Are You Two Sisters?

By Susan Krieger–

Several years ago, as I stepped out of a bar in a small desert town in New Mexico, a man followed me out and called after me, “Are you two sisters?” He had seen me with my partner Hannah inside the bar where she was now settling our lunch bill. As I walked with my guide dog toward our car across a dusty parking lot, the man tagged after me and called again in a challenging tone, “Are you two sisters?” I felt unnerved and did not respond, but his question stayed with me. Why did he ask? Why did he need to know? And why was it so hard for me to answer him?

When Hannah came out and we drove off, I told her what the man had said. “What did you tell him?” she asked. “I didn’t say,” I replied. She reassured me that was all right. But I was uncertain. I knew I had felt a need to protect myself in this isolated town surrounded only by dry desert fields and mountains. But I also felt, “I should have had the nerve to speak.”

By then, I had begun working on a book exploring the intimacies of a lesbian couple. The man’s question called my attention to how lesbians were viewed in the outside world—that just as Hannah and I were always relating to each other, we were also constantly navigating our boundaries with others around us, needing to protect ourselves and often not knowing quite how to do it.

I subsequently decided to title my new book Are You Two Sisters? because that is a question lesbians are often asked when others seek to know us, and because it suggests our own intimate self-questioning: Who are we? How am I different from others, and how am I the same? It also suggests feelings of vulnerability about our boundaries—the sense that one can easily be assaulted simply walking out the door.

In Are You Two Sisters? I trace the life of a lesbian couple over time, beginning in the 1980s with a meeting on a university campus, and through the several decades that follow as the two women become increasingly intimate with each other and share adventures in the larger world. Throughout, I raise the question: What difference does it make that the two women are lesbian? What makes them similar to others? What makes them different? What can be learned from following in the steps of these two women and considering their self-other dilemmas? Especially, I ask, why does lesbianism remain so often invisible?

I first examined issues of lesbian identity in my 1980s study The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community. The book focused on a sixty-member social group in which individuals sought a sense of themselves apart from the straight world. In Are You Two Sisters? I explore similar dilemmas of self and other, but this time, I focus more intimately on a lesbian couple.

Using a lively novelistic and autoethnographic approach that toggles back and forth in time, this new book addresses not only questions of gender and sexuality, but also of disability, as it explores how the couple adapts to the author’s increasing blindness. I hope that Are You Two Sisters? like The Mirror Dance, may have a mirroring function and that others with different forms of intimate relationships may gain insights from the experiences described.

Susan Krieger is a Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University, and the author of “Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple,” just published by Temple University Press. She will be speaking at the Book Passage Bookstore in Corte Madera on Saturday, April 23, at 1 pm.

Published on April 7, 2022