Katherine Binhammer

Traumatic Readings

A Review of
Martindale, Kathleen. 1997. UnlPopular Cukure: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars. Albany:
SUNY Press.

Reading Kathleen Martindale's Un/Popular Culture: Lesbian Wrtting After the Sex
Wars is a traumatic experience. By invoking trauma, Martindale succeeds in writing a
book that forces its readers to practise what she preaches and to form an ethics of
reading and writing like the one permeating both her text and the lesbian texts she
cites voraciously. Thinking through an ethical reading practice as trauma emerges
from Martindale's experience in the classroom when her students responded traumat-
ically to reading lesbian and gay cultural texts. Rather than seeing trauma as pain and
suffering, Martindale suggests that we conceive of it as productive difficulty. She
rereads trauma through Laplanche and Pontalis's interpretation of it as

an event in the subject's life defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapac-
ity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects
that it brings about in the psychical organization. (Qtd. in Martindale
1997:32)

Un/Popular Culture is marked, like the body of writing it takes as its subject, not by
"accessibility but excessibility, in the sense of a desire to exceed what lesbians are or
have been, and what one knows or thinks one knows about them and about the
world" (32). The book's trauma lies in its excessibility, or in my incapacity to respond
adequately to the many provocative arguments it makes. Martindale takes the reader
in multiple directions, and her book cannot be forced to go down one road, travers-
ing many instead: it engages with lesbian theory and questions of postmodern lesbian
identity and subjectivity; it gives a historical account of the sex wars of the 1980s; it
exemplifies the best of cultural criticism on contemporary lesbian writers, including
Joan Nestle, Sarah Schulman, Alison Bechdel, and Diane DiMassa; it provides a queer
and feminist intervention into theories of popular culture; it "que(e)ries pedagogy"
and describes classroom experiences with teaching lesbian and gay texts; it sketches a
citational map of post-second-wave lesbian feminism, theory, and writing (while cri-
tiquing lesbian theory for not citing lesbian writers enough, Martindale provides 424
notes for 159 pages); it discusses lesbian reading practices and how central reading is
to the formation of lesbian identities and communities; and it participates in the
project of a lesbian literary history. A difficult journey for 159 pages, and we never
arrive at a destination; to arrive would only enforce precisely what Martindale strug-
gles against-a static, knowable, accessible, comprehensible lesbian. If not to one
place, then where does this traumatic excessibility lead?

Wherever it is that I end up, it is not an easy place to get to. Lesbian writing after the
sex wars, according to Martindale, locates itself in unpopular territories. Her book
inhabits the space at which these territories intersect: '"lesbian/popular/culture'
names a space where several lacks overlap, it's difficult to locate contemporary lesbian
cultural productions securely either in high or in popular culture" (19). "Un/popular
culture," therefore, purposely denotes a cluster of historically and theoretically incon-
gruous spaces. The book is interested in "how lesbian-feminism became an un/popu-
lar culture" after the sex wars while lesbian postmodernism emerged as the "cultural
avant-garde" (1-2). But the book also explores lesbian postmodernism as, itself, "un/
popular" because of the way in which lesbians are often resistant to theory, viewing it
as too difficult, too elitist, and not realistic enough for the political vanguard. If lesbi-
ans are what they read, Martindale leads us to wonder, why doesn't Judith Butler
make it to the top of Lambda's best-seller list? In some ways, lesbian culture is, by def-
inition, unpopular: lesbian feminists, in general, find culture of any sort politically
suspicious (as Martindale points out using her trademark wit, the "cultural legacy of
lesbian-feminismseems restricted to softball and Holly Near" [13]), and Culture views
lesbians, if at all, as certainly anything but popular (since lesbians are denied the sta-
tus of being "of the people," critics of popular culture don't seem to think lesbians
have one). Martindale writes,

I term lesbian theorizing and other cultural productions in a post-modern

mode an "un/popular culture" not only because the highly contested terms
"lesbian" and "culture" are charged with unpopularity, especially in the cur-
rent American context, but because it is apparently difficult to think "lesbian"
in the same fiame with respect to "culture"--of any son. (14)

