Women on Top, Boys on the Side, but Some of Us Are Brave: Blackness, Lesbianism, and

the Visible
Author(s): Ann Pellegrini
Source: College Literature , Feb., 1997, Vol. 24, No. 1, Queer Utilities: Textual Studies,
Theory, Pedagogy, Praxis (Feb., 1997), pp. 83-97
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Women on Top, Boys on
the Side, But Some of
Us are Brave:
Blackness, Lesbianism,
and the Visible1
ANN PELLEGRINI

We have cooperated for a very longPellegrini is visiting a

time in the
maintenance of our own invisibility. And now the
tant professor of Wom
party is over.
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet
Studies at Barnard Co
[Wlho do we mean, after all, by "our own"?
Jackie Goldsby, "What It Means To Beand author
Colored Me" of
Performance Anxiet
INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL HORIZONS
Staging Psychoanaly
Many of the criticisms lodged by
women of color against the
Stagingexclu
Race (Routled
sions and "blank spots" (Anzaldua
1997).
xx) of white feminist studies in the 1980s (and
beyond) are condensed in the title of the 1982
black feminist anthology All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of
Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. If the
title of that volume declared that such formu
las or catch-phrases of inclusion as "women
and blacks" effectively place some subjects
out of bounds, its subtitle?Black Women's
Studies?called attention to the unmarked
whiteness of Women's Studies. To judge from
recent criticisms lodged against the intellectu
al currents and critical practices collected
under the name "queer theory," the roster of
the brave has increased.
Queer theory has emerged out of (and
sometimes broken off from) both lesbian and

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gay studies and feminist theory. Although queer theory in its anti-identitarian
strain aims to open up, rather than close down, the subjects of sexuality, it too
has been assailed from a broad range of intellectual and political positions for
its exclusions, evasions, and gaps. Nor do these criticisms fall into any one
place. From a Marxian perspective, for example, Donald Morton accuses
queer theory and a particular cadre of influential queer theorists of marching
in "veritable lockstep with the mainstream academy at large" ("Politics" 130).
In thrall to "dominant" academic and intellectual modes of theorizing, which
Morton glosses as "ludic (post)modernism," queer theory is, he argues, of a
piece with trends in late-capitalism ("Politics"; "Birth"). Drawing on terms that
usher in the specter of feminine excess trumping masculine order, Morton
calls queer theory "the most recent subversion of the rational" ("Politics"
121). It has abandoned radical social change and the theoretical tools that
would enable it for so much porno smoke and mirrors. Interestingly, Morton's
list of usual suspects is dominated by women. In a new incarnation of
cherchez la femme (and cherchez la feministe), Morton singles out Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss, and Judith Butler for espe
cial rebuke ("Politics" 139)2
If Morton implies that queer theory has been emasculated by an implicit
ly feminine ludic (post)modernism, for some white lesbian feminists the prob
lem is that queer theory is too much of the masculine. One of the strongest
such criticisms has been offered by Sheila Jeffreys, who blasts queer theory for
reinstituting a men's club under the banner of a falsely generic "queer." In her
apocalyptic assessment of the "queer disappearance of lesbians," Jeffreys
accuses some prominent women of collaborating in the lesbian's erasure, out
ing Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Sedgwick as key co-conspirators.3
Perhaps Jeffreys is reacting in part to the ways in which 1970s lesbian
feminism has become the "fall gal" for a new generation of lesbian, gay, and
queer theorists. This possibility points to another kind of "gender trouble." As
Biddy Martin has noted, queer theory's moves to differentiate itself from its
intellectual and institutional predecessors have too often been achieved at the
expense of feminist studies, especially a caricatured version of lesbian femi
nism, against which queer theory has constructed itself as the vanguard (104).
Martin also worries that attempts to complicate "hegemonic assumptions
about the continuities between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identi
ty, sexual identity, sexual object choice, and sexual practice" have opened up
the field of sexuality by closing down discussions of gender and race, both of
which, when and where they do enter the conceptual horizon of queer theo
ry, often end up cast in terms of fixity and constraint (105).
Queer theory's conceptual moves to distinguish between sexuality and
gender, such that sexuality is not reduced to an epiphenomenon of gender,
have been vital to its development and revitalizing as well for feminist studies,
very broadly conceived.4 However, the move to separate sexuality and gen
der, even if this is understood as a provisional step to render sexuality and gen
der distinct for the purposes of sharper historical analysis and critical clarity,

