Dasgupta 1

Samik Dasgupta

Prof. Shormistha Panja

MC 5

Gender Studies

11 November 2011

Expression of feminine sexual pleasure in a heterosexual public space of an imaginative rendering of a performance of Stravinskys The Rites of Spring, in the concluding chapter of the first book of Lost Girls, by Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore.

The argument for this paper was born out of a questioning of certain propositions of French Feminists in the context of gendered spaces and citizenship, such that what seemed to me abstruse academic discourse could be reconciled with the socio-political reality in which I situate myself. The bridge between academia and my socio-political reality was formed by a work of fiction, which was born largely from a reflection on matters of individual identity as connected to the social perception of sex ( Di Liddo 155). There is a specific reason for taking up the text of Lost Girls, which being a graphic novel reaches out to a very niche audience among the readership, mostly limited to a particular age group whose coming to terms with problems of adolescence, sex and identity, leads to the birth of certain irremediable conceptions. Even though Alan Moore has arguably led comics to being read as a serious genre of literary fiction, as the graphic novel, it cant deny its roots in mass consumed literary forms like pornography. By pornography, I am referring to the triad of image, text and sex where there is an absence of context, consequence or plot and the sexual act is blown out of realistic proportions to make it seem consensual and titillating. Alan

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Moore and Melinda Gebbie seem firmly aware of their origins, having grown up at a time when make-love-not-war(which is taken up as a dominant theme in the graphic novel being discussed) ruled the mindsets of the flower power generation and the youth was deeply absorbed in the psychedelic powers of characters of childrens literary fiction. I am aware of the problem of generalizing besetting my path, specially when Lost Girls seems to have been written keeping in mind a primarily Anglo-American audience, familiar with the already strange relationship between image and sex which tries to foreclose the intervention of talk and text into the image-sex dyad, (Sandifer). I intend to skirt this problem by foreclosing any possibility of a gargantuan leap from the text to a specific socio-political reality.

My paper reads the expression of feminine sexual pleasure in a heterosexual public space of an imaginative rendering of a performance of Stravinskys The Rites of Spring, in the concluding chapter of the first book of Lost Girls. As per the necessity of the argument, I will define the complicated categories like feminine sexual desire, gendering of spaces and the mythopoeic element of the final chapter, in the subsequent portions of my paper.

I.

Female Sexual Pleasure

I have not delved into the debate regarding Lacans positing of Jouissance as the painful principle, born out of a lack and how Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray re-read them in the light of an independent female identity. My concern is with the French word for orgasm or for a pleasure so intense that it is at once of the body and outside it, became a fashionable term of literary theory for an intensity which, like womans pleasure, is outside language. (Weil 153) This pleasure, located outside the discourse of patriarchal language, is capable of unshackling certain restraints which prevents women from asserting their sexual difference. In a text like

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Lost Girls where three characters from Anglo American childrens fiction indulge in unending sexual acts to get over their childhood traumas and societal taboos pertaining to sexual identity, this notion of sexual pleasure encourages one to remember the questions posed by Helene Cixous in Sorties from La jeune nee [The Newly Born Woman.]

For me, the question What does she want? that they ask of a woman, a question that in fact woman asks herself because they ask it of her, because precisely there is so little place in society for her desire that she ends up by dint of not knowing what to do with it , no longer knowing where to put it, or if she has any, conceals the most immediate and the most urgent question: How do I experience sexual pleasure? What is feminine sexual pleasure, where does it take place, how is it inscribed at the level of her body, of her unconscious? And then how is it put into writing? (Cixous)

I wish to answer Cixous questions by looking at the text of Lost Girls, since I believe that feminine sexual pleasure has been put into writing here. Reading the text as pandering into sexual utopia (Collins), I perceive that feminine sexual pleasure cant be defined from the male perception of a heterosexual intercourse, infact, it eludes any project at defining it in words alone. Gebbies fusion of art with Moores text offers us some help, by suggesting an exclusive topos like Hotel Himmelgarten where the lips get together. There is a lyrical evocation of lesbian love as a space where there are no proprietors, no purchasers, no determinable objects, no prices. However this equating of lesbian love with feminine sexual pleasure holds true for only certain chapters of Lost Girls, because in the recollections of the protagonists, we see a different idea of suppressed feminine sexual pleasure letting itself be known. This is where Moore engages with the canon of Anglo-American Childrens literary fiction and explores childhood-

