Discussion Questions:

349:

• Why does Michel quote Barbara Smith?

• What is the difference between desire and identification?
• Explain:  "That phobic reaction to sexual desire between women delineates the erotic as an arena significantly distinct from the more simply affective" (350).

• What does penumbra mean?
• What is "sapphic monstrosity"?
• What is the difference between a sapphist and a lesbian?
• What is lesbian panic?

• Why does Michel quote Wollstonecraft's Mary?
• Explain:  "As with Percy's monstrous vision,  the impropriety of the character Mary's position is available to her only through the response of others" (353).
• Explain:  "Geraldine's hideousness . . . appears to be revealed only by an optical shift, a difference in view" (353).

• Explain: "In accentuating affective bonds, both the 'lesbian continuum' and the notion of 'romantic friendship' may neglect what is specific to women's erotic bonds" (354).
• Explain:  "The absence of erotic bonds between women is constitutive both of Mary Shelley's text and of straight feminist readings of the novel. . . .  Such bonds are, in other words, marginalized by the homophobic and heterosexist paradigms both critiqued and constructed by the novel and by the critical  perspectives that replicate or exacerbate those patterns" (354).

• What is the purpose of Michel's discussion of Margaret Homans on this page?
• Explain:  "Homans assimilates erotic relations in the novel to heterosexuality, and assimilates relations between women in the novel to relations of identification" (356).

• Explain:  "The categories of the affective and the erotic are culturally constructed and variable" (357).

• Explain:  "Both the primacy of relations between women and the differences between the women involved can signal an improperly erotic bond" (358).
• What is the difference between Agatha & Safie and Elizabeth & Justine?

• Explain:  "Social-structural differences between women, differences of class and race, may themselves have come to signify a genitally sexual, as opposed to a purely romantic, relationship"(360).

• Explain:  "The crime of which Justine is convicted seems to be her raising the possibility of a relation between women that is not constituted by identification" (361).  How does Michel support this claim?
• Explain:  "Foregrounding women's sameness occludes the differences that can signal an erotic challenge to the patriarchal structures of marriage and the family" (361).

• Explain the "neglect of women" argument against male homosexuality.

• Explain:  "Frankenstein's critique of the dangers of male homophobia to women itself relies upon a suspension of erotic connections between women in the novel" (364).

• What is the "paranoid gothic"?

• Explain the final sentence.