ABSTRACT
In his reading of Nathalie. . ., Slavoj Žižek (2006: 190) rejects any claim to the relationship between Catherine and Nathalie as lesbian: ‘the trap to avoid’, he
writes, ‘is to read this intense relationship between the two women as (implicitly) lesbian: it is crucial that the narrative they share is heterosexual, and it is no less crucial that all they share is a narrative.’ Countering Žižek, I argue that the dynamic in Nathalie. . . is defined by the eroticism of the gaze. What the women share is not just a narrative, not just a heteroerotic recollection of a heterosexual act, but rather a potentialized homoerotic intimacy that is re-inscribed through fantasy. Žižek refers to the shared narrative as ‘lesbian subtext’ (2006: 189). However, if we see Nathalie and Catherine’s relationship as involved in the queering of heterosexuality through the eroticizing of the homosociality that triangulates it, rather than the narrowly defined and singular figuration of lesbianism, the eroticism in their relationship is neither text nor subtext. Recounted through a series of homosocial spaces, the women’s shared experience of sexual interaction with the same man creates a third relation of queer recollective eroticism that first depends on, but then sidelines, the heterosexual narrative.
