窗簾與窺孔：克雷藍《歡場女子回憶錄》中的跨性別同性戀書寫

Abstract

“Cross-gendered homoerotic writing” is my phrase to describe texts that have rarely been considered a genre: men writing about lesbianism and women writing about male homoeroticism. With examples from Baudelaire, Proust, as well as Yourcenar and “Boy’s Love,” these texts are distinguished from “lesbian and gay literature” that invokes authentic experience. In this thesis, I see Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure not only as a specimen of the genre, but also as providing a paradigm for reading it. The novel’s voyeuristic scene in which the heroine peeps at two men’s intercourse offers a series of metaphors about what it is like to look at homosexuality of the other gender. My thesis begins by examining the “transposition critique” of Memoirs, which reads the novel as a closeted gay text by claiming that the heroine is a “man in drag.” This critique is propelled by an identity politics that tries to out the classics, but it also tends to ignore Memoirs’ representation of female sexuality and lesbianism. Most importantly, transposition reading avoids the possibility of a woman’s relationship with male homoerotic images. I go on to explain that the sodomy scene in which the heroine is a voyeur provides a picture of how homosexuality is seen by the other gender. I argue that the structure of the heroine’s voyeurism resembles that of the camera obscura, which renders her a spectator in the dark room. The scene is then compared with the representation of lesbianism in the book. I argue that Memoirs not only depicts a lesbian erotics that excludes male penetration, but its lesbian scene also alienates its male readers by privileging tactile over visual descriptions. Finally, I argue that limited and precarious vision in the two homosexual scenes could be theorized as a kind of spectatorship that is peculiar to cross-gendered homoerotic texts. This alienated spectator is prevented from both identification and exploitation, whose masochistic pleasure lies in being excluded. I conclude that Memoirs offers a potential formula not only to read cross-gendered homoerotic writing as a genre, but also to understand the very pleasure that the texts provide.