Abstract
The primary focus of contemporary debates challenging the heterocentrism of Western culture has been the modern period. By naming and defining the troubadour effect, and demonstrating its tenacity in Western narratives of desire since twelfth-century Occitania, this study shows that there is nothing new about the heterophobia and misogyny of landmarks of modern and postmodern popular culture, which convey the message that the perfect woman is a man. Since its introduction into culture in the erotic lyrics of the troubadours, romantic love has not been heterosexual. Nor is it homosexual. The woman in narratives of desire is an illusion, a representation of a male artist’s desire to transcend conventional masculinity and express his difference from other men. The perfect woman of Western romance is a man, and the sexual arrangements in narratives of desire in Western culture are most aptly described as heterosexuality without women.1
I, Rene Gallimard, you see, I have known and been loved by... the Perfect Woman.
—David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Nobody’s Perfect.
—Joe E. Brown in Some Like it Hot
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Notes
That sexual difference remains central to the standard plot of romantic love in contemporary literature, which now must include film, is discussed by Lucy Fischer in a chapter of Shot/Countershot entitled “Kiss Me Deadly: Heterosexual Romance” (1989).
The parodic nature of Marilyn Monroe’s femininity is attested to by the title of Dean MacCannell’s article in Diacritics (1984), “Marilyn Monroe was not a Man” (114).
In “Cloud Cover: (Re)Dressing Desire and Comfortable Subversions in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine,” (1998) James M. Harding makes the point that “comfortable subversions,” such as the one in Some Like It Hot, exist not only in works produced for a heterosexual audience, but also in those whose intended audience is homosexual such as Churchill’s play, which came out of a workshop on sexual politics. He writes: Churchill’s play does not deconstruct heterosexual presumptions but, rather, enforces a repressive mode of expression, a passing under duress. Cloud Nine makes acceptance of gay male and lesbian desire easy because it represents these forms of desire in terms that reinforce heterosexuality (260).
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© 2001 Anne Callahan
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Callahan, A. (2001). The Voice of Pleasure: The Troubadour Continuum. In: Writing the Voice of Pleasure. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299149_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299149_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38691-8
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