"Dyke," hiss the schoolboys, to the girls with grass-stained knees and dirt-streaked cheeks. To the girls who run faster, throw further, tackle harder than the prides of fatherhood manifest. A word, but so much more a performance. A stereotype, but so much more an expectation. Sometimes, these girls are wronged. Sometimes, these boys are right. Playground dykes: a first acknowledgment of sexual beings, independent of sex, distorting the being.
I find it impossible to live separate from the homosexual lifestyle. To pass as straight is to deny gay culture, but to embrace gay culture for the sake of camaraderie is to perpetuate a false image. Sexuality and gender are not interchangeable ideals, nor do they obey the certain analogous formula of normal is to normal as abnormal is to abnormal. I can be gay and still be female.
[...] (Shakespeare, Macbeth III.iv.61-69) Under the constant pressure of Lady Macbeth's scrutiny and psychological abuse—and possible physical abuse off-stage—it is no surprise that Macbeth begins to agree with his own feminization, to look upon his delusions as the “strange and self-abuse” reflective of his own masochistic tendencies (III.iv.143). These delusions, the not-quite-tangible but otherwise expression of the remorse he feels for killing Duncan, the empathy he feels toward the victims of their regicidal plans, are in direct conflict with Lady Macbeth's lasting symptoms. [...]
[...] There is so much weight placed on But really, we all share the same risk of simplification. Works Cited Brierley, Marjorie. “Some Problems of Integration in Women.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1932): 433-448. Butler, Judith. “Melancholy Gender-Refused Identification.” Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture. Ed. Muriel Dimen and Virginia Goldner. New York: Other 3-19. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales (Original-Spelling Edition). New York: Penguin Chodorow, Nancy J. “Gender as a Personal and Cultural Construct.” Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture. [...]
[...] The qualities Lady Macbeth adopts to become a man, her journey toward her dreams of unsexing, become the qualities expected of lesbians. Because Lady Macbeth has become, not just a lesbian, but the lesbian, the archetype. And the web of assumptions remaining is tangled, confused, and inescapable. Straight females athletes can barely prove their heterosexuality through marriage. And I can never prove that I am happy to be a woman. I can never prove that I am not sadistic, that I am not oversexualized and undermoralized, that I am not Lady Macbeth. [...]
[...] Lady Macbeth exhibits a similar distortion of the oedipal complex. She defends her inability to murder Duncan not as a question of feminine weakness but as a question of masculine identity: he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had she claims (Shakespeare, Macbeth II.ii.12-13). To kill the semblance of her father, the man from whom she copied her identity, her mentor, would be to kill herself. Much of Lady Macbeth's masculinity is forged from the natural analogy between sex and violence. [...]
[...] ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” Freud on Women: A Reader. Ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New York: Norton 304-314. Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Abridged).” Freud on Women: A Reader. Ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. New York: Norton 89-145. Goldner, Virginia and Muriel Dimen. “Introduction.” Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture. Ed. Muriel Dimen and Virginia Goldner. New York: Other xv-xx. Harris, Adrienne. Gender as Soft Assembly. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Magee, Maggie and Diana C. [...]
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