Love thy Heterosexual Neighbor as Thyself: Othermothering, Responsibility, and the Traumatic Intrusion of the Lesbian in the Community of Brewster Place

Abstract

The female characters in Gloria Naylor’s novel "The Women of Brewster Place" (1983) live in a marginal space, an American ghetto, where they struggle to overcome poverty, sexism, racism and, some of them, lesbophobia. In the midst of this desperate situation of subjugation and discrimination, they find strategies for survival which contribute to heal their pain and sorrow. With no access to political domains or spheres of influence, they can only mitigate, but not change, their plight through their relationships with their immediate neighbors. The relationships among these female neighbors go beyond friendship, as they othermother each other assuming ethical and parental responsibilities. Yet, this community excludes those viewed as the Other, namely, a lesbian couple, rejecting thus the plurality that, according to Hannah Arendt, is necessary for the community to be political. In doing so, they demonstrate their individualism, their exclusionary ethics, and how they have been conquered by hegemonic discourses. In this dissertation, I explore how individuals form homogenous communities where they shelter from the menace that others pose to their identities and security, and refuse to take on responsibilities toward the Other in the name of self-defense. This M.A. thesis re-interrogates Gloria Naylor’s 1983 text within the current academic debate about who the Neighbor is, and what human responsibility towards the Neighbor involves. The dissertation both acknowledges and problematizes Patricia Hill Collins’s and bell hooks’s celebrations of black sisterhood and othermothering in the late twentieth century, and reexamines Naylor’s novel through the ethical approximations of Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, and Slavoj Žižek to the crucial theoretical articulations of the concepts of Neighborhood and Community.