Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies: Feminist Review Issue 54 (Feminist Review)

Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies CONTENTS Editorial Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies Gail Lewis and Merl Storr 1 Que...

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Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies

CONTENTS

Editorial Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies Gail Lewis and Merl Storr

1

Queer Black Feminism The Pleasure Principle Laura Alexandra Harris

3

A Straight Playing Field or Queering the Pitch? Centring Sexuality in Social Policy Jean Carabine

33

Island Racism Gender, Place, and White Power Vron Ware

69

Poem: Vera Emily Cargan

92

All Het Up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on the Oprah Winfrey Show Debbie EpsteinDeborah Lynn Steinberg

93

Reviews Sharon Morris on Space, Time and Perversion and Emptiness 124 of the Image Kate Soper on Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the ‘Feminine’and Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory

128

Noreen O’Connor on The Practice of Love, Lesbian Sexuality 131 and Perverse Desire Reina Lewis on Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique

133

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Delia Jarrett-Macauley on The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory

135

Karen Adler on Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women and Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture

138

Annie Phizacklea on Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration and Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexican Maquila Industry

141

Janet Hadley on Abortion in the New Europe: A Comparative 143 Handbook Juliet Mountford on Women in the Housing Service

145

Noticeboard

148

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Feminist Review is published three times a year. It is edited by a Collective which is supported by a group of Corresponding Editors. The Collective: Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Merl Storr. Corresponding Editors: Ailbhe Smyth, Ann Curthoys, Hala Shukrallah, Kum-Kum Bhavnanai, Jacqui Alexander, Lidia Curti, Meera Kosambi, Patricia Mohammed, Sue O’Sullivan, Zarina Maharaj. Correspondence and advertising Contributions, books for review and editorial correspondence should be sent to: Feminist Review, 52 Featherstone Street, London EC1Y 8RT. For advertising please write to the publishers: Journals Advertising, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE, UK. Subscriptions Please contact Routledge Subscriptions Department, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE, UK. Tel: 44(0)1264 342713; Fax 44(0)1264 342807; for sample copy requests, e-mail [email protected]; for subscription and general information, e-mail [email protected]. A full listing of Routledge books and journals is available by accessing http:// www.routledge.com/routledge.html Notes for Contributors Authors should submit four copies of their work to: Feminist Review, 52 Featherstone Street, London EC1Y 8RT. We assume that you will keep a copy of your work. Submission of work to Feminist Review will be taken to imply that it is original, unpublished work, which is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All work is subject to a system of anonymous peer review. All work is refereed by at least two external (non-Collective) referees. Please note that we cannot accept unsolicited book reviews. Bookshop distribution in the USA Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001, USA. Copyright © 1996 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review. Copyright © 1996 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors.

ISSN 0141-7789 ISBN 0-203-99084-6 Master e-book ISBN

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Editorial: Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies

This issue brings together exciting new essays on diverse topics. Disciplines range across sociology, social policy, cultural studies, media studies, history of feminism and lesbian studies, in both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary modes; contributors write from a range of feminist perspectives, by no means necessarily compatible with each other. What all of these essays have in common is that they aim to contest orthodoxies, even—or perhaps especially—feminist orthodoxies. Each of these essays contests orthodoxies of sexuality, both of normative heterosexuality and also of those forms of sexuality which feminists have regarded as anti-normative and contestatory. Laura Alexandra Harris, for example, highlights the complex dynamics of class, ‘race’ and gender in both heterosexual and lesbian contexts to produce a radical ‘queer black feminism’. Vron Ware explores the racializations of sexual identities, especially female sexual identities, in contemporary urban Britain, examining the ways in which female identities are constructed through racial identities. Both Jean Carabine’s discussion of social policy and Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg’s analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show focus on the (re-) constitution of normative heterosexualities in their very different fields. In each case, the authors highlight the complexities of sexuality and sexual identities: the ways in which identities are formed in the matrix of ‘race’, class, gender and social institutions. In each case too the authors offer not just analysis, but contestation of and resistance to those formations. The essays also, importantly, contest feminist orthodoxies. Laura Alexandra Harris challenges the hegemony of white middle-class feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s—not just heterosexual feminisms but also lesbian feminisms—with a vital new articulation of ‘queer’. Vron Ware challenges the continuing hegemony of certain feminist

2 FEMINIST REVIEW NO 54, AUTUMN 1996

explanations of white women’s racism, insisting on the profound implication of white women’s agency and identity in illusory meanings of whiteness. Jean Carabine challenges the neglect of issues of sexuality in much feminist analysis of social policy. Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg challenge the ‘popular feminism’ of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which claims to offer women viewers and participants empowerment as well as entertainment, but which ultimately recuperates them for normative heterosexuality. The challenges and contestations that are mapped in this issue indicate the ways in which the earlier challenges to previously hegemonic feminisms—challenges from black women, lesbians, working-class women—have formed the springboard from which more complex approaches and problematics for feminism are being produced. These complexities are here being played out in many different locations, both in forging new terrains and in returning to older terrains which have been marginalized and neglected in more recent debates. Feminism continues to challenge itself as well as its ‘enemies’. As these essays demonstrate, feminists contesting feminist orthodoxies are a vital part of the continuing project for feminist democratic transformation. Gail Lewis Merl Storr

Queer Black Feminism The Pleasure Principle Laura Alexandra Harris

Abstract In this critical personal narrative Harris explores some of the gaps between conceptions of feminist thought and feminist practice. Harris focuses on an analysis of race, class, and desire divisions within feminist sexual politics. She suggests a queer black feminist theory and practice that calls into question naturalized identities and communities, and therefore what feminism and feminist practices might entail. Keywords queer; black; feminism; fem; pop-feminism I The title of my essay reflects my expectations: articulating a useful queer black feminist criticism located at the intersections of pop culture, intellectual culture, and cultures of race, class, and sexuality. In one bold line, I level the entangled terrain of pleasure and politics in feminist, black feminist, and queer theory by equating their triple signification with the direct value of Janet Jackson’s pop-feminist pop song, ‘You might think I’m crazy but I’m serious’, if for only a brief maniacal moment (Control, 1986). Even I know that the grammatical power of the colon does not extend that far, or provide an antidote to the too often silenced but fierce clash of class and race and sexuality the emergence of these critical theories represents. Instead, as I explore my own identifications, I will propose that queer black feminism can rupture the silences contained in the words and practices of these theories. It can


create and re-create its own alliances of theories/practices that can begin to name, to loudly proclaim, what queer black female sexualities might entail. I suggest that it does so by explicitly foregrounding the sexual politics of racialized and classed sexuality as a feminist practice, and by interrogating the many interstices between feminism as an academic discourse and feminist bodies. For instance, I want to acknowledge the ways in which my desires as a lesbian but fem, as being black but ‘light, bright, and damn near white’ (an old Louisiana saying) and as being a feminist but from a particular class and culture reconfigure the politics of reclaiming bodies and pleasure. I want to speak out loud about these complications and contradictions. But which category addresses which complication? Should I speak to the history of my blackness as a black feminist or as a queer, or do I identify with both because I am a lesbian of AfricanAmerican descent? Often, black lesbian, and the way that description of myself troubles identity, are terms that inform each other best about my differences. Reducing queer to its bottom line—a position opposed to normative heterosexual regimes—seems to indicate that I am queer because I am a lesbian, black, and feminist. But am I only queer in relation to heteronormativity or perhaps also in the very categories with which I cast my opposition to it? Further, I want to consider how claiming this subjectivity does not simply inform my position with power relations and systems of oppression but enables me and provides me with agency. Already my equation dissembles as the terms are in dissonance, contradiction, complex difficulties with each other, with differing cultural spheres, and with Ms Jackson’s nasty do-me desires. Will what I write be queer, or black, or feminist at all? I toyed with the possibility of ordering them differently—black queer feminist, black feminist queer, feminist black queer—of placing question marks between them, but concluded that I have chosen for this essay the best possible order. To me, the very grouping of these adjectives further heightens the tension found in the definition Hazel Carby advocates for black feminist criticism, ‘as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions’ (Carby, 1987:15). Queer and black allow me to underscore that my relationship to feminism, the theories and practices that emerged as the ‘second wave’ in the 1970s and 1980s, is not in simple correlation with my gender but necessarily, sometimes desperately, formed from an angle that allows me to define my feminist identifications rather than have them defined for me. Queer and black allow me to bring the personal and the political together without having one circumscribe the

QUEER BLACK FEMINISM 5

other, to invoke a critical position towards prescriptive theories of oppression and activism, and to open up the possibility of productive insight into the emerging feminisms of this decade and their inherent power relations. In this critical personal narrative, the queer modifies and is modified by the black which then doubly modifies the feminism. I contend that as these multiple modifiers illuminate contradictions and problems they produce an axis where pleasure and politics and feminist bodies can compile their histories. Clearly, in this last decade of the twentieth century, history has become particularly important for feminism. Feminism, Lesbian Feminism, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Queer Theory seem to have reached a point in university discourse in the US in which they are the heated, exciting, and often conflicting topics of classroom, essay, and conference debate. At stake are issues of recognizing and theorizing difference, acquiring resources, visibility, representation, and ultimately institutional power: a power not to be taken lightly. A lot of the swirl revolves around the parameters of sexuality. Not surprising, considering the political necessity for each to put forth a theory of sexual practice. Black feminist theory is likewise in turmoil over its parameters, its institutional position, and grapples with the theorizing of sexuality. Revealingly, it only occasionally finds itself articulated in relation to the overdetermining queer and feminist paradigms. Most often, this articulation is found in specifically black organized conferences such as ‘Black Nations/Queer Nations?’ in April 1995 in New York. One of the many projects of this conference was to explore the ways in which queer and black modify each other’s concept of nation. In this arena, black feminists played an important role in determining some of the issues at stake. But, the dominant academic exclusion of black feminism as ‘other’ discourse, not queer not feminist, has a history both far-reaching and contemporary. For instance, I think this erasure of black feminist theory is evidenced in Barbara Smith’s 1977 positing of a black feminist lesbian criticism in ‘Toward a black feminist criticism’ three years prior to Adrienne Rich’s 1980 articulation of a lesbian continuum critical approach in ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’. Rich’s model oddly makes no reference to Smith’s essay though it reads as lesbian one of the same Toni Morrison novels, Sula. Instead, Rich refers briefly to earlier, perhaps in her view less sexually radical, black feminist writers to support her claims for a lesbian continuum. Is it because Smith’s black feminist lesbian emphasis on the link between sexual and racial politics underscores the white privilege implicit in Rich’s


theoretical move to not read lesbian in relation to sexuality (Rich, 1980: 178)? In Smith’s essay, lesbian is the site for an expression of black female sexuality and desire historically denied and oppressed. Further, Smith focuses on an erotic romanticism in reading Sula as a lesbian text that is directly linked to her theorizing of racialized constructions of sexuality that prevent black women from exploring their subjectivity (Smith, 1977:166). In doing this, Smith’s lesbian reading speaks loudly to Rich’s theoretical silence about racialized sexuality: a silence imposed when Rich claims that black lesbian continuums are parallel to white lesbian continuums as if they exist unaffected by the power relations between white and black female racial and sexual privilege (Rich, 1980:198). This privileging, of course, being the very system of oppression Smith’s black feminist lesbian approach is in large part intent upon unravelling. Similar to this historically feminist precedent much of the dominant critical theorizing of gay, lesbian, queer and feminist positions gestures towards difference but disregards many of the complexities that black feminist theory has already raised about differences. In Evelynn Hammonds’ ‘Black (w)holes and the geometry of black female sexuality’ (1994), she frames the continued dilemma by questioning whether the feminist shifts between lesbian and queer can dismantle the invisibility and silence that have enshrouded conceptions of black female sexuality. Rather than spend the inordinate amount of space required to take white feminist/queer theorists to task for their ‘failure to articulate a conception of racialized sexuality’, she analyses the ways in which the structure of this academic discourse, framed by historical institutions of racism, homophobia, and inequality, has compelled black feminist theory to enact its own silence and erasure about black female sexuality (Hammonds, 1994:127). Hammonds argues that sexual invisibility as a necessary historical and political strategy for black women has contributed to black feminisms’ hesitance to do much more than analyse the restrictions and oppressions of black female sexuality, as opposed to being empowered to explore the possibilities of agency and pleasure (Hammonds, 1994:134). Testing Hammonds’ claims about institutionally enforced black feminist reticence on the issue of sexuality, I imagine giving a paper on intraracial colour spectrums and butch-fem erotic dynamics. I would have a nervous breakdown worrying who would be in the audience and whether they would be intrigued or wondering what this has to do with scholarly criticism. Yet, with my girlfriends at the bar this is a topic we have often taken up. In this group of black/mixed race women, who


have other jobs, interests, and activities than academia, we have expressed serious conflicts, joked loudly, always gossiped about, and even made righteous political claims about intraracial colour politics and desire. In doing so, we have discussed issues of dark-skinned black lesbian fems’ continued exclusion from conceptions of womanhood by an always present misreading of the black lesbian body as automatically butch. These black fems express the contradictions of desire and frustration that come with claiming such an identity precisely due to the negative sexual definitions accorded black women’s bodies as not feminine, as not woman, and as oversexed and aggressive. Further, we have explored where the pleasure exists for some of us in eroticizing a system of colour and gender domination that divides women of colour as it uses the same old stigmas to oppress them. In comparison to this bar talk, not utopic by any means, Hammonds’ assessment of how academic structures do reinscribe systems of silence is vital. My reading of Hammonds’ essay understands it as offering an opportunity for a specific black feminist theory, one that confronts the dangers and restrictions of racialized and classed sexualities by producing a black female sexuality resistant to capitulating to the prescriptiveness of such constructions. Hammonds writes: Black feminist theorists must reclaim sexuality through the creation of a counternarrative that can reconstitute a present black female subjectivity and that includes an analysis of power relations between white and black women and among different groups of black women. In both cases I am arguing for the development of a complex, relational, but not necessarily analogous, conception of racialized sexualities. (Hammonds, 1994:131) In this essay I explore the possibilities of the counternarrative that Hammonds calls for in her idea of a cultural criticism of sexuality, one that details alternative forms of power queer black female sexuality creates; one in which labels are not naturalized as identity—queer, black, lesbian, feminist—and therefore do not reinscribe silence but engender ‘speech, desire, and agency’ (Hammonds, 1994:141). I would like to sort out some of the debates surrounding these trajectories, and I would like to do so in order to suggest a direction for the emerging generation of feminisms. This direction I call queer black feminism, a compilation of the experiences of liberation movements before it, a practice of alliances rather than community, a practice of reclamation


and confrontation, and a practice of theorizing the already traversed boundaries of culture. I relinquish all commonly held notions of success in the pursuit of this venture. At the same time that I articulate and analyse this already ongoing queer black feminist project I know I will be enveloping it in my own autobiographical perspective. I know it will be particular. My purpose in doing so is to bring theory and practice together by writing my self into history, by writing myself a history, and by writing a queer black feminist subjectivity into practice. I announce this intention because, eager as I am to treat the personal, I am equally disturbed by the exhibitionist tendency of autobiography, of experience, to close off the possibility of intellectual exchange. How can we argue, disagree, and evaluate the personal without attacking the person? Although I want to challenge academic notions of personal versus critical, or rather disregard them, I am ridden with anxiety about placing my body and desires into the controversy. Further, as a black feminist, I am afraid to air ‘dirty laundry’. I want to do the right thing. Believing as I do that this is a crucial dilemma for black feminism, I have chosen to locate it in a queer context in the hopes of refiguring the personal and the political. Knowing the text of my history, I know that feminism as the sole dilemma for this body makes it far less readable. Instead, when sexuality and race and the always overlapping clarity and confusion of the connections are considered, feminist maps of gender are in need of other terrains. This then, I imagine, is ultimately my point: for feminism to survive, and conversely to survive feminism, a greedy and attentive cartography must be practised. I hope it is not my accomplishment to set up and attack a mythic feminism, a paranoia fuelling much of the current theoretical debates, but instead to uncover a few of the layers and complexities of identity and politics always already within feminist debate. In presenting a self, myself, the intent is to project a representation of what makes queer and black and feminist useful as a strategy. Additionally, I want to write ‘camp’ feminism as a means of employing subjectivity and objectivity: certainly as a means of maintaining distance, but also to implicate my position as a queer black feminist. Perhaps it is my way of paying homage to and coming to terms with a feminism that has been difficult for me, be it second wave, black, or queer. If by virtue of this seemingly difficult feminism there is a gap, my intellectual pursuits have taught me to find gaps interesting, the location for exchange between boundaries, for resistance. Categories


are intended to draw straight lines. Feminism has found out, perhaps the hard way, that this may be the only way to think about differences of sexuality and class. Not to mention race. II Commercial and popular feminisms of the 1970s—that is what I grew up on. For years I envisioned myself as a feminist and what exactly this entailed I am unsure, except I know it was about being sexy. I planned early on to be looking good and acting sassy for the revolution. Film and television told me all I needed to know about sex and the single girl. I recall Cher’s image of the vamp, the tramp, and the bit of a scamp with her bold clothing and divorce from symbiosis with her short partner. Books were a great if confusing resource: The Fear of Flying (1973) and The Joy of Sex (1972). Curiously, my best girlfriend and I put the logic of those astrological positions to the test. Coupled with female anatomy, hedonistic sexual values were radical. In the background Helen Reddy’s ‘I am woman’ inspires tears of triumph to wet my eyes while something else is happening between legs during a behind the couch reading of Xaviera Hollander’s testimonial The Happy Hooker (1970). Finally, a definitive personal narrative bearing witness to the entrepreneurial strength of the new American woman—a ballsy immigrant story too. Yes, my coming of age in the 1970s was about the sexual revolution, about career gal goals, and about watching my mother straddling the options of the decade while telling me mine— ‘marry rich, you can do anything after you get the money’. (The mother has always been a core figure in feminist analysis.) I often ask myself now where the real feminists were when I was growing up. I know they existed and had a politics and an organized movement, at least that is how it appears in going back and reading about it. Granted my family was what I not too affectionately label ‘po’miscegenated class’ and intellectual debates were not found in abundance at the dinner table. I try to remember if and when I ever spotted one of these feminists, a funky-looking jean-clad one like Gloria Steinem. I must have but somehow the image didn’t take. Why didn’t I become infatuated with her and emulate her as I did with so many other women? Instead, I bared my navel in worship of Cher. I bopped to Diana Ross’ tunes and watched her countless times in the film Mahogany (1975), where she was the beautiful good black girl gone bad but come back to good black woman. I grew up with Janet’s bad girl struggles to be a good girl on the late 1970s comedy-drama TV show


about a black working-class family Good Times and, of course, now pay tribute to her attempts to express a nasty in-control diva attitude. It is my belief that Janet is only just beginning to work her diva attitude coupled with an Eartha Kitt sex-kitten style—she is lacking only the sharp claws and deeply satisfied ppprrrgggrrrwwwlll. When I gather together all the knowledge I have today about the height and impact of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s I am dismayed at the perception that such a mass movement passed me by. Is it only because I was (am) an oppressed pop-culture junkie? I always thought I was a feminist but the more education I manage to acquire the more inclined I am to believe that I must have been lingering in a pre-feminist purgatory all those years, particularly when I seem to have been stuck in a 1970s sexual liberation mode while coming to adulthood in the 1980s anti-porn generation. What then does it mean for a person to identify as a feminist when she does not possess an erudite knowledge of the feminist ‘canon’ of history, practice, and theory? I cannot begin to recount all the academic incidents in which professor feminists and comrade feminists have exclaimed to me ‘You didn’t know that? You don’t know who she is? You’re kidding!’ Clearly, part of the search for the real feminists in my experience is a search for feminists of colour and feminists of dubious social status. But colour was not included in the general discussion as black feminists in the 1970s battled out this terrain that feminism did not always actively call its own. It has become clear in writing this essay that of paramount importance to queer black feminist practice is the project of redrawing the parameters of feminism as a history, practice, and theory. It would also rescue my academic and lesbian embarrassments. (Who was Alec Dobkins anyway?) Knowing this is by now a repetitive litany I still find it imperative to state: the brand of feminism that seems to have passed me by, that waxes disappointed in my ignorance, works mainly from the university, from a prescriptive white intellectual theory of gender, and from an already enlightened state of sexual oppression within patriarchy. One would have to know about and agree on the terms of oppression to enter that sphere. Access seems to have been a serious problem for feminist theory and practice, not just for me personally, but as evidenced by the subsequent challenges feminism faced in the 1970s and 1980s from women of colour and diverse classes and sexualities. I have begun to consider myself a fortunate young feminist. I circumvented the squabble through my cultural impoverishment. I know I am fortunate as a black feminist because this allowed me to believe that sexuality was the first


