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K AY E M I T C H E L L
Popular fiction, from folk tales and fairy tales to popular ballads to modern
bestsellers, has always provided a structure within which our lives can be
understood. Who we are is never fixed, and in modern societies an embedded
122
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Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
sense of self is less available than ever before. Popular fiction has the capacity
to provide us with a workable, if temporary, sense of self.1
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kaye mitchell
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Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
and/or achieved, often through a supreme effort of will, and therefore can
be read as reflections on suitable and unsuitable models of masculine
identity. Masculinity is frequently achieved, in these genres, via an active
exclusion of the homosexual and homoerotic, even whilst forms of homo-
social bonding are encouraged as a means of learning and sustaining manli-
ness. Yet, if the male detective labours to offset the chaos of the external
world and impose his reason upon it, the heroines of popular fiction
frequently labour to contain the chaos and disorder of their own bodies
and emotions. ‘Being a woman’ arguably involves just as much labour as
being a man, in the form of an unceasing self-consciousness to maintain the
facade of perfect femininity, an unceasing performance of that femininity.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding satirises the frustrating and relent-
less labour of beauty-maintenance:
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kaye mitchell
and, crucially, this is ‘work’ that tends to be hidden; popular fiction can
perhaps be seen as bringing it to our attention, however unwittingly.
Is it, then, possible to read popular fictions without succumbing to –
assenting to – their more conservative and restrictive ideological messages?
The false consciousness argument denies the reader an agency (albeit an
agency of refusal) in their reading of popular fiction which feminist critics
have, in recent years, sought to insist upon. In The Feminist Bestseller, as
part of an argument for the inclusion of ‘trash’ (her term) on university
reading lists and for a feminist criticism that avoids the reiteration of
(gendered) literary critical hierarchies, Imelda Whelehan tacitly distinguishes
the ‘feminist reader’ from the common reader (as it were), suggesting that
the latter might still be regarded as prey to false consciousness. A more
optimistic account of the value of popular fiction for many (if not all)
readers comes from McCracken, who argues that bestselling works do not
simply ‘reflect and perpetuate the powerful ideologies that govern our
lives’, they also serve to ‘relate those generalised and impersonal structures
to the personal life and self identity of the reader’.9 Thus, in the case of
patriarchy, viewed as an institutional and impersonal (or supra-personal)
structure, bestsellers aimed at a female readership will attempt not only to
reiterate the terms according to which that institution operates – to ratify
and reify it; they will also seek to speak to the experience of individual
women living within patriarchal societies and to speak to them in ways that
are likely more consolatory than admonitory. For this reason, popular
culture cannot be viewed as simply and straightforwardly regulatory
(although it certainly serves this function, to some degree). McCracken,
then, retains a belief in ‘popular fiction’s ability to gesture to a better world’,
and argues that ‘the potential for transgression contained in popular fiction
creates the possibility for new and different potential selves’.10 These new
selves are made possible for all readers, I would suggest, not only those who
self-define as ‘feminist’.
Feminist authors have, though, exploited this ‘potential for transgression’
still further, by making notable interventions within genre fiction, using
popular fiction as a route to the subversion of gender and sexual ideologies.
Popular fiction is ideally suited to such ideological revisioning primarily
because of the large and diverse audience that it is able to reach and in this
way such appropriations also counteract allegations of feminism’s exclusiv-
ity (which Whelehan, in her appeal to the ‘feminist reader’, is in danger of
reinstating), its preserve as the interest of privileged, middle-class readers
or of those in receipt of a particular kind of education. An embrace
of the ‘popular’ – by author or by critic – can therefore be read as a
democratising impulse.
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Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
crime fiction and science fiction, and sometimes editions of already pub-
lished novels rather than originals, date from the 1930s, but the 1950s are
the heyday of pulp and the ‘lesbian pulp fiction’ that I’m going to discuss
here is pretty much confined to the period 1950–65.
Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks (1950) – ‘the frank autobiography of
a French girl soldier’, as its tagline proclaims – was one of the first books to
be published in the new paperback format by Fawcett Gold Medal Press and
is generally held to be the first lesbian pulp novel. It sold 1 million copies in
the first year of publication, more than 3 million in total before going out of
print. (It came back into print in 2005 with CUNY’s Feminist Press as part
of their ‘femmes fatales’ series.) In the light of its success, a young jobbing
journalist, Marijane Meaker, was asked by editor Dick Carroll at Fawcett to
write a novel about lesbian affairs between college girls. The result was
Spring Fire (1952) (‘A story once told in whispers now frankly, honestly
written’). Carroll informed Meaker that the book had to have an unhappy
ending (e.g. ‘the lesbian going crazy’) or copies of the book ‘would be
seized by the Post Office as obscene’, telling her, ‘you cannot make homo-
sexuality attractive. No happy ending’, and insisting that ‘your main
character can’t decide she’s not strong enough to live that life. She has to
reject it knowing that it’s wrong.’17 Meaker followed these instructions
(one character decides she’s not gay, the other ends up in a mental asylum),
and acknowledged that the book was meant to be a titillating read for
heterosexual men, yet she says: ‘when it came out I got just hundreds of
letters, boxes of them, all from women, gay women. It took them all
by surprise, this big audience out there.’18 The first printing sold more than
1.4 million copies, whilst Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out was the second
bestselling paperback of 1957.19 Hundreds of lesbian pulp titles were
produced through the 1950s and ’60s.
Although there was no single formula, lesbian pulp novels were more or
less formulaic, sharing a number of points in common, in their settings,
plots and characterisation, for example: all-female settings (college
campuses/dormitories, summer camps, career girls sharing city apartments);
stereotypical characters such as the butch (swaggering, predatory, preying
on the more feminine and often younger girl, wearing trousers and hanging
out in bars), and the femme (with her overdone femininity, voluptuous, a
femme fatale figure, or weak, ditzy and whining); there was a focus on the
bar scene, lesbian subculture, alcoholism, illegal or illicit parties, usually
with an urban setting (notably Greenwich Village); and usually there were
unhappy endings, where the lesbian characters were ‘converted’ to hetero-
sexuality (particularly the femmes), or where they ended up miserable,
alcoholic, suicidal or insane. So the surface ‘message’ was often that
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Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
value to her in also describing them as ‘the only blooms in the desert’.23
Katherine V. Forrest, with a little more hyperbole (befitting the pulp subject),
remembers her first purchase of a pulp novel:
If both Millett and Forrest’s descriptions reveal the shame and anxiety
associated with pulp (and, we might note, with much popular, sensationalist
fiction and much fiction dealing with the representation of the erotic), they
also insist upon precisely those issues of identity, community and pleasure
that are central to any discussion of popular fiction and gender and
sexuality.
Pulp novels ostensibly function as agents of social, moral and political
regulation, policing female sexual behaviour and producing female sexual
identity in various ways, working towards the re-establishment of sexual
and social order. In these novels, female promiscuity is punishable, lesbian-
ism (if not overcome or rejected by the end of the novel) brings alcoholism,
misery or suicide and is frequently linked to criminality. Pulps detail the
consequences of overt, active and/or ‘deviant’ female sexuality, figuring that
sexuality as both symptom and cause of social and moral degeneration;
indeed the issue here is precisely agency – active (as opposed to passive,
responsive) female sexuality, just is ‘deviant’, even if heterosexual. Specific
anxieties (about sex outside marriage and the increasing visibility of les-
bianism, for example) can be seen as part of a more general anxiety about
female roles and identities in the 1950s. ‘College girls’ and ‘career girls’
figure frequently in these novels, suggesting a concern both with the move-
ment of women into the public sphere and with the dangers of all-female
communities. A key problem is that of influence (an influence that works by
proximity or contiguity). This can be the influencing of women by other
women – examples include the butch college lesbian who preys upon her
weak but otherwise ‘normal’ roommate, found in Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl
Out and Vin Packer’s Spring Fire or the sexually experienced older woman
who leads astray a naı̈ve girl, which happens in Torres’s Women’s Barracks;
but fears about influence also concern the effect of woman’s exposure to the
public world (her innate corruptibility), and the influence of woman upon
that public world (the feminisation of the public sphere). Indeed, in one
non-fiction pulp work of 1961, lesbianism is referred to as an ‘infection’,
and in a chapter titled ‘The Infection Spreads’ it is suggested that ‘the
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This can be read as confirming Stacey and Pearce’s claim that, in lesbian
romance, ‘obstacles are shown to be integral to romance: they are not
something to be magically “disappeared” through consummation/
resolution’.30 Nevertheless, the possibility of some resolution of conflict,
doubt or indecision, however temporary, partial and fantasised, indicates
the value of popular texts – even those texts that simultaneously encode
quite conservative and punitive messages. I will leave open the question of
whether popular fictions concerned with sexuality – whether straight or
gay – are always marked, in their structural and ideological inconsistencies,
by ‘the nature of desire, restless and insatiable’, or whether it is such fictions
that are responsible for producing this particular understanding of desire as,
necessarily, uncontainable, uncontrollable, liable to wander. This ultimate
refusal of closure/satiation of desire (including readerly desire) always
leaves open the possibility of another story and, therefore, of continuing
consumption; this explains, in part, popular fiction’s investment in seriality.
