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Several comments have referenced the interpretative difficulties posed by Lifting Belly, and the gender ambiguity of both poems. On the one hand, I feel as though that ambiguity could come out of decades of institutional and historical silencing of lesbian sex… as though there is no way to come to speech about lesbian love – or, at least, no way that does not simply conform to the heterosexual paradigm or the language of othering that has been used to describe lesbian sex. But I also feel that we do not usually wonder about the gender of two lovers – that we usually assume heterosexuality until proven otherwise. This could make the explicit naming of lesbian sex important, but it could also make it important to NOT name the sex as lesbian. This seems kind of counterintuitive and I don’t know if I believe it myself, but I do wonder if to make it explicitly clear that this is lesbian sex we are writing about is to also allow for a process of othering, of marginalization. I am thinking of the phrase “woman artist”, which has simultaneously been used to recognize those artists who have worked within the constraints of the dominant patriarchal discourse, but it’s also been used to keep those artists still separate – to have “woman artist” exhibitions, while the big exhibitions remain male-dominated.

Middlesex and The Book of Salt are both written from the point of view of a man (though these men do have marginal narratives, in their intersex and homosexual lives)… and, indeed, Middlesex is even written by a man. I find it comforting that we did spend some time talking in class about the ability or position of Eugenides writing from an intersex point of view… but I hope that we spend the same time discussing the limits of Truong’s representation of a gay male. I think it’s important to talk about the respective positions of subject and author, but I also worry about allowing these narratives to become marginalized simply because they discuss marginalized subjects.