Lesbianism
as political practice
(January/February 2004): As I acknowledged at
the time I gave this paper, the theory contained in it is undeveloped and
consequently highly compressed, even at times labyrinthine. Although it
never did get developed to my own satisfaction, the main argument is clear
enough - lesbian feminism felt so central to the feminist enterprise and
could lay claim to being the most radical practice of second wave feminism
for two reasons - it posed a threat to the chief mechanism of women's subordination,
heterosexuality, by refusing to be implicated; and it involved women focusing
on each other, not on men. That the threat was more symbolic than real
is obvious, and not only with hindsight. (We were vaguely aware of it at
the time too). In fact it was wildly improbable, as indeed it turned out.
But that makes the question of why it was being said, not to mention the
strength of the negative reactions it evoked, even more interesting.
I have supplied a summary below, paragraph by paragraph,
which may help to clarify matters somewhat.
The paper starts (paragraphs 1 and 2) by setting
out what I saw as the crucial conflict within lesbian feminism - between
the importance of lesbianism on the one hand, and the comparative silence
about it in the public arena of feminism on the other. It is this latter
point that the more coherent of my critics kept disagreeing with - lesbianism
hadn't been silenced, they said, and it was only my ignorance of what had
been done that led me to say so.
In paragraph 3 I suggest that the reason why lesbianism
was not discussed to the extent it should be, might be in order to avoid
outright conflict among feminists. Paragraphs 4 to 9 suggest a number of
reasons why lesbianism might be important in feminist terms, eventually
finding these reasons inadequate. Paragraphs 10 to 12 cast the issue of
the current situation of women under capitalist patriarchal conditions
in Marxist terms (because there was a hope around at the time that feminism
and Marxism might be found to be compatible). What I was talking about
here was not lesbianism but the social problems to which lesbianism
was being posited as a solution.
Paragraph 13 starts with the statement that I was
concerned with 'the ideological mechanism whereby that exclusion of women
from the process of material production is effected'. That statement needs
unpacking and updating. What I was trying to do in this paper was to clarify
the feminist meaning of lesbianism, so the crucial phrase in that statement
is 'ideological mechanism' (that is, dealing with the question of how meanings
come to be imposed even though they are against people's best interests).
But coupling it with 'material production' meant that I was accepting,
at least in part, the 'ideological'/'material' distinction that bedevilled
so much of the Marxist theorising at the time. What I went on to talk about,
however, involved two concepts centrally concerned with the notion of meaning,
'discourse' and 'ideology'. I concluded in paragraph 16 with an argument
in favour of a theory of ideology with which to theorise social relations
of domination. This was a plea for a theory of meaning which would allow
for a distinction to be made between ideological and non-ideological systems
of meaning. (I developed this further in my thesis, 1993-1996 - see Radical
Feminism Today).
Paragraphs 17 to 20 contain a discussion of the
notion of 'subject' (starting from a statement by Foucault), using the
term in two senses, 'class' (as in the Marxist insistence that classes,
and not individuals, were the true subjects of history) and 'the individual'.
The discussion of 'class' pointed out that men didn't constitute a 'class'
in any sense resembling the Marxist one (and neither did women). The argument
seems pretty pointless now. The discussion of the individual was more cogent,
cautioning against a politics that targeted different types of individuals
(in this case, 'men'). It recommended instead exposing the ways in which
ideological individualism 'nullifies collective interests by "personalising"
them as "individual problems" to be punished/cured, and "universalising"
hegemonic interests as the "general social good"'.
This is a very compressed statement indeed, and
I'm not sure I could simplify it even now. Many years after I wrote this
paper I would return to this problem of ideological individualism, first
in my thesis (see Radical Feminism Today), and then in a research
project resulting in a number of papers, and which is still ongoing as
I write (see 'Feminism and the Problem of Individualism',
'The
Trouble with Individualism ...: A Discussion with Some Examples', 'Social
Welfare Policy and "the Unemployed": A Case Study in the Ideology of Individualism'
and 'Individualising the Social: or, Whatever Happened to Male Domination?').
It was in the course of this research project that I came to realise how
extraordinarily difficult it is to disentangle oneself from ideological
individualism, so hegemonic is it, much less convey the force of the critique
to anyone else.
The last two paragraphs, 22 and 23, contain the
theory of lesbian feminism as I saw it at the time. I don't disagree with
what I said then, although I wouldn't use the Marxist terminology, e.g.
'class society' would become social relations of domination. I would also
bracket off the assertions about lesbian feminism rather than making direct
statements, stressing that this is what lesbian feminism meant,
not what it did, or even what it could do. It wasn't possible to decide
what to do unless we were clear on what was already happening. Unfortunately,
that was not to be.
Click here for the full paper.
As I mentioned in 'Introduction to Lesbian Feminism',
this paper created something of an uproar. Some echoes of the fuss can
be found at these links.
Click here
for reply no. 1 - Melbourne Lesbian Newsletter
Click here for reply
no. 2 - Refractory Girl
Click here
for two letters and an article
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