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10. “The Place, Promised, That Has Not Yet Been”: The Nature of Dislocation and Desire in Adrienne Rich’s Your Native Land/YourLife and Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime against Nature
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chapter 10 “the place, promised, that has Not Yet Been”: The Nature of Dislocation and Desire in adrienne rich’s Your Native Land/Your Life and Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature rachel stein The hatred baffles me . . . /the way she pulled the statute book down like a novel/ . . . crime against nature. . . . /That year the punishment was: not less than five nor more/ than sixty years. For my methods, indecent and unnatural/ of gratifying a depraved and perverted sexual instinct./For even the slightest touching of lips or tongue or lips/to a woman’s genitals. —Minnie Bruce Pratt I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create. Begin, though, not with a continent or country or a house, but with the geography closest in—the body. . . . Begin, we said, with the material, with matter, mma, madre, mutter, moeder, modder, etc., etc. —Adrienne Rich Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt are contemporary U.S. lesbian feminist poets whose work overtly challenges many sorts of social inequalities and exclusions, including heterosexism, which rests upon the formulation of homosexuality as a crime against nature. Both poets expose how this discourse of unnatural sex dislocates lesbians from the social-natural order by framing homosexuals as societal pariahs and felons who are then excluded from social spaces and endangered within natural terrains. Rich and Pratt contest this “crime-against-nature” ideology by locating lesbian 286 Desiring Nature? speakers within beloved landscapes, and through this strategic, nonessential identification of women with the natural world, they stake a claim for what Pratt describes as “the place, promised, that has not yet been—” (Pratt 1990, 18), a revolutionary environment of sexual freedom. Both writers call into question the ways that our ideas of the “natural” have permeated social formations and have been used by the hegemonic culture to naturalize and legalize social norms; while their poetry consciously redeploys the natural so as to reaffirm lesbian desires, it also emphasizes that appeals to nature have troubled histories and violent results that we must always address. Their poetic subversion of crime-against-nature ideology brings together struggles for environmental justice and sexual justice and offers us one approach toward a queer ecology. Historically, United States religious and legal prohibitions against homosexuality have framed such desire as a crime against nature or unnatural perversion, as described in Pratt’s lines above. From colonial times through the present, American laws regulating sexual behavior have drawn upon the Judeo-Christian belief that certain sexual practices are natural and others are unnatural, even crimes against nature. The Pauline epistle to the Romans sets forth this doctrine of “vile affections.” Paul condemns those who pervert nature: “women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the man, leaving the natural use of the woman; (they) burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly” (quoted in Bullough and Bullough 1977, 24, emphases mine). While leaving unspecified exactly which acts are “against nature,” Paul’s passage bases its regulation of sexuality upon distinctions between natural and unnatural use of human bodies. In his era, Christian thinkers compared human sexual actions to planting a field and only those activities that corresponded to “seeding,” or procreation, were accepted as natural; other activities impeding or ignoring reproduction, whether performed with members of the same or the opposite sex were forbidden as against nature (Bullough and Bullough 1977, 28). This vague category of crime against nature became the basis of English and American laws regulating sexuality that set severe punishments for such acts while seldom specifying exactly what these crimes entailed. In the United States, state laws known as the sodomy statutes or crimeagainst -nature codes criminalized different forms of nonreproductive sexual acts, including homosexuality, which became the primary target for prosecution and was punishable by execution.1 Furthermore, because homosexuality was deemed so repellently unnatural, it was also believed [3.239.52.235] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:26 GMT) “The Place, Promised, That Has Not Yet Been” 287 unspeakable, for, supposedly, even to discuss it violated human nature. Thus the Pauline application of agricultural analogies to human sexual practices has undergirded centuries of social stigma, legal persecution, and cultural silencing of same-sex desire.2 The U.S. sodomy statutes that criminalized homosexuality were finally overturned by the...