Although pulp novels are defined by their (low) status as consumer
artifacts, possibilities for subversion of the messages (and regulatory lean-
ings) of pulp lie also in its modes of distribution. Pulps resisted regulation
through their sheer availability: they were sold via drugstores and news-
stands, rather than conventional bookshops; and by popular presses (such
as Fawcett, Beacon and Midwood) which were not subject to the controls of
more ‘literary’ publishing houses. They sold in huge numbers, quickly, and
went out of print just as quickly. Sales were not tracked, so it is difficult to
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know who exactly read pulp; the books were also passed from reader to
reader, or simply disposed of. Responding to Lee Server’s assertion that the
pulp publishing boom of the 50s was ‘subversive’,31 Christopher Nealon
writes that ‘pulp fiction seemed to open the door to unregulated consump-
tion of literary materials, out of reach – briefly, indeed – of censors, but
readily available to readers’.32 Again, the implied excess of this is troubling:
consumption is encouraged in the capitalist society in which these books are
exchanged, but ‘unregulated consumption’ suggests the inbuilt flaws of that
economy and reveals how pulp fiction, as a form of popular culture, is both
the most paradigmatic expression of the market and the moment of its
possible undoing.
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new subgenre: the women’s popular erotic memoir. Whilst Millet’s work
undoubtedly had literary (if not, indeed, philosophical) pretensions (and is
best read alongside continental antecedents such as Pauline Réage, Anais
Nin, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade), the works that publishers
have rushed into print to capitalise on Millet’s success have been
unashamedly mass-market, and have served to blur the distinction between
memoir and fiction (and, for that matter, between reality and fantasy).
Recent examples include: the two ‘Belle de Jour’ books, The Intimate
Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005) and The Further Adventures of
a London Call Girl (2007); Abby Lee, Girl With a One-Track Mind (2006)
and its follow-up, Girl With a One-Track Mind: Exposed (2010); Stephanie
Klein, Straight Up and Dirty (2007); Melissa P, One Hundred Strokes of
the Brush Before Bed (2004); Suzanne Portnoy, The Butcher, the Baker, the
Candlestick Maker: An Erotic Memoir (2006); Tracy Quan’s Manhattan
Call Girl series of novels (2005–8), and many more besides.
These titles are notable: first, for their interchangeability (regardless of
whether they claim to be true-life accounts or novels) and particularly the
interchangeability of their packaging (shades of pink, with animated,
slightly suggestive images of women); secondly, for their close relationship
to chick lit (evident, again, in their packaging, but also in the deployment of
similar motifs and concerns – romance, consumerism, ‘having it all’, the
legacies of feminism/the meanings of post-feminism);35 thirdly, for their
uneasy conflation of ‘erotic memoir’ and ‘prostitute narrative’ motifs; and
fourthly, for the fact that many of them began life as blogs (e.g. Belle de
Jour, Lee and Klein). This last point suggests that the internet has a hugely
important role to play in the construction and dissemination of popular
narratives about sexuality in the twenty-first century, and there are various
reasons for this: it facilitates the instant, widespread and notionally ‘free’
distribution of erotic material;36 it allows for author and reader anonymity
(which has been particularly important within communities and societies
where taboos remain around the discussion of female sexuality, homosexu-
ality, or sexuality generally), thus constituting a ‘safe’ space for sexual self-
expression; it encourages confession and links this, in a very un-Foucauldian
way, to identity;37 it creates (virtual) networks and communities (and
remember that communities of exchange have always been vital for the
success of popular fiction, particular for genres such as romance); ‘word of
mouth’ is here magnified, exponentially.
