A new vocabulary to examine the queer life

A migratory group of earth explorers attempt to, and fail at, colonising a planet called Jeep. There is a big problem: men who land on the planet are infected by a virus and die. The explorers assume, then, that the planet is not viable for human life, only to find that women can survive, and reproduce asexually. 

This is not wishful thinking but the premise of a science fiction novel called Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (not to be confused with the film of the same name which features Kate Winslet as a lesbian). Ammonite explores what a society can be in a world where men are redundant. We are in a women-only, lesbian world and the book is free to explore the possibilities of relationships, social structures and aspirations of the women who live there, giving richness to the choices and decisions the main protagonist Marghe makes. 

What science fiction can do for lesbians, writing set in the real world cannot. But we are lucky to have some recent books which place the desires of women for women, their sovereignty, autonomy and inner worlds front and centre. The last two years have given us books written by women, who identify as queer, writing about complex, complicated lesbian characters: Mrs S by K Patrick, the Booker-nominated Boulder by Eva Baltasar, and Love Me Tender by Constance Debre. 

Mrs S by K Patrick is set in an all-girls English boarding school into which our 22-year-old unnamed narrator enters as matron. Quite early on she lets us know she is a butch lesbian, often ill at ease in the school for girls which is bristling with adolescent boredom, rage and sexuality. She begins to nurture a simmering and heated crush on the eponymous Mrs S, the wife of the school headmaster. She speculates about Mrs S: could she be a lesbian? Do her rolled-up sleeves and armpit hair mean she likes women? 

The crush grows into a torrid love affair. As readers, we witness the narrator’s conundrums. The novel is erotically charged and textured. It produces a vocabulary for homosexual desire, making visible the nature of power that comes into play with gender. The steamy encounter with Mrs S is a journey into the narrator’s growing sense of self. 

While Mrs S offers us a young and underconfident narrator, Eva Baltasar’s Boulder gives us a more jaded, older lesbian. The novel is translated into English from Spanish by Julia Sanches and was nominated for the Booker Prize 2023. A cook on a merchant vessel working off the shores of Chile meets a woman, Samsa, who names her ‘Boulder’. The encounter is sensual and magnetic, and Boulder gives in to it and gives up her itinerant and sparse existence for a coupled life. The years roll by, and Samsa decides to have a child. Boulder has to decide on her role in this equation and the changing nature of intimacy. 

The novel explores Boulder’s gnarly relationship with all of this: the burgeoning intimacy with Samsa into motherhood. It offers a keen look at the dilemmas of responsibility and motherhood, and the imaginations of queer intimacy from the perspective of a confused, often fallible character. 

In Constance Debre’s auto-fiction novel Love Me Tender, translated from French by Holly James, we open to a sharp and difficult statement about motherhood: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other.” The statement is made by Constance, a woman who chooses to be with women. The casualty of this is that her ex-husband punishes her by snatching away her son, Paul. Constance, then, is forced to examine what everything means, including her motherhood and homosexuality. The novel holds us in a space that exists between Constance’s freedom where she breaks from heteronormative rules, and the price she pays for rejecting heteronormativity. 

Reading intense, imperfect lesbian characters affords the reader, and in this case, the writer of this article, an opportunity to imagine a queer life where the freedoms and costs of being queer can be examined three-dimensionally. 

The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society, and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.