading Second Wave feminists has had a lasting impact on feminist critiques of heterosexuality; however, tensions emerging from the legacy of this movement have also contributed to what has been described as an ideological impasse where female heterosexuality is concerned. Queer theoretical frameworks offer to reconfigure critical perspectives on heterosexuality but also present challenges for feminist frameworks and have provoked often polarised responses. In what follows, feminist and queer contributions to the analysis of heterosexuality will be considered, as will affinities and tensions between the two frameworks.

Compulsory heterosexuality: feminism and heterosexuality

Lesbian feminist theorists have been instrumental in establishing heterosexuality as an object of feminist critique and in setting the terms by which it is approached. Adrienne Rich’s ground-breaking essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (first published in 1980) documents the ways in which heterosexuality is constructed as the ‘natural’ destination for all women, in patriarchal and feminist discourses alike, and the coercive means by which this presumption is imposed, both discursively and materially. Her assertion that

‘heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution [emphasis in original]’* retains its counter-intuitive power, challenging as it does persistent assumptions about heterosexuality as rooted in the natural and instinctual (especially where reproductive sexuality is concerned), rather than the ideological. Rich asks why ‘such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men’? and in doing so establishes heterosexuality not simply as a sexual relation but also as a power relation. According to this thesis, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ divides women from each other by its ‘othering’ of lesbians as ‘deviant, as pathological, or as emotionally and sensually deprived’.® Rich offers the ‘lesbian continuum’ not only as an antidote to compulsory heterosexuality but also as a form of collective resistance to patriarchy; the lesbian continuum places same-sex desire between women within a spectrum of female attachment and solidarity and in doing so repairs the division between ‘women’ and ‘lesbians’ imposed by compulsory heterosexuality. As Rich writes:

Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of the reality and visibility of women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community; the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other [emphasis in original].’

The category of ‘women’ is self-evidently central to Rich’s analysis. She rejects the possibility of alliance between lesbians and gay men as serving to ‘deny and erase female reality once again’,® arguing that ‘to separate those women stigmatised as “homosexual” or “gay” from the complex continuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history.’? Significantly, sexed identity is privileged as the source of female solidarity; when Rich states that ‘lesbian experience [is] like motherhood, a profoundly female experience’!? she is contesting the accusation that lesbians are not ‘real’ women but at the same time seems to posit reproductive sexuality, premised on sexed identity, as integral to feminist definitions of women.

Where Rich subverts the category of women by universalising ‘woman-identification’!! as a female and feminist, rather than exclusively lesbian, experience, Monique Wittig abandons ‘women’ as an irrecoverably ideological concept, arguing in her important essay ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’ (first published in 1981) that ‘the refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.’!? Here heterosexuality is integral to the patriarchal construction of gender; the lesbian is celebrated as a subversive outlaw whose very identity is understood as a form of resistance and refusal:

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation ... a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual.!?

Where Rich extends the category of ‘women’ by means of the ‘lesbian continuum’, Wittig abandons ‘women’ as an inherently compromised subject position. Rich and Wittig interrogate heterosexuality as an agent of patriarchy, challenging both the unacknowledged and overt homophobia at work in the women’s movement by offering the lesbian as the (feminist) woman par excellence, both in her subjection and her defiance. To some degree ‘lesbian’ seems to stand for ‘woman’ and ‘heterosexual’ for ‘patriarchal’; this rhetorical strategy has the advantage of thoroughly politicising heterosexuality but arguably does so by conflating it with patriarchy in ways which may overlook their operative differences.

Crucially, Rich and Wittig understand heterosexuality as an institution rather than simply a sexual identity; heterosexual sexuality, however, is foregrounded in the influential work of radical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin and Sheila Jeffreys, where it is posited as intimately complicit in the perpetuation of hierarchical power relations. The assumptions underlying this position are exemplified in the following assertion by Jeffreys:

Masculinity and femininity, the genders of dominance and submission, are eroticised to create the sexuality of male supremacy which I call heterosexual desire. By the term ‘heterosexual desire’ I do not mean desire for the opposite sex, but a desire that is organised around eroticised dominance and submission.!4