While Martindale positions herself as a "lesbian theory queen," she reads lesbian post-
modern culture through the gaze of suspicion (54). She wants to work with difficult
texts but does not want to participate in the commodification of the "po-mo-lesbo" or
the co-opting of lesbian postmodernism as a sexy, trendy, avant-garde lifestyle. I am
reminded of the bizarre marketing strategy used in recent fashion advertisements
where models are shown posing as lesbians to sell designer jeans or expensive per-
fume. Since marketers know that lesbians are economically disenfranchised, earning
less than most women, who earn less than most men, to whom are these advertise-
ments speaking? Un/Popular Culture takes postmodern lesbian writing seriously in
order to challenge the margins of what we know about who lesbians are.
 Nowhere is Martindale's engagement with the difficult margins of lesbian postmod-
ernism more strikingly evident than in her discussion of two lesbian comics, Dykes to
Watch Out For and Hothead Paisan-read and loved by many lesbians but rarely men-
tioned in theoretical texts. Why aren't lesbian comics popular with either lesbian the-
orists or the comic-reading public? Or, as Martindale phrases the question, why are
lesbian comics "not popular enough to be mainstream, not straight enough to be fem-
inist, and not queer enough to be avant-garde-who's watching out for these dykes?"
(58). Thankfully, a lesbian theory queen whose maze of "un/popular culture" provides
a difficult, near impossible map of lesbian writing and identities.

There is a wonderful moment in Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie's documentary

Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives, in which a Toronto woman
recounts how she "discovered she was a lesbian in the 1950s. It wasn't through her
first kiss but through reading a lesbian pulp fiction novel that she came to identify her
sexuality. Reading provided her with the moment of self-revelation and naming. The
disappointment she later felt when she went to Greenwich Village in a futile search
for lesbians, because that was where they always lived in novels, reveals the complex
relationship between lesbian identity and reading. Like the woman in Forbidden
Love, Martindale's critical argument troubles a transparent relationship between text
and identity; she disrupts a reading practice based upon the search for true represen-
tations of our lives. Yet her entire book foregrounds the centrality of difficult writing
to thinking about and knowing lesbian identities. If there is a kernel of truth in the
-I
cartoon joke that Martindale describes about how a chic nineties lesbian stopped
being a radical lesbian-feminist because she couldn't keep up with all the reading,
5 then Martindale wants to demonstrate how reading remains crucial to the nineties les-
-
W
bian. But the lesbian she reads for is elusive, ever-changing,contradictory, butch a n d
11s femme, popular and unpopular, and, above all, this lesbian is excessible.

Someone gave me a copy of Sarah Schulman's After Delores, a revenge-fantasy lesbian

break-up novel, after a particularly difficult break-up of my own. I loved it and
devoured the book and my ex in a wonderfully cathartic evening of fun. But what
reading practice was I engaged in when I forged a lesbian identity through reading a
novel about a poverty-stricken, fucked-up, alcoholic killer who refuses to "heal" after
her loss?As Martindale points out in her chapter on Schulman, "there are no positive
images of lesbians in this novel" (126). Schulman's narrator is not a lesbian with
whom I should be identifying, and After Delores isn't a novel that neatly fits into the
"scarcity model" of reading (the term Martindale borrows from Terry Castle to
describe when lesbians read to find images of what they already know in order to fill
the gap in popular culture [34]).It is these moments--of reading, of pleasure, of difi-
culty, of ambiguity, of subjectivity-that Martindale chronicles. But she is not inter-
ested in telling me why I, as a lesbian, found the novel meaningful or in recovering
the novel as a classic of lesbian literature. Martindale wants to open up the reader of
Schulman's novels to the unknown, the unthought, and the unpopular of lesbian cul-
ture:

After Delores is no celebration of the glamor and romanticism of an outlaw

lesbian culture that would be marketed by the popular press as "lesbian
 chic." ... Her quest has provided her with no sense of belonging or meaning.
There is only absence and alienation. (127)

We are left with an unfillable lack, an uncomfortable ending that Martindale sees as
the beginning of meaningful reading. In a similar reading practised upon Joan Nestle,
the queen of butch-femme representation, Martindale states that she wanted to write
about Nestle because of her own "traumatic inability to 'read' butch-femme lesbian
subjectivities and representational practices adequately" (78). Martindale does not
want to read Nestle in order to tell us what a butch-femme reading practice would or
should be and thereby resolve her trauma; rather, she wants to explore "what makes it
difficult to develop a butch-femme reading practice" (78). In reading Nestle's A
Restricted Country, an autobiographical text of "theoretical erotica," Martindale sug-
gests many points of entry: she positions it historically, theoretically, aesthetically, and
erotically, and, in so doing, thinks with Nestle in providing us with a lesbian identity
that "doesn't speak of fragmentation but of multiplicity" (82). Martindale's readings of
lesbian novels, comics, zines, theories, and autobiographies take us to a well-popu-
lated country of lesbians who may have traded in "their Birkenstocks for Doc Martens
or stilettos" but are creating a vibrant and diverse un/popular culture of their own
(24).

