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Strange Ways On Trial: The Pathology of Lesbian Desire from Freud to Kristeva
Lizzy Trafford( MPhil in English, Keele University)
The paper consists of a sample of original poetry with an explanation of the personal and theoretical aspects which underpin it. My research considers the intimate connections and conflicts between desire and psychological illness. This takes two routes. Firstly, I look at Freudian psychology and the so-called‘ masculine complex’ where Freud pathologises lesbian desire. Secondly, my poetry explores how sexuality, in the Western world, is linked to personal‘ truth’. I ask what it means to live as a lesbian and be diagnosed with a mental illness and how the two can combine in certain ways especially when Western ideas of Self, reality and truth are Self-limiting. Ultimately, there is a feeling that the lesbian is‘ on-trial’ – this can be restricting and freeing if taken in the Kristevean sense. My poetry is influenced by the theories of Freud and poststructuralism, as well as personal experience. I create poetic spaces which are as vehement as they are celebratory of‘ Pride’, whether this is‘ gay pride’ or the Christian concept of pride as a‘ deadly sin’. Through changing narrative voices, my poetry engages with love and hatred, inclusion and discrimination, isolation, loneliness and anger. I press upon anxiety, depression and psychosis as psychological illnesses which can occur due to these emotions and question what these reactions mean to those observed.
Keywords: truth, mental illness, lesbian desire, pride, Freud
In this paper, I will explore my poetry and other poets work to ask whether there has been a change in the poetic expression of different sexualities, or the‘ queer’. The term‘ queer’ historically denotes strangeness, sickness and homosexuality. I shall contemplate the intimate connections and conflicts between desire and dis / ability 1, between the so-called‘ strange’ and the‘ sick’. I will question whether multiple sexualities and fluid identities inevitably involve internal conflict due to heteronormative social constructions which silence the queer voice. I will also ask why and how this voice is silenced and how sexuality, in the Western world, is linked to personal‘ truth’. More specifically, my research considers the hybridity of lesbian existence and experience in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Through the perspectives of different narrators who wear‘ masks’, or have antithetical selves, my poetry creates a space of Pride, asking what this means to myself and others.
For poet Adrienne Rich, the history of the lesbian existence is understood as the‘ Great Silence’. 2 To be lesbian is to exist at the margins of history and culture. Instead of
1 The slash within this word emphasises both polarities; it therefore deconstructs the construction of‘ ability’ and‘ disability’. 2 Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, ed., Adrienne Rich’ s Poetry and Prose( London:
Norton, 1993), 208.