The presumption of heterosexual women’s complicity in patriarchy is also advanced by Andrea Dworkin, whose analysis of penetration as a form of ‘occupation and/or colonisation’!’ makes it analogous to rape even when consensual. In works like Intercourse, published by Dworkin in 1987, and Anticlimax, published by Jeffreys in 1990, heterosexuality is understood principally in terms of sexual relationships between men and women, heterosexual sexual practice equated with penetration and penetration equated with oppression; these analyses have proved controversial in that they proceed from provocative and problematic assumptions. The thesis that forms of heterosexuality eroticise power difference and that sexuality can be a powerful way in which ideology is internalised continues to have currency; however, the denunciation of all heterosexual encounters — and all female heterosexuals — as ideologically compromised constructs heterosexuality as a monolithic, unified and omnipotent force, thereby underestimating its complexities and contradictions. Carol Smart observes that such polarised positions have had the effect of transforming feminist identity politics into a battlefield in which a ‘rhetoric of war, treachery and violence’!® prevails. Smart captures the impasse at which some feminist debates on heterosexuality had arrived when, in a discussion of Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger’s 1993 collection Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader, she states: ‘It was as if there were really only two available positions; one which seemed to gloat over the mistakes of heterosexual women and one which seemed to apologise for being heterosexual.’!? Within this context heterosexuality is constructed as an oppressive norm but the construction of its normative power, and the implications of this power for diverse heterosexual identities, are not examined. The oppositional politics in which this ideological critique is grounded seemed to have reached deadlock by the late 1980s and early 1990s. By contrast, new work on sexuality emerging in the 1990s, and influenced by the work of poststructuralist historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, was informed by an understanding of power as both repressive and productive.

Heteronormativity: queer theory and heterosexuality

Michel Foucault’s assertion that the very concept of sexual identity is historically and discursively produced has played a formative role in the development of queer theory. In a now celebrated passage from the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood ... Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him ... The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. !8

This insight into the ‘invention’ of homosexuality is central to queer theory’s interrogation of how sexual identities are produced and policed and pivotal for its critique of identity politics. However, it is not only homosexuality which emerges as a modern category of identity. The influence of Foucault is reflected in a book which has come to be seen as a landmark text for queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, in which she wryly observes that the period stretching roughly between Wilde and Proust was prodigally productive of attempts to name, explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual person — a project so urgent that it spawned in its rage of distinction an even newer category, that of the heterosexual person.!?

The oppressive power attributed to a universalised heterosexuality by some feminist ideological critiques is here complicated by the ‘discovery’ of its invention and, moreover, the revelation of the provisional nature of its power. Queer theory is concerned with questioning the binary structures by which sex, gender and sexuality are conventionally understood, whereby all human persons are required to identify/be identified as either male or female, either masculine or feminine and either heterosexual or homosexual. The causal logic by which sex is assumed to determine gender and both to determine sexuality, and the ‘spectres of discontinuity and incoherence’ 7° which result from the failure of this logic to fulfil its own requirements, have been the particular focus of Judith Butler’s critique. In Gender Trouble (first published in 1990), Butler writes:

The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’? — that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender.*!

Queer theory has been principally concerned with the hierarchical nature of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, but this binary is understood as not so much expressive as constitutive of heterosexual power. Butler argues that ‘for heterosexuality to remain intact as a distinct social form, it requires an intelligible concept of homosexuality and also requires the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible [emphasis in original].’?* In this way, ‘heterosexuality’ depends on ‘homosexuality’ in order to sustain its own identity — or rather the fiction of its own identity. While heterosexuality denies its reliance on homosexuality by seeking to repress or erase the latter’s existence, it is nevertheless subject to the same kinds of discursive complications and contradictions. A recognition of the ‘incoherence’ of heterosexuality significantly qualifies any assumptions about its power; Sedgwick refers to ‘the plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualising same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity, an incoherence that answers, too, to the incoherence with which heterosexual desire and identity are conceptualized [emphasis in original].’?> With its emphasis on the discursive production of sexed, gendered and sexual identities, the object of queer theoretical concern is not principally heterosexuality as a sexual identity; as a normalising category of sexual identity, heterosexuality is problematised in the same way as homosexuality. Queer theory distinguishes between heterosexuality and the discourses, practices and institutions which serve to construct and universalise it through its conceptualisation and critique of ‘heteronormativity’. Foucauldian frameworks prevail in queer theorising of heteronormativity which emerges as a discursive field implicated in disciplinary power; hence, Cathy J. Cohen defines ‘heteronormativity’ as follows: ‘both those localised practices and those centralised institutions which legitimise and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships as fundamental and “natural” within society’.*4 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner emphasise that while heteronormativity serves to privilege heterosexuality this privilege remains contingent and unevenly enjoyed; they define heteronormativity as ‘the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent — that is, organised as a sexuality — but also privileged’, but add that its ‘coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms’.?° Contingent and contradictory, heterosexuality does not possess a power that is unequivocal, nor does the functioning of heteronormativity announce itself through conventional modes of oppressive power. Berlant and Warner stress its pervasive and endemic nature which assumes a kind of invisibility:

Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; commerce; medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance, and other protected spaces of culture.”®

Crucially, then, the meaning of heterosexuality within heteronormativity is not limited to heterosexual sexuality; as Annamarie Jagose puts it: ‘it is not simply that heterosexuality seems irreducible to the sex acts that it nevertheless privileges, but also that heterosexuality is naturalized through a range of practices and institutions that don’t seem to be about sexuality at all.’*” Indeed, Berlant and Warner observe that ‘contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative.’*® The recognition that forms of heterosexual desire and practice might be at odds with heteronormativity starts to tease apart the potentially reductive conflation of heterosexual identity with heterosexual power. Such a distinction suggests that not all heterosexuals are complicit in heteronormative regimes and, moreover, that some heterosexuals may be subject to its penalties. Indeed, queer theorists have stressed the need to interrogate any presumptions about the uniformity of heterosexuality; Cohen makes such a project central to queer enquiry: ‘fundamental to my concern about the current structure and future agenda of queer politics is the unchallenged assumption of a uniform heteronormativity from which all heterosexuals benefit.’”?

If heterosexuality was once, somewhat paradoxically, the ‘proper object’ of lesbian feminist theory within feminist contexts, queer theory has made interventions into its analysis which offer to transform the very object under consideration. If this intervention has not been welcomed by all feminist theorists as a way out of the ‘sleeping with the enemy’ impasse this is perhaps because queer theory also questions some of the founding principles of Second Wave feminist politics: principally, its investment in identity politics.

Between feminism and queer theory

Judith Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix [emphasis in original p’? — ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’! — has played a key role in the conceptualisation of heteronormativity in queer theory. Butler defines it as a model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.**

In Gender Trouble, Butler acknowledges the contribution of Wittig’s ‘heterosexual contract’ and Rich’s ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ to her theorising of the ‘heterosexual matrix’; a degree of continuity between lesbian feminist theory and queer theory can be deduced from this gesture. This is striking since the relationship between lesbian feminist and feminist theory and queer theory is often depicted as one of discontinuity. Where Rich and Butler’s work is grounded in feminist politics, queer theories of heteronormativity are not necessarily concerned with patriarchal definitions of power. Indeed, where queer theory has been seen as ‘coming out’ of feminism this relationship has been seen by some of queer theory’s feminist critics as one of departure tantamount to a betrayal. Two competing ways in which the emergence of queer theory, and its relationship to feminism, has been received by feminists is encapsulated by Sharon Marcus in her 2005 essay ‘Queer Theory for Everyone’. Marcus observes that ‘If sexuality is one of the elements making up the sign woman, and if the goal of feminist theory is to challenge what we mean by woman, then queer studies is a crucial tool for feminist theory’;** this account reflects the perception that queer theory offers a new critical emphasis — on ‘sexuality’ — which can be added to the feminist focus on gender and deployed in support of the feminist project of critiquing the ideological construction of woman. The tendency to see queer theory as an extension of feminist theory can be problematic, however; efforts to incorporate queer insights into existing feminist practice, sometimes with the effect that feminist analysis is found to be queer avant la lettre, can have the effect of defusing the questions queer theory asks of feminism.

