Scouting for Queers

Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity. Kathryn R. Kent. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. xi + 355 pp.

It isn't always easy to find a lesbian when you're looking for one. This is especially true for those of us who work in historical periods prior to the coming out of the lesbian as an available model of identity. In Making Girls into Women Kathryn R. Kent performs a much-needed service: she finds, if not always lesbians, then "protolesbians" and other "queer" female types from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and in places one might not expect. Tracing the genesis of lesbian identity in and through women's literature, Kent contends that the formation of the lesbian took place not only in the sexological and medical texts highlighted in New Historicist accounts of homosexuality's emergence but also in the very texts meant to instill feminine propriety in girls and young women. Hence the lesbian comes into view not simply as the pathologized other to the "normal" woman but around and even in the involutions and incitements of normative femininity itself.

Countering readings of nineteenth-century sentimental culture that evacuate the erotic tensions in domesticity, Kent offers an interpretation of disciplinary intimacy as a site for the proliferation of sexual possibilities. Beginning with an astute, if brief, reading of the queer promise of (adoptive) sisterhood in Susan Warner's midcentury sentimental best seller The Wide, Wide World, Kent explores the erotics of disciplinary intimacy as it plays across the pages of postbellum novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma Dunham Kelley. While that play is initially limited by the absence of viable alternatives to maternal femininity, Kent reads the figure of the spinster in Stowe's Oldtown Folks as marked not so much by absence (of husband and children) as by a certain excess that identifies her as a protolesbian figure. Other possibilities are glimpsed in the erotic tangles of friends and families across Alcott's many novels and in Kelley's Megda. Kent's readings correct the long-standing critical habit of following Freud in artificially separating identification and desire. She notes that in these narratives, which trace the pedagogy of intimacy both inside and, significantly, outside the family, tutelage inspires a devotion that operates along the lines of a desiring identification, where "traces of the desire to have . . . remain within the desire to be" (102). Making Girls into Women astutely extends its analysis of the homoerotic female counterpublics formed in these novels to the counterpublics made up of their readers. Kent notes that Alcott's readers in particular attached themselves to the author and her narratives with a passion that suggests that they too were susceptible to the slippery erotics of intimate pedagogy and found in these fictions not simply static models of idealized femininity but dynamic tensions that opened onto potentially new configurations of gender and sexual identity. In this extension, as in the extrafamilial institutions (school, work, boardinghouse life) that multiplied the possibilities of homoerotic attachment for women, Kent sights the hand of capital, linking the development of what eventually became contemporary lesbian identity to a burgeoning commodity culture. For this reason, as Kent asserts in her reading of Medga, these proto-identities were differently developed by African American women writers, who structured identificatory erotics alongside, and not in opposition to, marriage.

The homoerotics of female tutelage also feature in Kent's suggestive reading of the early-twentieth-century history of the Girl Scouts. In the book's pivotal chapter, "'Scouting for Girls,'" Kent introduces the notion of mimetic reversibility, a core principle of the Girl Scouts' exhortation to their good-girl citizens in training to supersede the injurious influence of "bad girls" by offering them instead incitements to positive change. If this sort of reversal is possible, Kent asks, why not its perverse inversion—the (retrospective) recognition...