narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

‘The union of a let loose hair and a deep naval’ is a translated line from this art and
poetry that evokes vivid erotic images and imaginings that can be read as deeply
charged with homoeroticism. The art poetry also evokes the pleasure of sensual
romance coming out through the sensuousness of the dancing figure and attests to
Rabinowitz and Auanger’s analysis of homosocial intimacy nesting homoerotic desires
in Ancient times (2002). To be able to read this homoeroticism underlined in the text, is
to be able to go beyond the narrow, clinical reductionist masculinist readings of the
‘homo’/ ‘hetero’ binary of sexual experiences (Rich, 1980). The institutionalized
gendered binary that compulsively focuses on the hetero-sexual ‘act’ of male
penetration as an ‘invasion and colonization’ of women’s bodies is a phallocentric
discourse that cannot appreciate either the multilayered possibilities of ‘postheterosexual’
desire (Smart, 1996a: 236) or the deeply charged erotic imaginings of
homosocial intimate subjectivities (Lorde, 1997: 280-281). Although subjects did not
automatically invoke the term lesbian to describe their sexual identity, these
experiences can be read from such an angle, particularly in the way Rich (1980)
theorized a continuum of ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’ in female homosocial bonding. Her
concept of ‘lesbian existence’ and ‘lesbian continuum’ (1980: 648) eloquently captures
the homoerotic. Lesbianism, Rich argues, is often associated with clinical reductionism.
Lesbian continuum expands this clinical limitation and validates a lesbian existence to
mean a woman identified world of ‘rich inner life’, mutual bonding against male tyranny
and sharing of practical and political support (1980: 648-649). Rich’s theorization of
womanly bonding captures the homosocial intimacy in its broadest sense. However in
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