Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.
Princeton; Princeton UP, 2007.
☆「セクシュアリティ」（アイデンティティカテゴリとしてのレズビアン、および"invert"）誕生前夜の英国ヴィクトリア朝（1830 -1880）における女達の関係性。Marcusの主眼は（Abeloveと、そしてSedgwickと同様）gay identity politicsのminority化の戦略に抗うことだとも言える。抑圧された存在として、またheteronormativityとの対立関係によってlesbianityや同性間の欲望を捉えるのではなく、それを「システムの遊び--a play of the system」として定義づける: Between Women makes a historical point about the particular indifference of Victorians to a homo/hetero divide for women. . . [it] shows . . . that in Vicrotian England, female marriage, gender mobility, and women's erotic fantasies about women were at the heart of normative institutions and discourses, even for those who made a religion of the family, marriage, and sexual difference (13). 女達の関係は "legible and legitimate bonds" であったとする (25)。面白いので一気に読めたけれども（特にファッションに関する3章と結婚の系譜学に関する5章は圧巻）、同時にやや気にかかるのは、この手のVictoria期のセクシュアリティ研究がそれをある種ユートピア化しているように見えなくもないというところか。これはLillian FadermanやCarroll Smith-Rosenbergにも通じるところなのだけれど。果たして、禁止の「前」を想像するというのは、どうなんだろう。
★1890s--the rise of "sexuality": A new sense of heterosexuality, as a distinct sexual orientation formed in a diametrical opposition to homosexuality, made marriage and the family the province of make-female unions. (6)
★これまでのqueer studiesにおけるlesbianism研究: Ironically, what all of these arguments share is an assumption that the opposition between men and women governs relationship between women, which tale shape only as reactions against, retreats from, or appropriations of masculinity. (11) "the minority thesis" "reasserting a distinction between the lesbian minority and the heterosexual norm" (11)←このあたりは驚くほどAbeloveに似ている。マイノリティ化に対する疑義。reclamation of centrality。In order to see that sexual relationships between women have been part of history of the family and marriage since at least the nineteenth century, we need to abandon continuum and minority theories that define kinship as exclusively heterosexual and frame female couples in terms of their rejection of marriage or their failed appropriation of it. (12)
★Queerをどう捉えていくか: Queer theory led me to ask what social formation swim into focus once we abandon the preconception of strict divisions between men and women, homosexuality and heterosexuality, same-sex bonds and those of family and marriage. (13)
★★★"the play of the system": For Barthes, the play of the system is external to the system, a utopian alternative to the oppressive, self-contained structure from which systematics take flight. Unlike Barthes, I use "the play of the system" to conceptualize the yield built into systems. Okay signifies the elasticity of the system, their ability to be stretched without permanent alteration to their size or shape; it thus differs from plasticity, which refers to a pliability that allows a system or structure to acquire a new shape and be permanently changed without fracture or rupture. TheVictorian gender system, however strict its constraints, provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference. (27)
★Female friendship: 婚姻関係や神との関係のモデルとなる "even the most intense female friendships promoted the hegemony of marriage" (71)/ "female friendship's location at the heart of the hallowed middle-class institutions of marriage and family" (72)/ "catalyst of the marriage plot" (79)/ a "narrative matrix," a relationship that generates plot but is not its primary agent, subject, or object/ ultimate marriage can itself be read as a female friendship (90)/ the symbiosis between marriage and friendship (102)
★★"just reading"⇔"symptomatic reading": [Jameson's] symptomatic reading proposes a surface/depth model of interpretation in which the true meaning of the text must lie in what it does not say, which becomes a clue to what it cannot say (74). ⇔Just reading accounts for what is in the text without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation ("what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice") (75). / the text's purloined letter (82)
★Fashion and pornography: Precisely because Victorians saw lesbian sex almost nowhere, they could embrace erotic desire between women almost everywhere. Female homoeroticism did not subvert dominant codes of femininity, because female homoeroticism was one of those codes (113)./ because Victorians did not define lesbianism as an autonomous identity, they were not concerned that female homoeroticism might lead women to disclaim sexual relationships with men . . .Desire for women was the crucible in which femininity was formed. (166)
★★"want to be/ want to have": Conventional wisdom assumes that fashion and dolls embody what women want to be and what men want to have, that women identify with simulacra of femininity and men desire them. Since the distinction between identification and desire was invented precisely to separate in theory the homosexuality and heterosexuality that so often converged in practice, it is not surprising that identification has been used to explain away the homoeroticism inhabiting heterosexuality. Yet just as homo- and heterosexual desires and fantasies coexist within one subject, identification and desire merge within one viewer. (115) このidentificationとdesireというのはメランコリー論の肝になる。Erotic fantasies have no fixed relationship to gender roles, to sex acts, or to social power relationships.
★Lesbian marriage led to marriage reform, providing a model for independent rights to their income and property and rights to divorce: Charlotte Cushman (American actress 1816-76, also became a model for James' Golden Bowl) and her "lesbian marriage."/ because relationships between female couples were understood as marriages, they provided models for more flexible, egalitarian, and voluntary marriages between men and women. (212) 第５章のVictorian anthropologistsのセクション (218-) は再読すること―Darwinはfemale "married" coupleと親交があったし、Engelsにとってはsame-sex marriage was an element of the stage of kinship he found most promising (224)
