Chapter 7 - Judges

Personal Reflections

This chapter was an interesting (and shorter) one, coming off of the previous one, and the whiplash of Jeanette getting to return to her youth ministry role even though she was found out to be gay (because the church decided it must have been the fault of demons, actually, and forced a confession out of her) was a lot to take in. But I think it makes sense in terms of the story and setting, so I'm on board with that. I liked seeing how the story shows that even though Jeanette has gone back into the religious fold externally at the start of the chapter, she no longer really believes what they are preaching and is just doing what she needs to do to maintain her social position in the community, since she (correctly) assumes that staying in the closet will be necessary if she wants to continue living with her mother. And of course, she isn't able to stay in the closet for very long before she and Katy are found out and she is back in trouble again. The way that the story navigated the politics of this situation, with the church elders agreeing that if Jeanette wants to stay in their good graces she needs to stop "acting like a man" and no longer preach or be trained as a missionary, and that her mother agrees with this sexist policy even though it contradicts her own experience of being a woman who is also a religious leader in the church community, really impressed me and showed a keen understanding of how right-wing women navigate the complexities of these conservative environments. I'll talk about this more below, but I liked a lot how this chapter covered the intersections of homophobia and misogyny that lesbians (and other queer women) have to navigate. That was done really well. And I'm glad that Jeanette, by the end of the chapter, is finally free to strike out on her own, even if it means no longer having her mother's roof over her head. Probably good riddance, in my opinion. I'm glad she's choosing to live as her true self instead of pretending to be someone she's not like Melanie. I was so sad at the end of the last chapter when we found out that Melanie is planning to marry some army guy.

Critical Response

I'd like to look at theme again this chapter, specifically in the scene where Jeanette is discussing her mother's homophobia and how she interprets her daughter's homosexual behavior as her "aping men." The narrator responds as follows:

Now if I was aping men she'd have every reason to be disgusted. As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us. Then I remembered the famous incident of the man who'd come to our church with his boyfriend. At least, they were holding hands. 'Should have been a woman that one,' my mother had remarked.

This was clearly not true. At that point I had no notion of sexual politics, but I knew that a homosexual [man] is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros. Now that I do have a number of notions about sexual politics, that early observation holds good. There are shades of meaning, but a man is a man, wherever you find it. 

There's a lot to unpack here, but the main thing I'd like to talk about with this passage is the way in which misogyny and homophobia are related and frequently conflated, such that being a gay man is considered equivalent to being a woman and being a lesbian is considered the same as acting like a woman, even when the people in question are not gender non-conforming in any meaningful way beyond not being straight. But in the eye of the homophobe, heterosexuality is natural and mandatory for both men and women, who are supposed to be naturally drawn to each other, so any deviation from this script must mean that the person in question is playing out the wrong gender role. We see this idea show up further in the chapter when the church decides, as punishment for Jeanette's dalliance with Katy, that women having leadership positions in the church (a supposedly "un-feminine" behavior) is the cause of the demons and unnatural passions which are plaguing Jeanette and causing her to act gay. The fact that this doesn't make any logical sense doesn't matter, and is in fact the point: this conservative religious group can't accept the fact that it is both possible and safe to be queer, so anyone who is repeatedly acting gay needs to be explained away or punished in some fashion (often, as we've seen above, by blaming their actions on demons) in order to distort and hide the obvious fact that it is totally normal for people to be gay sometimes. There's so much going on related to this theme in the novel, but this short passage summarizes a lot of it very quickly just by using some well-articulated anecdotes about the way Jeanette's mother (and the church elders generally) view the connection between sexuality and gender.