Abstract
This chapter focuses on the positive representation of lesbian aging in the context of the 1970s lesbian-feminist movement. The author analyzes June Arnold’s Sister Gin (1975) as an exceptional work that disrupts the dichotomous juxtaposition of older predators versus younger victims, prominent in earlier representations. Building on Roberta Maierhofer’s approach of reading menopause as a catalyst for “becoming conscious of one’s own identity,” the chapter discusses Sister Gin’s instrumentalization of menopause as a trigger for rethinking (re-)productivity and decline. Hess subsequently examines Arnold’s use of the “aging lesbian woman” to denote a position of strength through which the narrative challenges stereotypes of older women’s asexuality, female acquiescence to invisibility, and superficial idealizations of feminist sisterhood.
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Notes
- 1.
Friedan would later author one of the first works within the humanities on aging, The Fountain of Age (1993), after Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vielliesse (1970, translated into English, The Coming of Age in 1972).
- 2.
Sheila Liming points out that “[l]iterature has long served as a vessel by which lesbian women might come to terms with their identity and has helped to contextualize lesbianism more broadly” (2007, 86), and Elaine Hutton asserts, “Literature as a way of reflecting and explaining our lives, and, at an even more basic level, writing ourselves into existence, has always been important to lesbians” (1998, 2).
- 3.
Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home (2006) is a good recent example of this practice. It makes extensive use of lesbian intertexts, showing that, even in the twenty-first century, those connections are still important.
- 4.
Central examples of this discussion include the Radicalesbians’ Manifesto “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), writings by Audre Lorde such as Sister Outsider (1984), Ann Ferguson’s “Sex War: The Debate Between Radical and Libertarian Feminism” (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza (1987), Teresa de Lauretis’s “Feminism and Its Differences” (1990), and Kathy Rudy’s “Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory” (2001), to name only a few.
- 5.
The concept of intersectionality pays specific attention to “social identities and inequality . . . [as] interdependent and mutually constitutive, rather than independent and uni-dimensional” (Bowleg 2008, 312).
- 6.
Furthermore, Sister Gin was first published by Daughters Inc., the publishing house Arnold co-founded, and Prism was first published by the Naiad Press, which was “the world’s largest and most enduring lesbian publishing company” of the twentieth century (Klinger 2000, 531).
- 7.
Although, as Elizabeth Freeman (2010) has shown, Harris’s Lover offers readers intriguing queer temporalities.
- 8.
These works form a “canon” in the sense that they are known, discussed, possibly celebrated by a community who sees them as part of their collective identity, as a connection between lesbian women (particularly at times when many lesbian women did not have much opportunity to meet other lesbian women in their day-to-day lives), and as evidence of a lesbian history. Maybe more appropriately one could refer here to the “megatext,” a term Damien Broderick uses with regard to science fiction to denote “the conglomeration of all those SF novels, stories, films, TV shows, comics, and other media, with which SF fandom is familiar” (1995, 3). In contrast to the canon, the megatext is conceived of as fluid, continually subject to debate and to changes.
- 9.
Halfway through the narrative, Su quits her job at the newspaper and decides to become a playwright after all ([1975] 1987, 158). Ultimately, readers realize that the novel they are reading entitled Sister Gin is the “play” that Su is working on in the novel.
- 10.
Of course, this passage still assumes the absence of mental impairments, such as dementia. It is nevertheless a crucial passage as it takes an entirely different approach to definitions of being “old.”
- 11.
This is not to say that lesbian women were/are not mothers; they certainly are. But politically, insofar as lesbianism is discussed in Sister Gin, the role and worth of lesbian women do not derive from their biological reproductive function.
- 12.
The novel, written by Alma Routsong under the pen-name Isabell Miller, was first self-published in 1969 under the title A Place for Us, then reissued by Ballantine Books under the title Patience and Sarah (1971).
- 13.
The eponymous name of the alter ego, Sister Gin, might be an indication that Su writes those reviews when she is drunk and her self-censoring mechanisms have broken down, or it might also indicate a feminist allegiance. Gin is presented later on as a drink invented by a woman. Miss May claims, “ask an old woman what she likes to drink and she’ll answer gin” (Arnold [1975] 1987, 212).
- 14.
Alluding to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York as a widely recognized symbol of gay liberation (see Chap. 5).
- 15.
Almeta is the sister of Miss May, who works as a maid in the household of Bettina’s mother.
- 16.
Works such as bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) point out not only that the feminist movement was predominantly composed of white, middle-class women, but also that this fact affected its aims and actions considerably. Issues that concerned working-class women or women of color often found no room in dominant strands of the feminist movement, and racism and classism were actually reinforced rather than done away with. Organizations such as the Combahee River Collective, an African-American feminist group founded in Massachusetts, or the Salsa Soul Sisters, a group of lesbian women of color founded in New York—both in 1974—attested to the need for groups that addressed women whose experiences were not represented or were purposely excluded by white (lesbian-)feminist groups.
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Hess, L.M. (2019). Lesbian-Feminist Aging: June Arnold’s Sister Gin (1975). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_4
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