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Performing Subjectivities: Multi-Mimesis in These Waves of Girls

© Jessica Laccetti

In one way or another, the multiple mimetic modes together with the patchwork of Tracey's memories and past realities intensify the hyperfiction's explicit use of representation to convey changing realities, specifically from a young lesbian's view. Likes Woolf's character(s) in The Waves who mediate a "precarious dialectic between identity and its loss," Tracey self-consciously questions her memory and her own theorising of her identity. Speaking of her high school years as "middle class, white, encouraged to do well in math, believing nothing held [her] back," Tracey was not "too distressed" to be in love with the star of "the junior girls' basketball team." In this retelling of the past Tracey is thankful that she did not suffer from "a serious case of femme invisibility," but immediately thinks to herself, "no, I wouldn't have called it that." Indeed Tracey's exploration of the importance of certain versions of the past links to how she controls the present. In this way Tracey can be thought of, as in Kristeva's words a "sujet en process" where, as Minow-Pinkney observes about Woolf's character(s), "the subject is neither 'this' nor 'that.'" Tracey's "site" is the very dialectic between present and past or between her representations of experiences. The suggestion that there may only ever be versions of the past and that the concept of a consistent, empirical, unchanging 'truthful' constant is always elusive and impossible suggests a feminist "double-voiced discourse" where memories and reality blend and blur to represent Tracey's present.

To further develop the multi-mimetic representations of Tracey's life experience Fisher oscillates her focus from the narrative as convoluted shards of memory to the explicit representation of female sexuality. Although Tracey says she not concerned with being a "teen lesbian gymnast" she realises that while the other girls in her grade six class are uproariously discussing the boys they like Tracey cannot. Instead Tracey sees heterosexuality as not "making sense" and tries

... to come up with a name, but can't. During these anxious minutes, [she realises she'd] be happy to kiss almost every teacher in the school: Mlle. Summers, Mrs. Olivette, even the kindergarten teacher with adult braces and the librarian who also works at Dairy Queen, in addition to Madame Turcotte. They're all girls.

As Tracey ages she begins not only to be more open about her sexuality but also pleased with it. She is proud that she plays "spin the bottle" with Vivian and not only kisses Vivian but "made her do the asking." Even at summer camp Tracey is "obvious. Indiscrete..." and "like[s] it when the sex [she has] is crowded... [she] wants to be seen." Tracey's view of her own sexuality changes as well. As she was coming to grips with her lesbianism she found sexual activities adventurous and exciting. At sixteen Tracey dismisses it and says that instead of concentrating on her conquest, Jennie, she "watch[es] Young and the Restless." (See fig. 3).