lesbian fiction — little help?
By shag carpet bomb • May 6th, 2009 • Category: Queer, Sex & Sexualityoiy. I’ve mentioned that my feminist book club feels oppressively heteronormative sometimes. often. ok. yeah: often they are heteronormative! i’m not at the punching walls state i was with the first team i worked with at my new job, but there’s a lot of educatin’ to do. or something.
i won’t get into details, but i eventually said that, since the majority of folks wanted to read some fiction (they all like fiction!) and something on the order of summer beach reading, and since they’d been making jokes about the lack of dick in lesbian sex how they could never, ever be with a woman because they wanted dick! i figured that maybe they ought to read a little more about lesbian sex.
now, me, i’d like to drag out a series of scandalous (to them) essays, a little low theory. i think reading some of those short opinion piece type essays would be great light summer reading. but i got these strange looks.
they want fiction.
fiction isn’t my strong suit. but i’d surely like to recommend a good lesbian novel that tells it like it is about lesbian sex, its variety, etc. and god, not any of those “lesbian” erotica thingys that is really just lesbian porn written for hets. blah.
Prefereably with a feminist bent but at this point, I see a lot of people pushing us away from feminism for the summer reading. Why? don’t know. I just get that feeling.
But part of me just wants to drag out some lesbian s&m erotica and go to town with them! :)
any ideas? please pass this along the request, not the link and then post any suggestions or email me at shag @ cleandraws DOT com
i don’t want to get linked to, unless there’s no other choice.
but i’d rilly rilly like some help with a good, steamy, lesbian novel that very heterosexual woman might enjoy and learn from.
tall order, I know.
so, if you have to link, that’s ok. but if you can figure out a way to get this out among communities of people you respect for their opinion, mucho appreciated.
here’s a few things i found at amazon, looking at some listmania lists:
Rubyfruit Jungle (believe it or not, i never read that one, though lord knows it’s near the beds of every woman i’ve ever slept with. so help me dog, if it is about pinky sex, though, i’ll punch a wall
Walk Like a Man — looks promising
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Probably not fluffy enough for summer beach reading, but one of the sexiest, lovelorn novels I’ve ever read, with def a feminist and lesbian bent but enough room for discussion, is Written on The Body by Jeanette Winterson. Women’s Lit 102, maybe, but it’s awesome.
I adore Winterson, but there’s nothing in her work to belie the notion that lesbians just have and (only have) pinky sex. These women don’t watch _The L-Word_? I know more het women than lesbians who watch that show, seems like. Why not start them rolling with Califia’s “Genderbending: Roles and Reversals”? You can make a strong case for it as fiction. And they’ll learn that there’s more to sex than penises and pinkies (strictly speaking).
Written on the Body is awesome, sexy, and lovelorn, and could be a good choice, but it’s not straightforwardly lesbian. The narrator/protagonist is not assigned a gender. Some readers come away from the book sure that it’s a straightforward heterosexual love story; others (especially those looking for autobiography) are left just as sure that it’s a lesbian story; others can’t (or don’t feel the need to) decide.
Described that way, it may sound gimmicky, but there’s no sense of contrivance, and the character (though nameless and ageless, too) is richly developed. It’s a great book, and does usefully challenge heteronormative presumptions, but I can’t say it “tells it like it is about lesbian sex.”
(Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, probably isn’t sexually graphic enough for your purposes either, but if, by chance, you haven’t read it, I think you’d appreciate its sense of humour)
For the group, have a look at Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet.
thank you everyone! i’m cranking busy right now, but I will let you know what comes of this. If things work out, the reading with be for July — usually at end of month.