Let's Bounce

The Flight Backward, or Witch feelings count?

When friends speak of ‘lesbian drama,’it evokes, for me, purposeful, hardcore misrepresentation and strategic (denial of pain) misunderstanding of trauma narratives or ways that violence (past and present) recreates itself in sometimes petty re-enactments and in re-evoking the affect of a prior time and experience (temporality that might transcend a particular moment in one’s history), we might get somewhere less petty and probably less pretty.

Heather Love’s book intentionally forces her readers revisit sites of pain and sites that have already been inscribed with ‘set’ meaning. Coming out is not quaint; it is still dangerous and fraught with anxiety. Most people have a level of investment in that paradigm because there seems to be no outside, regardless of any our level of awareness or level of disdain toward the larger hegemonic hetero-normative paradigms that rule our social identities. Mourning and loss seem to be part of the shame paradigm. It does not mean that the shame should exist, but that in rejecting heterosexual models and ways of being, we will destroy certain ties that are emotional, cultural, and intellectual while creating new bonds. There are lessons to be learned. Love harkens us to Odysseus (via Horkeimer & Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment): “One might argue that Odysseus survives his encounter with the Sirens: though he can hear them singing, he cannot do anything about it. What saves him is that even as he looks backwards he keeps moving forward. One might argue that Odysseus offers an ideal model of the relation to the historical past: listen to it, but do not allow yourself to be destroyed by it” (Feeling Backward, 9). In essence, Love tells a cautionary tale as central to her argument: “…we need to pursue a fuller engagement with negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics” (14).

I wanted to read Love’s chapter on Radclyffe Hall (“Spoiled Identity”) and her novel The Well of Loneliness. I always stayed away from that book because of the bad rap it received as being dated and politically embarrassing. I knew that Hall would say something productive though. Love takes up Hallberstam’s reading of the novel in Female Masculinity while creating her own reading: “I argue that in her portrait of Stephen’s ‘loneliness’ Hall offers us a portrait of a complex and historically specific structure of feelings…As a result, loneliness is not primarily a question of epistemology in the novel but of ontology. Loneliness afflicts Stephen’s being; it is deeply inscribed in her body” (107). I want to take this idea and connect it with the loneliness of transgender identities within a queer context. The Policing and politics of identity politics is clearly a site of fissure for those who want to navigate genderqueer spaces. Many are subject to judgmental reactions when they don’t ‘fit’ the codes/coding inscribed in queer spaces. Dean Spade, for example, in “Undermining Gender Regulation,” often finds people “disappointed” and “aghast.” They thought ze would be “older, taller, more confidently looking, look like a lawyer, and, more importantly look like a man” (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity 65). Spade ends the story with this cautionary tale from within: “Folks were concerned that the legitimacy of trans identity in the eyes of a transphobic culture is frequently tied to how normal and traditionally masculine or feminine trans people appear. I was ruining it for everyone” (65).

Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight sustains an intellectual engagement as a means to spoil, ruin, or disrupt the linear narrative of hegemonic ‘common sense’—we are asked to engage the cinematic representations of the black femme as a counter-narrative and counter sense-making strategy. In setting up her ‘theoretical scaffolding,’ Keeling “generates the witch’s flight, because the witch—the black femme I desire and pursue throughout this study—takes her raison d’etre from the very mechanisms and conditions that sustain the cinematic, even as her existence is part of a collective will to destroy it”(10). In Set it Off, Keeling argues that the “black femme’s femininity is made visible insofar as she serves as the currency that secures Cleo’s masculinity” (119). Cleo dies in a dramatic scene that valorizes her bravery and her resistance to (white) power structures embodied in the police state. The film silences the black femme and the only way we know how she feels in the end is seeing her watch the televised death scene with tears streaming down her face. The sole survivor of the four women is Stony who escapes with all the bank robbery money; her survival is contingent on her leaving LA, leaving home, her anonymity being exemplified by her hair cut. She now is almost bald. Her tears, at the close of the film, exemplify sadness and triumph over all the socially inscribed violence in her life.

The sad truth is that the L-Word seems more violent and vile in its portrayal of butch-femme identities in comparison to any of the other cinematic examples Keeling analyzes. This Showtime series needs some serious intersectional analyses. The portrayal of women of color, transgender identities, bisexuality are so off the mark. Keeling rightly sees Kit, Pam Greer, as the only person, the femme, the heterosexual foil to the group of lesbian friends, as the only one challenging the show’s hetero-normative precepts (114-117). If this is the present or the future, let’s definitely go back.