However, Marcus qualifies her observation in a footnote in which she adds: ‘It could be argued that by undermining gender as a stable category, queer theory undermines feminism, which depends on the concept of woman.’ Indeed, queer theory has been dismissed or denounced by some feminist theorists as antithetical to feminist politics; the expansion of queer theory is here seen as posing a threat to feminism and its future.°° Conversely, concerns about the appropriation of queer theory and the dilution of its radical politics have also been given expression.” Evidently, queer theory is no less diverse and dynamic than feminism; however, where tensions between specific iterations of queer and feminist politics become entrenched the richly complex relationship between queer theories and feminisms can be reduced to a struggle between apparently monolithic and mutually exclusive entities. In a revised version of her essay ‘Against Proper Objects’, Butler reflects: ‘It seemed that an exploration of the “encounter” between feminist and queer theory was timely and potentially productive, but I forgot how quickly a critical encounter becomes misconstrued as a war.’*® However, while queer interventions have been met with resistance and even hostility by some schools of feminist thought, others have made considered and concerted attempts to synthesise feminist and queer frameworks for the analysis of heterosexuality; the tensions that persist even in these efforts illustrate, in less inflammatory fashion, what is at stake in the engagement between feminism and queer theory.

Feminist theorist Stevi Jackson has written extensively on the subject of heterosexuality and feminism; in the course of her reflections, collated in her collection entitled Heterosexuality in Question, she articulates in exemplary fashion a key challenge encountered by feminist efforts to conceptualise and critique heterosexuality:

An effective critique of heterosexuality — at the levels of social structure, meaning, social practice and subjectivity — must contain two key elements. The first of these is a critique of heteronormativity, of the normative status of heterosexuality which renders any alternative sexualities ‘other’ and marginal. The second is a critique of what some have called ‘hetero-patriarchy’ or ‘hetero-oppression’ ... in other words heterosexuality as systematically male-dominated.*?

When Jackson refers to ‘“hetero-patriarchy” or “hetero-oppression””*° she evokes the dominant way in which heterosexuality has been considered within Second Wave feminist frameworks; understood as being ‘implicated in the subordination of women”*! it is a supplementary category of analysis, symptomatic of the primary category: patriarchy. While ‘heterosexuality’ is foregrounded in the work of key lesbian feminist theorists such as Rich and Wittig, their works are less concerned with defining what heterosexuality is than with exploring the implications of its normative power for non-heterosexual females. However, Jackson’s reference to ‘heteronormativity’ indicates the impact of queer theory on the field of feminist enquiry; an understanding of heterosexuality as an institution which oppresses and marginalises non-heterosexual identities is clearly not new for feminism but queer theory brings new conceptual frameworks for the analysis of gender and sexuality, frameworks not exclusively concerned with the lived experiences of women. Jackson’s ‘effective critique’ implies the need for a synthesis of two imperatives; however, such an endeavour entails reconciling mandates which are not identical and even potentially in tension with each other. This tension is made explicit when Jackson asserts that ‘queer . . . is centrally concerned with destabilising the heterosexual norm, but not with heterosexuality as patriarchal. Where queer takes gender seriously, it is usually as division without hierarchy.’42 While the contribution of queer theory to the interrogation of heterosexuality is acknowledged, reservations about its usefulness for the feminist agenda are disclosed here; more than that, there is a sense that, in its purported failure to acknowledge what Jackson calls the ‘hierarchical relation between (social) men and (social) women’® integral to heterosexuality, queer theory (and its popularity) may serve to undermine the goals of feminism. Jackson’s two key elements — ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘hetero-patriarchy’ — perhaps suggest that the ‘heterosexuality in question’ is differently constituted in each case; the ‘alternative sexualities’ subject to marginalisation by the former are implicitly non-heterosexual and the ‘male-domination’

integral to the latter is a category of oppression which constructs its victims as female.

If the ‘proper object’ of feminist perspectives on heterosexuality has implicitly been the lesbian and the ‘proper object’ of queer perspectives on heterosexuality has implicitly been the homosexual (with male homosexuality foregrounded in Foucault’s formative work), this book seeks to investigate the potential blindspots in such frameworks through a focus on representations of female heterosexuality. Recent work both within and between feminist and queer theory has suggested that the ‘homosexual’ is not the only identity formation subject to heteronormative forces; efforts to disentangle heterosexuality as an institution from the diversity of heterosexual desires, identities and practices make it possible to explore the ways in which non-normative heterosexual identities are constructed. Moreover, the conventional conflation of heterosexuality with reproductive sexuality, and the close implication of reproductive sexuality in the construction of sexed, gendered and sexual identity for women, ensures that the figure of the non-normative female heterosexual occupies an especially complex and fraught position in relation to heteronormativity.

(Im)proper objects: female heterosexuality in contemporary fiction

To the extent that we are not normatively female or normatively women, we are not considered the proper subjects of feminist concern.

