“The Politics of Respectability Reconsidered: Using the Framework of Respectability to Examine Southern Lesbian History.”
By Ben Wise, University of Florida
I was fortunate to be chair of this panel, which included papers by La Shonda Mims, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, Megan Taylor Shockley, a professor at Clemson University, and Janet Allured, a Professor at McNeese State University. Carolyn Herbst Lewis of Louisiana State University delivered the comments.
Megan Taylor Shockley’s paper entitled, “Respectability and Lesbian Motherhood: Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman,” discussed the child custody cases of Sharon Bottoms and Linda Kaufman though the lens of respectability. In the early 1990s, Sharon Bottoms’ mother sued for custody of her grandson because of her daughters’ harmful “lifestyle” as a lesbian, and the Virginia courts, citing the state’s sodomy laws but turning a blind eye to many other custody case precedents, gave her custody in 1996 (despite the fact that she, too, was living in an unmarried sexual relationship, albeit with a man). Shockley detailed the ways Bottoms was portrayed in the media and in the trial, and argued that—in addition to the obvious homophobia at work—the discourse relied also upon portraying Bottoms as too mobile, too dependent on state welfare, and too unpredictable: in short, she was not a respectable woman in terms of class and social comportment. In contrast, Linda Kaufman was an ordained Episcopal priest who sued the Virginia Department of Social Services in 1999 because they halted her attempt to adopt a child, again citing the state’s sodomy laws. But Kaufman, who was portrayed as an “excellent mother,” a stable worker, and a rooted middle class woman, won her custody case. Shockley worked through the nuances of these two cases and raised questions about the role of the state, the law, and the family in constituting not only our cultural values about sex and gender, but also the well being of children.
Janet Allured’s paper, “Fashion and the Performance of Lesbian Feminist Identity,” opened with a compelling vignette: a group of women were boarding a bus to travel to Baton Rouge to fight for the passage of the ERA, and some women were not allowed to board the bus because they were wearing pants (not skirts, not dresses). Allured invited us to consider fashion through the lens of respectability, because that was a major split among activist women in the 1970s: on the one hand, women wanted a platform from which to speak, and appearing “respectable” allowed them to do that (quite literally—women wearing pants were not allowed on the floor of the state legislature). On the other hand, some women (lesbians in particular) viewed this as a capitulation to the demands of middle class, patriarchal values. Allured drew upon theories of fashion and gender performance to raise questions about the nature of activism and women’s political lives. Fashion, she argued, should be interrogated more fully, alongside other aspects of women’s public lives, in order to give us a more complete view of politics, activism, and American gender norms.
La Shonda Mims’s essay, “Activist or Apathetic? Lesbians and Bar Space in the Post WWII South,” examined bars in Charlotte and Atlanta in order to raise questions about homosocial spaces, political discourse, and the nature of activism. In her research in oral histories and queer newspapers in particular, Mims has found evidence of thriving queer bar scenes in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Her aim has been to figure out what these spaces meant to those who frequented them, and how these meanings did or did not translate into a political vocabulary. Mims argued that in most cases, her evidence suggests that women who went to lesbian or gay bars (most queer bars at the time served a male clientele, since they tended to have more money) seemed to have wanted mainly to drink beer and meet other women. They wanted a place to socialize after a softball game, not a place to organize political networks. Though lesbian bars suggest disrespectability and a segregated social space that is potentially political or pre-political, the women in Mims’ story did not necessarily conceive of their queer identity as a political identity. Mims’ essay provoked a very fruitful discussion of queer activism, the nature of “space” in politics, and the cultural work of homosocial spaces.
On the whole, these papers addressed questions about the viability of respectability as a political strategy among women. Carolyn Herbst Lewis, in her comments, discussed the ways lesbian identity was always mediated by race, class, and gender presentation, and that “respectability” has been only one of many strategies employed by women activists. Whom we call activists, in turn, should be broadened to include not only those demanding entrance into political buildings, but also those whose priorities may be less explicitly political but no less important. The important part of these stories, she noted, was that these were all stories about lesbians fighting against heterosexist laws, policies, spaces, and customs. In some cases they won; in others, there is work yet to be done.