There’s evidence that D.H. Lawrence enjoyed an erotic power exchange relationship with his wife, that James Joyce was into scat (among other things), and that Oscar Wilde—well, most of us know what Oscar Wilde liked. These literary geniuses explored radical sexual agency and desire in their work and in their relationships, but little beyond rumors and personal letters exist to tell us what they themselves thought of their turn-ons and the ways in which those dovetailed with their writing. Even if space for such a discourse and community had existed back then, Lawrence, Joyce and Wilde couldn’t freely discuss their sexuality. As it was, they faced censorship and generated scandal wherever they went, and of course Wilde went to prison for his sexual behavior.
Although our world is still intolerant of sexual difference, I want to believe we’re at a point where people can speak openly about the consensual ways we express our erotic selves. And I’m interested in the connections between those private expressions and the larger, more public work we do in the world. This series is meant as a forging of community; a validation of that which gets called sexual deviance; and a proud celebration of the complex, fascinating ways that humans experience desire.
In this ongoing series of short personal essays, writers in all genres—novelists, poets, journalists, and more—explore the intersection between our literary lives and practices and our BDSM and fetishistic lives and practices. In other words, these essays aren’t about writing about non-normative sex: rather, it’s a series about how looking at the world through the lens of an alternative sexual orientation influences the modes and strategies with which one approaches one’s creative work.
If you have questions or comments, or if you’re a writer who would like to contribute, please contact me at kinkwriting@gmail.com.
–Arielle Greenberg, Series Editor
Cunts & Catastrophes: Trauma Play and Writing
Last June, Feminist Press made an English-translated and unabridged reprint of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle available in the US for the first time. I had been waiting for this particular banned book to appear in circulation. Shameless disclosure: I own a VHS copy of the sexploitation film adaptation of Thérèse and Isabelle, a wannabe art house production that Roger Ebert pronounced the worst movie of 1968. And it’s not just this film I love: I can easily waste a day binge-watching grindhouse hits directed by Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, and Doris Wishman. While many cult followers laud the nonsensical narration and low-production aesthetics that hallmark the sexploitation genre, I look specifically for arousing variations on a theme that I’ll call Cunts & Catastrophe—or Muffs & Malcontent, Boobs & Burdens, Tits & Torment (add to this alliterated list as you like). So when I read Thérèse and Isabelle in one sitting, it was not to observe a nearly lost text from the lesbian canon. I was just greedy for more Cunts & Catastrophe.
Consistent with just about every other teenage lesbian narrative, Thérèse and Isabelle’s secret affair suffers the threat of being exposed, though the crux of their suffering comes from aggrandized insecure-attachment behaviors. Again and again, they fail to make eye contact that is intense enough, to vocalize their desires persuasively enough, or to hold each other forcefully enough: “We squeezed each other until we nearly suffocated. Our hands shaking… our arms fell back, our inadequacy astonished us… ‘Harder harder, squeeze,’ she demanded… ‘don’t you know how?’”
This doomed symbiosis titillates me, and feels rather familiar. More familiar still is a passage found on page thirty-seven where, during the close of a love scene, Thérèse begins to talk about her mother. A hostile mother with appallingly unhealthy boundaries, a mother character who closely resembles Leduc’s own childhood abuser, whom Leduc wrote unflinchingly about in her only well-received book, her memoir La Bâtarde.
La Bâtarde, published in 1964, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, a prize nomination that ought to have earned her esteem. Two years later Thérèse and Isabelle was banned. Censorship and controversy have battered much of Leduc’s fiction, with critics targeting explicit lesbian sex and themes of incest and familial abuse. I wonder if Leduc was ever admonished for writing her abusive mother into love scenes? Was the reoccurrence of trauma, which readers applauded in her memoir, the reason why her subsequent books were censored or banned? While other queer text had been celebrated in France the 1950s and 1960s, why was Leduc deemed unfit for readers?
Read the full Essay: http://therumpus.net/2016/08/kink-10-writing-while-deviant-amber-dawn/