order of the day. The media put out the back end of feminism, literally the feminist as a sexualized revolutionary. What I am suggesting is that this sexy back end provided more than just a pleasant diversion. This media-hyped feminist was perhaps epitomized by the big-breasted braburning Adrienne Barbeau, who played the daughter on the TV show Maude. A feminist was sexually rebellious if also straight and righteous. In this TV situation comedy, actress Bea Arthur as the mother, Maude, dominated the family life. One might argue that Maude herself was the better version of genderfuck on the show. I can only confess I found her domineering masculinity seductive and had a masturbatory fantasy or two about her and Adrienne’s buch-fem motherdaughter duo. (The confession is a core paradigm of feminist consciousness.) Feminism was the equivalent of power, in turn the equivalent of sexual pleasure. After realizing the difficulties the three terms have encountered within feminist and specifically black feminist debate, I have learned to appreciate and come back to this youthful if not naive connection. I resist being educated out of my feminism. Rather than interpret my history as one devoid of feminism it seems more productive to ask what brand of feminism was at work in my experience? Who were my feminist role models then? What lessons did they impart to me about being female and black? How can I understand the impact of a media-popularized female sexuality? Was it straight-up gender oppression and objectification, as perhaps the anti-porn feminists might argue? Did equating feminism with sexual prowess undermine it or can the pejorative images be reclaimed? Is this cultural background of the 1970s and 1980s mine to claim? (Ain’t I a feminist too?) If I focus on feminism as the only category for consideration an ellipsis occurs: there were other identity aspects to work out. The type of pulp-pop commercialized images I adhered to were not just about feminist pleasure; instead, these images often scrambled boundaries by letting the wrong race and class identities meander across them. For instance, in claiming a commercial and popular feminism as my history I mentioned Cher as a strong recollection of a recognition of gender and sexuality as empowering. What I did not state overtly and what is encoded in Cher’s image is her mixed-race body—a body that resonates for mine. There is a crucial facet to this coding: within the gossiphistory of Cher’s racial mix the imbrication of class with race is made obvious rather than belaboured as a complicated connection to be searched out. I recall that in interviews and songs Cher spoke about her


mixed Anglo-Native American identification and poverty class background and that provided me with information and affirmation of how often one was inherent in the other. Moreover, this pop-image rumour model of racial mixing offers insight into the race—class nexus by enacting publicly that to be of mixed parentage could define one’s class standing, while, if one was in a particular class (stardom), it could be ameliorated by class privilege. Class, and most certainly race, seem to have been two areas of difficulty for feminism to fill in and, when it did, it often essentialized how they were mediated by gender. I think it is difficult to write about feminism and at the same time have the writing be about race. This is perhaps one of the most important concerns for a queer black feminist practice: to make the terrain of feminist sexual politics a discourse on race. In understanding this as a queer black feminist project it is important then to understand how different cultural images might work. Obviously I am relying on a theorizing of my memory of gossip rags. But if it is mistaken memory, then the fantasy stands in—the narrative I did create with Cher’s image. Rather than question the veracity of memory-fantasy I would point to the lyrics of some of Cher’s songs for verification of this reading of her body. Anyone remember her singing ‘Half-breed’? (Bad taste in music is a feminist must.) Cher’s pop-culture prowess along with her Anglo-Native American identification alongside her light complexion alongside her sexual exclamations provide one code for my feminist history. By bonding with her background I could then begin to imagine how I might conceive of my own. I might identify with Cher because of my light complexion, because of looking for insight into interracial and class connections, and because I like the worst kind of pop music and culture, but, like feminism, the media in the 1970s offer a veritable void when it comes to powerful sexy black female images: particularly, I think, for my class background of black females who were not familiar with some of the bold writing being done. There was Tina Turner with her throaty vocals. Some of us black women managed to imagine living as large as blaxploitation film heroines Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973) or Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974), but even so they were not granted pop-culture icon status. It is difficult to remember how I conceived of myself; I try to remember how other black girls like my cousins conceived of themselves. I try to remember how we conceived of ourselves in relation to each other. I know we all did the necessary grappling with understanding what blackness meant to each of us as female but in different ways and through different means. Writing as a


queer, as a feminist, is difficult for me because even though race can be added on it can’t be because race is its own queer feminist category. Further, in the US system of black and white race works queer. A queer black feminist practice requires marking race and class in relation to desire and reveals that the telling of desire must always be a text written about race and class no matter how encoded within gender oppression. It certainly requires a rethinking of pop-cultural representations of feminism, the functions they served for their audiences, and the challenges they presented to prescriptive notions of where feminist consciousness is located. In one sexually exploitative package Cher’s race and class addressed baggage attached to certain differences central to determining how bodies are grouped in the US in a way that academic feminism struggled to capture. For instance, what different combinations of gender, race, and class mixtures are obtrusive to the delicate skeletons of spoils, plunder, and murder in the US’s national closet? The answer is all of them but they are played out differently. Without disregarding its particular exploitations, Walt Disney has the romance of Pocahontas and that yucky white guy. Clearly this Pocahontas romance suffers its own devastating historical erasures, but even Disney cannot imagine an equivalent US romance between black and white. Slavery: it’s the too nasty story of race whispered in expose form about dead presidents and public figures because it involves a most insidious form of rape, bondage, and perverse desire. Further, I can be an academic feminist; I can be a black feminist; I can be a dyke feminist. But I can’t be any of them really without first ‘passing’ the boundaries set up in each, without confronting the assumptions of each, without recombining the advantages and disadvantages of each, and without being a queer in each. This ‘I’ certainly is not the unique case of passing through feminisms. It is not solely specific to my being light and a fem; passing operates on a variety of levels, gendered, social class, ethnic, economic, educational, and it is embedded within a structure that seems to articulate difference but often contains and silences it. Apart from my puerile bad taste, what attraction to an image like Cher represents to me was the basis for thinking about constituting my difference in terms pleasurable and empowering. I would like to think that probably from the first revelations I had about her I realized that accessing feminist power entailed outing the closets of race and class first—but that is hard to claim sincerely. Only in looking back can I interpret my race and class as inextricable from my sexuality and feminist consciousness, and only


in looking forward can I predict what a schizophrenic narrative it constructs. III Clichéd and retrograde as the admission is, my mother and her friends were certainly feminist influences surrounding me. They are the women that were of age in the 1970s, that were caught up in the ideologies and images and cultural revolutions. It was their lives that were available for revision, or unable to be revised. The memory of these women and their desires has a clarity and poignancy for me that no amount of feminist analysis can interpellate. All of them were what I like affectionately to call ‘high priestesses’ after a disparaging description of women in Joanna Russ’ story ‘When it changed’ (1972). They were the highheeled, painted, cleavaged, and perfumed images of women feminism wanted to wash off and liberate. And when these women refused a liberation that appeared to them as just another brand of repression— feminism rejected them. Maybe what feminists did not know is that these women made fun of them. My mom and these ‘girls’ would break out laughing, they would go out drinking, and they would chase down possible sexual exploits at the bowling rink together. They were going to have a little bit of fun before it was over. Claiming and naming her own desires, this was my mom’s feminist revolution. And certainly in late 1970s feminist terms they were not part of the community. Whose community was it anyway? These straight, working-class, racially diverse women, mostly divorced with kids, or stuck in bad marriages, or young and searching for desire, were far more concerned with finding pleasure than finding community. Pleasure they understood was what had been denied them, and whatever else they failed to grasp they understood that claiming pleasure was the currency of power. In order to better understand my mother’s desires, it will be useful to describe what a queer black feminism might look like in relation to a brief and admittedly general mapping out of some of the issues troubling to feminism. In the US, feminism, from an early radical stance that assessed gender as biologically constructed and therefore oppressive, seems to have become almost immediately a plurality of feminisms rather than a cohesive movement. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s feminism was characterized by a dispersal of political stances with lesbian feminists and cultural feminists overdetermining the debates on gender, sexuality, and practice. Although categorizing these complicated ideological groupings does disservice to their own plurality,


as Alice Echols (1984) points out in her essay, The taming of the id: feminist sexual politics, 1968–83’, these dominant feminisms tended to cancel out other sites of feminist practice or render them as antifeminist. The critical objection facing mainstream (cultural) feminism and lesbian feminism is the analysis of it as white, middle-class, antisex, utopic, gender reactionary, and academic. Feminists from this period are often upset by the revisionist renderings of what they ‘experienced’ as a radical time. Evidence of this was abundant at the 1995 Modern Language Association convention in San Diego where feminism ‘revisited’ panels were the crowd-grabbers. The rhetoric ranged from claims about the ‘repressed’ memory of feminism to angry ‘mother-feminists’ who could not locate what those wayward feminist daughters were contributing to the cause.1 Perhaps without negating feminist icons’ own history and concerns we can call into question their paradigms. Without disbelieving their narratives of liberation perhaps we can assess how that practice of liberation was displaced in certain communities, across certain identities, and became a prescriptive legacy. (What have you done for me lately?) The overriding issue informing this feminist discussion is whether or not feminism was able to address issues of difference, primarily race. Feminists wanting to preserve a memory of feminism as one of antiracism claim as examples women of colour writing, for instance, Audre Lorde. In fact, Judith Butler, in a lecture delivered at the University of California San Diego on 15 February 1995 entitled ‘Against proper objects’, treated this very aspect of feminism in relation to queer, and, I believe, made the claim that feminism was not impaired in its focus on gender in relation to race unless we are now to discount writers like Lorde as feminists. Although this is a valid point, my position is that a slippage occurs in the power relations of feminism when we simply include all feminists regardless of some very serious divisions and power dynamics. There did emerge a dominant ideology of feminism against which women of colour or other diversity had to write. I would go even further and suggest that it is these writers who are also the inventors of queer feminism exactly because, as race was elided by gender, so were sexual politics and other conceptions of difference and oppression. In fact, I can readily name women of colour whom I have heard identify themselves as queer/ black feminists: for instance, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldua, Chrystos, Cherrie Moraga, and Jewelle Gomez; it is much harder for me to think of women of colour who identify as simply feminists. Feminism was inspired by the 1950s and 1960s US Civil Rights movement and, if that is acknowledged,


feminism’s growth out of race relations resituates its absence of race analysis as a dominant factor in need of correction, not as a history of a multicultural plurality of feminist practice in which all were equal participants. Of importance to this particular essay, one of the commonalities between these models of feminism was an emphasis on desire as a political choice rather than a personal one. This seems to have occurred primarily due to lesbian recognition within mainstream feminism as a political choice over a sexual one. The praxis was emphasized by focusing on an alternative female culture, one with innate gender values, in which equality would be achieved by eliminating power, a ‘masculine’ construction. By the 1980s this praxis seems to have been exacerbated by its focus on sexual practice in relation to gender oppression, a focus which quite clearly erased class and race. For instance, straight working-class women like my mother understood getting fucked as one of the few moments of power and pleasure they could engage in. For them feminism was not about rejecting supposedly masculine values—they liked masculinity—instead, negotiating a relationship with it was essential to their empowerment. For black women, race mandated very complicated negotiations with masculinity. In an attempt to purge male identification, this brand of feminism failed to consider how pleasure might intersect and subvert the power dynamics of socially constructed gender or how racism functions. This becomes markedly apparent within lesbian feminism as butch-fem desire, a desire of gender polarity between lesbians came to be labelled an unacceptable and heterosexually imitative power dynamic. Not only did this once again recast gender as innate to anatomy but it lacked any regard for the divisions of race and class where this culture often occurred. Women—a category already seriously divided by gender definitions and class and race and sexual preference. The personal is political has been paramount to feminist analyses, as if it hasn’t been for other types of political or intellectual analyses. Feminism did not invent ‘the personal’ but admitted it, worked it, and went on to canonize it as a litmus test. Personal choices of pleasure are political in so far as we are at liberty to make them. The parameters of what that personal pleasure entails are not an indication of intellectual savvy or political commitment. This remains for me the pivotal misconception of feminist thought. A queer black feminist agenda should make this distinction and in making it expand feminist practice until it is unrecognizable as such, not to erase it, but to enable its dispersal throughout an array of political, cultural, and intellectual


alliances. To give credit its due, it is exactly the ability and future of feminism, and the premise of this essay in making claims for queer black feminism, that feminist history is strong enough to shore up emerging radical movements. bell hooks often seems to be making a related point in her writing. In her essay ‘Feminism: a transformational politic’ hooks states: ‘Strategically, feminist movement [sic] should be a central component of all other liberation struggles because it challenges each of us to alter our person or personal engagement (either as victims or perpetrators or both) in a system of domination’ (hooks, 1989:43). Although her later utopic desire to replace power and domination with ‘love’ differs greatly from my perception of power as everywhere— especially in ‘love’—hooks is making an insightful and radical claim about how and where feminism should be located in the future. Furthermore, hooks emphasizes a feminist practice that does not require literacy as a contingency of participation. This conception informs this entire essay. By disrupting the literal interpretation of classic feminisms’ ‘the personal is political’, queer black feminism inverts that aspect of identity politics that attempts to institute an assimilationist agenda for all women under gender oppression. I am genuinely concerned that the liberation 1970s feminists made for me should not be denied. Let me state clearly that this essay could obviously not be written without their struggles, triumphs, and failures. But just maybe while they were liberating they were simultaneously oppressing. Missionaries did it; at least we know feminists had the best of intentions. I’m too old to be the rebellious teenager in my mother’s house. I do not want to argue over who remembers what right any more. Instead I want to record what feminism meant for me, to me, with the understanding that I do so because I am grateful it was there. I need to claim my feminist past for the future, not be told I never had one, and therefore feminism needs to be reconfigured to include that past and define that future. Often, this entails recognizing women whose voices were not articulated through feminism or whose politics were not formed correctly according to feminism. Many of these women will not be so identifiable as feminists. Some of these women are people I have found through feminist education and counter-education like Joan Nestle, Dorothy Allison, Amber Hollibaugh, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez, and Barbara Smith: women who have been both discomfited and embraced within feminism. A combination of these women and others make up my closest feminist relatives; they are my historical precursors for queer black feminism.


IV My grandmother taught me how to play jacks. This is a nostalgic memory my father reminds me about. I can recall only one time when I was playing jacks with her. My parents were having a horrific battle in the next room. Whatever it may have been about domestically, it was always about interracial strife and economic standing. In this case my grandmother was being deployed as part of the battle. My father likes to remember that she taught me to play jacks because he likes to see the similarities in us. My grandmother and I were/are both small, fullbreasted women with sharp features, hooded eyes, and long-fingered hands slightly too large for our bodies. Our skin tones were different; my grandmother was reddish brown and I range from a pasty light yellowish complexion to a nicer olive depending on the weather. My grandmother sat there that day while they raged about her but really about everything else it meant to be an interracial couple in the US. They who had sent love letters to each other that I had snuck under the bed to read. Love letters about beautiful brown hands and monkeybitten thighs. She never missed a beat in our jacks game that day, but I did. My grandmother taught me that day to play jacks without missing a beat, no matter what storm is raging on the horizon. I think about the women on my father’s side of the family. My aunts and cousins. The real aunts were all generations older than him and religious. They taught us children to sit up straight, say please and thank you, and wear our hair neat, if possible. The other aunts were really cousins but so much older that we called them aunts. Some of them were different, a little less constrained; apart from the church they belonged to social organizations. Except one aunt-cousin. She was unruly, brown, and beautiful. I do not know if she was an active black radical and black feminist but she seemed to know a lot. She worked hard each day, and had her up and down days so I think she was a black radical and feminist. She was considered a she-devil in the family because she did what she wanted: a drinker, smoker, and cultivator of shady male lovers. I used to have to beg to go over to her house even though it was her five children with whom I attended school and did call cousin. She told us so many things the other generations of black women in my family were unable to. On those rare moments when I had her to myself as we watched latenight television she spoke to me as adults often do to children who are not their own: honestly. She comforted me over my parents’ raging, affirming that my mother’s new opinions on race were a result of her


disillusioned immigrant naïveté as a result of being married to my brown father in 1957 in the US, not a heartfelt sentiment. She revealed precious family gossip that I couldn’t get anywhere else, and that helped me to understand some of the racial tensions in my family despite, or because of, the fact that it is a study in skin shades. For instance, after being in the US a short while my mother asked my grandmother what race my father’s real father was. My grandmother found this inquiry so ill-mannered and intrusive that she dryly declared to my father, ‘If it was white you had wanted, there’s a half dozen black girls in the neighbourhood whiter than what you picked up but still black enough for me.’ To which my mother responded, ‘I’m not white, I’m Neapolitan.’ Knowing how intrusive and stubbornly illogical my mother can be, I laugh about this incident. I also imagine that she, only recently familiarized with the rigidity of the American colour line, must have been thinking there was going to be some middle ground that was undiscovered—a mestiza model of race. Further, in this black family tree—as I suspect in others—paternity was not an issue of interest to anyone but an outsider. In her essay ‘Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe: an American grammarbook’ (1987) Hortense Spillers has made the most astute historical analysis of this systematically enforced silence originating in slavery and its effect of devoiding black female sexuality of any agency through constructions of immorality and voraciousness. This was what my aunt-cousin endured—and spent frustrated energies trying to push aside—angry condemnations. My mother had no concept of the relationship between colour and silence in the US and therefore secured her outsider status with this inquiry. From then on, my grandmother found her to be ‘frayin’ on her nerves and illin’ to her stomach’. I think about many of these complicated female bodies in my family: complicated in relation to each other through their own complicated desires and subjectivities. For me, queer black feminism should have a complicated history of bodies and desires; it has to be able to acknowledge these complications to further resist the shame and oppression some of these bodies are made to be silent about. At the infamous ‘Scholar and Feminist IX’ Barnard College Conference in 1982, where anti-porn feminists and sex-radicals battled it out, it seems to me that this queer project was begun on one front and requires further consideration: that is, in terms of racialized and classed sexualities. In Gayle Rubin’s essay, ‘Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality’ (1984), resulting from this conference, she argues that feminism cannot address sexuality because it is a theory of gender


oppression and as such is limited in analytical scope and definition. In stating this, the trouble must also be stated about raced and classed sexualities, and from this we have a fundamental indication of class, race, and sexuality as intersecting discourses. Feminist bodies are sexually marked bodies and they need to be defined within their concerns as class and race marked bodies. Amber Hollibaugh’s contribution, ‘Desire for the future: radical hope in passion and pleasure’, to the conference-inspired anthology, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1989), states the class problem within feminist analysis of sexuality succinctly: I have always been more ashamed of having been a dancer in night clubs when I’ve talked about it in feminist circles than I ever felt in my hometown, working class community. There are many assumptions at work behind feminist expressions of surprise or horror: I must be stupid or I could have done something better than that; I must have been forced against my will or I was just too young to know better; I have prefeminist consciousness; I had a terrible family life; I must have hated it; I was trash and this proved it; and finally, wasn’t I glad I’d been saved? (Hollibaugh, 1984:404) Hollibaugh’s statement suggests the implications of ‘consciousness’ on classed bodies and this can further illuminate racial complications within feminism that need disentangling. So, with all these problems, why not toss feminism and be queer? In thinking about queer black feminism, and the intersection of feminism and queer, it should not be established that one supersedes the other. Queer owes a debt to feminist analysis, especially that of gender as a social category, a debt feminism can be remunerated for by taking advantage of queer sex radical politics of pleasure. A sexual politics that links to the notion of queer as a social theory in oppositional stance to and confrontational reappropriation of deeply held norms and discourse might enable feminism to regenerate its sexual politics, to toss aside its own normalizing silences. This feminist politics has too often been unable to plug the knowledge of gender or race or class oppression into an outlet of desire as power not fully explored. One cannot toss feminism for queer, they are inextricably bound together historically as social theories. Further, for me queer has been most expressively articulated through black feminist writers although they are not often accredited with such analyses in those texts purporting to define or do


