"Rubyfruit Jungle" de Rita Mae Brown

Feminismo, teoría queer y avances sociales en la América de los años cincuenta y sesenta

Abstract

First-wave nineteenth-century feminisms addressed their positions by attempting to fit women into the universal “Human”. Second-wave feminisms, starting from the 1960s and 1970s, generated a critique of the universal Human as inherently not just incidentally masculine. Yet this critique rested upon a categorization of men and women, on gender difference, on a doubling of universal categories. The universal category “woman”, taken up so strongly in the 1980s, was then criticized in turn as inherently not just incidentally focused on white, upper/middle-class heterosexual women. Given this analysis, a greater focus on more specific identities seemed to be the solution, offering a plethora of identities from which women can choose.

Feminism has often been presented as being the “wicked stepmother,” the originator of a prescriptive identity-based morality which wags a mumsy finger at improper behaviour and against which it is important to rebel. My contention in this paper is to explore queer theory’s tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory and literature. In order to demonstrate this, I will analyze Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle. With notable parallels with Brown’s real life, its success is part of why the genre is now often considered a cliché. This work is notable for being an early literary lesbian novel, as well as for Brown's own activism in lesbian and feminist causes but deliberately ignores other identities we cannot do without.