ABSTRACT
Confluent love opened up for the social acceptance of gay love. With compatibility replacing complementariness as the highest partner ideal, mating with someone of the same sex came to break less with mainstream ideology. Building on the queer literary tradition, Sofi Oksanen, Finland’s most accomplished living author, stages a further evolution of mating morality. She imbues Baby Jane (2005) with what can be termed lesbian heroic love, an ethos which inverts antiquity’s patriarchal ideology. The novel’s protagonist couple dehumanize heterosexual men to justify their own economic exploitation of them. This chapter argues that Oksanen seeks not to promote female or queer supremacism. She indicts how our era’s increasing marketization of mating motivates people, straight and queer, to exploit each other in a manner that reduces human well-being. Baby Jane’s queer ideology offers not a moral foundation for a new social order but functions as a cultural dissolvent meant to undermine people’s belief in confluent love. The purpose behind this dystopian novel seems to be to open up for more functional mating in the twenty-first century.
