The Lesbian Touch: Counter-Narratives of Lesbian Erotic World-Making

Abstract

Abstract Racialised patriarchal heteronormativities have produced knowledge/power systems that inform which categories of people and relationships have cultural entitlement to sexual pleasure and desire. In South Africa, heterosexuality is commonly constructed through the lens of masculine sexual pleasure, and penile penetration of the vagina is the definition of ‘having sex’. Simultaneously, same-sex desire has been constructed as unnatural and un-African. Analysing in-depth interviews of 23 self-identified lesbian and queer people’s accounts of their everyday lives in Cape Town identified a series of counter-narratives, theorised as modes of intersectional queer world-making (QWM). The interviews considered the ways in which the participants talk about and experience their erotic life worlds, their counter-narratives of sexual pleasure and the meanings they attach to their sexual experiences. These counter-narratives produced modes of lesbian erotic world-making through claiming their entitlement to inhabit desire and enact sexual agency. Foregrounding a lesbian-centred frame of sexual pleasure and desire, three counter-narratives reveal how ‘the lesbian touch’ extends the erotogenic body beyond the genitalia and produces, innovates and transforms hegemonic libidinal zones, thereby extending the frame beyond phallocentric culture. There is a centring of the bodily senses – touch, taste, sight and hearing; while drawing on the heart, mind and fantasy. Although these counter-narratives are imbricated and entangled in, and with, dominant constructions of patriarchal heteronormativities, they ultimately challenge hegemonic notions of ‘real sex’ and make lesbian desire legible. Lesbian erotic world-making makes place for and creates an archive of lesbian desire and sexuality.