LGBTQ Female Role Models: Dorothy Allison [at DUKE!]

Who is Dorothy Allison?

To begin, Dorothy Allison is the feminist and queer writer who is COMING to DUKE this Friday, September 23rd to give presentations around campus! [See the bottom of the post for event times and dates.]

Duke acquired Dorothy Allison's papers September of last year, and was excited to bring her work to our Rare Books and Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) here at Duke. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison is a natural fit as a Southern writer who is one of the foremost queer and feminist American writers of the 21st century in her fields.

As the first person in her family to graduate from high school or college, Allison studied anthropology in Eckerd College on a National Merit scholarship, and pursued graduate studies at Florida State University. She held a variety of jobs, and later

moved to NYC, where she enrolled in The New School (a historically progressive academic college in NYC) and in 1981 recieved her M.A. in urban anthropology. While in college, Allison credits a feminist "collective" for introducing her to feminism and credits "militant feminists" for encouraging her to write.

Allison is both a non-fiction and fiction writer, writing novels such as Cavedweller, which brings up issues on class, sexuality, female bonds, domestic violence, Southern society, child sexual abuse, and non-fiction pieces such as "The Women Who Hate Me", which was a response of Allison to critics of her political and social activism. Winner of three Lambda Book Awards, the Lesbian Book award and the National Book Award (p.s. Alice Walker won the National Book Award too! Notice a queer women's authorship trend??) today she continues to write and is a visiting professor at Emory University and Davidson College.

Her social activism takes varied forms, and she is one of the co-founders of the "Lesbian Sex Mafia" in New York City, a LGBTQ women's support group that promotes safer sex regardless of sexual preferences and type of sexual act, emphasizing a woman's choice, unihibited gender and sexual expression, consent, and BDSM.

After realizing Dorothy Allison was coming to Duke-I decided to start reading her collection of semi-autobiographical short stories, "Trash", which has won the Lambda and Lesbian Book Awards. It's moving and powerful and vulnerability and strength all in the same text:

"There was a day in my life when I decided to live..."

"I became an escapee-one of the ones others talk about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship."

"Even now I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die."

"I wrote out my memories of the women. My terror and lust for my own kind; the souts and arguments; the long, slow glances and slower approaches; the way my hands always shook when I would finally touch the flesh I could barely admit I wanted, the way I could never ask for what I wanted, never accept it if they offered....-all the stories of my family, my childhood, and the relentless deadening poverty and shame I had always tried to hide because I knew no one would believe what I could tell them about it."

"I write stories...I put on a page a third look at what I've seen in life-the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working clas lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine."

-Dorothy Allison, "Trash" (1988).

Here at Duke we are lucky enough to have prominent scholars and leaders in various fields come to our campus, to give lectures to students, engage us, and allow us to ask questions that explore their works. Don't miss this chance to meet Dorothy Allison and discuss her works in person!

Where can we meet Dorothy Allison?

Two or Three Things: Readings from the Works of Dorothy Allison

Thursday, September 22, 4:00 p.m.

Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library

Dorothy Allison in Conversation with Students

Friday, September 23, 12:00 p.m.

Center for LGBT Life

Out in the South: Writers in Conversation Featuring Dorothy Allison, Shirlette Ammons, Jim Grimsley, and Minnie Bruce Pratt

Friday, September 23, 7:00 p.m.

White Lecture Hall, East Campus

[See the Duke University Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in the RBMSCL website for more information, here.]

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Alice Walker

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." -The Color Purple

I started to write this blog post on Alice Walker, and then I realized that I had never actually read any of her works; I had only heard of her through feminism that I had read. (Fun feminist fact: Walker was an editor for Ms. magazine in the 70s.) I didn't really feel comfortable with the realization that I hadn't read her actual work; if Alice Walker is one of the most famous LGBTQ female authors alive today, why haven't I read anything of hers? That didn't sit well with me.

So, earlier last week, I picked up Alice Walker's most famous novel at Perkins Library and sat down to read The Color Purple.

The Color Purple was written in 1982, and Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1983 (she was the first black woman to win this award, as well as the National Book Award in the same year). The story chronicles the life of a young black woman living in an impoverished community of rural Georgia in the 1930s.

As I was researching the book, I learned that it was one of the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books" due to the fact of its explicit mention of violence. But there's no doubt about it, that what Walker describes in her novel is definitely real. Domestic violence and child abuse are a part of Walker's novel because they are a part of life, and that's something I actually found myself very much appreciating about her work; her style of writing is so real and accessible:

[Note on the below quote: "Mr _____" is the husband that Celie has no choice but to marry, and "fixed" refers to Celie's infertility.]

Pa said to Mr_______, She ugly. But she no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it.

I take out the picture of Shug Avery. I look into her eyes. Her eyes say Yeah, it bees that way sometime.