Feona Attwood argues that the popularity of such blogs and ‘blooks’ (as
the blogs-turned-books have become known) amongst female authors and
readers ‘can . . . be linked to the longstanding identification of diaries and
other autobiographical forms of writing as women’s genres. More generally,
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talk about personal and intimate issues is associated with women and with
women’s media such as the talk show, romantic novels and women’s maga-
zines.’38 Whilst this, rightly, places blogs and blooks within a particular
popular cultural tradition (and Attwood proceeds to read Belle de Jour and
Abby Lee in relation to Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary), it fails
to challenge either these kinds of gendered associations or the inherent
validity of sexual confession and its supposed, constitutive links to identity.
In addition, although affirmative readings of these memoirs tend to high-
light the emphasis on female pleasure and (sexual) agency, that is an
emphasis that is often undermined by the content of the texts themselves.
Thus, Belle’s own pleasure is not an issue in most of her sexual encounters as
she is (unsurprisingly) more concerned with pleasing the client – she
acknowledges that ‘this is a customer service position, not a self-fulfilment
odyssey’ and elaborates that ‘being desired is fun’;39 following another
professional encounter, she laments that, ‘It made me feel like unturned
clay must, wanting to form into something, some fantasy, but not being
allowed’, and yet this desire to form into someone else’s fantasy is miscon-
strued, in the popular and media response to the books, as female sexual
liberation.40 In her personal life, Belle’s description of her ‘enjoyment’ in her
first sexual encounter with a particular man boils down to the fact that
‘Here was a man, finally, who knew what he wanted and, better still, knew
what to do to get it’;41 of one abusive relationship, she claims, ‘I couldn’t
imagine myself in this man’s arms so much as on the end of his fist.’42 Abby
Lee’s sexual experiences are more convincingly pleasurable (not least
because she’s not working in prostitution), but she still agonises, endlessly,
over the question of whether her sexual desires (which are actually fairly
conventional and heterosexual, albeit non-monogamous, casual and active)
make her a ‘freak’.43
Whilst the original blogs from which these books derive might seem to
operate outside the exigencies of the market, they are centrally concerned
with consumption, and indeed reveal the increasing difficulty of discussing
sex and sexuality – in a popular arena – without employing the language of
commerce, consumerism and quantity.44 Even if not rapidly appropriated
by and assimilated into the commercial sphere through print publication,
they model a neo-liberal conception of sexuality as consumption, possession
and individualism: as Belle asserts, disconcertingly, ‘Like the Army, I have
fun and get paid to do it. Sometimes it’s not as fun but I always get
paid.’45 As such they constitute one more example of the movement of
capitalism into the sphere of personal life, whilst also suggesting the con-
tinuing, compromised attempts of popular culture to account for those still
tricky subjects of female sexual agency and pleasure. As self-consciously
136
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NOTES
1 Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press,
1998), p. 2.
2 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) (Hertfordshire: Words-
worth Editions, 1997).
3 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 4.
5 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Litera-
ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
6 Ibid.
7 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (London: Picador, 1996), p. 30.
8 Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Chris Weedon, Rewriting
English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 75.
9 McCracken, Pulp, pp. 44–5.
10 Ibid., p. 13.
11 See Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford University Press,
2005), ch. 6, ‘Regendering the Genre’.
12 Sally Munt, Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 6–7.
13 Ibid., p. 1.
14 See, for example, Susan Stryker’s book Queer Pulp (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 2001), one of the earliest overviews of pulp, although mainly notable for
its extensive illustrations.
15 Lee Server, Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paper-
back, 1945–1955 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 9.