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may end up disarticulating queer theory from feminist theory. And once
queer theory becomes conceived as the academic area "reserved" for the
study of sexuality, and once feminist theory gets marked out as the place set
aside for the study of gender, it becomes difficult to imagine and enact theo
ries that can investigate the diverse ways how gender and sexuality articulate
each other. Moreover, and this concern is more squarely to the point of this
section of "Queer Utilities," it is difficult to imagine how either the newly dis
tinguished territories of queer theory or feminist theory could address the
problematic of "race," except as an after-thought or secondary feature. The
segmentation of academic enterprises into distinct territories, each with dis
tinct (read: "proper") objects and identities,5 does not advance but may actu
ally impede the development of theories and strategies which can conceptu
alize and address the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are inter
structured and interstructuring.6
White feminist scholars and white feminist studies have responded in dif
ferent ways and with varying degrees of success to this challenge to integrate
race and racialization into studies of gender. To be sure, this is an unfinished
project. But there are important and identifiable traditions in feminist schol
arship in which gender is not and has never been the privileged object of
analysis apart from, say, race or class or sexuality, traditions in which anti-sex
ism has been joined from the start to projects of anti-racism, anti-homophobia,
and economic justice. To assert otherwise would be to misrepresent or over
look the leading roles such feminists of color?many of them also "queer"?
have played in the development of feminist theory in the academy and out:
Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Chela Sandoval,
bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and
Barbara Smith. The list goes on. The presence of lesbians among the women I
have just named also importantly counters those who would describe, and
then on these grounds dismiss, lesbian feminism as "white." As Linda Garber
suggests in her important reconsideration of the poetry and identity politics of
Judy Grahn and Pat Parker, mischaracterizing the history of lesbian feminism
as a movement for and of white women does a gross disservice to the lesbians
of color so instrumental to the development, history, theories, and practices
of lesbian feminism. This mischaracterization of lesbian feminism has con
tributed, Garber argues, to the condescension sometimes directed at it by
younger feminist and queer theorists writing today.7
Let me be clear: I am certainly not asserting that Women's Studies in its
institutional forms and feminist theory everywhere and adequately enunciate
and work through a conception of gender, race, and sexuality as mutually con
stituting. (Gender, race, and sexuality do not exhaust the sites in which iden
tity is cast and molded, of course.) Moreover, to claim that gender, race, and
sexuality construct and inflect each other does not settle the question how
they have been interarticulated historically nor does it decide in advance the
historical forms these interarticulations will continue to take. If I am here
falling into caricatures of my own and portraying the relations between queer

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theory and feminist theory as more antagonistic and either/or than they actu
ally are, I do so to make a point. Disarticulating queer theory from feminist the
ory risks, among other things, casting out by forgetting the lessons feminist
theory and its various practitioners have learned in their struggles to make
race, class, sexuality, and other "Others within" not just additions to, but con
stitutive features of gender studies.
Failing to remember is one way to repeat with a difference. But there are
others. It is, as Evelynn Hammonds observes, one thing to acknowledge that
race is not simply a derivative of or addition to sexual difference and quite
another to follow up that insight with careful study of "the powerful effect
that race has on the construction and representation of gender and sexuality"
(127). This is an undertaking, she says, too few white scholars of sexuality
have yet pursued.
Hammonds's essay, written for the second special issue of differences on
queer theory, represents an attempt to take queer theory at its word. Five
years into the institutionalization of something called queer theory?a very
tenuous institutionalization, granted, and one to some degree launched by dif
ferences' first special issue on queer theory?Hammonds asks how well queer
theory has responded to editor Teresa de Lauretis's 1991 charge to,
problematize some of the discursive constructions and constructed silences
in the emergent field of "gay and lesbian studies," and...explore questions
that have as yet been barely broached, such as the respective and/or common
grounding of current discourses and practices of homo-sexualities in relation
to gender and to race, with their attendant differences of class or ethnic cul
ture, generational, geographical, and socio-political location, (de Lauretis,
"Queer" iii-iv)
Later in her introduction, de Lauretis re-marks the kind of critical move she is
calling for under the now ascendant term "queer theory." In implied contrast
to "gay and lesbian studies," the designation "queer theory" is meant to break
through the logjam of "discursive protocols" in which "gay" and "lesbian," and
the qualifiers of race and national or local scene that specify just which les
bians and gays are being talked about, fight for pride of place in the titles of
organizations, publications, and?I would add?academic affiliations (v).
Taking the measure of queer theory five years on, Hammonds finds a contin
uation of, in her words, "the consistently exclusionary practices of lesbian and
gay studies in general" (127). A shift from "lesbian and gay" to "queer" (or
from "studies" to "theory"?) accomplishes little, Hammonds implies, if white
scholars defer the project of theorizing "differences between and within gays
and lesbians in relation to race" or leave it to someone else to do (130).8 As if
"race"?studying it and having it??properly belongs to someone else.
Hammonds commends The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, for exam
ple, for including essays by many prominent writers of color as well as numer
ous essays about the sexualities of people of color and how their sexualities
are constructed in relation to other fields of power?such as class, gender, and
race. But she criticizes the apparent failure of other (and white?) contributors