In Gender Trouble Judith Butler provocatively asks whether ‘the construction of the category women as a coherent and stable subject’ might be ‘contrary to feminist aims’.* She goes on to articulate a question which is central to this book: ‘To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix? [emphasis added].’4¢ If feminist analyses of heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution cannot fully account for the ways in which female heterosexuals are subject to the forces of heteronormativity, then the questions which queer theory asks of feminism may prove enabling: this is the premise of this book. Queer theory reframes debates about sex, gender and sexuality in ways which are productive for a reflexive feminism invested in perpetually renewing its own methods. My focus on specific configurations, and discontinuities, of female identity, reproductive sexuality and heterosexuality makes a feminist framework of analysis invaluable. However, to the extent that I wish to simultaneously question the construction of ‘women’ formed by this configuration, the ‘subjectless’*” critique of queer theory and its interrogation of identity categories is also indispensable.

Women’s writing and women’s representations of women’s experience continue to constitute a ‘proper object’ for feminist analysis within the field of contemporary fiction; this imperative is the legacy of the pioneering works of feminist literary scholarship of the Second Wave and continues to animate contemporary feminist scholarship. All but one of the novels explored in this collection of essays features a female protagonist-narrator; as narratives about ‘women’ they might seem the ‘proper object’ of feminist analysis, and indeed feminist frameworks are essential to what follows. However, the chapters which follow are not concerned principally with representations of femininity, nor with representations of girls and women in relation to men, nor with representations of male domination, although inequalities of gendered power are evident throughout. Moreover, in other regards these texts might be considered as ‘improper objects’ of analysis where feminist literary criticism is concerned. Waters’ Affinity is a neo-Victorian fiction which arguably resists the revisionary lesbian feminist imperative to identify the repressed sexuality of an upper-class spinster as ‘lesbian’. Heller’s Notes an a Scandal activates (however satirically) demeaning stereotypes of spinsterhood and offers a portrait of ‘liberated’ female heterosexuality difficult to reconcile with feminist constructions of sexuality as empowering, since its object is a minor. Homes’s The End of Alice confounds readerly feminist identification since it is narrated by a man convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of a young girl and depicts the apparent apprenticeship of a young woman in the sexual abuse of a boy.

Morvern Callar, Middlesex and Never Let Me Go are all male-authored narratives employing female first-person narrators; sensitivities about authorial prerogative where gendered identity is concerned have led to Warner, for one, being charged with writing as a ‘colonist of female experience’.*® Eugenides’ narrative is female narrated to the extent that its narrator is raised as a girl but she renounces her gender when diagnosed as intersexed, refusing to ‘become’ both a woman and, by implication, a lesbian (given her attraction to other girls). While Ishiguro’s narrator is female her account of her girlhood is curiously ungendered, as if her genetically engineered inability to reproduce has divested her of her status as a woman. What, then, do these diverse texts have in common and why do they invite a critical framework informed by both feminism and queer theory? All are suggestive of a complex relationship between female identity, reproductive sexuality and heterosexuality. Feminist theory has offered critiques of the ways in which reproductive sexuality is governed by patriarchal institutions, discourses and practices, from the family and marriage to the development of reproductive technologies. However, a feminist insistence on female experience has sometimes served to reinforce the conflation of female identity, reproductive sexuality and heterosexuality. Moreover, reproductive sexuality has become increasingly detached from heterosexual sexuality in contemporary culture through both new reproductive technologies and new social arrangements where family and marriage are concerned. Technologies developed to enable women to fulfil their ‘natural’ destinies as women have had the inadvertent effect of removing reproduction from the realm of heterosexuality. The increased incidence and social acceptance of same-sex parenting in Western cultures further questions the status of reproduction as an exclusively heterosexual prerogative and reproductive sexuality as the norm against which homosexual identities are defined.*? The narratives explored in this book all depict (nominally) female figures who ‘fail’, refuse or are not permitted to ‘become women’ in the ideological sense; despite being nominally heterosexual they do not benefit from the privileges which heteronormativity is supposed to grant but rather are subject to its penalties. While some undertake acts which defy social convention it could be argued that none are offered as affirming figures of volitional transgression; if they find themselves at odds with heterosexual norms it is because the combined forces of patriarchy and heteronormativity have placed them as such.