queer studies. Nor perhaps do many black feminists feel at liberty to claim queerness in an atmosphere in which their status is already tenuous. I suggest that, like other black feminist writers, black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde, expressing this need for exploring the political power of desire early on in her essay, ‘Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power’ (1984), anticipated recent queer social theories. Certainly Barbara Smith’s earlier work is crucial, and in her ‘The dance of masks’ (1992) Smith takes this use of the erotic even further as she writes her desires out in an inspiring narrative combination of fear and agency about the sexual power of her butch body and desires as she expresses them. In her essay, The myth and tradition of the black bulldagger’ (1991), SDiane Bogus challenges negative images of black female sexuality by reclaiming the history of the black bulldagger as the site of an empowering mythology and legend about self-defined sexual agency. More recently, black feminist scholar Jackie Goldsby, in her essay ‘Queen for 307 days: looking b(l)ack at Vanessa Williams and the sex wars’ (1993), demonstrates the importance of understanding how black feminist theory queers queer and feminists’ sex radical stance. Goldsby does so in a theoretical move analogous to my critical suggestions about the history of Rich’s privileged silence about lesbian sexuality. Goldsby interrogates the sex radicals’ sex war debates’ historic proximity to and silence about Vanessa Williams, the first black Ms America beauty queen who was dethroned due to the expose of lesbian porno photos. In Goldsby’s analysis of Vanessa Williams’ image she links a personal narrative with an incisive analysis of historically race-premised social and economic relations of black female sexuality, that of it as an owned commodity. Further, Goldsby points to the underlying assumption of the whiteness of lesbian sex culture to assess how both factors contribute to the silence around black female sexuality that the lack of lesbian feminist discourse on Ms Williams’ public fall demonstrates. In these few examples, if queer is in opposition to normative discourse then it is already part of the terrain of black feminist critical practice. Further, black feminist destabilization of oppositional categories reinscribes and breaks the silence of what queer and feminist might mean as more than ‘naturalized’ identities. For me, as an umbrella term queer has a gloss to it that can only be sharpened with feminist history: a history often grappling over and in contradiction with race and class and sexuality but with a saliency and experience of pushing bodies and politics against each other. Queer, as it is often claimed by academically powerful white masculinity,


sometimes suggests and describes its political constituency as seductively fluid, unmarked, ambiguous, and chosen. This fluidity sounds dangerously like the status of white masculinity to me. For instance, one could compare Michael Warner’s notion of an individual practical self-reflective queerness in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) to the queerness articulated through complicated familial interrelations, experience, fantasy, social systems, and in contradictory connection to others that Thomas Allen Harris presents in his documentary film on queer black siblings ‘Vintage: Families of Value’ (1995). Furthermore, in what appears to me as a direct contrast to queers of colour, this same type of queer theory often calls for an analysis of class and race alongside sexuality without producing it. This predominant unfulfilled project is what queer black feminism is capturing. I contend that queer social theory is indebted to black feminism: that queer black feminism’s anticipation of a praxis of sexuality and bodies, premised on its axis with a feminist history of fraught relations of class and race, articulates an analysis of sexual politics that could reconstitute the understanding of queerness altogether. V Pursuing pleasure has become central to my understanding of a queer black feminist model. The courage behind the pursuits I owe to exploitative sexual imagery no matter how convoluted and screwed up the analyses which were enacted. Feminism did not have models or access for me as a queered-out young woman feeling sexual, grappling with race and class status. Nor could feminism address women like my mother or aunt-cousin, women who liked to fuck men, who wanted a better life but did not want more rules about how to get it. Indeed, a queer black feminist analysis comes into play when I can re-evaluate my aunt-cousin’s and mother’s sexualities as differing but interlocked systems of race and class domination, ones in which white dominance differently pathologizes and penalizes their desires but does so by a dependence on constructing a pervasive and excessive perversity of blackness. This construction works against developing an analysis of black women’s struggles for sexual agency while it locates degeneracy in the psyche of the female interracial violator. Instead of a persistent paralleling of black women’s sexual oppression to that of Anglo or European women’s as if that encompassed the extent of the systems, an understanding of the specific negative significance of blackness in


relation to female sexuality offers one way of grasping how the repression of black female sexuality exceeds this reductive positing of sameness. Certainly, it is not the only way. Looking for pleasure invites me to look at my mother’s identity as a feminist in terms of her ethnicity, interracial violations, class, and sexuality. Instead of negating her as anti-feminist because she participated in her own oppression, I can map out her brand of feminism as it worked for her. My mom didn’t have access to complicated political analyses, or the time or training to acquire it. She was just angry about the structure. She was going to beat it—on that point she was determined. After her divorce in the 1970s my mom had a bit of a time to find employment since she had been housewifing it for sixteen years or so, had three kids to support, and a foreign high school degree. She finally landed what as a child I considered an excellent position: the sales clerk in the Kmart pet section. Kmart, that large department store where inexpensive ‘brand’ name clothing and greasy french fries could be purchased under the same roof. Unfortunately it paid little and she had to keep looking for a second job. In the meantime she had had to go to the welfare offices to ask for AFDC: the US financial social service of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It was destined to be a disaster as all experiences with American bureaucracy were for her. I recall her retelling the indignities in her heavily accented, high-pitched fast voice to her then good friend and co-Kmart worker F (simultaneously she was cutting years off F’s face while cutting bangs in her hair). Apparently, when all documents were produced, the social worker had instructed my mom to correct an item in the paperwork before processing: the children’s father was black therefore the children were black. That worker seeking accuracy above all probably never knew what hit her, but she had certainly struck at one of my mom’s sore spots with the US. ‘My children are not black I told the bitch and threw the papers back in her face! In European families, in my family, we have grandparents from Ethiopia, from Spain. We say we are Italian, we do not say we are black! This, this is the hypocrisy of this damned United States. Who is a goddamned American anyway, show me their faces.’ (Check one box only: facism or racism.) It seems a couple of weeks later that my mom had learned of a women’s meeting that was convening locally. It promised support and action. From my perspective now I assume it was a placid apolitical version of a female consciousness raising group, middle-class suburban style and, knowing that, I realized the pain that must have cut through my mom’s optimism when she told her recent story and asked for action


—now. No one understood her anger, they probably had no paradigms for thinking of gender in relation to class or race and, worse, I feel certain they found her display of illogical frustration, loud desire for revenge, and even perhaps her interracial ties appalling. Obviously the social worker was correct, why was this woman upset? Obviously to me, my mother was irrational and racist in the target of her anger. But what has become even clearer is that in my mother’s racist attempts to insist on her children as not-black she had made an astute correlation between the overlap of black and class in the US, an observation that mainstream feminism’s insistence on gender oppression was ignoring. For my mother white status implied privileged class status in the US, and black status was dominated class status, and having access to class privilege was to participate in power and pleasure. My mother may not have been able to put this into abstract enunciation, rather, without defining it, attempting to ‘pass’ her children was her retaliation. One of the difficulties in writing this essay has been to resist a tendency to write separate stories about conflicting intersections: to write about the influence of my mom’s class-marked pursuit for pleasure as queer material for refiguring feminist practice and, second, to write out the strife over my racial identification within my relationship to my mother as I actually claim her as a feminist model. The oddity is that this seems parallel to the story of feminism and women of colour. Although gender provided them with some common ground, race created vast divisions. Audre Lorde’s essay ‘An open letter to Mary Daly’ (1981) exemplifies this fracture as Lorde takes Daly to task for her racial assumptions and erasures. Actually this comparison belies a slight difference. While feminism denied overt racism, my mother practised at times just that. Without retracting that last statement in the least, I know it was not a sustained racism; I know it came in angry bouts; I know it was a US-induced racism; and I know it was juxtaposed against a predilection for dark bodies. It is the nature of the beast that my mother could compliment my brother’s brown skin for being just that—a lovely colour—and still spout epitaphs of slicing desire to annihilate the black in us. Yet my father was by no means the last black or male of colour with whom my mother was sexually involved. How is the predilection involved in the angry disavowal? Was my mother a woman who cannot claim her desires because they are entangled in taboos that make her a nasty girl in social exchanges? Did this nastiness titillate her to further fulfil the taboo-crossing desire and simultaneously fill her with shame? What I am suggesting is a particular component of my mom’s racism that is


about her gendered relations to race as an interracial interloper, but also an indication of how desire, gender, class, and race are pitted together. If it is understood that desire itself might be fuelled by shame over ourselves, over our own desires, then perhaps the question is not how do we overcome this shame/desire but it should be how do we address this shameful desire and make it empowering, resistant, a political stance? Beyond analysing the social relations and history that produces this shame and desire, how does queer black feminist practice necessitate reclaiming our history of shameful desires? Feminism made some attempt at deconstructing shame and the female body in a variety of configurations, obviously by making sex a topic of discussion. But it became evident in the 1980s when the sex wars were ensuring that feminism had never moved beyond a narrow perception of sexuality or race and class in relation to gendered shame. ‘Since I am analysing my mother’s desires, a task I find troubling (exactly because I’ve got a Toni Cade Bambara fear of her coming into my room in the middle of the night essay in hand), I should reflect on my own history of desire in relation to my racial history: my own history of shameful desires. It would help to begin with childhood. One of the games when playing with my cousins and friends was a game about master/slave relations. On more than one occasion my aunt-cousin was sitting in the living room in a heated debate with friends about Black US Slave History and we kids, being an annoyance, were excluded to the basement or yard and took up the conversation for our own use. We were well-informed for our roles. Being light I was the house slave, the one who got to dress pretty and eat well but who would also be forced to sleep with the master of the house, until she was rescued both emotionally and physically by another female slave, her unknown till then blacker sister and illegitimate daughter of an evil owner. The drama heightened as they faced punishment but together they would either run away or kill everyone. If that sounds elaborate, I can assure the reader we had lots of variations, and despite that we were usually all girls we had plenty of gender-role playing going on. Keeping the sanctity of the playground rule ‘not to tell’ I’ll refrain from further details, and instead point out that what I am trying to make visible is an identification of desire and gender that came through my racial identification. The queerness of being black but light, the shame of being light but black, the gendered mediation of the two, and the acted-out fantasies of the history of power relations embedded in the formation of these categories bears resonance on my adult desires. Now certainly I am not


trying to claim that all my desires have been clearly in place thanks to childhood games. More to the point I am trying to claim that interacting with one’s history, with the desire, shame, and responsibilities embedded in that history, enforced through that history, should be a part of arriving at an understanding of the power of desire. It should enable a queer black feminist reclamation of that desire, a resistance to that shame. I have to comprehend, accept, and speak out about the certain position of advantage and disadvantage I have in the structures of oppression. I need to turn the shame of that position around and make use out of what it puts in my imagination to arrive at any sexual agency. Related to my experience of expressing myself to others as black is the more complicated experience of outing myself as a fem, an identity that denotes certain sexual desires, but doing one is embedded in doing the other. The necessity of my always having to say I am black to be identified as black marks my light appearance as both a privileged and silenced history of power relations and shame around interracial sexuality in the US. This has parallel roots in my always having to come out as fem to be identified as lesbian and then as a particular type of lesbian, one invested in an overtly gendered erotic relationship. Along with my fem investment in eroticizing lesbian differences I am often mistaken for straight, another history and set of power relations in this society. Concurrently, claiming my fem desires has given me access to my body, a light body that as black-identified I often am alienated from, by allowing me to find ways to take pleasure in it despite its racial and sexual perversities. This queer sexuality of mine then is engendered by and engenders my queer racial identity. This puts my history at my service, this places my race as central to my gender and desire, and this places my sexual fantasies to my advantage. In those devastating moments when feminists defined practice as an elimination of all power-tainted sexual fantasies their own ‘overt’ racial bias is most certainly established as they shape practice on white middle-class empowerment—not to mention, prescribe a sexual practice as oppressive and boring as it gets. It is this necessity for continually coming out of closets of knowledge that I suggest queer black feminism should embrace and I believe is already moving towards. Once a system of knowledge is in place, once gender oppression is under scrutiny, the focus should include not only disrupting the stability of the category but finding methods of making one category always a discussion of another. It just doesn’t prove enough to add the themes—here’s race, a bit of class, and a touch of sexuality—without allowing them to disrupt the system in ways that


reconstitute it. A dialogue on race is a feminist dialogue is a class dialogue is a queer dialogue already. Categories are queer. By this I do not mean that categories are useless, obviously not when they are already in place as a complex network of social meanings and bodies of knowledge. It has taken me a long time to come to understand my mother’s identity in the above terms, and thereby start taking a closer look at my own. In telling this story it is not an accomplishment for me to bash feminism. The accomplishment in telling this story resides in the acknowledgement that at the place where theories and identities converge to form practice categories fall apart and practice can no longer be prescribed. Feminists of the 1970s may feel anger towards the revisionism occurring but they also need to move beyond their own experience. With their anger I can both empathize and disagree. (Balance and equality are core feminist values.) VI In order to better illustrate the complexities involved in concepts of community, identity, and politics at stake in a queer black feminist agenda I want to turn to a recent publication of journalism and essays by Sarah Schulman entitled My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (1994). This text is not a comprehensive history by any means, and in fact contains writings done mostly between 1981 and 1994, but, as I stated earlier, history has become important for feminism in the 1990s and this is one such recent history. I chose this particular text over other recent contributions because it is experiential and already in an odd relation to feminism with its queer trajectory and therefore provides a complicated feminist identification. What the text offers this essay is the perspective of a germinal lesbian feminist political activist involved with queer activism, Sarah Schulman, and as such presents an insider’s view on how movements define themselves and their communities. To start off Schulman addresses feminist revisionism with a competitive challenge to 1990s dykes over who is/was more sexually daring: And this line was backed up by an amazingly distorted revisionism on seventies feminists and lesbians claiming that they were sexually inhibited and prudish, when all the documentation from that period points in the opposite direction… In the end, I


still don’t believe that the nineties dyke enjoys sex more than Catherine MacKinnon. (Schulman, 1994:9) Well, we all have to have our ‘beliefs’. I believe Schulman when she claims that sexual experimentation was laid open by feminists and lesbians in the 1970s. What I wonder about is how straight workingclass women like my mom or black women like my aunts were supposed to get their rocks off and still be admitted to feminism as more than an object for reform. What I wonder about is whether feminist and lesbian sexual experimentation made room for diversity or defined this experimental sex rather narrowly and prescriptively; if it thought about race and class models for sexuality. I want to argue from my own understandings of cultural feminism, lesbian feminism, academic feminism, and popular feminism that it seems that sexuality was usually either heterosexually defined or politically defined and therefore narrowly defined by all camps in the feminist debate. It is not about who is ‘badder’, it is about how to create a politics that allows for a claiming of one’s own pleasure. Isn’t it? Schulman’s book offers a reflection on how feminist communities worked in the past and how they might or might not work now. It admirably reveals the complexities that occur with bodies and categories and boundaries. For instance, Schulman gives a welldeserved and righteous slap on the hand to Susan Faludi’s recent book about backlash, a very real issue for the 1990s, by asking why five hundred pages and no mention of dykes? Always straight feminists and lesbians had trouble getting together. Until of course they could align around gender values, make sex political, and oppress all other sexual paradigms. Whose utopia is it anyway? In another breath Schulman defines core gay and lesbian issues and lesbians in the military as not one of them: ‘Not only is there great dissension within our community about the role of the military (which has made grass-roots organizing on the issue difficult and low key), but it seems clear that the community’s own priority is AIDS’ (Schulman, 1994:14). Granted, this may have been an issue sent from the political top down but black lesbians often join the military as an economic necessity and, as Schulman herself acknowledges, are the first booted out on homosexual charges (while others have charges dismissed).2 This certainly speaks to the specific sexual stigmas attached to the black female body. If the community’s own priority is AIDS, one might ask, as Evelynn Hammonds does, how the gains made by queer activists around AIDS have disrupted the stigmas


attached to black women’s sexuality and AIDS in the African-American community. Schulman, who makes up your activist lesbian feminist community? And how do you go about analysing the most pressing concerns—does the community dialogue on race incorporate class at all? Granted Schulman presents a diverse and impressive array of analyses around race and class, particularly with her inclusion of a narrative about Jewish working-class women and journalistic excerpts recording the contributions of black feminists among other people of colour. But in her introduction Schulman critiques identity politics and ethnicity divisions as entering feminist activism and de-activating it (Schulman, 1994:4). Class and race and sexuality and gender and feminism, what a dilemma for the 1990s. Why can’t we all just work together? Schulman’s recent text intersects feminism with other agendas expertly and, intentionally or not, articulates the complexities feminist agendas have inherited today. It is clear to me that pleasure is central to all the debates. Schulman’s participation in the organization of a new method of lesbian activism, the Lesbian Avengers, illustrates her own feminist understanding of pleasure’s relationship to politics. The handbook uses sexy images and slogans once seen as exploitation for political fliers. On one flier Pam Grier of blaxploitation film fame appears with artillery and hot pants luring members to a fund-raising party. Direct and confrontational political actions known as ‘zaps’ are detailed. The Lesbian Avengers methodology seems to be capable of attacking a varied line-up of political concerns, and seems to be able to make it appealing to a larger constituency by extracting political involvement from prescriptive sexual politics. Where can the types of feminist and sexual politics links that Schulman presents with her avenger model, where there is not an explicit analysis of race or class, be further defined? I suggest that queer black feminist understandings of pleasure and politics are ‘id’ for feminist agendas. What are the purposes in this queer black feminism being claimed out of creating a sexual politics of pleasure? Abstractly, the answer is a cultural analysis and reclamation of queer black female sexualities: sexualities that have had a long history of being denied pleasure. But this queer black feminism may seem to be consumed by sexuality while other issues are laid by the wayside. What about equality of wages, opportunity, and rights? I will risk arguing that the feminization of poverty is an issue of the right of women to define their own pleasure as much as it is an issue of wage earnings precisely because it is the same body being subjected to service and circumspection, because one type


of oppression inheres the other. When public discourse and legal legislation define single black mothers receiving public aid as sexually immoral and irresponsible in order to enforce the use of birth control technology and even sterilization as a condition of their public aid, then sexual agency is clearly at stake. Queer black feminism can best be understood to take up sexuality in ways that make it simultaneously about race, class, and gender—in ways that politicize pleasure—not just personalize it as a politics of being. The constituency for queer black feminism may alter daily, may be organized differently around class or race, and may carry agendas from welfare activism to academic cultural analysis. It should exhibit the methods for a changing agenda by changing the concept of the feminist body and its pleasure and its history. Queer black feminism’s attention to pleasure will not be viable for all feminist agendas. But queer black feminism understands pleasure and sexuality as bodies seeking rights and wages in a way earlier feminism was unable to do: in a way that does not require a conformity to ‘ideal’ models of gender and pleasure in order to demand political rights. Queer black feminism does not extract one type of identity from the other by containing and silencing markers of identity within boundaries of gender. The category of woman has been sexualized precisely by markings of class and race, and inner-circle feminist oppression has occurred precisely by attempting to eliminate these markings with gender. Hence, straight women who understand the liberty to fuck as emancipation might have found feminism more accessible if their desires had been recognized. Black lesbians might have found it more accessible if raced and classed constructions of sexuality had informed the theories. Since this resulted in an area of contention for mainstream feminisms, queer black feminisms can now take the opportunity of historically locating, analysing, and redrawing the bodies at stake. In conclusion, I want to reflect upon the writing of this essay. I want to draw upon a facet revealed in the personal aspect of this essay that is apparent in arriving at the end. I find it illustrative of the dynamics of the complexity of identity that, although my queer black feminist agenda calls upon a combination of pop culture and intellectual arenas, it relies even more on being grounded by the interrelated and different experiences of both black and white straight working-class women grappling with oppressions—women who have a complex set of ethnic and racial and gendered circumstances. The agency, pleasure, vocality, and particularity of struggle denied these subjects inform this essay. Is


this a problem or a solution? Perhaps the grouping of queer and black and feminism resides in just such a contradictory and tentative alliance. Perhaps the possibility of such an alliance and diversity of queer black feminists is conditional. Queer black feminism recognizes this; already its subjectivities are creating theories/practices/alliances with which to work. Notes Laura Alexandra Harris teaches in the Women’s Studies Department at California State University San Marcos. Currently, Harris is the recipient of a UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship that will give her an opportunity to finish writing her dissertation this coming year. Her project is entitled, ‘Women writing resistance: bodies, class, and race in the Harlem Renaissance’. Her e-mail address is: [email protected]. 1 It was Teresa De Lauretis and Florence Howe, respectively, who proposed these dilemmas. 2 Alicia Harris, my cousin, was part of a group of women brought up on homosexual charges in the 1980s in the Navy in which only the black women were discharged. It was a fairly publicized event with much media distortion and (mis)representation.