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to the volume to integrate questions of race and racialization into the study of
sexuality. It is, of course, important to remember that The Reader collects and
reprints essays written at different times and in different contexts over the
past twenty years. Thus, some of the articles Hammonds implicitly rebukes for
failing to engage "the work of the writers of color that do appear in the vol
ume" were written before the work of these writers was either in general cir
culation or had even been written (128). This is in some ways a minor point,
since there were other writers of color whose work and challenges were
already in circulation when the other essays in The Reader were written.
If I am focusing on something I have just characterized as a "minor point,"
I also think that the broad brushstrokes with which Hammonds sometimes
moves in her essay raise some substantive questions about critical genealogies.
Earlier I suggested that genealogies of feminisms, including lesbian feminisms,
that begin by leaving out the women of color who were writing alongside and
in some cases before the white feminists usually given credit (or, as is more
the case these days, blame) for "founding" feminisms do not simply misre
member history, but they actually construct a narrow history with disturbing
implications for the future. It seems to me that the problems with
Hammonds s genealogy of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory are of
another order, but with related difficulties. Mischarting the chronological rela
tions between and among the essays reprinted in The Reader authorizes the
attribution of something like "bad faith" to the editors of the volume as well
as to individual essayists. It is not, I want to insist, that the critiques she offers
of the unexamined whiteness of many of the anthology's critical terms of art
for example, "subjectivity," "sexuality," "lesbian," and "gay"?are wrong
(128). But the chronology implied in her analysis may collapse the complicat
ed historical and institutional relations between and among feminisms, lesbian
and gay studies, and critical races studies. And this too can get in the way of
developing alternate critical paradigms for the urgent intellectual and political
work that needs to be done now and in the future.
These concerns notwithstanding, Hammonds's over-arching criticism of
lesbian and gay studies and of queer theory does seem to me on target, name
ly that the models of inclusion practiced do not go far enough. Women and
men of color, inside the academy and out, have been pushing white scholars
of sexuality to investigate the ways "race" is sexed and "sex" raced. This intel
lectual and political project reconceives the "and" linking "women
and blacks" or "gender, race, and sexuality." This other "and" does not secure
a neat analogy between otherwise discrete categories. Rather it marks out a
different set of relations and demands a different mapping. This is the sort of
critical geography called for by Kobena Mercer, when he observes that,
Today we are adept at the all too familiar concatenation of identity politics,
as if by merely rehearsing the mantra of "race, class, gender" (and all the inter
vening variables) we have somehow acknowledged the diversified and plu
ralized differences at work in contemporary culture, politics, and society. Yet
the complexity of what actually happens "between" the contingent spaces

