1) “Passing Last Summer” by Dominika Bednarska
1) “Passing Last Summer” by Dominika Bednarska
Before we get started with this week’s material, I want to clarify how the word “queer” is being used in our
assigned readings. The term queer refers to identities that radically challenge heteronormative identities
and practices regarding gender, sexuality, reproduction, and notions of family. It is a reappropriation of
what used to be used as a slur against LGBT people in that instead of denigrating its connotations of
abnormality and strangeness, its reappropriation by LGBT communities celebrates its differences from
heteronormative ideals of whiteness, monogamy, able-bodiedness, and affluence.
In “Passing Last Summer,” Dominika Bednarska discusses several issues that are usually given short
shrift in gender studies conversations. Being lesbian-identified and disabled, she has often found herself
subject to varieties of prejudice and discrimination that usually don’t confront able-bodied LGBT people.
Moreover, she identifies as a lesbian who has romantic relationships with women, but who is also
sporadically attracted to and engages in sexual relations with men. She hesitates to tell other gays and
lesbians about her sexual relationship with a queer, disabled man she calls “N” for fear of “the disdain so
many lesbians feel toward queer women who express any sort of desire for men” (282).
Since both she and N are queer and disabled, she finds their sex to be more freeing and less dependent
on expectations regarding normative bodies, genders, and sexuality: “My disabled queer lovers and I
understand that the genitals are not the be-all and end-all of sexual pleasure. Sex is not centered around
performing a prescribed set of acts, but around finding pleasure” (288). Still, she does not think it would
be right to let her primarily sexual relationship with N to define her sexuality, acknowledging that she is
“very attracted to masculinity—butch, trans, and sometimes, rarely, even the most cliché of all: actual
scrotum-toters,” but does not identify as bisexual, since she is usually attracted to and has emotionally
intimate relationships with women.
Bednarski knows other lesbian-identified women like herself who are open to sex with men, but no desire
to have emotionally intimate relationships with them, but she does not know of any convenient, socially
recognizable categories or “boxes” that these women would fit into or if the term “bisexual” would be
useful for them. The only thing that she does know for sure is that her desires change over time,
“depending on the partner and the possibilities and the mutabilities of our own desires” (288). This fluidity
to sexuality is often not tolerated well by both straight and queer communities, since it defies hegemonic
ideas about the fixed and categorizable status of sexual orientation. While wary of the discrimination she
faces, Bednarksi nonetheless accepts this mutability, writing that “it is impossible
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