The Intimate Distance of Desire

ABSTRACT

Through an exploration of June Jordan's poetry and prose, this essay questions contemporary definitions of bisexuality and lesbian writing, and attempts to enact a nonbinary bisexual reading praxis. I argue that Jordan employs several tactics - including ambivalently gendered pronouns, oscillations among apparently distinct categories of meaning, shifting referents, and performative speech acts - to resist restrictive identity politics. These bisexual inflections enable Jordan to replace conventional Enlightenment-based concepts of isolated, self-enclosed identities with open-ended models of identity formation that transform both herself and her readers. Moving between sameness and difference, Jordan's bisexual inflections destabilize the binary system structuring sexual, gender, and ethnic categories, creating an intersubjective matrix where new commonalities can arise.

Key Words:

• Bisexuality
• Jordan
• June
• reader response criticism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Analouise Keating

AnaLouise Keating teaches at Aquinas College. Her book Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (Temple, 1996) examines the revisionary techniques and the transformational epistemologies developed by these writers. She has also published on queer theory, feminist theory, gender issues, Latina/Chicana writers, and pedagogy.