16 Examples of non-US pulp include Shirley Verel, The Dark Side of Venus (1962)
(British), and Anna Elisabet Weirauch, Of Love Forbidden (1958) (German –
also published under the title, The Scorpion).
17 Quoted in Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 55.
18 Ibid.
19 Bannon is now feted as the queen of pulp and still does lecture tours and readings
in the US, although at the time she was an unhappy housewife, making illicit trips
to Greenwich Village and then writing fiction based on her experiences there.
20 Yvonne Keller, ‘“Was it Right to Love her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?”:
Lesbian Pulp Novels and US Lesbian Identity, 1950–1965’, American Quarterly
57:2 (2005): 390–1.
21 Ibid., p. 390.
138
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Gender and sexuality in popular fiction
22 Ibid., p. 395.
23 Kate Millett, Flying (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974), p. 202.
24 Katherine V. Forrest, ‘Introduction’, in Lesbian Pulp Fiction anthology (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 2005), p. ix.
25 Carlson Wade, The Troubled Sex (New York: Beacon Envoy, 1961), p. 33.
26 Tereska Torres, Women’s Barracks (1950) (New York: Feminist Press, 2005),
p. 30.
27 Vin Packer, Spring Fire (1952) (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004); Ann Bannon,
Beebo Brinker (1962) (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001).
28 Bannon, Beebo Brinker, p. 232.
29 Diane Hamer, ‘I Am a Woman’, in Mark Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing:
An Anthology of Critical Essays (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990),
p. 69.
30 Jackie Stacey and Lynne Pearce (eds.), Romance Revisited (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1995), p. 24.
31 Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 9.
32 Christopher Nealon, ‘Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction’,
New Literary History 31 (2000): 748.
33 For the important, more positive feminist, accounts of romance, see: Radway,
Reading the Romance; Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance: The
Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Stacey
and Pearce (eds.), Romance Revisited; Lynne Pearce, Fatal Attractions (London:
Pluto, 1998) and Romance Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Tania Modleski,
Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London:
Methuen, 1982). For second-wave attacks on romance, see Kate Millett, Sexual
Politics (1969); Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970).
34 The Sexual Life of Catherine M sold more than 400,000 copies in France, and
has been translated into twenty-six languages; in the UK it became Serpent’s
Tail’s biggest seller, and they proceeded to have significant success with Melissa
P’s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (2004) (an international bestseller) and
Emily Maguire’s Taming the Beast (2005).
35 The connection to chick lit is reinforced by reviews of Belle de Jour which
describe her as ‘a top shelf Bridget Jones’ (Daily Mail) and ‘Bridget Jones in a
brothel’ (Heat Magazine).
36 Erotic, rather than pornographic, although the distinction is, admittedly, a
contested one – the difference here is perhaps that you have to pay for
pornography!
37 Such blogs can be seen as an extension of those social networking sites which
seek to express and/or consolidate identity through the enumeration of tastes – in
music, film, etc; in the ‘sex blogs’, it is sexual tastes and proclivities which are
seen as defining the individual or as constituting the ‘truth’ of identity, particu-
larly as far as women are concerned.
38 Feona Attwood, ‘Intimate Adventures: Sex Blogs, Sex “Blooks” and Women’s
Sexual Narration’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 12:1 (2009): 6.
39 Belle de Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (London: Orion,
2005), p. 94.
40 Ibid., p. 212.
41 Ibid., p. 67.
139
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42 Ibid.
43 Abby Lee, Girl with a One-Track Mind (London: Ebury Press, 2006), p. vii.
44 For alternatives to the more commercially minded Belle and Girl, see, for
example, the (recently discontinued) ‘Bitchy Jones’ blog at http://bitchyjones.
wordpress.com/, which puts great stress on the fact that Bitchy is not selling
sexual services (‘I do not do dominatrixing for money’) or writing for money. See
also Kitty Stryker’s blog, Purrversatility, where she describes herself as a queer
professional domme, and muses on her experiences and relationships; although
she is selling her services (on another site), she presents herself as ‘alternative’ in
her sexuality and in her politics.
45 Belle de Jour, Intimate Adventures, p. 102.
46 Lee, Girl With a One-Track Mind, p. 217.
47 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
(London: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 29.
140
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