References BOGUS, SDiane (1991) ‘The myth and tradition of the black bulldagger’ in Burana, Lily, Roxxie and Due, Linnea (1994) editors, Dagger Pittsburgh: Cleis Press. CARBY, Hazel V. (1987) Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist New York: Oxford University Press. ECHOLS, Alice (1984) ‘The taming of the id: feminist sexual politics, 1968– 83’ in Vance, Carole S. (1989) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality London: Pandora Press. FRILOT, Shari (1995) ‘Black nations/queer nations?’, video 3/4• 52 minutes, New York: Mix Festival, call 212 947 9277 for information. GOLDSBY, Jackie (1993) ‘Queen for 307 days: looking b(l)ack at Vanessa Williams and the sex wars’, in Stein, Arlene (1993) editor, Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation New York: Penguin. HAMMONDS, Evelynn (1994) ‘Black (w)holes and the geometry of black female sexuality’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Vol. 6, No. 2:126–45.


HARRIS, Thomas Allen (1995) ‘Vintage: families of value’, film 16mm, 72 minutes, USA, call 619 534 1307 for information. HOLLIBAUGH, Amber (1984) ‘Desire for the future: radical hope in passion and pleasure’ in Vance, Carole S. (1989) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality London: Pandora Press. hooks, bell (1989) ‘Feminism: a transformational politic’ in Talking Black: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black Boston: South End Press. LORDE, Audre (1984) ‘Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power’ in Sister Outsider New York: South End Press. ——(1980) ‘An open letter to Mary Daly’ in Anzaldua, Gloria and Moraga, Cherrie (1981) editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour New York: Kitchen Table Press. RICH, Adrienne (1980) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ in Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine and Thompson, Sharon (1983) editors, Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality New York: Monthly Review Press. RUBIN, Gayle (1984) ‘Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality’ in Vance, Carole S. (1989) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality London: Pandora Press. RUSS, Joanne (1972) ‘When it changed’ in Ellison, Harlan (1972) editor, Again Dangerous Visions New York: Doubleday. SCHULMAN, Sarah (1994) My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years New York: Routledge. SMITH, Barbara (1977) ‘Toward a black feminist criticism’ in All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave New York: Feminist Press, 1982. ——(1992) ‘The dance of masks’, in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader Boston: Alyson Publishing. SPILLERS, Hortense (1987) ‘Mama’s baby, Papa’s may be: an American grammar book’ Diacritics Vol. 17, No. 2:65–81. WARNER, Michael (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

A Straight Playing Field or Queering the Pitch? Centring Sexuality in Social Policy Jean Carabine

Abstract This article argues that there is a lack of theorizing about sexuality within social policy in what is referred to as the mainstream and more surprisingly within feminist social policy. This is particularly surprising given the presence of sexuality in recent as well as past social policies as well as in social theory. The purpose of this article is not merely to argue that a relationship between sexuality and social policy should be examined but rather to explore and outline the specific nature of the relationship and its implications for both sexuality and the discipline of social policy. Specifically, how do prevalent sexuality discourses inform and constitute social policy and what are the social relations involved in this process? Correspondingly, what role does social policy play in constituting what we know to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality? What exclusions and inclusions result from these dominant social relations and discourses when ‘played’ through social policy? That sexuality has failed to be analytically incorporated within the discipline of social policy is addressed. First, reasons for the lack of theorizing are explored. Specifically, the historical development of the discipline and the formation of an implicit consensus about what constitute the real concerns of welfare. Second, there is an examination of the ways feminist social policy has or has not engaged with sexuality. The final section posits an emergent framework for integrating sexuality into social policy analyses and critiques.


Keywords sexuality; social policy; heterosexuality; welfare

feminist;

regulation;

The relationship between sexuality and social policy seems to be largely ignored and under-researched. Little material exists which critiques heterosexuality either as taken-for-granted in social policy practice or as an issue for social policy as a discipline. This is surprising given the presence of sexuality in recent as well as past social policies as well as in social theory. A cursory examination illustrates how sexuality issues have been the concern of policies: think, for example, of debates surrounding teenage pregnancy, sex education, age of sexual consent, HIV/AIDS, the Child Support Act, Back to Basics, and sex tourism. Correspondingly, social policy is also a focus for the politics of sexuality—a site where various issues and ‘truths’ about sexuality are contested, challenged, transformed, and reformed. However, little attention has been given to theorizing sexuality or heterosexuality as a form of sexuality specifically in relation to social policy. Sexuality has, in general, failed to be awarded any analytical power within the discipline of social policy. As will be discussed in more detail later, this lack of attention to theorizing sexuality in social policy applies not only to what might be termed traditional ‘mainstream’ accounts, but perhaps more surprisingly to UK feminist work, albeit with some notable exceptions (e.g. Wilson, 1977, 1980; Williams, 1992; Dominelli, 1991; Carabine, 1992a, 1992b; Langan and Day, 1992). There are also exceptions in neighbouring disciplines, for example, in feminist socio-legal studies (Smart, 1989; Bell, 1993). Recently, commentators from a number of disciplines have written of the decline of class (Giddens, 1991; Pierson, 1991; Taylor-Gooby, 1991; Cahill, 1994), arguing that people were moving away from social class as the basis for self-identity (Taylor-Gooby, 1991:18) to more complex and individual multiple identifications and reflecting significant social change. In social policy some of these writers have been concerned to address the relationship between social change and social policy (see Cahill, 1994; Taylor-Gooby, 1991; Williams, 1992, 1995). Sexuality is also an area of significant social change. This can be seen in changing social attitudes to marriage, divorce, single motherhood and homosexuality; in the diversity of household and family forms which exist; in the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on sexuality, intimate

SEXUALITY IN SOCIAL POLICY 35

relations, risk and health. In The Netherlands this social change resulted, in April 1996, in proposals suggesting the legalization of lesbian and gay male marriage and same-sex adoption. Including sexuality in our analyses of social policy can be a means by which to understand social change and in particular help us to go beyond more normative analysis of social policy. The family, for example, has been identified as an arena of change having significant implications for social policy. A principal concern has been with the impact of family changes on existing caring patterns (see Taylor-Gooby, 1991; Langan, 1992), that is, their effect on the available pool of carers and the implications of this for informal and state provision (see Taylor-Gooby, 1991:12, 79–81). Being sensitive to sexuality it is possible to see how lesbian, gay, and queer challenges and changing attitudes towards lesbian and gay men might affect developing patterns of family life or even what we understand as family life. Similarly, such a sensitivity challenges assumptions about caring: first, that caring takes place only within formal families and, second, that only heterosexuals care. The lack of a sexuality analysis combined with traditional ideas about the family, women, and caring reinforces traditional discourses and models in accounts of social change (see, for example, Taylor-Gooby, 1991). Incorporating sexuality permits caring carried out in other forms of social networks to be recognized. Making visible the caring undertaken by gay men and lesbians for their friends and partners. This will include the HIV/AIDS caring work undertaken by gay men whether as part of an intimate relationship, or as part of friendship networks and/or as unpaid voluntary work. Including sexuality in this way allows a fuller representation and analysis of the complex forms of caring which exist. Incorporating sexuality in our analysis can also broaden our general understandings of how the destabilization of social categories affects social policy. Similarly, social theory on sexuality may also contribute to our understandings of social policy. Furthermore, including sexuality in our analyses means not that we simply account for the experiences of lesbians and gays but also that we critique how social policy, both as discipline and practice, constitutes appropriate and acceptable sexualities in ways which affect heterosexuals and lesbians and gays, albeit differentially, and which are mediated by ‘race’, class, gender, disability, and age. At this stage I think I need to clarify what I mean when I suggest that the relationship between sexuality and social policy is largely ignored. How might sexuality be included in social policy analyses? Sexuality as an issue for social policy can be explored in at least three main ways:


first, through its inclusion as a topic for consideration within social policy analyses. This might include reference to, for example, contraception, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, reproduction, sex education, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, lesbianism, and homosexuality. Here the focus might be on needs and provision of services and benefits for single and teenage mothers, lesbians, and/or data about these categories and/or reference to the existence of policies relating to these areas. A second level at which sexuality might be addressed in social policy is through the examination of the power relations which surround sexuality issues. So, for example, social policy writers might analyse or assess the direct and indirect ways in which lesbians and gay men can experience discrimination on the basis of their sexuality. They may also address the ways in which appropriate and acceptable sexuality is the means for establishing access to and eligibility for welfare benefits and services, such as sexuality as a criterion for eligibility to benefits in the critiques of the cohabitation rule. A third and related level is in theorizing and critiquing the influence of dominant sexual discourses on social policy. This would require looking beyond sexuality merely in terms of the discrimination of individuals and groups on the basis of their sexualized identities; it would mean going further than seeing sexuality as one means by which eligibility to services and benefits is established. It would mean sexuality would be seen instead as a framework or logic which informs social policy practice and analyses in very particular and real ways rather than as a discrete issue or topic of social policy. The aim of this paper is to not argue simply that a relationship between sexuality, specifically heterosexuality, and social policy should be examined, but to explore and outline the specific nature of this relationship and its implications for both sexuality and social policy. The focus will be on social policy as a discipline. A feminist-mediated Foucauldian analysis informs this perspective. Foucault’s work, although not without criticism (see, for example, Bartky, 1988; Fraser, 1989; Braidotti, 1991; Sawacki, 1991; McNay, 1992; Ramazanoglu, 1993; Bell, 1993), is particularly helpful because it offers analytical and theoretical insights into both sexuality and social policy. The paper will be divided into three main sections. The first is concerned with the reasons for the failure to theorize sexuality and social policy. Three principal explanations are given: the influence of ideas about the nature of sexuality; the historical development of the discipline of social policy; the formation of an implicit consensus about the ‘real’ concerns of welfare. Interwoven with this analysis will be


examples of the ways the discipline has tended to deal with sexuality along with an assessment of how these might be interpreted. The second main section examines the ways in which feminist social policy has, or has not, engaged with sexuality and the tendency not to theorize it in relation to social policy. The third and final section discusses what putting sexuality on the agenda would mean for the discipline. A straight playing field: the failure to theorize sexuality The failure of the discipline to theorize sexuality can be understood in three main ways: first, the influence of prevalent discourses of sexuality on the discipline; second, the historical development of the discipline of social policy, particularly the influence of Fabianism and the social administration legacy; third, the establishing of an implicit consensus about what constitute the real issues of social policy and welfare. Ideas about sexuality exist within society as discourse. Foucault argues that power is constituted through discourses which function as sets of rules designating ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’. In relation to sexuality, prevalent discourses of sexuality specify what sexuality is at particular moments in time. They are the means by which what we know to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality are established. In his work on sexuality Foucault (1990) investigates the ways in which sexuality has come to be seen and spoken of and in particular how the development of knowledges about sex and sexuality can be understood as an operation of power. These knowledges about sexuality tell us what is ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ sexuality while establishing the boundaries of what is acceptable and appropriate sexuality. Although what we know to be heterosexuality at any given time is historically, culturally, and socially specific, subject to redefinition and transformation, it is heterosexuality that persists as the benchmark of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ sexuality.1 In this way, ideas about heterosexuality become naturalized in commonplace thinking with the effect that heterosexual relationships are taken for granted as the norm. Social policy as practice and discipline develops within the social and social policy writers and analysts are also influenced by these common understandings about the nature of sexuality. The implicit acceptance of heterosexuality as ‘normal’ sexuality in social policy is part of a process through which measures are established by which all sexuality behaviours and relations are judged and deemed


to conform or not. This normalizing effect is the means by which appropriate and acceptable sexuality is enforced and regulated. This ‘truth’ of sexuality is generally left unchallenged and unquestioned in much of social policy writing, resulting in a notion of heterosexuality as normal, fixed, and universal sexuality being established and constituted through social policy. In part this has been responsible for the invisibility of sexuality analyses and issues in social policy and a tendency in much previous work on social policy to reinforce heterosexual norms and relations (Carabine, 1992a). Texts have assumed heterosexuality as the ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ state of affairs. This can be seen in much, particularly mainstream, work on the family which is often presented in an unproblematic and universalistic way. The existence of other family forms is often ignored and, where they are acknowledged, writers often fail to consider service and welfare provision based on nonuniversalistic family forms. An example of this approach can be seen in an article by Pinker on ‘Family services’ (1985). Here it is acknowledged that the ‘family is not a homogeneous institution’ (1985: 72); however, it is clear from the remaining text that the model of the family under consideration is heterosexual. He states unquestioningly that ‘one of the primary aims of social policy is to preserve and restore families’ (1985:73). However, a critical examination of social policies reveals that it is a particular ‘ideal’ of the family which social policy seeks to preserve and restore: that of the heterosexual nuclear family. Pinker also argues that it seems sensible to base service provision on the notion of family membership (1985:75). This is fine if a nonuniversalist notion of family is applied, which allows for a variety of formations including lesbian and gay families. Pinker (1985:75) takes ‘as a rough index of normality an evident ability [of a family] to manage its own affairs and to discharge its responsibilities to dependent members within the terms of its own resources’. It would seem, therefore, that provided a family (whatever its form) manages its own affairs then it will be considered ‘normal’ for policy purposes. However, an examination of policy and practice reveals this not to be the case and it is often not enough that families can manage their own affairs. For example, the introduction of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 in December 1986 with its concerns, among other things, to ensure that local authorities did not ‘Promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as pretended family relationship’ illustrates that there are other factors which may determine what is considered a ‘normal’ family for policy


purposes. This self-management measure of ‘normality’ is restricted to the management of resources and adopts an analysis which ignores other social and structural concerns. It also leaves unquestioned the privileging of the heterosexual nuclear family as ‘normal’ and acceptable for policy purposes, raising questions about the place of other family forms, such as lesbian couples, within social policy. Other linked ideas about sexuality as biological and an essence, and heterosexuality as essential for reproduction, serve to perpetuate the experience of sexuality as ‘taken for granted’ and as something which ‘just is’ and about ‘doing what comes naturally’. The ‘naturalization’ of sexuality leads to it being situated outside the realms of theorizing as far as many individuals and disciplines, including social policy are concerned. Additionally, sexuality has not been theorized within social policy because it is commonly perceived as an intimate, personal, and private matter. This operates in two main ways. First, sexuality and social policy have come to be defined and commonly understood as about private relations and public policy. Sexuality has come to be defined as signifying that which is most personal, intimate, and private. Prevalent sexual discourses marginalize sexuality as an issue of the private and domestic. Mainstream social policy, on the other hand, has generally represented a concern with the public in its focus on the role of the state and the market in the provision of public welfare. Correspondingly, the discipline has, until relatively recently, tended to treat the private and public as distinct and separate. Traditionally, the primary concerns of the discipline have been the state and the market and the operation of welfare in the public sphere. It was not until feminists argued for women’s unpaid caring and domestic work and for the centrality of the family to welfare to be acknowledged that the private sphere became a concern for the discipline (see, for example, McIntosh, 1981; Pascall, 1986; Dale and Foster, 1986; Land, 1989). However, many mainstream, mainly male, writers continue to ignore these aspects (see, for example, Esping-Andersen, 1990, and the critique in Sainsbury, 1994a). However, sexuality becomes further privatized within the private sphere precisely because it is perceived as intimately personal and private. This privatization is institutionalized within legal and political frameworks, as in the Wolfenden Report 1957 and subsequent legislation dealing with prostitution, homosexuality, and pornography (see Richardson, 1996:14) and in everyday experience as ‘What people (usually two) get up to in the privacy of their own homes is their own business provided no one gets hurt’.


The privatization of sexuality in this way results in its being experienced and understood as an individual experience (see Cooper, 1992/3:23), a concern therefore of the individual. This individualizing may be another reason why sexuality is marginalized as an analytic category. Individualizing sex and sexuality also means that the social relations of power are ignored at the level of the social as well as the interpersonal. This is surprising given that what people do sexually, where and with whom is the focus of implicit and explicit social regulation and control.2 That sexuality is more explicit in law than in policy may also explain why it is theorized in some socio-legal studies (as in the work of Smart, Bell, and Collier) and not social policy. What is interesting about looking at the public/private relationship in the context of sexuality is that there are different constructions of what each constitutes and the relationship of one to the other (see Richardson, 1996:9–13). Although there has been considerable discussion, ‘showing’, and ‘outing’ of sexuality recently in a variety of media, many people still feel uncomfortable speaking of sexuality issues. For some to speak of sexuality is still taboo (see Carabine, 1992b:353) but it may also arise from a perception of sexuality as dangerous. To write about sexuality exposes the writer in ways that writing about income support or health may not, precisely because it is seen as exciting, pleasurable, dangerous, personal, and intimate. Sexuality is frequently not taken seriously as an academic subject and often not afforded the same intellectual weight as economics, politics, sociology, or social policy. Second, to write about sexuality may also invite unwanted attention from, for example, the media, as happened at the BSA Conference on Sexualities in 1994. Additionally, sometimes people conflate sexuality with homosexuality and you may risk being seen as promoting homosexuality or ‘pretended family’ relations. Having considered the ways in which prevalent ideas about sexuality might influence the discipline and how this has resulted in a lack of theorizing, I want to look next at the impact of the historical development of the discipline on this. The origins of the discipline are well documented (Hill, 1980; Madge and Brown, 1982) and critiqued (see, for example, Pinker, 1971; Mishra, 1977, 1984; Taylor-Gooby and Dale, 1981; George and Wilding, 1985, 1994; Deakin, 1987; Williams, 1989; Taylor-Gooby, 1991; Bryson, 1992) and therefore will be discussed only briefly here. Social policy grew out of a social administration tradition concerned more with the collection of empirical evidence than its interpretation or the development of theories arising


out of it (Mishra, 1977: 4–6; Williams, 1989:8). The roots of social administration were the ‘politics of collectivism and the practice of state intervention to deal with social problems in the beginnings of the twentieth century’ (Williams, 1989:4). The discipline of social policy is traditionally concerned with welfare and the provision of welfare to meet individual needs (Marshall, 1975:15). Most definitions of social policy are about achieving welfare objectives in relation to services, such as housing, education, health, social care, and income maintenance. Similarly, social policy is defined as the establishment of statutory social services for the furtherance of public welfare (Madge and Brown, 1982:277). This led to a concern with the minutiae of statutory services and policies rather than with the value perspectives informing their interpretation, implementation, and instigation. These definitions also reflect the discipline’s focus on the state which led to a tendency which ‘unconsciously defined problems in the state’s own terms, and thereby upheld the status quo’ (Williams, 1989:8). Of the various influences on social administration it was Fabianism which was to be the most influential, remaining until the 1970s as the bedrock of the mainstream. With the influence of Fabianism came the acceptance of traditional ideas about women, ‘race’ (see Williams, 1987, 1989), and sexuality. The role of women as mothers and wives was accepted as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ along with the normality of the traditional heterosexual family. Households not seen as conforming were regarded as deviant, problematic, or potentially deviant (Wilson, 1977:90; Weeks, 1981: 235). Similarly, Fabianism was influenced by ideas of the time about male and female sexuality, and the naturalness and normality of heterosexuality were taken as given. In fact, many early Fabians saw the importance of the link between the control of sexuality and eugenics (Weeks, 1981:133). However, this relationship between sexuality and social policy was not developed theoretically by the discipline although the link between eugenics and sexuality has been critiqued. Concerns about the survival of the British race did not completely disappear and were a significant concern of the post-war welfare settlement and the establishment of the welfare state: ‘At the heart of welfarism was a clear concern with the conditions of “reproduction”— both in its widest social sense, of producing a healthy workforce in the context of comprehensive social security and full employment; and its narrow biological sense, of improving the conditions of parenthood and childbirth’ (Weeks, 1981:232). Central to this concern were normative


assumptions about sexuality, the family, marriage, and motherhood (Weeks, 1981: 235; Williams, 1989:7). The Fabian influence survived relatively unchallenged until the 1970s when writers started to examine the impact of values and ideology on welfare provision (see, for example, Pinker, 1971; George and Wilding, 1976, 1985, 1994; Mishra, 1977, 1984; Walker, 1983).3 The most notable of these challenges was the political economy of welfare perspective (Gough, 1979; Ginsburg, 1979; Offe, 1984). However, the values and ideologies which began to be identified as influencing social policy were narrowly defined along a class axis and influenced by mainstream social theory developments which themselves explained social stratification narrowly in terms of social class. Subsequent theorizing focused predominantly on the structural relations of class and debates took place along a left-right axis which focused on the role of the state versus the market.4 This analysis was to have an enduring impact upon the discipline to the extent that other analyses of social division or the differential effects of social policy, such as the feminist challenge (Land, 1976, 1978; McIntosh, 1981; Finch and Groves, 1983; Ungerson, 1985; Pascall, 1986; Dale and Foster, 1986; Williams, 1989), ‘race’ (Williams, 1987; Gordon, 1983; Jacobs, 1985; Mama, 1989), disability (Oliver, 1990; Morris, 1991/2; Lonsdale, 1990), and sexuality (Carabine, 1992a, 1992b, 1996; Shaver, 1990, 1993; Cooper, 1992/3), tend to be treated less seriously within the mainstream. Some writers disagree with this analysis, arguing instead that ‘Social Policy and Administration has broken away from a devotion to any one value perspective’ (Erskine and Ungerson, 1995:256). Some definitions of social policy go further and include the impact of ideology (as in Mishra, 1981; Walker 1983). For example, Walker argues for definitions to include: the rationale underlying the development and use of social institutions and groups which affect the distribution of resources, status and power, between different individuals and groups in society. (Walker, 1983:141) Definitions of social policy which go beyond traditional approaches (such as Walker, 1983, or Mishra, 1977, 1981) focus on resources and distributional effects in terms of ideological and material outcomes but exclude material and ideological outcomes arising out of the ideology of heterosexuality. For many writers a concern with ideology reflects a