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 where each variable intersects with the others is something only now com
ing into view theoretically, and this is partly the result of new antagonistic
cultural practices by hitherto marginalized artists. Instead of analogies, which
tend to flatten out these intermediate spaces, I think we need to explore the
ories that enable new forms of dialogue. ("Skin Head" 193)
Mercer cites the work of "hitherto marginalized artists" as a place where the
messy contingent spaces "between" identities may be sighted. But I also take
him to be arguing that these artists' "antagonistic cultural practices" already
represent one such moment of theorizing. In extending to these cultural prac
tices the claim to theory, then, he expands what counts as theory and what
counts as cultural intervention.
At this juncture, I want to turn my sights on some recent feature-length
films in which lesbianism and the particular difference it may or may not rep
resent appears alongside blackness as magic sign. The two mainstream films
"featured" in the following section exemplify by analogy ways not to explore
the intersections of identity. But it is hoped that the analysis brought to bear
on these films will model one way for queer (and) feminist theorists to
"explore theories that enable new forms of dialogue" and ask new kinds of
questions about and at the intersections.
II. "IS THIS A BLACK-WHITE THING? "9

In light of the on-going debates about the place of race in feminist and
queer theories, the startling frequency with which recent cinematic portray
als of lesbianism or, better, "lesbianism" (since some of the films in question
signify around the bush) have depicted interracial couples consisting of a
white woman and a black woman deserves closer scrutiny. So many such fea
ture-length films have come out, and in such a relatively compressed period of
time, that this interracial couple has become virtually the cinematic face of les
bianism: She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), Bar Girls (1995), The Incredibly
True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995), Boys on the Side (1995), When
Night is Falling (1995), and Work (1996).10
There are major differences between and among these films, not the least
of which being the different market relations effecting and affecting the dis
tribution and reception of the individual films. Only one was made by a major
studio (Boys on the Side). Three others?Bar Girls, When Night is Falling,
and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love?were picked up
and released nationally by major distributors.11 With one exception?the
Canadian film When Night is Falling?all the films were made in and focused
on the United States. Finally, and with one exception again, all the films were
directed by white women; Boys on the Side was directed by a white man.
I do not want to elide the differences between these films, but I do want
to offer a schematic of one of the ways blackness is working in all of them;
this general claim must be adjusted to fit the scene, and "seen," of each film.
In each of these films, albeit with different inflections and different effects,
blackness bears the burden of making difference within the same visible.

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What Mercer writes of the "tension of sameness" introduced into the visual
field by Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic depictions of black male nudes
may also be operating in the films mentioned above. The sameness in "same
sex" love "transfers the frisson of 'difference' from gendered to racialized
polarity" (Mercer, "Looking" 351). Arguably, this deployment of blackness as
visible "difference" functions to interrupt or keep off homophobic concep
tions of lesbianism as narcissism by any other name. That is, by articulating les
bian difference through racial difference, the films can avoid, or potentially
avoid, homophobic equations of same-sex love with narcissistic love of the
same. However, this transfer from sexual difference to racial difference does
not disrupt binaries, but displaces them.
The project of putting off the accusation of "too much" self-love can oper
ate hand in hand with a homophobic panic that wants to know, perhaps at
first glance, the difference between homo- and heterosexuality. In Boys on the
Side, blackness is joined to both these projects. This female buddy film traces
the adventures of three women, two white (Robin and Holly) and one black
0ane), as they drive across country, from New York to California.
Significantly, their trip stops short of its target in Tucson, Arizona. But the
depiction of Tucson and the Chicano culture and traditions that are part of
that city's fabric as a kind of Utopian frontera?where everyone really can get
along?turns this detour into the destination they did not know they were
aiming at all along.
This points to the numerous ways in which the film flattens differences
even as it is representing them. The film is more than happy to position itself
on a "lesbian continuum" (to borrow Adrienne Rich's famous formula) and
celebrate and affirm intimacy between and among women, but it unevenly
manages just how far this intimacy may reach. A capsule review in New York's
Village Voice wryly described Boys on the Side as yet another in a series of
recent films in which two women meet, fall in love, and do not have sex. The
film also seems uneasy about the ripple effects bonds between women may
have on heterosexuality once the centrality of women to each other's emo
tional life displaces men to the position of "boys on the side."
Newspaper advertisements and trailers for the film promoted the distinc
tively female character of these bonds, referring to the special ties between
women and to the envy men felt for the closeness women enjoyed with each
other.12 In the world of the film, this envy becomes a death blow when Holly
kills her abusive boyfriend Nick in self-defense, and the other two women,
who witness the event, conspire to conceal Holly's role in it. In a climactic
courtroom scene, when Holly is on trial for murder, the bonds between
women seem as much on trial as Holly herself. The film's narrative and its two
love stories have been set in motion by two deaths, a man's and a woman's.
Nick's death is among the first events depicted in Boys on the Side, and the
shadow of Robin's imminent death from AIDS is cast over the length of it. It
is not clear, then, whether envy's killing sting is directed outward at the ones
who incite envy (women-identified-women and/or women-loving-women) or