Something else that I appreciated was the way Walker approaches the bisexuality (or perhaps, lesbianism?) of her characters. The theme of same-sex attraction is just so well articulated in The Color Purple. Same-sex attraction isn't gross; it isn't unnatural. It's literally the best thing that happens to her [the protagonist]:

Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty than my mama. She bout ten thousand times more prettier than me....I ast [the woman] to give me the picture. An all night long I stare at it. An now when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery.. She dress to kill, whirling an laughing.

Shug Avery standing upside a piano, elbow crook, hand on her hip. Lord I wants to go [with her] so bad. Not to dance. Not to drink. Not to play card. Not even to hear Shug Avery sing. I just be thankful to lay eyes on her.

I found the book to be beautifully crafted. I'm particularly impressed by the way Walker uses simple, unflowerly language to capture some of the deepest of human expression that I've ever read. She is truly a genius writer:

I feel bad sometimes Nettie done pass me in learnin. But look like nothing she says can git in my brain and stay.

She try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I just say, Yeah, like I know it.

I never tell her how flat it look to me.

The strength of Walker's characters would seem to parallel instances from her own life as well. When Walker was a child she had an accident that left her blind in one eye. Later, thanks to medical advances, she was able to gain sight in it again, but it forever impacted the way she viewed the world. She wrote that it "helped her to really see people and things, to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out."

If you're interested in Alice Walker's work, particularly on black feminism, you might also like to check out Tyler Perry's film, For Colored Girls, while it's currently in theaters. (I saw it this past weekend and was glad that I did.) The playwright, Ntozake Shange, is Alice Walker's contemporary, and wrote the play in 1975 around the same time of The Color Purple. (There's also a dialogue with the African and African-American studies department tonight, at 7pm in the Mary Lou.)

Queer women in literature: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

[Small spoiler note: I tried not to include any huge spoilers about the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, but I did include a few excerpts about the relationship between Clarissa and Sally Seton.]

This semester I decided to take my first English class at Duke, and so I signed myself up for “English131S: Topics in a Single British Author – Virginia Woolf”.

I have to admit that I signed up for the class because I knew Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a queer woman. As someone who wrote openly about her relationships with women and men, Virginia Woolf has been retrospectively labeled as a bisexual author of the early 20th century. Our instructor, Professor Sarah Nuttall, confirmed this fact, noting that Woof’s relationships with women are extremely well documented, particularly one with Vita Sackville-West, a fellow English author and poet.

Both Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf were members of a literary circle called the Bloomsbury Group, which discouraged sexual exclusivity. The two married women had a long romantic affair, and Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) was later called “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature” (according to Vita Sackville-West’s son). Published in 1928, Orlando was considered one of her best novels and is a story about a young man who awakens one day to find himself in a woman’s body.

Anyone looking to read about lesbian, bisexual or transgender women in early 20th century literature should definitely consider giving Virginia Woolf a try. While she’s not the most accessible author (she drops key moments in her plots between parentheses and in the middle of long-winded descriptive paragraphs), her stylistic qualities make her worth all of the effort.

Having just finished Mrs. Dalloway for this class, I can easily say that Woolf’s depiction of the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton is by far the most eloquent romantic relationship between two women that I have ever read about in fiction. Within the first thirty pages of the novel, the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway remarks on her wondrous relationship with a woman:

“Yet [Clarissa] could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older-like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination."

When I first read this paragraph in Woolf’s novel, I was floored. I felt like I could have written this-not in terms of the quality, but the context. It seemed very similar to my own coming out experience, or perhaps anybody's:

"The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women grown up…the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, ‘She is beneath this roof…She is beneath this roof!'"

Perhaps something equally remarkable about Mrs. Dalloway, is that it was a best-seller. I had no idea that a novel published in England in 1925 with prominent same-sex romance throughout the work (5 of the main characters are implied to be LGBT) would be so well-received by the public at the time. Today the book is still immensely popular, making TIME magazine's 2005 Top 100 novels list. I have to wonder what kind of political or social undercurrents the novel might have brought with its publication, considering the equality it demands for same-sex romantic attraction:

"But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people."

Equally exciting about the novel is that it is highly affirmative of same-sex relationships between women. The stereotypical portrayal of LGBTQ women in older literature is that if lesbians do exist (which they rarely do), one or both of them ends up depressed, desolate or dead. Nevertheless, Woolf’s portrayal of Clarissa Dalloway’s relationship with Sally is largely positive, perhaps more so even than any of Clarissa's relationships with men:

"All this was background for Sally. She stood by the fireplace, talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress. Suddenly she said, ‘What a shame to sit indoors!’ and they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf went on about Wagner."

And of course…it’s just beautifully depicted as well:

"She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a store urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!"

Personally I think that if you want to read empowering literature about LGBTQ women in fiction, reading Virginia Woolf if you haven't already is a great idea. I had actually tried to read Mrs. Dalloway two different times before this class, and I always stopped by page 10 or 20 because she's really difficult to get into. ("Plot" isn't her main focus-description is.) For me, being in this class and knowing ahead of time that Woolf writes equally about same and opposite sex attraction was a huge motivator to get through the novel.

"But this question of love, this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?”