concern with class. In the classic Marxist view of ideology ‘it is class that acts as both the determinant of ideology and its material base’ (Williams, 1995: 259). This may go some way to explaining why these very general definitions of ideology which in their non-specificity could include all ideologies, including heterosexuality, do not do so. (An example of this approach can be seen in Hill and Bramley (1986).) Certainly, writers have examined the impact of ideology and of normative values on social policy, in both general and specific terms relating to politics, class, economics, and, more recently, gender, ‘race’, and disability (see George and Wilding, 1985; Manning, 1985; Showstack-Sasson, 1987; Williams, 1987, 1989; Spicker, 1988; Land, 1989; Qureshi and Walker, 1989; Morris 1991/2). However, absent from all of these and other works is an analysis of the effect of normative ideas about sexuality in the form of heterosexuality on the practice and discipline of social policy. The neglect of an analysis of the influence, operations, and outcomes of discourses of sexuality on social policy has resulted in the predominance of studies which are concerned with ‘welfare’ in resource or distributional or ideological terms but where ideology is materially based. Although it may not have been the intention of writers such as Walker and Mishra to include sexuality, or more specifically heterosexuality, in their ‘ideological’ definitions of social policy, sexuality could have been accommodated. That it was not, reflects the ‘taken for granted’ nature of (hetero)sexuality and the marginality of sexuality issues in theorizing about social policy. In the final part of this first main section I will examine how the influences discussed above set the boundaries for an implicit consensus within the mainstream about what were the ‘real’ concerns for the discipline. One possible explanation for the exclusion of sexuality, or lack of explicit acknowledgement of sexuality in social policy critiques and theorizing, lies in the implicit consensus about what constitute the important issues and policy concerns in social policy. As Paul Spicker (1988: 22), commenting on social norms and welfare aptly puts it, ‘In social policy, explicit value conflicts do occur, but many of the most prominent debates concern issues—like abortion or sexuality—which are of marginal importance in relation to the issues of welfare provision’ (my emphasis). Spicker appears to be suggesting two things: first, the marginality of sexuality issues to social policy and, second, albeit implied, that there is no relationship between sexuality and welfare provision. Spicker’s conclusion is especially surprising given his analysis of the cohabitation rule (1988:25–6) in which he explicitly


identifies a link between sexuality and welfare benefits, as the following quote demonstrates: ‘[S]ex is central to the issue [cohabitation]; a brother and sister, or parent and adult child, would not be treated as “cohabiting” even though other criteria besides a sexual relationship and having a child together all applied’ (1988:25). This is not seen as being designed to enforce ‘moral principles’ (1988:25). Because Spicker sees sexuality as marginal, the wider link between it and social policy is not developed even though the centrality of sex to policy/benefit entitlement is acknowledged. That the cohabitation rule is generally applied to women and not to men is explained in terms of ‘institutional sexism’, ‘sexism in effect if not in form’ (1988:26) rather than one of a number of disciplinary aspects of the relationship between sexuality and social policy. Returning to the question of the ‘real’ issues of concern for social policy, the ‘real’ issues are, as discussed before, the provision of welfare and particularly the role of the state in that. Although welfare is often interpreted broadly within the literature it is traditionally seen to be concerned primarily, even exclusively, with poverty and/or redistribution (see Marshall, 1975; LeGrand, 1982; Mount, 1985; Walker, 1983). This focus on the redistributive function of welfare set the boundaries of welfare discourse within the discipline (as well as politically) and limited the possibilities for wider interpretations and analyses of social policy outcomes and impacts. This is exemplified in the following quote: ‘If greater equality of whatever kind is desired it is necessary to reduce economic inequality’ (LeGrand, 1982:150–1). What this illustrates is a narrow conception of inequality determined by class analyses and how, as Lois Bryson argues, the ‘key concepts and perspectives that form the framework of conventional analyses of welfare and of welfare states…provide terms within which welfare as a social phenomenon is comprehended’ (Bryson, 1992:30). That sexuality was marginalized reflects where much of the thinking was at that time. In relation to sexuality a critique of heterosexuality5 was only beginning to be conceptualized by Adrienne Rich in 1981. Another important influence which has shaped the discipline is politics6 and what is considered political or ‘real’ politics. ‘Real’ politics concern the ‘hard’ issues of the public, the role of the state and the market, poverty and wealth and redistribution. ‘Soft’ issues are questions raised by newer, and often alternative and radical, forms of politics, such as feminism, radical Black politics, and queer, lesbian, and gay politics (see also Jeffery-Poulter, 1991). An example of this at the local level can be seen in research conducted on policy making and politics in Sheffield in the


early 1990s (Carabine, 1992b). The major influence on policy and policy making in Sheffield City Council is Labour politics. Labourism determines not only the policy priorities, resource allocation, and service provision but also what is considered ‘political’. Labourism also defines the ‘real’ and ‘hard’ issues of politics and policy and also the ‘soft’ issues. At the time of the research the ‘hard’ issues were classbased traditional Labour political issues, such as social inequality, employment, poverty, housing, education, health, public health, and social provision (see also Coote, 1987). ‘Soft’ issues included sexuality. Similarly, Coote and Pattullo (1990:181) comment that sexuality was ‘not part of Labour’s traditional agenda… [and] had generally not been seen as [a] “political” issue’. To some extent this is changing, as we can see in approaches which recognize the influence of the new social movements on social policy (Williams, 1989; George and Wilding, 1994, Pierson, 1991; Cahill, 1994). In this vein Christopher Pierson’s (1991) Beyond The Welfare State includes a chapter on ‘New social movements’. Pierson considers critiques of social policy and the welfare state based on feminist, antiracist, and green perspectives. These are in addition to the more traditional focus on capitalism and class. However, in his review of the new social movements the impact of heterosexuality is omitted as is the influence of lesbian and gay politics on social policy. This partly reflects the absence of any lesbian/gay/queer critique/perspective of social policy—but it also ignores the extent to which social policy has been the site of protest and transformation for lesbians, queer activists, and gay men. It disregards the importance, centrality even, of sexuality to many feminist demands. That (hetero)sexuality is not incorporated is also partly a result of the way the different theoretical approaches to the welfare state, on which Pierson focuses, can themselves be criticized for not including an analysis based on sexuality. This results in an analysis of feminist and anti-racist critiques which both accepts and reinforces the universality of heterosexuality while also acknowledging that ‘the dependent-female, male-waged household is increasingly untypical in modern economies’ (1991:71). For Pierson, the untypicality is about a change in male-female household employment structures, and with it an implicit acceptance of the heterosexual household model, rather than a change in household forms. In adopting this framework, economic arrangements in, for example, same-sex relationships (although the particular position of oneparent/female headed households is discussed) are not considered. Thus, Pierson accepts unquestioningly the universality of ‘dependent-


woman family’ central to feminist critiques of the welfare state (1991: 70). Additionally, in accepting the feminist argument that ‘the more public systems of formal economic and state welfare cannot be understood except in the context of their relation to welfare within the family household system’ (1991: 72), there is inherent an implicit assumption that the ‘family household system’ will be heterosexual in form. Similarly, while he argues that ‘the welfare state does more than simply “reproduce” existing patterns of sexual (and racial) inequality’, it is apparent that ‘sexual’ is narrowly utilized in terms of gender and biological sex rather than in broader theoretical ways (1991:75). The implicit influence of heterosexuality is prevalent elsewhere in Pierson’s work, for example, ‘for most women then, child-rearing implies economic dependency, whether upon a male partner’s income or, failing this, upon the state’ (1991:77). Additionally: while black women are disadvantaged economically both as blacks and as women, the nature of this disadvantage is also shaped by the fact that they are married to (economically disadvantaged and more marginally employed) black men or, particularly in the US, that they are disproportionately likely to be head of (frequently impoverished) single-parent families. (Pierson, 1991:92) While Pierson recognizes the double disadvantage that Black women experience, the influence of prevalent sexual discourses about Black women’s sexuality renders Black lesbian experience invisible through an analysis which is blind to the impact of heterosexuality or the existence of lesbianism. What this example reveals is that, even when the impact of the new social movements on social policy is taken on board, the picture is incomplete without an analysis which recognizes not only the significance of social policy as a site where the ‘truths’ of sexuality are contested but also the influence and impact of dominant discourses of sexuality on the social policy process. What we understand to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality or knowledges of sexuality are not only ‘played’ through social policy, they also constitute the discipline and practice of social policy in a particular way which reflects existing powerknowledge relations. These are centred on, among other things, the discourse of sexuality, as well as the discourses of gender, ‘race’, and welfarism. An example is the way that social policy takes for granted


universalistic notions about heterosexuality, marriage, the traditional family, and heterosexualized ideas about caring, needs, dependency, welfare distribution, and allocation in its analyses. As a result, the reality of many people’s experience is denied and people are seen as occupying fixed sexed subject positions in relation to society and to social policy. Sexuality issues may be forced to the margins but activists have sought to use social policy as a vehicle for positive change in terms of attitudes, practice, and resource allocation.7 Social policy as practice and as a discipline has been pushed, sometimes willingly, to recognize sexuality and the diversity of sexual behaviours, identities, and beliefs, but sexuality itself has failed to be awarded the status of analytic power in social policy. Social policy has not yet engaged with the discourse of sexuality in the same way that it was forced to do so through discourses of resistance on gender, class, ‘race’, and to a lesser extent disability. So, while social policy has looked to other knowledges in its development, it would appear that it has so far not looked to the knowledges and resistances of sexuality. Those writers who do offer important insights for social policy come from outside the disciplines, for example, Vikki Bell, Richard Collier, Davina Cooper, David Evans, Carol Smart, and Jeffrey Weeks. While I argue that social policy has been predominantly influenced by a class discourse this is not to suggest that it is stuck in some kind of time warp completely resistant to change and to new ideas. In addition to the social policy and administration focus, Erskine and Ungerson (1995: 257–9) identify the following major changes influencing the development of social policy: work on the changing organization of welfare, a developing theoretical analysis ‘examining neglected issues in the development of Social Policy and taking account of changing patterns and new insights from post-modernism’ (1995:258), welfare pluralism, comparative social policy, and, finally, ‘developments which seek to extend the boundaries of the subject itself’ (ibid.). The discipline ‘may be uniquely ready to accept the introduction of a new perspective put forward by those who have, so far, been unheard and unheeded’ (1995:259) and only time will tell if sexuality is one such new perspective. Whether it is, is one issue, how it is, is another. For example, one recent writer who acknowledges the significance of sexuality is Michael Cahill (1994) in his book The New Social Policy. Cahill includes sexuality in the context of greater sexual freedom and control of reproduction for women and changed attitudes towards lesbian and gay men (1994:16). However, the real significance of


sexuality to this text is as a signifier of social change and to illustrate the link between consumerism and lifestyle. In this context the politics of the new social movements become a form of ‘self-expression’. ‘Social movements encourage a concentration on self-expression because the “personal is political” and feminist, gay and lesbian groups wish to see a renegotiation of the bases of everyday life with greater scope of tolerance of unconventional ways of life’ (1994:20). ‘Selfexpression also helps to make their cause known. The commercialisation and the social come together in the tee-shirt…or the mug, the poster, the car sticker’ (1994:20). Cahill is not arguing that we integrate sexuality into our analyses of social policy but rather for the inclusion of communications, shopping, and leisure in the new social policy. For many, sexuality may be seen in terms of a lifestyle choice but this is not all that it is about. As the popular gay chant says, ‘we’re here, we’re gay and we’re not going shopping’. In summary, the influence of dominant sexuality discourses, the joint legacies of social administration and Fabianism, and an implicit acceptance of what constitute the ‘real’ concerns of social policy have resulted not only in a lack of theorizing but in the discipline treating sexuality and sexuality issues, first, as though they do not exist, second, in ways which reaffirm the universality and normality of heterosexuality, and, third, in ways which view sexuality in a narrow or limited way. Feminist social policy and sexuality This marginalization of sexuality is not confined to what are referred to as mainstream accounts of social policy but perhaps surprisingly also to many feminist critiques. The lack of theorizing of sexuality in feminist accounts is particularly interesting given that much feminist political action has been concerned with sexuality issues and that analyses of sexuality are central to much feminist writing outside the discipline of social policy.8 Often feminist social policy, however, tends to ignore sexuality. This is not to suggest that feminist social policy has completely neglected sexuality, rather that there has been a tendency not to theorize it in relation to social policy. In this section I examine the ways that feminist social policy has either included or excluded sexuality and the possible explanations for these different approaches. When sexuality is not addressed in feminist social policy work it is for the following reasons. First, there is often an implicit assumption of heterosexuality in feminist work leading to analyses which focus


entirely on heterosexual family forms as in, for instance, much work on informal caring and the family (see, for example, Finch and Groves, 1983; Maclean and Groves, 1991; Ungerson, 1990; Dalley, 1988). Often, such work may challenge the presumed role of women as carers while at the same time making implicit assumptions that caring takes place within a heterosexual family and is undertaken by women who are themselves heterosexual. Linked to this, some writers make assumptions about motherhood and the family as being heterosexual. Often it is implied that families will consist of a man and a woman and that motherhood takes place within a heterosexual family context: for example, ‘will roles within the family tend towards greater symmetry of men and women?’ (Joshi, 1991:191). This is particularly interesting given that many feminists, including these, also recognize the changing nature and diversity of the family: for example, ‘the apparent changes in family forms have had a major impact on women’s working lives, despite the fact that their lives still do not mirror those of fathers’ (David, 1991:99). Additionally, sexuality is an aspect often ignored in feminist social policy research and in government surveys forming the basis of much feminist social policy analysis. Therefore, ‘because definitions of cohabitation, like definitions of marital status, only pick up on women’s domestic relationships with men, sexuality is a dimension of difference which goes unrecorded in most surveys’ (Graham, 1993:6). This, together with implicit assumptions about the universality of heterosexuality, results in, for example, the experience of lesbian women often, although not always, being invisible in studies concerned with the feminization of poverty, in analyses of dependency, of work, and in some critiques of citizenship. Second, there is also often a tendency for sexuality to be ignored in work which omits difference and in which women are treated as a unitary category or where the experience of women is assumed to be universal. This is evident in some studies which critique areas of social policy where a gender analysis is itself omitted. In such work, the focus is on directing attention to gender issues which sometimes unintentionally results in gender being applied almost exclusively in an undifferentiated and universalistic way. An example can be found in recent work on comparative social policy (Sainsbury, 1994a) which sets out to ‘synthesize the insights of feminist and mainstream research in examining the impact of gender on welfare state analysis and outcomes’ (back cover). This collection is an attempt to redress the gender omissions of mainstream comparative social policy and the authors seek


to develop frameworks which will gender welfare states. In doing so, the chapters contain examples of the ways in which women’s experiences of welfare are materially and qualitatively different from those of men. Mainstream texts are criticized for ignoring or marginalizing gender and in particular the significance and centrality of the traditional family to welfare policies. Within the text, there are repeated calls for the family to be included in comparative analyses which have focused on the state and market. More specifically, the significance of the ‘breadwinner-carer’ model is examined in relation to women’s access to rights, citizenship, benefits, childcare, and the labour market. The relationship between state, market, and family is argued by many of the contributors to be a defining characteristic of welfare states. This book, while radical and challenging in gendering welfare states, can be seen as traditionalist in its assumptions about the normative family and gender relations, although the article by Hobson is an exception to this. Thus, the text may tell us how women are also incorporated into welfare state policies on the basis of their assumed heterosexuality and required appropriate and acceptable sexuality.9 In much of this collection women’s experiences are rarely acknowledged as being differentiated along the faultlines of ‘race’, disability, and sexuality. This is partly an outcome of the adoption of an overarching gender framework based on a relational dynamic along a men—women axis (see Daly, 1994:101–2), which inadvertently neglects women’s subject position in relation to other women. The stressing of the family as central to welfare in feminist social policy accounts provides another explanation for the omission of sexuality in feminists’ critiques of social policy. Feminists have identified how welfare states and social policies are influenced, if not framed by, traditional ideas about the family and ‘more attention was given to ideological prescriptions concerning women and their role as caregivers. These prescriptions stress the wife’s inherent domesticity and her duties in caring for members of the family in the form of unpaid labour in exchange for the support of her husband’ (Sainsbury, 1994b: 151–2). In identifying this crucial aspect of welfare many social policy feminists have become bound by the parameters of the discourses central to their critiques. Thus, in identifying the centrality of the family to welfare, it has become the pivot/matrix through which gender and women’s experience is both explored and understood. Given the importance of the family in feminist critiques of social policy it is not therefore surprising that the family itself is rarely problematized in relation to heterosexuality. Jo Van Every (1996:40) points to a similar


lack in sociology: ‘literature on households, family and marriage (some of it feminist or influenced by feminism)… rarely explicitly problematises heterosexuality’. This can lead to the form of family under consideration in such feminist texts being undifferentiated as with the traditional ‘breadwinnerhusband’/‘carer-wife’ family form seen as central to welfare states being privileged over other forms (see Sainsbury, 1994a). One outcome is that the implications of the centrality of the family form in welfare are not therefore explored for women who do not fit this. The breadwinnerhusband/dependent wife-carer model and traditional family form has become one of the long-term analytical principles of feminist critiques of the welfare state and the frame within which feminists have sought not only to examine social policy and the welfare state but also to redefine social rights and citizenship. This frame has at times constrained feminists to traditional notions of motherhood, the family, and a carer/worker model which is frequently implicitly heterosexual. For example, in the Sainsbury collection women’s access to the labour market is frequently used as an indicator of social rights. A central argument of many of the chapters is that women’s labour market involvement ensures social rights to benefits. However, looking at women’s labour market involvement through the lens of sexuality we can see that even though, for example, lesbians may work and pay full taxes and contributions, this does not guarantee they will be considered eligible for all welfare services and benefits. In some cases, they may be discriminated against or denied access to services or benefits on the basis of their sexuality, such as in the withholding of funding to lesbian and gay groups, or the refusal of some councils to give same-sex partnerships joint tenancy agreements, or the recognition of lesbian and gay relations for pension purposes (Wilton, 1995:190). Furthermore, ‘older lesbians’…needs with respect to bereavement or institutional care may…be neglected’ by social work agencies (Cosis Brown, 1992:200). Similarly, it is appropriate sexuality, rather than simply access to the labour market, which is an important criterion in discerning eligibility to National Health Service fertility services. These services are usually restricted to heterosexual women who fall within an approved age range and who are in long-term stable monogamous relations. This is legally prescribed in the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Act 1990. In practice there is evidence to suggest that these treatments are being restricted to women who are white, married, ‘firmly attached to an affluent male partner’ (Foster, 1996:109) and non-disabled (see also Van Every, 1991/2; Haimes, 1993).10