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inward at the ones who feel envy (heterosexual men). The self-justifications
offered by Holly's new boyfriend (a clean-cut white policeman with the unbe
lievable name of Abe Lincoln) for turning in the woman he loves give away
the film's ideological bottom-line, "There's no kind of family without the law."
Of heterosexuality? Racial "purity"? Both?
Appearing for the defense at Holly's trial, Robin must offer an accounting
that can exonerate the bonds between women of a lesbian connection as well
as clear whiteness from the charge of crossing over racial borders. Her speech
is worth repeating in full; it is the one moment in the film when men too are
explicitly invited to enjoy the same-sex ties that bind, "I don't know what it is,
but there's something that goes on between women. You men know that
because it's the same for you. I'm not saying that one sex is better than the
other. I'm just saying like speaks to like. Love, or whatever, doesn't always
keep, but you find what does if you're lucky." The film here labors to conceal
the very differences?of race, sexuality, and gender?that it has made its run
ning punch line. Throughout the film, characters have been stating in tones of
wonderment, "Jane's gay?" and "She's a black lesbian?" These statements of
fact, pitched upwards into the form of a question, deny any knowledge of the
very thing they pronounce. Lesbianism and blackness are the questions the
film cannot stop itself from asking or help itself to answer.
This scene thus reveals that different strategies are necessary to manage
and put off the white woman's lesbian possibility. For her, the evasion is bro
kered on an appeal to a race-neutral conception of sisterly solidarity. As in:
"like speaks to like." But this ostensibly race-neutral conception is generated
by a racial "fix." For how can we (the film's presumptively straight "we" )
guard against the possibility that this woman-woman identification might
cross into or be finally indistinguishable from woman-woman desire? After all,
the Radicalesbians' woman-identified-woman was a spokeswoman for just
such a convergence cum crossing. What if, in the midst of all this sisterly sol
idarity and loving but non-sexual touching, a hand, a mouth, a feeling goes
astray? Where and how can you tell the difference between female homoso
ciality and female homosexuality? This, I want to suggest, is the work Jane's
blackness does. Of the three female friends, Jane is the only lesbian character
named as such; she is also the only woman of color. Her blackness visibly
marks out the difference between the lesbian and the straight woman she
loves and who may even love her in return, just "not in that way." Bearing the
representational burden for the threatening difference lodged at the heart of
the same (or was it: the threatening sameness lodged at the heart of differ
ence?), her blackness, like her lesbianism, marks the place beyond the pale.
In contrast to Boys on the Side, in which blackness marks out differences
within the category "woman" by drawing the boundaries between a woman
identification that stops short of desire and a woman-identification that cross
es into it, in the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes blackness demarcates dif
ferences within whiteness. The film deploys a strategy of "compensatory
stereotyping."^ The whiteness and, so, propriety of a loving relationship

