Female Deviations:
By Justin Hayford
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Loomis embodies the transgressions that send a large sector of the American population into apoplectic fits. Despite Hollywood’s aggressive attempts to neutralize (read “de-gay”) the subversive potential of drag, America remains a land of pathological gender insecurity; how else can you explain the cultish popularity of Julia Sweeney’s “It’s Pat” sketches on Saturday Night Live, designed with no other objective than to ridicule someone of indeterminate sex? Though mainstream pop psychologists are getting rich detailing the skirmishes in an imaginary war between straight men and women, in reality normative masculinity and femininity occupy adjoining penthouse barracks in the well-fortified bastion of heterosexuality, from which endless salvos are fired at those who prefer to go without the rusty, clanking armor of traditional gender roles. The stain of homosexuality on the body politic threatens to dissolve our culture’s most cherished and fundamental self-concept: gender. Gays are threatening because, as “feminized” men and “mannish” women, they demonstrate that the terms “man” and “woman” come not from nature but from a centuries-old patriarchal coercion campaign.
In essence, Loomis seems to be asking what happens to lesbianism when it eroticizes patriarchal power relations. Loomis and her lover are not “real” lesbians, at least as mainstream gay culture would define them (a lesbian performing fellatio on a dildo?). Yet these “unreal” lesbians are not “real women” in the eyes of mainstream America either, because real women are heterosexual and feminine (whatever that means). Loomis and her lover become double ciphers, stranded on a cliff of their own making where culturally accepted signifiers cannot get a toehold. It’s no wonder that, in one of her menstrual dreams, Loomis finds herself sleeping in a bed on a swiftly flowing river, longing for solid ground.
