In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005) 325-327



[Access article in PDF]

How Lesbians Look

Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire. Amy Villarejo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. ix + 235 pp.

Early in her project Amy Villarejo wrote a letter to Katharine Hepburn, asking her to comment on herself as a lesbian icon. Villarejo recounts that "in a carefully worded but altogether too long letter, I asked her whether she was interested in the mobility of that role, these processes of detachment and appropriation in the name and cause of lesbian visibility and community" (3).

This is a little embarrassing. Not for Villarejo, perhaps, but for the reader, certainly for this reader. It never occurred to me that we wanted or needed the permission or even the acknowledgment of our objects of identification and lust. Something about contacting Hepburn seems to give away the interiority of our identifications.

But Hepburn wrote back:

Dear Amy Villarejo,

I'm sorry—I can't answer those questions—I'm really too busy to understand why anyone would want them answered.—Good Luck— (3)

Although I am a little uncomfortable that Villarejo asked Hepburn what she thought of us lusting after her (even if iconographically), the interrogation of the lesbian spectacle is an interesting and vital undertaking.

Villarejo's book stems from an interest in what makes an icon, an image, or a spectacle lesbian. It starts with, or is illustrated by, an early interest in what made Sylvia Scarlett a lesbian icon—the eponymous cross-dressing character played by Hepburn in George Cukor's 1935 film—and the inspiration for Hepburn's, the lesbian bar Villarejo frequented "in college and in the years just after" (1).

Villarejo spends some time in her introduction interrogating the lesbian iconography of an otherwise nonlesbian cross-dressing character. Indeed, the bar [End Page 325] is named after the actress who played the cross-dressing but nonlesbian character. I wish that Villarejo had pursued this line of inquiry about why we might lust after metonymic lesbians. She writes that "the central task of the first chapter is, above all, to name some of the stakes of lesbian appearance through different languages of abstraction" (22). As I read, I thought of other examples of the Hepburn perplex. What of the (now renamed) lesbian magazine Deneuve, named, presumably, for another Catherine who delighted lesbian spectators with her provocative portrayal of sexy lesbian monstrosity in The Hunger? What of Barbra Streisand's contentious and noncomedic (and so more closely parallel) cross-gendered portrayal of a yeshiva boy in Yentl?

This is an erudite and complicated book. After the painful moment of Hepburn correspondence, one is not embarrassed again. Baffled, perhaps—baffled, indeed, in the way that Hepburn probably was, in being asked to respond to questions about herself that really had little or nothing to do with her.

Like Hepburn, I wanted and needed more of the why in the assumption that we should take time to ask such questions. Villarejo gives some good rationales in the introduction—"Lesbianism remains subject to violent erasure. . . . Against the force of its erasure, I want to mark lesbian's resonance, history, and richness" (8)—and some provocative indications about what questions to ask next in the conclusion (indeed, she is very good at generating questions), but I wanted more reminders along the way as to why this matters.

Reading Lesbian Rule, we are the beneficiaries of a very capable theoretical mind. Villarejo's interests are eclectic in the best sense. She looks at many different media: theory, theory, and theory, but also pulp novels, photographs, and film (especially documentary). As she puts it, "This book bears the traces of several large arenas of thought" (22). And of any number of ways of looking at lesbian—the word, rather than the woman. The double meaning of looking here is deliberate, as Villarejo interrogates the lesbian gaze and the lesbian as spectacle. Lesbian Rule, as Villarejo puts it, is "centrally concerned with the politics of...

pdf

Share