Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Posted in Articles, Gay & Lesbian, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-01-26 21:57Z by Steven

Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 2, Issue 2 & 3 (October 2002)
pages 53-71
DOI: 10.1300/J159v02n02_04

Sikorski Grace, Associate Professor of English
Anne Arundel Community College, Maryland

Passing novels, exemplified here by E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life, often perpetuate the representation of bisexuality and/or bi-racial identity as a tension on the border between communities and bodies that threatens to break down or leak when tested. Alice Walker offers an alternative representation of sexual and racial terrain for such hybrid identities. In The Temple of My Familiar, the characterization of Lissie, a multiple reincarnation, and the use of skin as a charged metaphor bring categories of sexual and racial purity to the point of collapse, suggesting the potential to reimagine identity as plural, fluctuating, regenerative, erogenous and permeable. 

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