This book is kind of the American counterpart to Dangerous Intimacies, despite being by different authors. Each chapter looks at a different book or set of books to see how women’s relationships with each other function in relation to the broader culture. For example, Chapter 1 takes a look at the figure of the spinster as a type of proto-lesbian.
Kent’s analysis partially builds off of a subversion of the Electra Complex. Instead of saying daughters libidinally desire their fathers, Kent argues that girls desire their mothers and convert that desire into the desire to become their mothers later in life. Instead of internalizing the mother’s gaze through fear (like the panopticon), children internalize the mother’s gaze through love. Kent calls this the disciplinary-tutelary paradigm, and argues that the shift into the industrial age disrupted this model for bourgeoise white women because aspects of the mother/daughter relationship were displaced by other women’s places— women’s colleges, boarding houses, etc. Intimacy and love are vital for subject formation and identification, and identification is always also desire (the desire to be like or near). Certainly, lots of wlw joke today about the perennial problem of figuring out “Do I want to be her or do I want to be on her?” (And the answer is often both)
I think this book could have been a companion to D’Emilio’s analysis of how capitalism created the conditions for homosexual male identity, but about women, but Kent goes in a totally different direction. Instead, she sees emerging proto-lesbian intimacies as “resistances” to the conflation of reproductive labor and productive labor. This is based off of a misreading of Marx (pages 154-155), which Kent imports from Andrew Parker who imports it from Hannah Arendt. They argue that Marx is arguing in The German Ideology against all waste, excess, all labor expended without utility, that he views reproduction as the only valuable sexual expression, that productivity reigns supreme. This is just not true. Marx is saying that under capitalism, objects must have utility in order to have economic value, and labor has no economic value if the thing the labor went into isn’t sellable. And the “labor is the life-activity of the species” bit is saying that people naturally like to do and make things! The whole point of that section is that wage labor, by making us do work in order to have money instead of doing work because we like it, takes away all of the pleasure in working. Like how when people monetize their hobbies, they like those hobbies less.
So, since a lot of her argument in the book is based around this (wrong) idea, I’m not finding the book overall very useful, even though I think some of the readings are interesting. For example, Kent’s reading of Little Women and Jo March’s gender and relationship with her mother, and the next chapter about the early Girl Scouts handbook.
The Girl Scouts chapter discusses how, when the GSs were formed, people were very nervous that they were trying to make girls into Boy Scouts, and that would make them masculine, and that was bad. So, the handbook, while emulating the Boy Scouts in some ways, also makes sure to emphasize traditionally feminine qualities. The idea is that masculine women CAN be made as well as born, even though women ought to be made feminine because that is the way they naturally are. It’s a contradiction. This chapter also shows how scouting is bound up with nationalism, citizenship, and class norms. Girl Scouts is about how to become a Good Middle Class Woman, and if it did its job right, would bring some “masculine” qualities/activities into the fold as acceptable feminine activities, rather than making girls inappropriately masculine. It doesn’t challenge gender norms, just shifts around the boundaries of gender. Just like rainbow capitalism and homonationalism have shifted the boundaries of sexuality so that now there are appropriate ways to be gay without challenging bigger social structures.
(Personally, I’m glad to be affirmed in my childhood sense that Girl Scouts was an inferior version of Boy Scouts designed to make girls feel included while really just making them be Girls instead of letting them learn/do boy stuff. But since I was never in Scouts, it was also fascinating to see how the early iterations of the GS handbook emphasized nationalism and capitalist thrift- selling cookies of course, but also opening a savings account, managing one’s allowance responsibly, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, etc.)
I was also interested to learn that Boy Scouts in England originated when the end of the colonial age meant boys didn’t get the exposure to nature and bonding and practical training in masculinity and nationalism that they would have otherwise gotten.