Coherent deviants: Transformation and transition in life-stories of once-married women who chose to live as lesbians

SynopsisMarried women who choose to live as lesbians in Israel are expected to perform a transition. In a culture that maintains a system of binaries by classifying heterosexuality as opposite to lesbianism, lesbian women are expected to 'cross' discursive borders, to abandon heterosexual identity, desire and kinship and to emerge as 'natural' or coherent lesbians. They are also expected to explain the 'scandal' that lies at the very foundation of such a 'transformation,' and to maintain firmly situated belief systems that do not confuse the 'old' and 'new' identities. The purpose of this paper is to map discursive sites where transition and transformation are expected in order to establish a coherent life story. The study analyzes life stories of once married Jewish–Israeli women who chose to live as lesbians. Following the notion of a life story as a cultural device for structuring experience into socially shareable narrative and the notion of identity as performance, I discuss the ambivalent response to the expectation to construct a coherent narrative of transition.