ABSTRACT
When I proposed this topic for a paper in this collection, my intention was to push myself to try something I have never done before: to read explicitly as a lesbian, to take account of my particular desire structure in reading rather than try to make generalizations about desire as such, even lesbian desire "as such." Much has been said about the theoretical and political issues involved in what Nancy Miller calls "reading as a." 1 On the one hand, to the extent that dominant discourses have used the fiction of universality to ground their authority and to silence other voices, it is important for the voices thus silenced to speak for and as themselves. But, on the other hand, just because something has been silenced doesn't mean it possesses "an" identity, knowable and stable. Speaking "as a" plunges the speaker into new questions of reliable representativity and identity, as Nancy Miller suggests. If I tried to "speak as a lesbian," wouldn't I be processing my understanding of myself through media-induced images of what a lesbian is or through my own idealizations of what a lesbian should be? Wouldn't 1 be treating as known the very predicate I was trying to discover? I needed a way of catching myself in the act of reading as a lesbian without having intended to.