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back in Victorian times . . . we came up with this fabrication of what childhood is supposed to mean, which is contrary to any real experience. . . . Childhood is a frightening, savage time that is awash with emotions that are probably more powerful than any that we will ever have for the rest of our lives. . . . It has got everything in it. It has got terror, it has got sex, it has got everything that, as adults, we try to protect children from. And we know from our own experience that you cant protect them from it, and that is the world in which they live. (Tantimedh)

The notion of an idyllic or fantastic childhood of Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz) and Wendy (from Peter Pan) is shattered when the readers confront the sexual explorations which such familiar characters of child fiction indulge in. The feminine sexual pleasure addressed here is not of a similar nature to that expressed by their elder, happily-ever-after counterparts of Lady Alice Fairchild, Dorothy Parker and Mrs. Potter in Lost Girls. However, for both, the ritualistic power of sex in healing injured souls. While its important to talk openly about a basic physical process like sex, one must remember that it doesnt only manifest itself in the literal act between homosexual or heterosexual partners. The pleasure derived from the ritualistic power of sex can also be located in the exercises of certain political rights, in the reading as well as composition of texts and in realizing a world devoid of the hypocrisy-

that claims to preserve innocencefor instance by pretending that children are asexual while actually accepting worse forms of violence and constantly abusing that very innocence both through overt aggression, as occurs in the case of wars or of juvenile exploitation (see Amacker, The Virtues of Vice Part 2), and through the covert, and thus even more

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dangerous, sexualization of infancy that often appears in pop culture (see Tantimedh, Finding the Lost Girls Part 1). ( Di Liddo)

In the text of Lost Girls, the topos of expression of female sexual pleasure is not one but several. It includes the sexual utopia of Hotel Himmelgarten, the opera at Paris where Le Sacre du Printemps was staged, the island in the Bodensee and the reconstructed, recollected memories of Alice, Dorothy, Wendy.

At the level of the body of these three characters, it takes place as an act of assertion of ones sexual needs, devoid of a male counterpart, often tribadic but necessarily cerebral, imagining ones way to unrealised fantasies to test them for their validity and how they shaped their individual persona. The way it plays out on their unconscious is comparable to the way imagination and sexuality work in another work by Alan Moore, Promethea. Here imagination is suggested to be the antidote for crimes on humanity, justifying that when human beings give leeway to their imagination, they enter into a realm not facing the material problems which plagues our world. Since this realm promises infinite resources for the pleasurable livelihood of every dreamer, it poses a threat to the militaristic, capital driven society of private ownership and private property1. A similar dichotomy is drawn in Lost Girls when the women indulge in a mnage a trois while World War I starts to spread its dehumanising shadow over Europe. Its also present in the clearly defined contents of speeches of men and women in the novel. Harold Potter and Rolf Baueur always seem to discussing the immense power wielded by the mechanized mercantile society thats come into being all over Europe whereas the women tend to discuss their childhood sexual traumas.
1

These ideas are the paraphrased conversations between Sophie Bangs and the Promethea projection of

Margaret in the Weapon for Liberty, Book 5 of the Promethea series.

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One can accuse Alan Moore of being politically incorrect and not nuanced on the basis of such sharp distinctions but one must realise the essentialist argument to which Moore is subscribing.

Rather than reading Moore and Gebbies work as pop Freudianism2, I would argue that they endorse the essentialist viewpoint of early critical works of Luce Irigaray

Elsewhere in Speculum de l'autre femme, however, Irigaray insists that women today are not the same as men but that they have much to gain, politically, from demanding social justice and risking sameness. Sameness, in other words, may be a necessary first stage before differences can be perceived and appreciated:" It is still a matter, ultimately, of demanding the same prerogatives [as men have] .... [W]omen have to advance to those same privileges (and to sameness, perhaps) before any consideration can be given to the differences that they might give rise to." (Holmlund)

Thanks to Freud, we all lost our innocence, the story goes. Moore and Gebbie pay their respects to Freud quite explicitly. After Wendy

tells of her childhood encounter with Peter in Volume 1, she expresses concern that she sounds deranged, to which Alice replies "'Fiddlesticks! Why, there is a notable professor of the mind currently practising not far from here, in Vienna. He would find your image of flight perfectly acceptable and indeed appropriate. I have no doubt you are as sane as I" (I, 8: 8). "Of course," she adds, "I did spend a number of years in a sanatorium" (1, 8, 8). Alice, of course, predates Freud, whereas Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz were written in Freud's lifetime. Barrie's description of the Neverland seems rather akin to Freud's notion of the unconscious, and literary critic Jacqueline Rose has pointed to other such echoes in her study The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. The Wizard of Oz appeared the same year as The Interpretation of Dreams, and of course the 1939 film released the year of Freud's death turns Baum's novel into an elaborate dream-work. The popular reception and adaptation of psychoanalysis, then, helps account for the staying power of these three classics and perhaps vice versa. It's not just that Lost Girls draws from pop-Freudianism; it is pop-Freudianism. (Kidd)

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II.