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between two women is secured by playing it off against stereotypes of put
upon black folk. Lesbianism is raced white and disappears behind the screen
of normative and even heroic whiteness.
In Fried Green Tomatoes, as in Boys on the Side, two women meet, fall
in love, do not have sex, and one of them dies. Moreover, in Fried Green
Tomatoes, as in Boys on the Side after it, one of these two women is played
by Mary-Louise Parker, who seems to be making a career out of treading the
line between woman-woman identification and woman-woman desire. The
film represents around the issue of lesbianism, depicting a strong and intense
friendship between two white women (the tomboy Idgie Threadgoode and
the fern Ruth Jamison), but never committing itself one way or another.14
Asked whether the film was "really" about two lesbians, director Jon Avnet
responded, "You can take it how you want to. I had no interest in going into
the bedroom" (qtd. in Parish 149). The Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) was not so coy; it claimed the film and
gave it a Media Award for its positive depictions of lesbians in a film.
I am not particularly interested in settling the question were Idgie and
Ruth lovers or "just" good friends. However, that there can be disagreement
on this question indicates some of the weaknesses of "positive images" or a
"politics of visibility" as liberatory strategy. Images do not speak once for all.
We cannot control for all the different and sometimes even contradictory mes
sages one and the same image or text may open itself to and produce. If
GLAAD s recognition of the film commended the identificatory pleasures the
film gave some lesbian viewers, the film's representations of its black charac
ters may have foreclosed the pleasures and identifications of some others of
its spectators?including some of the lesbian spectators in whose name
GLAAD gave Fried Green Tomatoes a Media Award.
In Fried Green Tomatoes' story within a story, the heroism and goodness
of Idgie and Ruth are established by showing their hatred for all forms of prej
udice, especially white racism. That Idgie and Ruth are unflagging opponents
of racism is indicated in their opposition to the Klan and in their generous
concern for the black men and women who live around them and whom they
employ. In their turn, these black men and women repay Idgie's and Ruth's
kindness with their unflagging loyalty, but we never get a sense of them as
independent moral agents.
The film links its criticism of the Ku Klux Klan to its indictment of Ruth's
husband, Frank Bennett, whose faults include beating Ruth and being a mem
ber of the Klan. Frank's Klan membership is one of the ways the film proves
what a bad guy he is?as if wife-beating would not be sufficient evidence. But,
and this is my principal concern with the work "race" does in the film, the
white racism represented and criticized in Fried Green Tomatoes seems, in the
end, to be all about whiteness. It becomes a way of making distinctions within
the category of whiteness between "good" white people and "bad" white peo
ple; the white racism directed at African Americans, which the film vividly por
trays (up to and including a scene where a black male character is whipped by

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the Klan), is really all about white people. For which lesbians, then, did the film
offer "positive" images? To repeat the epigraph from Jackie Goldsby that
launched this essay, "[W]ho do we mean, after all, by 'our own'" (10)?
Both Fried Green Tomatoes and Boys on the Side fail, in part, because for
each film, difference is a problem to be overcome. Each works different and
sometimes even contradictory strategies to fix the "problem" and make unruly
difference go away. Ultimately, both films are wedded to a universalizing pro
ject. Although they invoke a pluralism of differences?depicting differences of
erotic choice, gender, race, and class?they persist in wishing these differ
ences away and into some putatively shared transcendent vision in which
unlike turns out to be like, and then they can speak to each other.15 This ana
logical thinking overlooks the ways in which differences construct, reinforce,
contradict, and cross-cut each other?and that these fraught crossings do not
make them the "same." The failures of the two films discussed above can be
instructive as we (an expansive open "we") move to create theories and strate
gies capable of mapping the intersections of identity.
III. CONCLUSIONS WITHOUT FORECLOSURES
One of the most undertheorized aspects of these films?and of this
essay?is the ways in which differences energize and enlist desire. This possi
bility produces embarrassment, denial, evasion, uncomfortable silence. In a
much-quoted observation concerning the different treatments of "race" by gay
male and lesbian communities, Goldsby writes, "Dykes politicize it, gay men
eroticize it, either perception neutralizing any middle ground on which I can
stand and say my piece" (11). Despite Goldsby's disclaimer, her attempts to
theorize about and at the intersections of identity constitute one such "middle
ground," however tenuous and revisable it may be. Goldsby's essay"?What It
Means to Be Colored Me"?and Goldsby "herself' are both works in progress.
She explores the between-spaces, where desires, identifications, histories,
imagined futures, self, and other meet, cross-cut, and complicate each other
in sometimes unpredictable ways. One of her critical insights comes in the
form of a question. Discussing her relationship with a white woman, she won
ders "where, in the context of lesbian political discourse on race, can we
acknowledge that our knowingly crossing boundaries of race and class is part
of our desire for each other" (11, italics in original). And what would it mean
to allow that the eroticization of difference can sometimes be the ground of
politics and not its Maginot line?
Rachel Reichman's Work, which is centered around an affair between an
unhappily married white woman (Jenny) and a younger black woman Qune),
is one recent film that does thematize the ways in which difference mobilizes
desire.16 With varying degrees of self-consciousness, each woman connects her
desire for the other to the transgression of loving across the color line. They do
not love "despite" racial difference or as a way to overcome it, but in some
sense because of it. June tells a parable in which one woman (a thinly disguised
June) desires a second woman (readable as Jenny) because the second woman