Women may gain social rights through labour market involvement but those rights will also be mediated by ‘race’, class, sexuality, age, and disability. Macro-type analyses, while important, tend to ignore that the experience of receiving benefits and welfare services may be as important as earning rights to them. The nature of women’s interactions and experiences of welfare are not simply determined or even guaranteed by their labour market involvement. Tamsin Wilton (1995: 201–2) illustrates how, in relation to health, lesbian women may experience homophobia, be ignored as potential users, and even have their specific healthcare needs ignored. Indeed, in order to avoid discrimination many women may have little choice other than to allow people to assume that they are heterosexual in order to gain access to certain services and welfare benefits. So far I have looked at why sexuality has been ignored and I have suggested that this is partly because of the implicit acceptance of traditional/‘normal’ forms of the family and mothering as heterosexual and universal. However, the numbers of social policy feminists addressing issues of sexuality in their analysis of social policy is growing. Some feminists award it greater significance than others. Few treat it as an analytical category. While such writers acknowledge, to varying degrees, the universalizing impact of heterosexuality and the existence, for example, of lesbianism and same-sex relations and parenting, most writers do not, however, extend their analyses further. An examination of feminist social policy work reveals that sexuality is included in a wide variety of different ways. As a means of understanding these I have classified them broadly into three main categories: first, sexuality as an aspect of difference; second, sexuality as an explicit concern of policy; third, sexuality theorized as an analytical category. In the first of these, lesbians are seen as a ‘special’ category having different needs and experiences within an acknowledgement of the diversity of needs (Foster, 1991:82; Langan and Day, 1992; Graham, 1993; Hallett, 1996:11; Tester, 1996:139–40; Woods, 1996:75, 77). Tester, for example, argues that feminist critiques of social policy reveal the need to examine the ‘interactions of class, age, “race”, disability, and sexual preference’ (1996:140). Some writers also highlight the lack of research on lesbian experiences of caring in feminist and mainstream work on community care (Tester, 1996:139– 40) and in accounts of mothering (Graham, 1993:6, 27, 73). Additionally, Tester argues that ‘care services are based on familialist norms that promote the heterosexual nuclear family and stigmatise other


family forms and living arrangements’ (1996:139–40). How other family forms and living arrangements are affected or the processes involved in this are not explored. In such texts, although lesbians are included, this is primarily because they represent different needs and experiences. However, what is also needed if we are to develop an analysis which can accommodate all aspects of the relationship between sexuality and social policy is a framework which examines the relationship between sexual discourses and social policy as well as the ways in which all women are affected by these. There is also a danger that in not addressing the wider aspects of sexuality in analyses of sexuality we end up by equating sexuality narrowly with lesbian sexuality or ‘sexual preference’. Hilary Graham (1993:12) warns against ‘pigeon-hol[ing] women, implying that they have one set of experiences deriving from the category to which they have been assigned…with fixed and homogenous needs which stem… from their disability or sexuality’. This is important because it requires that we recognize that people’s needs in relation to social policy are fluid rather than fixed and that these are not solely determined by a person’s identity or sexuality. Individuals have multiple identities and hold different agendas of needs at the same and different times in different contexts. We cannot assume, for example, that one lesbian’s needs will be the same as another’s. Moreover, ‘lesbians do not constitute per se a social work client group but lesbianism, as an issue, often arises in the social work context’ (Cosis Brown, 1992:201). A second way in which sexuality is addressed within feminist social policy texts is where the focus is on policies which have sexuality as their central concern or on sexuality in relation to specific policy areas— as in the case of abortion, sex education, sexual violence, contraception, prostitution, and reproduction. Again different approaches are adopted. Some writers limit their analyses to a specific topic and the policies dealing with it. For example, Rosemary Deem (1996) examines sexuality as the explicit concern of sex education policies and practice. The significance of gender is also briefly analysed. By adopting this approach Deem is one of the few writers to recognize the way in which ideas and policies about sexuality affect all women. ‘There are considerable implications for girls and women of the current state regulation of sex education, especially in relation to their struggle for sexual identity and relationships, irrespective of sexual orientation, in which they exercise power and control’ (1996:96). For some, sexuality may be an explicit aspect of policy but it may not be central to any


analysis (see, for example, Fair-bairns, 1985, on the cohabitation rule). For others, sexuality is addressed as an aspect of feminist analyses of specific policy areas. Pascall (1986: 166–81) examines women’s experiences of abortion, reproduction, and childbirth within the context of health policies. Although, while sexuality can be said to be implicit to these areas it is not always explored explicitly as an aspect which informs women’s experiences and access to relevant services. One text that does is the collection edited by Lesley Holly (1989a) on Girls and Sexuality which examines the experiences of women and girls within education and focuses specifically on schools. Sexuality is addressed in relation to the experience of all girls and women and lesbians are not focused on as a special category. The main emphasis of the chapters is on how children and girls specifically should be taught about sexuality in schools, dealing with HIV/AIDS, contraception, teenage pregnancy, harassment, and menstruation. The introductory chapter explores ‘The sexual agenda of schools’ and includes an analysis of the relationship between sexuality, femininity, masculinity, and power. Heterosexuality is central to Holly’s critique and is described as the ‘cornerstone of… normality’ (1989b:4). The collection explores this in relation to sexuality as it affects all girls, heterosexual as well as lesbian. In a similar vein, Helen Cosis Brown (1992) examines the relationship between ‘Lesbians, the state and social work practice’. In doing so, she adopts a wide social constructionist frame which reviews how social work theory has theorized lesbianism, highlighting how ‘recent feminist social work literature has little, beyond generalities, to say’ about lesbianism (1992:204), along with an assessment of the impact of this on practice for lesbians as clients and social workers. Texts such as these are important because they identify some of the ways that sexuality operates in relation to social policy and, correspondingly, how social policy constitutes sexuality. The recognition that ‘sexuality is evident everywhere—in school and everyday life’ (Holly, 1989b:3) is important if we are to develop analyses of how prevalent discourses of sexuality inform and constitute social policies and practice in other social policy areas. However, in order to be able to do this we have to identify the various ways in which this operates.11 Some commentators also take as their concern the relationship between sexual self-definition, rights, and social policy as well as the effects of discrimination (see, for example, Wilson, 1977; Holly, 1989a; Mayo and Weir, 1993). Sexuality has also been included as part of a differentiation between various feminist approaches to explaining women’s oppression and feminist approaches to social policy (Dale and


Foster, 1986; Williams, 1989; Bryson, 1992:49, 51). Some writers may deal with sex rather than sexuality in the form of sexual differences or the sexual division of labour and/or sexual stereotyping (Glendinning and Millar, 1987). These different approaches are significant because they reveal the range of ways social policy writers may address sexuality. These, together with other approaches, offer an opportunity to map out the various ways that sexuality can be understood in relation to social policy as an issue, as an analytical tool, and in terms of provision and need. The third way that sexuality is specified is as an analytical category. This occurs on a number of levels. First, there are some feminist social policy writers who place sexuality more centrally in their analyses. One of the first of the second-wave feminist writers to address sexuality in relation to social policy was Elizabeth Wilson (1977). In her Women and the Welfare State women’s sexuality is examined broadly in the context of the impact of ideas about sexuality, femininity, marriage, divorce, and cohabitation on women. Implicit in Wilson’s work is the unravelling of normalizing assumptions about women, particularly their roles as housewives and mothers, and ideas about dependency and marriage implicit in social policy (1977:81). Often the relationship between social policy and sexuality is implied: for example, in critiquing the Beveridge Report (1977:149–54) she exposes a ‘clear moral bias in the way women are treated and discussed in the Report’ (1977:152). It is evident from the text that she is identifying a link between moral status, in the form of acceptable sexuality, and access to benefits and the treatment of women in the Report. The recommendations of the Beveridge Report treat women differentially on the basis of their moral status (read unacceptable sexuality). Thus, single mothers, divorced women, and cohabitees are treated less favourably than married women, who in turn are seen as being dependent primarily on men for welfare. In making links between moral status and appropriate sexuality she is probably one of the first writers in the area of social welfare to identify, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, the social regulatory aspects of social policies where sexuality was not directly their concern. What is interesting is how these insights seem to have ‘dropped off’ the agenda as far as many mainstream and feminist writers were concerned.12 Shafquat Nasir (1996) adopts a different approach to Wilson by looking at the impact of different constructions of sexuality on social policy and is one of the few writers to do this and to do so in relation to ‘race’13 (see also Carabine, 1992a, 1992b, 1996).


Sometimes sexuality as an analytical category may be implied or suggested but is neither central to the writer’s analysis nor pursued. For example, Barbara Hobson recognizes that ‘solo mothers are not a homogenous group’ (1994:176) and is sensitive to the non-mainstream interpretations of the relationship between gender and social policy, acknowledging the importance of time, body, and care as ‘facets of welfare states so crucial to women’s citizenship’ which are ‘marginalised in a nether region, often noted as the private sphere, or civil society’ (1994:170). Additionally, she recognizes that benefits reflect family norms and ‘penaliz[e] economically and socially those who deviate from them’ (1994:174). Although it is not excplicitly included it is precisely within such a framework that sexuality could be included. Other writers may acknowledge the existence of heterosexuality and different family forms and the family as an ideology (see Abbott and Wallace, 1989). In their review of Thatcherite policies on the family (1989:78) they argue that the traditional nuclear family is a minority and that policies continue to prioritize the heterosexual nuclear family ‘and in some cases to reinforce the view that this is the only morally correct living arrangement’. This analysis could be extended beyond the ideology of the family to an analysis of sexuality and social policy more broadly. For example, they could critique social policy using the ideology of heterosexuality or examine how social policy might be ‘constructed’ in relation to sexuality. They could consider, specifically, how lesbian or gay families might be affected. Examples given tend to use traditional family forms—talking of effects on married men and women (1989:85–6) or in a neutral non-specific way which tends to suggest a universalistic family experience under Thatcherism, although clearly this is not their intention (1989:85). As with feminism generally, sexuality may be inextricably linked to gender. This is also evident in some feminist social policy approaches. Sheila Shaver (1990:1), for example, argues for an extension of the concept of gender widely accepted as central to welfare states so that the basic components of it, such as sexuality, which operate in social policy regimes are identified. ‘There is, however, a large and important area of social policy which no existing perspective places at the centre of its focus. This is sexuality, fertility, maternity and the peopling of the nation’ (Shaver, 1990:7). Shaver attempts to do this through the use of Connell’s (1987) notion of cathexis which ‘refers to the pattern of emotional attachments and antagonisms, including the patterning of desire…two main patterns of cathexis [are noted] as socially hegemonic:


heterosexuality and the opposition of feminine and masculine, and the organisation of sexual practice in couple relations’ (1990:8). While Shaver does not really map out how the concept of cathexis is applied to social policy she does explore how the concept of rights central to welfare states is not only gendered but also generally ignores sexual rights as in ‘the control of one’s body or sexual person, as in marriage, consent to sexual activity, and the control of fertility and reproduction’ (1990:9; see also Shaver, 1993/4) and how ‘historically the individual rights underpinning economic life have been most salient in the lives of men and those concerning sexuality and fertility most salient for women’ (1990:9). In applying the concept of cathexis she outlines the development of women’s sexual rights, as in their access to abortion, while identifying the ‘central place of the married couple in…social policy regimes’ and its centrality in ‘wage determination, income security and taxation’ (1990:15). In adopting this approach she restricts the operations of sexuality discourses to the realms of family and reproduction. If the influence of sexuality discourses on other social policies and the regulatory effects of other social policies in determining/prescribing appropriate and acceptable sexualities were included, this could offer a useful framework for theorizing sexuality and social policy. With this it would be possible to map the implicit operations of social policies which function to reinforce heterosexual norms and ideals and to regulate not only homosexuality but also heterosexuality. In more recent work Fiona Williams (1992) cautions against adopting approaches which reduce sexuality (along with disability and age) to gender, ‘race’, and class. Instead, she argues for greater prominence to be given to ‘forms of identity, difference or inequality. In particular, disability, age, and sexuality’ (1995:212, 214). These are conceptualized in terms of a ‘multi-faceted and interrelated…three dimensional polyhedron’ (1995:213–14). This codification represents a conceptualizing of the relationship of difference and diversity to social policy, as they are experienced in all their complexities by individuals and groups. Although we may still have to fill in how this model works in relation to sexuality the frame is useful in that it offers us ways through which to explore fluid identities and the recognition of ‘diverse and differentiated needs’ (1995:215). However, that sexuality is included in social policy analyses should be seen as a positive development. It would seem that challenges to Anglo-American feminism on the grounds of universalism from Black feminists, as well as lesbian, disabled, and working-class feminists,


illustrate that questions of difference are more integrated within feminist critiques. However, the acknowledgement of difference, whether as in different needs or experiences, is not the same as viewing social policy through the lens of sexuality to show its impact on all women, heterosexual as well as lesbian, differentiated by class, disability, age, and ‘race’; that is, to treat sexuality as an analytical category/framework/logic similar and inter-related to, but also different from, ‘race’, gender, and class. Common to most, if not all, feminist social policy approaches is their focus on the relationship between sexuality and the practice of social policy. Missing is a critique of the role played by the discipline of social policy in constituting sexuality. Today, we have access to different conceptual tools with which to understand the social world and the complex inter-relationship between social divisions, difference, identities, and inequality. Additionally, the major developments in these areas of thinking have come from the margins of the disciplines and the activism and demands of the new social movements. Feminism, in particular, has been significant in seeking to extend the conventional boundaries of the discipline. Nancy Fraser’s14 (1995) recent work is an important development in this area and is an attempt to extend the boundaries beyond redistribution to include recognition which allows for the experiences and demands of, for example, lesbian, gay, and queer sexualities. However, access to more sophisticated frameworks does not, as the evidence shows, result in ideas being taken on board by the mainstream. Conclusion: queering the pitch In this final and concluding section I will begin to indicate how we might incorporate a theoretical analysis of sexuality within social policy. Theorizing sexuality in relation to social policy would require that we develop analyses which frame sexuality in a number of different ways. First, this would incorporate a recognition that prevalent sexuality discourses privilege heterosexuality and affect all women in specific and real ways as they intersect with ‘race’, disability, and class discourses. Additionally, dimensions of difference combine at the interfaces of welfare and social policy to produce materially different experiences for women. Therefore, it is important to recognize that women’s subject position is not relative solely to men but also to other women, ‘the relative power of women depends on particular practices which differently favour (or not) “mother”, “single women”, “married


women”, “black women”, “lesbian women”, “disabled” and “nondisabled” women’ (Carabine, 1996:68). Second, it requires recognition of the implicit and explicit normalizing role of social policy as a discipline and as practice. Third, theorizing sexuality is not simply a matter of ‘adding’ lesbians and gay men to a growing list of ‘isms’ or differences nor is it about reducing sexuality to issues of lesbianism and homosexuality. It requires that we not only ask ‘what do lesbian and gay struggles and challenges have to tell us about welfare?’ but also ‘what do struggles around a range of sexuality issues, such as abortion, contraception, sexual violence, prostitution, sexual self-definition, reproduction, and HIV/AIDs tell us about welfare?’ Additionally, we have to ask ‘what does welfare and social policy tell us about sexuality?’ Social policy has to take account of lesbian and gay men’s needs and their experiences of welfare but as these are defined and articulated by them. Williams (1987:24) argues in her critique of racism and the welfare state that ‘such struggles are about the politics of need— challenging the state’s and administrators’, and agency’s definition of need’ as well as those of the discipline. This means more than adopting an anti-discriminatory approach. It also requires ‘intervening in a deep well of socially respectable and institutional prejudice’ and recognizing that ‘this form of oppression is as important to people as economic hardship’ (Penna and O’Brien, 1996: 58). This means not making assumptions that women, if they are lesbian, will not want children or will have no need for fertility ‘treatments’ as well as recognizing that they may be denied access to such ‘treatment’ because of dominant discourses of heterosexuality and negative discourses of lesbianism. Including sexuality also means that we need to take care not to accept stereotypical representations of Black, disabled, and lesbian women’s sexualities. This necessitates that we work with more fluid notions of identity in order to avoid fixing women on the basis of their sexualized and/or other identities. Correspondingly, this requires that we recognize needs as fluid not solely determined by a person’s identity or sexuality. What all this means for an emergent framework for integrating sexuality into analyses of social policy will be considered next.15 Having argued that sexuality is inextricably linked to gender, ‘race’, class, disability, and age, I want to argue that in order to understand how sexuality works in relation to social policy we have temporarily to distingiush it as a separate logic: heterosexuality. In this way, we can begin to map out the dominant social relations and discourses of sexuality which affect social policy: how do prevalent sexuality discourses inform and constitute social policy, as practice and as a


discipline, and what are the social relations involved in this process? Correspondingly, what role does social policy play in constituting what we know to be the ‘truths’ of sexuality and dominant social relations of sexuality? The aim of the project would be to look at how sexuality affects all men as well as all women while recognizing the differential effects of the power relations involved both between women and men and women and women. Additionally, a focus on heterosexuality reveals that it works in some importantly different ways from, for example, the disciplinary effects of femininity. Unlike femininity, heterosexuality tends to be awarded a privileged status position, and this is mirrored, enacted, and constituted through social policy. By contrast, femininity is measured against masculinity as the ‘norm’, while heterosexuality is itself the ‘norm’ by which all—heterosexual or not— are measured, differentiated, and categorized. Next, we can begin to identify the processes of exclusions and inclusions which can result from these dominant social relations and discourses of sexuality when they are ‘played’ through social policy. This requires that we examine also the various ways that sexuality is mediated by other discourses of social divisions, difference, identity, inequality along with the discourses of welfare and social policy, the family, and motherhood. In this way, we can begin to identify the ways that social policies treat and affect people differentially and the social relations of power which are involved. Finally, social policy is also one means through which the ‘truths’ of sexuality can be challenged and contested. Any framework, therefore, needs to account for the challenges from social movements which have taken issues of sexuality as their concern. What would a historical analysis of these demands from such movements tell us about the changing nature of the relationship between sexuality, rights, needs, identity, difference, social relations of power, and social policy? If ‘New giants have emerged in the Social Policy debate: Exclusion, Discrimination, Social Control’ (Erskine and Ungerson, 1995:256), an analysis of sexuality/theorizing sexuality, which incorporates ‘race’, class, gender, age, and disability may tell us a lot more about these new giants of welfare than more traditional approaches. It may tell us about more than exclusion, discrimination, and social control, about, also, the relationship between identity and difference and welfare, between forms of resistance, and about multiple sites of power and the changing social relations of power. The interdisciplinarity of the discipline is a point in its favour. Whether sexuality is developed and accepted as an important and new theoretical perspective, however, remains to be seen.


Notes Jean Carabine is a lecturer in Social Policy in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. I am especially thankful to Fiona Williams for critical discussion and her very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 See Carabine (1992a, 1996) for more detailed discussion of this. 2 Foucault has shown that sexuality rather than being secret, repressed, and privatized in the Victorian period was very much a matter of public concern and discourse (Foucault, 1990). 3 See Fiona Williams (1989:9). 4 See Diane Sainsbury (1994a). 5 Other disciplines have also been reluctant to take on board perspectives informed by Black, disabled, feminist and lesbian and gay politics and theorizing. 6 ‘Working class demands articulated principally through Labour party politics, had traditionally been seen as the principal engine behind the post-war expansion of the welfare state in Britain’ (Taylor-Gooby, 1991: 18; see also Gough, 1979). This has shaped the focus of the discipline and despite a recognition within the discipline away from a class-based focus as the principal basis for individual identity (1991:18). This has not been reflected in mainstream recognition of the complex and multiple nature of identities and of how these connect to welfare needs. 7 As in campaigns against Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, local authority funding for Rape Crisis Centres, the establishment of Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse Units by the Police, housing and counselling projects for young women experiencing sexual violence, abortion campaigns, well women clinics, etc. 8 See, for example, Jackson (1978, 1982, 1996); Smart (1981, 1989, 1992); Walby (1990); Cooper (1994, 1995); Richardson (1981, 1992, 1996); Wilton (1995); Kitzinger (1987); Kitzinger and Wilkinson (1993); Hollway (1984, 1993); Hanmer and Maynard (1987); Dworkin (1981); Collins (1990); MacKinnon (1987); Lorde (1982); hooks (1982); Segal (1987, 1994); Lees (1986, 1993). 9 See also the critique by Fiona Williams on feminism and social policy in Richardson and Robinson Introducing Women Studies, 2nd revised edition, forthcoming. 10 There are inconsistencies in the application of this: for example, a woman with HIV has been receiving IVF treatment in London. But it would appear that notions of ‘acceptable’ behaviour still apply: for example, it is reported that ‘when she approached Prof. Winston for treatment she had been off drugs for eight years, had been in a “totally supportive relationship” for five years’ (Guardian 13 May 1996:1).


11 In another article (Carabine, 1996) I identify a framework— Normalization, Constitutive and Contestation—for understanding this relationship. 12 This is a recurrent question which, because of space, cannot be addressed here. 13 Shafquat Nasir explains, in a footnote to the chapter that restrictions of space limited detailed consideration of difference and that ‘theoretical work on the way these factors inter-relate needs to be developed further before it can be integrated into a chapter of this nature’ (1996:30). 14 Fraser’s concept of recognition is applied only in relation to lesbian and gay sexualities as ‘despised sexualities’. What remains to be explored is where and how a broader understanding and analysis of sexuality would be incorporated. 15 This framework benefits partly from a framework developed by Fiona Williams (1995) ‘Race/ethnicity, gender and class in welfare states: a framework for comparative analysis’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society Vol. 2, No. 2:127–59.

