Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex by Lynne Huffer (review)

Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex reminds us of a seemingly simple but all-too-often forgotten aspiration: “Politically and ethically, queers need feminists and feminists need queers” (9). This chiasmic balance, with its ethical emphasis, is the driving force behind Lynne Huffer’s response to the oversimplified rift between feminists and queers that claims queer theorists avoid ethics because of their relation to moral norms and feminists are too invested in moral policing to adequately consider ethics (13–20). Revisiting this story, and, more important, revising it through a reading practice she calls “narrative performance,” Huffer’s book opens up new spaces through which we can rethink our ethical responsibilities. Traversing several discourses—including French post-structuralism, post-Levinasian ethics, feminist and queer theory, and narratology—this book is aimed at an audience well-versed in critical theory, but Huffer’s clear and concise writing and examples are helpful in teasing out the implications of her abstract concepts.

The turn to ethics is motivated by Huffer’s Foucauldian background. Huffer finds a methodological tension between her queer attachment to Foucault’s understanding of the subject and the dominant mode of feminist inquiry, intersectional analyses, because, for Huffer, intersectionality relies too heavily upon the judicial imaginary (54). Employing the genealogical method, Huffer identifies historical links between sexuality and morality that have made sexuality a specifically moral experience. As ethical subjects produced within disciplinary power– knowledge apparatuses, we must negotiate and interrupt our relation to forces of moral production in order to change. Any such ethical transformation must both acknowledge the violent exclusionary force of moral norms while nevertheless attempting to think otherwise, the two prerequisites of ethics’ “dual burdens” (32). For feminists reluctant to worship at Saint Foucault’s altar, the introduction and first two chapters may prove taxing. Even the inclusion of Luce Irigaray and her emphasis on sexual difference is approached through Foucault. In Chapter 3, “Foucault’s Fist,” Huffer employs the fist to distinguish the two Foucaults: the early Foucault feminists take issue with, whose fist represents regulatory power indifferent to gender, and the later Foucault whom queer theorists embrace, whose fist of pleasure finds a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” (73). Realigning this traditional reading of Foucault’s divisive role through the fist pleasurably repositions a body of scholarship for us to think how to read this story differently. Without drawing a definitive conclusion, Huffer tasks the reader with this challenge: If we are to move forward and create new stories as queer feminists charged with an erotic ethics, then we need to understand as clearly as possible the stories we have received.

Huffer provides a queer intertextual reading practice focused upon narrative ethics. Whereas the first half of the book delineates the theoretical underpinnings of this approach, the second half provides close readings that test Huffer’s hypothesis within the realms of literature, law, and film, reminding us to listen for the voice of the other, and to do so she concentrates upon intertextual traces. For this reviewer, Huffer’s analysis of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and how the law rereads and silences the minor in the rape trial Powell v. State (1998) within Lawrence v. Texas was a chilling example of why we need a queer feminist ethics. In brief, Justice Kennedy cites Powell in his decision to overturn sodomy laws in Lawrence because the defendant in Powell was found guilty not of rape, but of sodomy. However, in Lawrence, the context of Powell—the incestuous rape of a 17-year-old girl by her uncle—was completely ignored. The citation of Powell within Lawrence signals the inscriptional violence that still silences women while ushering in a queer victory.

Stories and their retellings are vital to Are the Lips a Grave? If the overarching story of modernity is that sexuality has...