The heterosexual space

Both the public workplace and the private domestic sphere comprise key sites where gender is operative. Recent sociological studies aim to read spaces as not geographical entities which have an inherent geocentric meaning but to whom meaning is lent by the dominant discourses operating in that region. This leads to a gendering of space, most notably in the form of heteronormativity in which sex is represented, perceived and understood in different national contexts, collectively it has suggested that the organization of space in western societies serves to naturalize heterosexuality. Such a discourse creates problems for people of different gender orientations to inhabit a common public space and consequently, lay claims to a citizenship of the space vis--vis state. A woman breast feeding in public is still perceived as an anomalous practice; increasingly metropolises across the world are getting split up in the form of ghettos for people with differing sexual preferences. 3

The heterosexual public space which I wish to analyse in my paper is the Opera at Paris where an adaptation of Igor Stravinskys The Rites of Spring was staged, in the last chapter of Book 1 of Lost Girls.

Why am I insistent on calling it heterosexual? Its precisely because of the visual depiction of the space in the graphic novel that one has to continuously assert the nature of the space. The

Developing this point, Susan Smith (1989: 151) refers specifically to the example of Australia, where notions

of citizenship appear to have been constructed around notions of mateship and fraternity, which are simultaneously racialized, gendered and sexualized. This, she argues, results in political and civil rights for Australians that are not liberatory per se but instead represent an institutionalization of sexual (and gender and racial) inequality. (Hubbard 54)

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space is being defined by the performance that is taking place, both on the proscenium stage and in the audience. In fact, different rows of the audience react to the performance in different ways, with a strict gender colouring on the part of the illustrator of the text.

III.

Expression of feminine sexual desire in a heterosexual space

But if women are to preserve and expand their autoeroticism, their homo-sexuality, might not the renunciation of heterosexual pleasure correspond once again to that disconnection from power that is traditionally theirs? Would it not involve a new prison, a new cloister, built of their own accord? (Irigaray 32-33)

Irigarays essay holds a very important proposal for understanding of sexual differences. She argues that homosexuality can play an important role in the unshackling of feminine sexual desire. I am not conflating feminine sexual desire with feminine sexual pleasure but trying to read how this desire expresses itself as jouissance and makes possible the birth of an ecriture feminine. During the performance of the opera, we observe Alice, Dorothy and Wendy gradually indulging in tribadism, in full public view of the first row of audience. Le Sacre du Printemps, the adaptation of The Rites Of Spring, which is being staged in front of them, is recreating the genesis myth from a feminine perspective. The accumulative aesthetic force of the costumes, music, gesture, lights is creating an atmosphere of fantasy for the three protagonists. As they indulge in various sexual acts, they seem to be oblivious of their surroundings and their surroundings seem to be too caught up with the performance on stage. The illustrator doesnt let this illusion persist for long. She immediately starts showing how the men and women surrounding Alice, Dorothy and Wendy have started reacting to these

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performances. They cant stare at the three women asserting their sexual needs but can only grimace collectively. (2499 words)

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Works Cited
Di Liddo, Annalisa. "Finding a Way Into Lost Girls." Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore : comics as performance, fiction as scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 134-161. Collins, Meredith. "History, Pornography and Lost Girls." 2007. Department of English, University of Florida. 10 11 2011 <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/collins.shtml>. Gebbie, Melinda and Alan Moore. Lost Girls. Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006. Holmlund, Christine. "The Lesbian, the Mother, the Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray's Recodings of Difference." Feminist Studies 17.2 (1991): 283-308. Hubbard, Phil. "Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space." Sexualities 4.51 (2001): 51-71. Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. 23-53. Kidd, Kenneth. "Down the Rabbit Hole." 2007. Department of English, University of Florida. 10 November 2011 <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/kidd.shtml>. Sandifer, Philip. "ImageSexT:A Roundtable on Lost Girls, Introduction." 2007. Department of English, University of Florida. 10 November 2011 <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/>. Tantimedh, Adi. " Finding the Lost Girls with Alan Moore Part 1. ." 25 May 2006. Comic Book Resources. 10 11 2011 <http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7411.>. Weil, Kari. "French feminism s ecriture feminine." The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Ed. Ellen Rooney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 153-171.