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HOLLY, Lesley (1989a) editor, Girls and Sexuality: Teaching and Learning Milton Keynes: Open University Press. ——(1989b) ‘The sexual agenda of schools’ in Holly (1989a). hooks, bell (1982) Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism London: Pluto Press, 1986. JACKSON, Stevi (1978) On the Social Construction of Female Sexuality London: Women’s Research and Resources Centre. ——(1982) ‘Femininity, masculinity and sexuality’ in Freidman, Scarlet and Sarah, Elizabeth (1982) editors, On the Problem of Men: Two Feminist Conferences London: The Women’s Press, pp. 21–8. ——(1996) ‘Heterosexuality and feminist theory’ in Richardson, Diane (1996) editor, Theorizing Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 21–38. JACOBS, Sidney (1985) ‘Race, empire and the welfare state: council housing and racism’ Critical Social Policy 13:6–28. JEFFERY-POULTER, Stephen (1991) Peers, Queers and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present London: Routledge. JOSHI, Heather (1991) ‘Sex and motherhood as handicaps in the labour market’, in Maclean and Groves (1991). KITZINGER, Celia (1987) The Social Construction of Lesbianism London: Sage. KITZINGER, Celia and WILKINSON, Sue (1993) editors, Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader London: Sage. LAND, Hilary (1976) ‘Women: supporters or supported?’ in Allen, Sheila and Barker, Diane (1976) editors, Sexual Divisions and Society London: Tavistock. ——(1978) ‘Who cares for the family?’ Journal of Social Policy Vol. 7, No. 3: 257–84. ——(1989) ‘The construction of dependency’ in Bulmer, Martin, Lewis, Jane and Piachaud, David (1989) editors, The Goals of Social Policy Aldershot: Gower, pp. 141–59. LANGAN, Mary (1992) ‘Who cares? Women in the mixed economy of care’ in Langan and Day (1992). LANGAN, Mary and DAY, Lesley (1992) editors, Women, Oppression and Social Work: Issues in Anti-discriminatory Practice London: Routledge. LEES, Sue (1986) Losing Out: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls London: Hutchinson Education. ——(1993) Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls Harmondsworth: Penguin. LEGRAND, Julian (1982) The Strategy of Inequality London: Allen & Unwin. LONSDALE, Susan (1990) Women and Disability: The Experience of Physical Disability among Women Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. LORDE, Audre (1982) Zami, A New Spelling of My Name London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1984.


MCINTOSH, Mary (1981) ‘Feminism and social policy’ Critical Social Policy Vol. 1, No. 1:32–41. MACKINNON, Catherine (1987) ‘A feminist/political approach: pleasure under patriarchy’ in Geer, James and O’Donohue, William (1987) editors, Theories of Human Sexuality New York: Plenum Press, pp. 65–90. MACLEAN, Mavis and GROVES, Dulcie (1991) editors, Women’s Issues in Social Policy London: Routledge. MCNAY, Lois (1992) Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and Self Cambridge: Polity Press. MADGE, N. and BROWN, Muriel (1982) Despite the Welfare State: A Report on the SSRC/DHSS Programme of Research into Transmitted Deprivation London: Heinemann. MAMA, Amina (1989) The Hidden Struggle: Statutory and Voluntary Sector Responses against Black Women in the Home London: London Race and Housing Research Unit. MANNING, Nick (1985) Social Problems and Welfare Ideology Aldershot: Gower. MARSHALL, T.H. (1975) Social Policy London: Hutchinson. MAYO, Marjorie and WEIR, Angela (1993) ‘The future for feminist social policy?’ in Manning, Nick and Page, Robert (1993) editors, Social Policy Review 5 University of Kent at Canterbury: Social Policy Association, pp. 35–57. MISHRA, Ramesh (1977) Society and Social Policy: Theories and Practice of Welfare London: Macmillan. ——(1981) Society and Social Policy: Theories and Practice of Welfare, 2nd revised edition London: Macmillan. ——(1984) The Welfare State in Crisis: Social Thought and Social Change Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ——(1990) The Welfare State in Capitalist Society Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. MORRIS, Jenny (1991–2) ‘“Us and them”? Feminist research, community care and disability’ Critical Social Policy No. 33:22–39. MOUNT, Ferdinand (1985) Marxism Today July. NASIR, Shafquat (1996) ‘“Race”, gender and social policy’ in Hallett (1996). OFFE, Claus (1984) Contradictions of the Welfare State London: Hutchinson. OLIVER, M. (1990) The Policies of Disablement Basingstoke: Macmillan. PASCALL, Gillian (1986) Social Policy: A Feminist Analysis London: Tavistock. PENNA, Sue and O’BRIEN, Martin (1996) ‘Postmodernism and social policy: a small step forwards?’ Journal of Social Policy Vol. 25, No. 1:39–61. PIERSON, Christopher (1991) Beyond The Welfare State Cambridge: Polity Press. PINKER, Robert (1971) Social Theory and Social Policy London: Heinemann.


(1985) ‘Family services’ in Berthoud, R. (1985) editor, Challenges to Social Policy Aldershot: Gower. QURESHI, Hazel and WALKER, Alan (1989) The Caring Relationship Basing-stoke: Macmillan. RAMAZANOGLU, Caroline (1993) editor, Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism London: Routledge. RICH, Adrienne (1981) ‘Theory and practice’ in Hart, John and Richardson, Diane (1981) editors, The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. RICHARDSON, Diane (1981) in Hart, John and Richardson, Diane (1981) editors, The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 5–37. ——(1992) ‘Constructing lesbian sexualities’ in Plummer, Ken (1992) editor, Modern Homosexualities London: Routledge. ——(1996) ‘Heterosexuality and social theory’ in Richardson, Diane (1996) editor, Theorizing Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 1–20. RICHARDSON, Diane and ROBINSON, Vicky (1997) editors, Introducing Women’s Studies, 2nd revised edn London: Macmillan. SAINSBURY, Diane (1994a) editor, Gendering Welfare States London: Sage. ——(1994b) ‘Women’s and men’s social rights: gendering dimensions of welfare states’ in Sainsbury (1994a). SAWACKI, J. (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body New York: Routledge. SEGAL, Lynn (1987) Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism London: Virago. ——(1994) Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure London: Virago. SHAFQUAT, Nasir (1996) ‘“Race”, gender and social policy’ in Hallett (1996). SHAVER, Sheila (1990) ‘Gender, social policy regimes and the welfare state’ Social Policy Research Centre Discussion Paper No. 26, University of New South Wales, Australia. ——(1993/94) ‘Body rights, social rights and the liberal welfare state’ Critical Social Policy, No. 39:66–93. SHOWSTACK-SASSOON, Anne (1987) Women and the State London: Century Hutchinson. SMART, Carol (1981) ‘Law and the control of women’s sexuality’ in Hutter, Bridget and Williams, Gillian (1981) editors, Controlling Women: The Normal and the Deviant London: Croom Helm, pp. 40–60. ——(1989) Feminism and the Power of Law London: Routledge. ——(1992) Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality. London: Routledge.


SPICKER, Paul (1988) Principles of Social Welfare: An Introduction to Thinking about the Welfare State London: Routledge. TAYLOR-GOOBY, Peter (1991) Social Change, Social Welfare and Social Science Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. TAYLOR-GOOBY, Peter and DALE, Jennifer (1981) Social Theory and Social Welfare London: Edward Arnold. TESTER, Susan (1996) ‘Women and community care’ in Hallett (1996). UNGERSON, Clare (1985) Women and Social Policy: A Reader London: Macmillan. ——(1990) editor, Gender and Caring: Work and Welfare in Britain and Scandinavia Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. VAN EVERY, Jo (1991/92) ‘Who is “the family”? The assumptions of British social policy’ Critical Social Policy No. 33:62–74. ——(1996) ‘Heterosexuality and domestic life’ in Richardson, Diane (1996) editor, Theorizing Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 39–54. WALBY, Sylvia (1990) Theorising Patriarchy Oxford: Blackwell. WALKER, Alan (1983) ‘Social policy, social administration and the social construction of social policy’ in Looney, M., Boswell, D. and Clark, J. (1983) editors, Social Policy and Social Welfare Milton Keynes: Open University Press. WEEKS, Jeffrey (1981) Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 London: Longman. WILLIAMS, Fiona (1987) ‘Racism and the discipline of social policy: a critique of welfare theory’ Critical Social Policy No. 20:4–29. ——(1991) ‘Women with learning difficulties are women too’ in Langan and Day (1992) Discriminatory Practice London: Routledge, pp. 149–68. ——(1992) ‘Somewhere over the rainbow: universality and diversity in social policy’ in Manning, Nick and Page, Robert (1992) editors, Social Policy Review 4 University of Kent at Canterbury: Social Policy Association, pp. 200–19. ——(1995) ‘Barrett’ in George, Vic and Page, Robert (1995) editors, Modern Thinkers on Welfare London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 255– 74. WILSON, Elizabeth (1977) Women and the Welfare State London: Tavistock. WILTON, Tamsin (1995) Lesbian Studies. Setting An Agenda London: Routledge. WOODS, Roberta (1996) ‘Women and housing’ in Hallett (1996).

Island Racism: Gender, Place, and White Power Vron Ware

Abstract The election of a British National Party councillor in London in September 1993 was greeted by shock and disbelief in the media, particularly because it happened during controversial preparations to celebrate the anniversary of Britain’s role in Hitler’s defeat in 1945. This essay sets out to examine some of the ways in which the BNP victory was reported in an attempt to understand how intricately gender and class are interwoven in discourses of racism in contemporary British politics. First, it draws attention to the dramatic images of white, working-class (or rather, non-workingclass), violent, masculinity that dominated media representation of the event. In particular, the apparent invisibility of women in the photos and headlines seemed questionable, particularly when their anger and frustration about their own living conditions percolated through the lengthier written reports on the inside pages. Looking beyond superficial media coverage of the election, it was clear that gender was also a significant factor in the construction of a local, exclusively white, organic community fostered by political parties responsible for administering social housing and other public resources. While gender can articulate different forms of racism, the reverse can also be true. Ideas about what it means to be white, for example, defined against the racialized ‘other’, are also implicated in the social construction of gender. The violence perpetrated by those attracted to the xenophobic rhetoric of groups like the BNP is able to represent an aspect of masculinity that is both patriarchal and active in defending the ‘racial’ community. The third voice of beleaguered mothers summons up a version of white femininity


that is passively concerned with the task of trying to reproduce the racial purity longed for by their menfolk. Finally, the specific characteristics and dynamics of the area in which the election took place also demands attention, not just because it happened in the heart of one of the most contested territories in London, but also because it was a reminder that the spatial aspects of social conflict are inseparable from the social, political and economic. Keywords whiteness; gender; fascism; racism; community; urban development The United Kingdom lurches from one manifestation of its prolonged identity crisis to another. The end of Empire, the prospect of European federalism, demands for Scottish devolution, the crumbling of the monarchy, the political impasse over Northern Ireland, all combine to produce regular paroxysms of conflict and uncertainty over the meanings of Englishness and Britishness at the end of the twentieth century. Within the context of national decline, the memory of Britain’s victory over Nazism is routinely employed by different groups of people to demonstrate an instinctive hatred of fascism and intolerance in the British national character. Almost continuously since the 1940s, however, there have been many other voices, both within and outside the established political parties, insisting on the harm being caused to ‘British culture’ by the presence of former colonial subjects. The desire of the most extreme group in this contingent to ‘Keep Britain White’ erupts periodically to diffuse the complacent afterglow of the nation’s apparently invincible anti-fascism. The episode that I describe below is just one recent example of a political crisis that both reveals and produces deep anxieties about the state of Britain today, and which is expressed through an overt language of ‘race’ and white supremacy. In September 1993 a member of a neo-fascist group called the British National Party was elected as a local borough councillor in the East End of London. Although Derek Beackon was in office for only nine months, his initial success and the accompanying rise in racist attacks in that area were deeply shocking to many people throughout the country.1 The media responded to the election with outrage: overnight, pictures of jack-booted, nazi-saluting thugs covered the front pages of newspapers

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under headlines such as ‘Votes, fists and boots for the BNP’; ‘Sieg Heil… and now he’s a British councillor’; and ‘Day Cockney pride turned to shame: growing threat from Europe’s evil boot boys’. Crowing over their moment of glory, and refusing to accept any responsibility for the vicious racist attacks that accompanied their presence in the area, BNP leaders brandished in the face of hostile TV reporters placards bearing the simple message: ‘Rights for Whites’. By intervening in the local politics of housing allocation and manipulating existing racial tensions, these men had applied their nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric to a very small place; but, as I shall discuss later, in doing so they raised the spectre of a wider, national community of longsuffering, angry whites, seething with resentment at what they saw as the iniquities of multiculturalism. In this essay I want to examine different aspects of the BNP victory in an attempt to understand how intricately gender and class are interwoven in discourses of racism in contemporary British politics. First, it seemed important to investigate what lay behind the shocking images of white working-class (or rather, non-working-class) masculinity that dominated media representation of the event. The apparent invisibility of women in the photos and headlines seemed questionable, particularly when their anger and frustration about their own living conditions percolated through the lengthier written reports on the inside pages. Second, looking beyond superficial media coverage of the election, it was clear that gender was also a significant factor in the construction of a local, exclusively white, organic community fostered by political parties responsible for administering social housing and other public resources. Third, the specific characteristics and dynamics of the area in which the election took place also demanded attention, not just because it happened in the heart of one of the most contested territories in London, but also because it was a reminder that the spatial aspects of social conflict are inseparable from the social, political, and economic. ‘Female racism’ However, before discussing the election of the fascist in more detail I want to link these concerns to an on-going, if somewhat intermittent, feminist debate on gender, racism, and ideologies of whiteness. I can still recall my excitement on first reading Adrienne Rich’s essay ‘Disloyal to civilization’ while riding the New York subway, hardly able to read the words on the page they felt so right and timely.2 It was


Plate 1 Votes, fists and boots for the BNP. Source: Evening Standard, 17 September 1993

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the idea of a history of ‘female racism’ that so intrigued men, for that was precisely the problem that feminists in the anti-fascist movement were grappling with in Britain in the late 1970s. How was the far right attempting to mobilize women in support of racist and fascist policies, and on what grounds could feminists appeal directly to women to take an anti-racist stand? At that time there was little theoretical discussion of the links between ‘race’ and gender, although few could deny the very real and divisive effects of racism in feminist politics. I have discussed this period in more detail in Beyond the Pale,3 but here I wanted to emphasize both the novelty and the radical nature of Rich’s intervention at that time. Now, re-reading the same essay with my own project on ‘female racism’ in mind, I am intrigued by the way in which Adrienne Rich repeatedly stresses the role of patriarchy in pressing women into active and passive racist service. Having identified the futility of white guilt and the problems arising from ignorance, she reminds her readers that white women too are locked into a system of oppression which ought to give them special insight into the structures of racism: The passive or active instrumentality of white women in the practice of inhumanity against black people is a fact of history… But beneath that indis putable fact—or overarching it—there are other facts. White women, like black men and women, have lived from the founding of this country under a constitution drawn up and still interpreted by white men, and, under which, even if the Equal Rights Amendment should finally pass, there would still, given the composition of the courts, be no guarantee to any woman even of equal rights under the law.4 To claim that the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy are connected is one thing, and no one could really argue with the ‘facts’ in this example. However, almost twenty years after the publication of Rich’s essay, I do not think it is possible to talk so confidently about the unitary category of ‘women’ and to generalize about the effects of white male domination on such a huge and diverse group of people contained under this heading. However, Rich is quite clear about her motives in calling attention to ‘female racism’ without wanting to overemphasize its significance. Further on she writes: ‘We have a strong antiracist female tradition, despite all efforts by the white patriarchy to polarise its creature-objects, creating dichotomies of privilege and caste, skin-color and age and condition of servitude.’


By calling attention to the ways in which white women have historically collaborated in the oppression and exploitation of black men and women, Rich had, in some sense, ‘outed’ a problem that was almost taboo in the more enthusiastic quarters of women’s liberation politics, in Britain certainly. But today it is clear that we need more information about and analysis of how (and why) women engage in racist activity if we are to understand how discourses of white supremacy address different groups of people in different places, and how racism works in conjunction with other systems of domination. It is no longer sufficient to argue that all white women are born into a racially divided and patriarchal world that they have not helped to create. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s feminist theorists have argued persuasively how issues such as social and economic status, ethnicity, and sexuality intervene to complicate the construction of the female subject. In the intervening years since the publication of ‘Disloyal to civilization’ the voices of black women and women of colour both in the US and the UK have long since removed any grounds for shock at the idea that white feminists might not be immune to practising ‘female racism’. One result has been that the project of exploring the active and passive instrumentality of women in racism is already under way in some very interesting and important work, particularly in historical studies. The activities of the Women’s Ku Klux Klan, for example, have been examined in fascinating detail by Kathleen Blee; British women’s place in colonial societies is also being scrutinized and new information is coming to light concerning the role of women in collaborating with the Nazis.5 Although there has been less focus on women’s involvement in contemporary forms of racism, Ruth Frankenberg’s exploration of gender and the social construction of whiteness highlights the importance of looking at the details of everyday life.6 It is appropriate here to acknowledge the significance of Lillian Smith’s earlier work on the foundations of white racial prejudice in the family and home. Although she focuses on the American South, her attempt to discuss the psychology of racism through acknowledging black women’s roles in rearing white children must surely resonate with the histories of segregated colonial societies, particularly the Raj where the ayah was a central figure in many British children’s early lives in the colonial period. Smith’s extraordinary book Killers of the Dream describes how women and men are born into a world that teaches children the ideology of white supremacy with their mothers’—and nurses’—milk:

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From the day I was born, I began to learn my lessons. I was put in a rigid frame too intricate, too complex, too twisting to describe here so briefly, but I learned to conform to its slide-rule measurements. I learned that it is possible to be a Christian and a white southerner simultaneously; to be a gentlewoman and an arrogant callous creature in the same moment; to pray at night and ride a Jim Crow car the next morning and feel comfortable in doing both. I learned to believe in freedom, to glow when the word democracy is used, and to practise slavery from morning to night. I learned it the way all of my southern people learn it: by closing door after door until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and from reality.7 The value of Smith’s work lies partly in its description of how the ideology of white supremacy constructs and positions everyone as having a ‘racial’ identity. In doing so it refuses to confine questions of ‘race’ and racism to a world of people judged to be black; and by focusing on lessons learned in childhood Smith’s analysis implicates mothers as well as fathers. In other words, she allows her readers to glimpse how concepts of whiteness are socially constructed in everyday life and can be experienced as aspects of gender relations from the earliest possible moment. In her reconstruction of the domestic worlds of the South, Smith also constantly reminds her readers that the whiteness of which she speaks is a product of that geographical area; it is a differentiated whiteness crossed by regional, local, and ‘ethnic’ factors. Isle of Dogs On 16 September 1993, Derek Beackon, long-standing member of the British National Party, won the election in the Millwall ward of London’s Isle of Dogs by a mere seven votes. The slogan that propelled Beackon to victory was ‘Rights for Whites’ and his election propaganda dealt mainly with housing issues in the Isle of Dogs. It appeared from the interviews carried out in the streets that few people who voted for the BNP cared about their underlying policies and the ideologies that had formed them as a political faction. ‘Rights for Whites’ had struck a chord among those who felt their housing needs had been passed over in favour of the local Bangladeshi population, and their votes had been cast as a form of protest by those who were estranged from political power.


