LESBIAN BODIES: Tribades, tomboys and tarts

Abstract

The central image used to control representations of the potentially lesbian body – to draw back the female body from entering the dark realm of lesbian desire – is that of the tomboy. The persistent desire to see the lesbian body as a pseudo male body certainly does not begin with Freud’s theory of penis envy. The solution to the female body which threatens to confuse gender boundaries is either legal or surgical or lethal. Historically and culturally, the lesbian body – although indistinguishable in reality from the female body itself – has been represented as a body in extreme: the pseudo-male, animalistic and narcissistic body. The representation of the lesbian couple as mirror-images of..