“Lesbian gender is about the sensuous promise of destruction and the unwieldiness of desire that [has] no place to go, [cannot] be sated”. So posits Sasha, the frequently insufferable protagonist of Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette: A Novel. Sasha is explaining the viral essay that has brought her a level of infamy among the chic Instagram queers around which Davis’s novel revolves. The character of Sasha typifies the author’s proposed new lesbian archetype, the titular “Dykette”, first outlined in Davis’s own viral essay High Femme Camp Antics which was published in 2020 in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The “Dykette” is a hyper-femme caricature who exists in contrast to her butch lover. She is an exaggerated ‘girly girl’ doing a self-conscious performance of anachronistic womanhood, all frills and fur coats and jealousy. Most crucially, she is sustained by her butch’s desire for her, a desire that she desperately tries to but, as this novel goes on to show, cannot control.
An immediate reaction to Davis’s idea of the “Dykette”, and specifically a heterosexual reaction, may well be one of discomfort. There is, of course, something undeniably regressive in the “Dykette’s” dependence on a butch/femme dynamic, a dynamic that is similarly reproduced in the three masc/femme couples whose ill-fated sojourn to an upstate New York holiday home the plot follows. (Surely we have moved beyond the cliche of queer couples having to replicate heterosexual ones?) There is also something arguably misogynistic in the characterisation of Sasha, her “femme-ness” becoming narratively conflated with her being controlling, jealous and emotionally manipulative. Her behaviour, or “antics” as Davis would pen them, are often immature and uncomfortable. For example, when she sees her partner Jesse’s ex-girlfriend at the cinema, she takes a series of photos making fun of the woman’s appearance, which she then sends to Jesse.
courtesy of @thearch1111ves @prince_alice_
Yet despite all this, when reading Dykette, I couldn’t deny my visceral identification with the novel’s acknowledgement, albeit comically exaggerated, of the propensity for play within queerness. As non-straight subjects in a heteronormative world, we have consumed the scripts of straightness and, dependent of course on privilege, have their rewriting more or less at our disposal. Through humour and hyperbole, Davis’s novel is enacting the performative pleasure possible within queer dynamics.
In Sasha’s relationship with Jesse, they are both visibly buoyed by the affirmation they give each other through playing their roles. Sasha, as “Dykette”, thrives on simultaneously acting the part of beleaguered wife and sexy, destructive vixen. Jesse meanwhile clearly gets a kick out of starring as the practical, lusting partner, with the novel frequently alluding to various trinkets she has welded and smelted for Sasha in a performance of horniness at its most butch. Davis is acknowledging the gay glee in taking what is not meant for us and queering it, swallowing it whole and making it our own. It is the very fact of the characters’ queerness that opens up a subversive pleasure in these performances of what initially appear to be regressive tropes.
This pleasure, however, is crucially sustained through the knowing adornment and seamless casting off of these tropes. It is about moving queerly between structures and never quite taking any of them too seriously. The problem with Sasha is that she is stuck in her performance. Davis’s novel must in this way be understood as a study of the unreliable narrator. We are aligned with Sasha throughout, but when we take a minute to look a little closer at the other characters, it is clear they are not playing their roles as perfectly as our protagonist would like. In reality, Jesse is palpably uncomfortable with the rigidity of the adoring boyfriend box Sasha has put them in, their own pleasure dependent on the ability to stand down from their role.
To quote Sasha herself, “antics [are] a way to express desire that [cannot] be sated and has to be performed instead”. Davis brings us a deeply unlikeable protagonist whose over-the-top unwillingness to break character nonetheless performs a very relatable desire, that to be seen and to control how we are seen. This insatiable desire for visibility gains particular purchase in a queer context.
Dykette joins a number of recent entries into the queer canon to make heavy use of textual referencing, bringing to mind Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Davis’s frequent allusions to other texts, from Boys Don’t Cry to Stone Butch Blues via a perhaps surprising detour through Gossip Girl, indicates the queer need to trace ourselves, find ourselves in history and render us visible. Between Sasha’s eccentric and excessive “antics” and these very tangible grasps at queer legibility, Davis’s novel portrays the endlessly tempting but always impossible desire to try and make oneself seen.
