twentysomethingfeminist

Well folks, I told you I was making my way through Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women – an anthology of short essays on just that, women who’ve left men for women. The book is quite different from other collections of coming-out stories in two key ways. It challenges the heterosexual/homosexual binary that reductively polices sexuality as an either/or identity (Hasn’t Kinsey taught us anything? SPECTRUMS, people, SPECTRUMS!) and gives voice to all those women who’ve been somewhere in the middle (a vast space in itself). The book also gives legitimacy to those women who’ve chosen to identify as lesbian or Queer who haven’t had traditional trajectories of getting there.

The collection’s pieces do a great job of unraveling the many layers of complex relationships that women who’ve left men for women have – with their former male partners, children, families, new woman-identified partners, and the larger lesbian and Queer communities. I must admit though, that I did tire of the “Had-a-husband-but-now-I-don’t” trope.

Editors Candace Walsh and Laura Andre were clear that they chose which pieces to include based on the quality of writing presented; the sheer volume of submissions and truths of women who wanted to participate meant that there had to be some way of molding this text. If we’re really going to look at the complexity of women’s sexualities though, there needs to be diversity in the situated experiences and identities of the women whose stories we look to for these answers.

As a woman of colour, who is in an interracial relationship with a man (a relationship that I dare NOT classify as heterosexual), I know that the choice to love someone and the conditions under which this love is accepted varies depending on the cultural and social identities of each individual woman. The collection certainly addressed how religion and class complicate the matter, but presenting an alternative to a traditional coming-out narrative means not simply presenting another catch-all story but picking apart the ways that these narratives exclude and ignore the realities of many women, and why they do so.

I had the pleasure of meeting Vanessa Fernando in 2009 as an undergrad at McGill University where we were both active with a campus sexual assault centre. Her writing has always struck me as painfully true. Vanessa’s piece “Wanting” is included in Dear John, I Love Jane.

Q: How did you get involved with the anthology?

A: I read Lisa Diamond’s book Sexual Fluidity about a year ago and it really resonated with me because she emphasizes that women’s sexual identities can’t be neatly categorized and thought of as static. That idea connected with my own experience – I clearly remember this moment, when I was about 17. It was a period in my life when I had just broken up with my high-school boyfriend and was questioning a lot of things about my life, including my sexual orientation. I had just made out with this guy, a cisgendered guy, and I was really, really into it. I remember feeling really turned on by him and thinking to myself, ‘Well, I guess that settles it. I’m straight.’

That attraction didn’t preclude even more attractions and feelings of wonder and surprise when I found myself just as electrified by partners who identified as female and as genderqueer. I wanted to be part of a movement that tries to step away from thinking about sexual orientation as boxes you can check off… because the most amazing and liberating and revolutionary thing I’ve learned so far is that you can really, really surprise yourself with what your attraction is capable of.

Q: Dear John, I Love Jane does a lot to destabilize the traditional coming-out narrative – where people have always “known” their sexuality but waited to come out until they could find acceptance – why do you think this narrative has become the standard?

A: The traditional coming-out narrative is this way that queer people connect to one another – ‘What was it like when you came out?’ And it feels like you need to have this neat arc, this neat narrative about your life: ‘I was always gay, but I just didn’t know how to name it, and then I realized, and I was truly myself.’ I think that arc is true for a lot of people, including my partner – she feels like she’s always been a lesbian, and that when she ‘discovered’ that she was attracted to women then it made sense of her whole past.

I have a more ambivalent relationship to the coming-out narrative because it’s hard for me to make sense of my past attractions in a way that feels authentic – I don’t want to just create this revisionist history of my life to fit with how I currently identify. I mean, there are some things that are just facts: I had crushes on women as I was growing up, from a very young age, and I felt confused and anxious about this. I have diary entries from when I was 11 years old with “I swear I’m not a lesbian!” written on them. In high school, my best friends and I kissed to experiment and I wanted to take it farther, but I was scared to cross that line between joking and being serious which might actually mean something. But coming out, for me, wasn’t so much a single event as a slow progression – Kissing my friends to admitting that I wanted to sleep with a woman to going to a queer gathering to kissing a girl there to inviting her to stay over to having sex with her to getting outed in front of my parents. This whole rambling answer can attest to the fact that it’s messy. It’s a process.

Q: How does being a feminist and woman of colour affect your writing?

A: When I decided to submit to this anthology, I was really conscious of all the identity signifiers that you become hyper-aware of when you do a degree in something like women’s studies. Queer. Mixed-race person of colour. I thought this anthology might be white-dominated because it wasn’t explicitly aiming towards including people of colour. That made me a little anxious because I didn’t want to be the token non-white voice. So I guess being a feminist affects my writing because I’m more aware of how I’m positioned, as a writer, and of how my work will be framed. I was also aware that I would probably be one of the only Queer-identified (as opposed to lesbian-identified) women contributors, although you can never assume these things. I decided to submit despite all of that because even if it’s tokenizing, I wanted to share my experiences, to get it out there to other people and maybe start a ball rolling to get more voices talking.

Before, when I wrote, I just wrote my own life story without thinking about how I’m positioned in these larger power dynamics, but now I feel hyper aware of the way my writer-self is perceived. I also feel a certain amount of responsibility for how I present issues or present myself in my writing- I feel pressure to be the good feminist, to touch on all the anti-oppression points, to make people feel good that way. I try to actively fight against this urge because as important as anti-oppressive language is, I think real anti-oppression can only be achieved if we are completely and brutally honest with ourselves, even about the unflattering parts of us. Otherwise everything looks good and sounds good on the outside but no real work is being done.

I am constantly trying to find that balance between connection in the purest form and creating something that I’m politically in line with as well- politics without shoving it down your throat or being preachy, just representing something complicated and multi-faceted that hurts to read because it’s true.

Q: Lisa M. Diamond, in the foreword to the book, uses a pivotal point from your piece to tie the anthology together as an alternative to the strict hetero/homosexual binary that constricts women’s sexualities. You wrote, “I spent years trying to be the kind of girl a boy would want to toss into the air. I wish I had realized earlier that I didn’t want to be like those girls so much as I just wanted them.” I think this really resonates with women along all points on the sexuality spectrum. Could you explain this further?

A: It’s really neat that you connected with this idea because it is so so so true for me and I wish I had realized it earlier. One thing I really wanted to get across in the piece was how interconnected sexuality is with every other feeling that we have in life and about our bodies. For me, my relationship with my sexuality was intertwined with my negative feelings about my own body and my feelings of alienation towards my ethnicity as a mixed-race Sri Lankan woman – a part of my legacy that has been pretty denied and cut off in my life. So it wasn’t just learning to love women, it was learning to love myself enough – body, skin, hair, to be at peace – to love women. I wanted to be the tiny blonde girls and I wanted to fuck them, too. Sex is so complicated.

My friendships with other women have always been loaded with a lot of emotion. Just heavy. I think a lot of female friendships can be like that. Some of that was definitely sexual. Letting it go to the sexual place lets me explore different parts of myself and my body too. You don’t have to hate somebody because they’re skinnier than you or whiter than you. Desire doesn’t have to ricochet into self-hate. Desire can just be desire, plain – but not simple, never simple. It’s liberating to have another way to look at women, and a different way to see myself: as a desiring agent, not just some inferior version of those blonde girls.