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has been branded a trouble-maker. But this branding precedes any act that
would qualify the second woman for the category "trouble-maker." So, the
trouble-maker becomes one by virtue of being identified by and coming to
identify with the name. The film suggests that transgressive desire occasions?
is?this identificatory branding. The reciprocity of one woman's desire for the
other both constitutes and confirms that the interpellation has reached its
appropriate mark. These two women together make trouble by confounding
the lines between desire and identification, other and same.
The film also complicates its treatment of cross-racial desire by attending
to the two women's class positions. Jenny and June are both working class,
but their ostensibly "shared" class position means differently because it is
inflected by differences of race. The black woman is on her way up and out
of the working class; but the white woman seems stuck, when she is not plain
losing ground. These reversals of the "expected" alignment, in which white
correlates to more economically privileged, and black to less, is not a facile
inversion dependent on stereotypes even as they are turned on their head.
This "flip" would not complicate conceptions of race and class because it
would allow and encourage audiences to read upside-down. In Work, howev
er, the rising and falling class fortunes of the black woman and the white
woman, respectively, are part of the history of their racial identifications. The
ambitions driving June to college and onwards to a professional career are as
much June's grandmother's as her own. June's aspirations for self-improve
ment cannot be understood apart from a connection to intimate others, to a
particular family history, and to the uplift of "the race."
By contrast, Jenny has no moorings. Her relationship with her husband is
noteworthy for its pitch of disconnection. The film follows her from one job
interview to another, each for a pink collar job, each unsuccessful. Arguably,
her whiteness camouflages her desperation. What does a white working class
woman want? No one asks Jenny, not even Jenny. Her desire for June is
marked by a wishful identification with the black woman's class mobility. But
without goals or ambitions of her own, these identifications initially cast Jenny
even further adrift by opening up another distance between the two women.
As the film closes, June is away at college, and Jenny gets a job doing land
scaping, an occupation that occasions another crossing over, into traditional
ly male territory. But her new employ and the way she newly carries her body,
as if it is her own, and for the first time, traces the route of Jenny's desire for
June as this desire transgresses and is transgressed by identification. Through
the intersections of same and different, desire and identification, Jenny comes
to identify with another possible future.17
Work manages to represent differences of class and race and to draw them
through the switchpoints of desire and identification without letting any one
difference do all the work or any differences stand still. The spare title, Work,
which is a declaration and a dare, well describes the sometimes tiring, some
times energizing, but always necessary labor of negotiating the intersections of
identity. Work to be done. And different kinds of queer theories to be offered.

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 ENDNOTES
1 Portions of this essay were first written for a talk given at Montclair State
University, in April 1996. I am grateful to the organizers of "Crossing Boundaries: An
Interdisciplinary Series with Lesbian Artists" for inviting me to take part in this series.
This essay has benefited above all from conversations with Liz Wiesen, whose ideas,
questions, and challenges are imprinted across this essay.
2 This is a criticism joined, though from a slightly different angle, by Terry Castle
in her "Polemical Introduction" to The Apparitional Lesbian, in which she character
izes Butler's reluctance to specify who or what a lesbian is as doing violence to the
ordinary commonsensical meaning of "lesbian" (14).
3 Key instances of this conceptual move are contained in Rubin's 1984 essay
"Thinking Sex" and Sedgwick's second axiom in Epistemology of the Closet, in which
she states, "The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; corre
spondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry. But we
can't know in advance how they will be different" (27). Rubin's essay is reprinted in
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, among other places.
4 For a compelling set of arguments "against proper objects," see Judith Butler's
essay of the same name.
5 One model of the ways in which lesbian/gay/queer studies, critical race studies,
and a feminist gender studies may complicate and enrich each other without staging a
turf battle over disciplinary domains is offered by the special issue of Diacritics, ed.
Judith Butler and Biddy Martin. In their introduction to the issue, Butler and Martin write
that they were initially asked to edit a special issue on gay and lesbian studies, "and
[they] took occasion to broaden the scope of that request to work that interrogates the
problem of cross-identification within and across race and post-colonial studies, gender
theory, and theories of sexuality" (3). The title of this special issue, Critical Crossings,
evokes not just a conception of identity as intersectionality, but also enacts theoretical
movements and critical analyses which intersect, cross over, and complicate each other.
For identity and for theory, this special issue suggests, such "critical crossings" are
enabling and necessary conditions. One measure of the success of this issue in compli
cating issues of academic "ownership" is that, stripped of the author-functions of
Butler's and Martin's names (especially where the former's has become synecdochical
for "queer theory"), the table of contents is as likely to announce itself as a special issue
on post-colonial theory and critical race studies as on lesbian and gay studies.
6 The arguments presented in this paragraph draw on Butler ("Against"), Martin,
and Garber.
7 Discussions of the shift from speaking in terms of lesbian and gay studies to
queer theory have usually been focused around the advantages and disadvantages of
"queer." To my knowledge, there has been no substantive discussion of this other redi
rection: from "studies" to "theory."
8 Question posed by "Robin" (Mary-Louise Parker) to "Jane" (Whoopi Goldberg)
in the 1995 film Boys on the Side.
9 If I were to expand the list to include non-narrative feature films, I would add
Without You I'm Nothing (1990), which poses as a documentary of Sandra Bernhard's
performance piece of the same name. For essays treating this film and its complicated
relations to blackness, see Berlant and Freeman, Walton, and Pellegrini, in which the
relations between blackness and Jewishness are foregrounded. The work of Cheryl
Dunye, a black lesbian video maker, also falls outside the scope of this essay. Dunye