After the reader has wandered through the maze of lesbian writing after the sex wars
with its lesbian-feminists, feminist lesbians, lesbians who are not feminists, feminists
who are not lesbians, postmodern lesbians, lesbian postmodernists, and post-feminist
lesbian postmodernists-not to mention the sidetracks into (lesbian and) gay theory,
lesbianandgay theory, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory-we emerge, at the
end, inside a classroom. The stakes of travelling through lesbian writing here are quite
different. While in theorizing, Martindale suggests lesbian writing queries traditional
understandings of identity and subjectivity, in the classroom, queer pedagogues often
revert to these traditional models. Her own experience, however, has taught her to
distrust "the 'domino effect,' the assumption that ignorance is a passive lack that can
be replaced with knowledge, which will in turn replace hatred with tolerance" (145).
If we could only fill absence with plenitude and tell our students what lesbians really
are, then they would be open to lesbian writing and queer theory. Martindale argues
that such a model of teaching never forces students to question their own homopho-
bia, and it allows them the comfort of passive voyeurism without solving the problem
of getting "beyond Antihomophobia 101" (159). The book ends with her anecdotal
narrative of teaching a class in gender studies at York University and the acknowledge-
ment that the class failed to get students to question their own reading practices. Her
"que(e)ring pedagogy" challenges the efficacy of the institutionalization of lesbian and
gay studies in favour of a pedagogy that works with the difficult and the traumatic in-
and outside courses with lesbian and gay content, a teaching practice (like her read-
ing practice) that concentrates on process rather than content.

The book, then, ends with teaching as a verb, but a verb of which Martindale will no
longer be the subject. The ultimate trauma of UnlPopular Culture is announced in
Deborah Britzman's foreword: "It is my sadness, and of course, the collective sadness
of many others, to report that in the late Fall of 1994, her breast cancer reoccurred
 and on February 17, 1995, Kathleen Martindale d i e d (ix). I cite Britzman's announce-
ment of Martindale's death not only because it is easier to put traumatic words into
someone else's mouth but also to suggest that if we follow the generosity of Martin-
dale's own citational practice and allude to the words already spoken and written by
lesbian critics and writers, Martindale will live on in the bibliographies, indexes, foot-
notes, and quotations of the writing that sustained her life.

Udpopular culture does not end with Martindale's death. The political and cultural
critique she enables continues in contemporary lesbian writing with its fierce refusal
to sacrifice unlpopularity for the financial rewards of trendy popularity or to trade in
excessibility for accessibility. Martindale certainly would have appreciated Sarah Schul-
man's most recent book, Stage Struck: Beater, AIDS, a d the Marketing of Gay Amer-
ica. The book provides a compelling and horrific account of how the multimillion-
dollar, megahit musical Rent is a plagiarized version of her novel People in Trouble. In
chronicling how her novel was co-opted and stolen to make Rent (turning a novel
about the impact of AIDS on East Village gay life into a play where straight people are
the heroes of AIDS), Schulman makes a larger argument about the commodification
of gay culture and writing about AIDS. She draws parallels between the gentrification
of the East Village-the neighbourhood so central to her novels-and the marketing
of gay culture, and she warns against the costs of gays becoming "popular." Remind-
ing us over and over of the various ways lesbians do not profit--either in financial
terms or in terms of who gets to be represented-from the contemporary cultural fas-
-I
cination with gay life, Schulman exposes the pernicious effects of institutionalization,
8 something Martindale anticipated and warned against in her book. Rent, Schulman
5 writes, "reflects the power of institutions to normalize privilege, to homogenize aes-
W
thetics" (44). "Homogenize" and "aesthetics"are two words Martindale's life and writ-
120 ing fought vehemently to keep apart, and UnlPopular Culture gives us a map for the
future, a way of reading lesbian writing as traumatically heterogeneous.

References

Forbidden love: the unashamed stories of lesbian lives. 1992. Directed by Aerlyn Weissrnan and
Lynne Fernie. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada.
Nestle, joan. 1987. A restricted country. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
Schulrnan, Sarah. 1989. After Delores. New York: New American Library.
. 1998. Stage struck Theater, AIDS, and the marketing ofgoy America. Durham, N C : Duke
University Press.