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does feature black/white couples in her videos, but in this essay I am concentrating on
feature-length narrative films. Dunye has just completed her first feature-length film,
Watermelon Woman (1996), but it does not depict an interracial couple. Finally, I
have deliberately left Go Fish (1994) off this list, although there is an interracial lesbian
relationship in the film between a Latina and African-American woman. But, again, in
this part of my discussion I am looking into the representation of lesbian relationships
between white and black women. In setting Go Fish aside, I do not thereby mean to
settle, before I have even asked into, "the" Latina's relation to whiteness. At minimum,
it can be argued that Go Fish never sees the Latina woman as white; she is an "ethnic
other." It is, of course, vital to a feminist anti-racist project to interrogate differences
within the category of whiteness, something I attempt to do with respect to class in
my discussion of Work in the main text.
10 Although She Must Be Seeing Things received national notice through a review
in the New York Times (April 13, 1988), the film was never released nationally. For a
discussion of She Must Be Seeing Things, see de Lauretis ("Film" 223-64). See also the
audience discussion which followed de Lauretis s presentation of her paper ("Film"
264-76).
11 I have lifted part of this essay's title from a trailer for the film; its closing line
was, "Women on top and boys on the side." (The trailer appeared at the beginning of
a video of The Client, yet another film featuring Mary-Louise Parker.)
12 See Judith Mayne's discussion of this phenomenon in the films of Dorothy
Arzner (esp. 125).
13 Although Fried Green Tomatoes received mixed critical reviews, it was a
resounding success at the box office, taking in more than 75 million dollars in its first
22 weeks of domestic distribution (figure cited in Parish 149). So, this strategy of con
notation, evasion, and representing around worked. This "women's film" brought in
women-identified-women as well as women-loving-women.
14 For a brilliant treatment of these universalizing strategies in relation to Pauline
theology and the difference "Jew/Christian," see Boyarin and Boyarin.
15 In reserving my praise for an independent film, Work, I do not thereby imply a
neat division and too-neat moral difference between independent films ("good") and
mainstream, studio-produced films ("bad"). First, the distinction between independent
and studio films is being broken down as major studios purchase independent pro
duction companies. Additionally, and this is more to my point, failures charged to Boys
on the Side and Fried Green Tomatoes above may also apply to some of the indepen
dent films named in the opening catalogue of section two. If I have focused much of
my discussion on two studio films, this is because these films reached a wider audience
than any of the indies and, consequently, have been more influential in shaping public
(read: straight) conceptions of what "the" lesbian "is."
16 June has not "rescued" Jenny. Such a reading would turn a nuanced and com
plicated film into yet another story of a white woman "saved" by the gift of a strong
black woman. If this film charts a colonial adventure, it is really about the ways desire
and identification de- and re-territorialize each other.

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