It should be evident from its name that the Isle of Dogs is no ordinary place. The name refers to a peninsular of the Thames, just east of the City of London and north of the Greenwich meridian, situated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the areas was excavated to become the centre of London docks serving the Empire, and populated by dockers and their families as well as seamen living a more precarious existence. Heavy bombing during the 1940s saw much of the ‘island’ flattened, while industrial decline and new developments in shipping led to almost complete abandonment of the docks by the 1970s. The remnants of the established working-class community, which had traditionally included migrants from the former colonies, were either rehoused in sub-standard public housing, or relocated to suburbs, such as Dagenham, the site of a huge Ford plant, or to new towns in Essex, such as Harlow. Meanwhile the post-1940s period also saw the largest settlement of migrants from the Sylheti district of Bangladesh, drawn to the borough initially by the relatively high proportion of privately rented property in adjoining areas such as Spital-fields. As the pattern of migration changed and the demand for family accommodation increased, Bangladeshi settlers were housed in council blocks that were considered undesirable by the majority of white residents.8 The 1991 census showed that the Bengali population constituted almost 23 per cent of the borough’s residents, and a more recent local educational survey showed that over half the borough’s school pupils are now from families whose parents came originally from Bangladesh.9 Various plans for redevelopment of the derelict docks were stalled by successive governments until 1981, when the Tories assigned the area, along with neighbouring sections of riverside, to the non-elected London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) for complete refurbishment. The result was the largest redevelopment site in Europe, directly affecting over 50,000 people living in mainly working-class communities, and a financial disaster for many leading developers and their clients. Now, over a decade later, it is the visual impact of the contrast between great extremes of wealth and deprivation concentrated in a small space that is likely to make the most impact on the visitor. The eight-square-mile area, running along a nine-mile stretch of the river Thames east of the City, represents an extraordinary and unsuccessful experiment in the creation of new forms of urban space. As a symbol of late capitalist aspirations, the construction of Canary Wharf by multinational property developers Olympia and Yorke serves as an eternal monument to the greed and stupidity of a government

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determined to enforce the redevelopment over the heads of communities who had least to gain from the precarious world of finance and investment.10 Situated firmly in the Isle of Dogs at the centre of the LDDC zone, the silver 245-metre tower of Canary Wharf (the building, 1 Canada Square, is referred to by the name of the development as a whole), designed by Cesar Pelli, is visible for miles around, hubristically changing the skyline of the city itself. To the developers its physical location is crucial in that it is situated mid-way in the time zone between New York and Tokyo, within easy reach of London’s historical financial centre. Its position on the digital highway must indeed have seemed more attractive than the fact that it might potentially bring regeneration to an area of industrial decline. It is easy to demonstrate the contempt with which the local inhabitants of ‘the island’ were held other than by simply looking at the scale of the building, inside and out. The Docklands Light Railway, built to connect the new commercial district with the City of London, began with one carriage, and is now unable to expand beyond two; until late 1995 services were scheduled to run during working hours so they ended at nine in the evening and did not run at all at weekends. A ride along its elevated track through the Isle of Dogs provides a remarkable view from the frontier between steel, glass, and waterfront developments, on one side, and dilapidated housing projects, on the other. These brief details of urban deprivation and over-development do not on their own account for the bitterness and resentment expressed in the vote for the BNP at the local election in September 1993. Shortly afterwards Stuart Hall expressed the rage many people felt at the predictability of the white, racist response: That terrible moment recently when we woke up to find the official form of the liberal democratic process had seen a fascist elected in the Isle of Dogs brought home the brutal reality of a community that was expunged and an area flattened to give rise to that monument to Thatcherism, Canary Wharf—this fetishistic totem that can’t even rent itself. In one small area an abandoned white population is left. Then, it is into this cauldron that you drop some Bangladeshis.


Plate 2 Source: Vron Ware

Source: Vron ware

Plate 3

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How difficult it is to tell the story of why Canary Wharf is there, and what happened to those old communities. It is so much easier to blame the blacks.11 Imagined communities Beneath the images of brute masculinity and shattered complacency that emerged in the days of attempted analysis and post-mortem it was possible to see the outlines of a complex social ecology, encompassing decades of history and tradition, myth and very real political neglect. As I shall demonstrate, the media drew pictures of the Isle of Dogs as a very particular zone of London, partly, it seemed, to explain and reassure that a democratic vote for fascism could not, or was less likely, to happen anywhere else in the country. In this way it was possible to read this interpretation of the result as an aberration from the British sense of fair play and a typical response from a media usually concerned to play down racism and to deny its effects. On the other hand, the fact that the area could be described as an island allowed it to be seen both as an isolated spot and as an allegory for the predicament of Britain itself. The danger of this ambiguity, which allowed the small ‘island’ to stand for the larger island nation, arose from the way that the very real racism articulated in the Isle of Dogs could be applied and made to speak for wider, white communities. Examining a sample of media representations of place and community that appeared the day after Beackon’s shallow victory, it is possible to catch a distorted glimpse of this social ecology. One tabloid wrote: The Isle of Dogs hangs like a tear-drop into the Thames. Yesterday it had good cause to cry. For years its face was a source of Cockney pride. A place of kith and kinship to warm the cockles of every East Ender.’ The same paper went on to describe the impact of the Dockland development as a goldrush that had brought financial rewards for yuppies far beyond the reach of East Enders: ‘a cockney community began to die as daughters were forced to move far away from their Island mothers. Sons went their separate ways. And strangers, they claimed, walked in their steps.’12 The area has also been repeatedly described as ‘the loop of land known to millions only from the title sequence of EastEnders’.13 The Guardian referred to it as ‘this introverted community stranded in a loop of the Thames’ and as an area famous for three things: ‘it’s that nipple hanging from the belly of the Thames you see in the map on TV’s EastEnders; it was the birthplace of Millwall football club; and it

ISLAND RACISM 81

houses one of the world’s greatest follies.’ In another reference to Canary Wharf, the same paper referred to the building looming over the area ‘like a school bully’.14 The Independent described it as ‘an outcrop of land almost entirely surrounded by the Thames’ where recent developments had created a ‘siege mentality among the indigenous population’.15 The Observer stated that: ‘in many ways the people of the Isle of Dogs live in a time warp. The “island” is cut off from the rest of East London in a meandering noose of the Thames.’16 The relationship between the local and the national ‘island’ discussed earlier is further complicated by the marking of the fiftieth anniversaries of the Second World War. The commemoration of events such as the Battle of Britain, D-Day, or the Blitz, in which large areas of London, including the Isle of Dogs, were destroyed, involves a celebration of British nationalism that was once defined against the threat of Nazism. How could anyone explain the appeal of this new breed of nazis in an area that had almost died to keep Hitler’s army out? The emphasis on the sense of shame and shock provoked by this traditional East End community’s vote for the BNP served to marginalize the non-white residents further, particularly the Bangladeshis who were perceived to be jumping the housing queue by having large families and making themselves homeless in order to get rehoused more quickly. However, since the racist language of post-war immigration debates in Britain routinely employs metaphors of invasion and warfare, it would not be far-fetched to argue that the Bengalis had been cast in the role of invaders who were being permitted to succeed by stealth where Hitler had failed with bombs. Their status as non-British interlopers emerged from the interviews with residents who were asked why they had taken this step of voting for the BNP. Less visually striking than the pictures of fists and boots illustrating the events surrounding the election were the quotes from women who gave vent to their different varieties of hatred. One pensioner who said she usually voted Labour added that the Bengalis were ‘dirty pigs who bring disease into the group and spit everywhere. I’m not prejudiced, but they’ve got two wives and get about £300 per week. We have to pay. We work all these years and it is for them. This country is finished.’17 Another woman, aged 20, was quoted as saying: ‘I would love them if they weren’t in my block. We are running alive in cockroaches. They are taking over aren’t they? I’m for the BNP.’ A young mother made no apology for voting for Beackon: ‘I’m stuck up in a tower block with no chance of anything. I’m not saying I’ve got more right to live here, but I find their smell awful…. Here, we just don’t mix with different religions. We just don’t mix.’18


It is worth examining this vocabulary of intolerance to consider the significance of, first, who is articulating it; second, what it represents about the idea of cultural mixing; and, third, the way in which it conjures up images of the migrant as a source of pollution. Taking this last point first, the journalists interviewing the white residents selected quotes that expressed a classic racist view of outsiders as vermin, whose standards of personal hygiene and propensity for breeding made them a danger to the indigenous community. By calling her Bengali neighbours ‘dirty pigs who bring disease into the group’ the English woman from the East End was resorting to a familiar metaphor of life-threatening dirt, pollution, and disease once found in ‘horrid little’ slums like the ones described so vividly by Engels in Manchester. The mention of cockroaches supplies a more modern menace to this scene. As Stallybrass and White argue in their essay The sewer, the gaze and the contaminating touch’, it was the metaphor of the rat that so powerfully conveyed the creeping horror of physical and moral ‘dirt’ that threatened the nineteenth-century European city.19 Although cockroaches have figured less dramatically in the topography of the city than rats, their untouchable insect bodies are still able to evoke a demonised Other,20 particularly in the way that they conjure up infestation and failure to control ‘dark’ natural forces. The powerful imagery of filth and vermin conveyed by these racist comments also demands attention because of what it infers about the process of cultural mixture. Within the few sentences quoted there are many elements of ‘difference’ that suggest complete incompatibility between the Islanders and the Bengalis: the threat of disease precludes any easy proximity; personal habits such as spitting and intolerance of different smells make separate living space desirable; the mention of ‘two wives’ suggests a degree of female subordination that is not only unthinkable but also illegal in British society; lastly, the question of different religions sits rather lamely at the end of the list. For religion here must surely mean ‘way of life’ rather than actual faith, a way of life that encompasses all of the above transgressions. The third point of significance to be found in the comments of the women interviewed is that they supposedly represent a specifically female point of view. As I have already suggested, most of the intolerable habits that they identify refer to the organization of domestic space: smells, spitting, cockroaches, and the bringing in of disease all represent a threat to the home in one way or another. Nor is it surprising that women should call attention to the alleged custom of Bengali men having two wives as it suggests a totally different basis for gender

Source: Daily Mail, 20 September 1993

Plate 4 Churchill waarns of ‘more fascist victories in cities’.

ISLAND RACISM 83


relations within the family. Although the quote suggests that the crime consists of claiming social security payments illegally to support this arrangement, it has also to be inferred that the practice of polygamy is unfair to women, and therefore can be seen as a mark of an inferior civilization.21 Finally, the woman who claims to be ‘stuck up in a tower block with no chance of anything’ is expressing the anguish of the unemployed, impoverished, young woman who is a victim of totally inadequate social policy. It is perhaps ironic that this construct of the dutiful young mother who stays at home with her children, acting entirely in accord with the most conservative ideology, becomes a cipher for racial intolerance through the vulnerability and powerlessness that it comes to articulate. As I shall argue below, this enduring image of a seemingly passive, but wronged, white femininity can be seen to occupy a central place in the contemporary histories of racist domination and female subordination. Island Sons and Daughters In this context of social deprivation and despair, the media represented the BNP vote as more of a protest than a genuine demand for fascist government, a cry to be heard above the confusing rhetoric of political multiculturalism and the babble of very un-British voices. The fact that this cry came largely from women helped to present it as a far more authentic and heartfelt appeal for justice than the macho violence of the racist thugs. However, in the days that followed, more considered articles discussed the local politics of housing, education, health, and other issues that helped to explain, or at least make sense of, the underlying tensions that had led to Beackon’s opportunism. In the aftermath of the BNP election, it was not the development corporation that was seen to be responsible for bringing the cauldron to the fire. The success of Derek Beackon revealed that many people were utterly disillusioned by the efforts of both of the established political parties— Labour and the Liberal Democrats—to improve the area. Above all, the election was linked to a local power struggle between the two parties that centred on housing policy allocation. For several years the Liberal administration of Tower Hamlets, an area extending from the edge of the City to Canning Town in East London, had devised a housing policy for residents of the borough that assured them that their children would be rehoused within the same area, in spite of the relatively high numbers of homeless families needing accommodation. This policy was

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then applied to the Isle of Dogs where housing resources were even scarcer and where there was a substantial homeless population. Promising housing priority to ‘Island Sons and Daughters’, the Liberals’ propaganda repeatedly stressed that the families of existing ‘island’ residents would be rehoused in the same area, implying that newcomers would have to wait their turn or live elsewhere. The rival Labour group argued that the propaganda distributed by the Liberal Democrats had deliberately tried to scare the local white population into thinking that the Labour Party would not only abolish the Sons and Daughters scheme when they gained control but would also discriminate in favour of Bengalis and other ethnic minorities, since it was known that Labour commanded more support from the Bengali population in Tower Hamlets than the other parties.22 It was claimed, and later proved, that the Liberals had published fake leaflets purporting to come from the Labour Party in order to stir up resentment against ethnic minorities. As a result of these allegations the national Liberal Democratic Party immediately launched an inquiry to investigate whether their local representatives had produced racist election material during the preceding two years. The resulting report concluded that the material was guilty of ‘pandering’ to racism by encouraging white voters to believe that their resentment and anxiety about the Bangladeshi section of the community were soundly based. The panel had examined the wording and presentation of several incriminating leaflets produced by the local administration in the period preceding the election. One such leaflet, an issue of the local Liberal newsletter called Focus, demonstrates how the sense of an exclusively white community was created through an appeal to family, hostility to non-whites, and a spurious sense of local, class-based tradition. The front of the newsletter described how the Labour Party opposed the Liberals’ Sons and Daughters scheme for the Island because they say the Commission for Racial Equality would ‘take a dim view of it’. On the reverse side was a questionnaire headed ‘HAD ENOUGH?’ It asked three questions: 1. Do you believe that new homes should go to Islanders not homeless families? 2. Do you believe that the Island should have an Island Sons and Daughters scheme like Liberal Neighbourhoods? 3. Do you believe that your island Councillors should listen to Islanders and not the Commission for Racial Equality? THEN PLEASE LET US KNOW TODAY…


FOCUS SAYS: PEOPLE’23

‘ISLAND

HOMES

FOR

ISLAND

It is worth repeating here that the constant use of the world ‘island’ is a metonymic substitution for the nation as a whole. I would also suggest that the whole concept of ‘Sons and Daughters’ is tacitly addressed to women as mothers. The appeal to keep families together in one place could be read as an attempt to exclude all those who are not able to claim natural kinship with the group. By calling on residents to ignore the advice of the Commission for Racial Equality, the leaflet constructs that kinship as white and gendered, and in doing so naturalizes the community as both homogenous and rooted organically in the soil. Another leaflet, produced after the election but in time to be considered by the inquiry into the Liberal Democratic Party, is also worth examining for the way in which it addresses different kinds of white fears. Headed ‘Focus Fights for Mrs X’ the leaflet bears a single image of a menacing, unmistakably black, male figure in the pose of a boxer. The text describes the plight of Mrs X, a ‘74 year old decorated during the war’ who lives alone on a ‘dangerous’ housing estate in an area controlled by Labour. Describing her predicament, and that of other pensioners living next door, the leaflet ends by saying, ‘Is this any way to treat those who endured the Blitz, and risked their lives for our country? Is this the welcome fit for heroes?’ The report produced by the inquiry noted that this second leaflet was offensive in that it suggests that blacks were partly responsible for the state of fear endured by Mrs X. It also drew attention to the repeated references to the war which constructed the leaflet’s audience as white, excluding the more recent immigrants who had settled there since 1945 and recasting them as invaders. What it did not do was to analyse the way the two images—aggressive black masculinity and vulnerable white femininity—work together to suggest something even more insidious than simple cause and effect in the context of Mrs X’s situation. These constructions derive their apparently hidden (but no less effective) meanings from the historical memory produced by centuries of slavery and colonization. The image of the defenceless white woman whose safety is threatened by the predatory and violent black male can be traced back to discourses of white supremacy, as I have argued in Beyond the Pale. In the context of later twentiethcentury British racism, this coupling was revitalized by Enoch Powell in 1968 when he drew a portrait of the white woman old-age pensioner marooned in a street taken over by ‘negroes’. The spectre of this

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helpless female figure, surrounded by people of alien cultures who had respect for neither her person nor her way of life, was one of the most potent symbols of racism for the following two decades. By resorting to such a well-worn and instantly recognizable image, the Liberal Democrat leaflet was therefore able to express the idea that these very local issues are connected to a wider national problem caused by the presence of black people in British cities. Once again the spectre of impoverished and neglected white womanhood is seen to articulate the tired old refrain that ‘we just don’t mix’. Everyday social networks In this brief and preliminary account of an alarming episode in the dismal history of British racism, I have done little more than call attention to the crucial importance of gender in the understanding of how communities are divided hierarchically along ‘racial’ lines. The figure of the embittered cockney ‘mum’, fighting to have her grown-up children rehoused in her own neighbourhood, the pale, tense young woman held prisoner in a tower block overrun with cockroaches and foreign smells, or the frail pensioner, afraid to leave her flat for fear of being mugged by blacks, are powerful icons in the construction of a white working-class femininity that stands as a symbol for the wider racially defined community suffering from years of political and economic neglect. Although these images are less visible in the media than the tattooed bodies of the young white males who periodically kick their way into the headlines, the deceptive passivity that they seem to represent demands investigation all the more urgently. We have seen how racist propaganda can construct a mystical white kinship through appeal to family, tradition, and association with place which can then erupt with physical and verbal violence to assert itself. The media represent racism as a gendered set of activities in which men and women play different but interconnected roles: in this context the overwhelmingly male violence directed at young Bangladeshi men on the streets cannot be easily separated from the sneers of women who stay at home, complaining of vermin, foreign religions, and overbreeding. This growing recognition of the complexities involved in thinking about gender in relation to various forms of white supremacy connects directly with my discussion of Adrienne Rich’s concept of ‘female racism’. Earlier I suggested that it was important to go beyond the idea of women being drawn into actively or passively supporting racism as


an aspect of their subordination to men, arguing that it might be more fruitful to analyse gender and racism in relation to a particular place and time in order to demonstrate the intricacies of social relations that give rise to white supremacist activity. Here I would like to summarize five main areas that require further investigation if we are to understand more about the gendered dynamics of local forms of whiteness. First, it is important to study the ways that ideas about ‘race’ and racial difference move between the private and public realms of everyday life: the home itself, the street, the school playground, the clinic, the hospital, the church, the supermarket, and other places of congregation. It is important here to look critically at the concept of gendered space, as increasingly high rates of unemployment in traditionally male sectors and the availability of part-time work for women have meant that many more men are now involved in what were once exclusively female domains: this means that in an area like the Isle of Dogs, it is not uncommon for men to take and collect children to and from school and nurseries, for example, spend time in parks, playgrounds, and health centres. A women’s group based in an area of the East End adjacent to the Isle of Dogs reported many incidents of aggressive and abusive behaviour from white women of all ages on buses, in the streets, and within housing estates.24 More research is needed on the spatial aspects of community life which might include procedures and sites of exclusion as well as cohesion and solidarity. Clearly this does not mean looking solely at white women’s lives but at the cultural geography of specific locations. Second, we need to know more about codes and styles of masculinity and femininity that express ideas about cultural superiority and difference: does gossip, for example, operate differently among certain types of women than men? Again, members of the women’s group referred to above had ‘overheard’ older white women, while travelling on buses, talking loudly about the fact that they had seen Asian women with cockroaches in their hair. How do different styles of dress articulate such powerful ideas about patriarchy, independence, or incommensurable foreignness? How does the body become an emblem of difference that gives rise to vicious racial hatred or repressed desire? There are myriad questions like these that need to be addressed in order to break through the surface tension of everyday life and to analyse how gender figures in the psychological construction of whiteness. Related to this last point, it is important to acknowledge that, while gender can articulate different forms of racism, the reverse can also be true. Ideas about what it means to be white, for example, defined

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against the racialized ‘other’, are also implicated in the social construction of gender. For those who absorbed the fleeting accounts of the dominant media but who had little time or interest to reflect on the complexities of the episode, the violence perpetrated by those attracted to the xenophobic rhetoric of groups like the BNP is likely to represent an aspect of masculinity that is both patriarchal and active in defending the ‘racial’ community. The tired voice of beleaguered mothers summons up a version of white femininity that is passively concerned with the task of trying to reproduce the racial purity longed for by their menfolk. This traditional military model sustains the mistaken belief that women cannot also be actively involved in violent racist and fascist practices, and asserts a rigid norm of heterosexuality in which men and women must conform to strict codes of behaviour in order to qualify as ‘white’. Fourth, as this episode in the Isle of Dogs has demonstrated, it is clear that the particular histories of a place, whether it comprises a few square miles or a whole country, can be reconstructed by political factions in order to divide inhabitants along lines of ‘racial’ and cultural difference. These versions of history invariably appeal to a sense of family in relation to place, and, as the infamous Sons and Daughters policy demonstrates, it is possible to construct an exclusive white kinship in the name of local democracy, a kinship which implicitly appeals to a form of matriarchy in its desire to protect the rights of its offspring. Gender, as well as class and ‘race’, becomes an essential factor in analysing this powerful concept of racialized community. Finally, it is necessary to return to the images of white masculinity with which I began. If it is possible to demonstrate how ‘female racism’ (to borrow Adrienne Rich’s phrase again) has a different status in the media from the more violent, and more visible, forms of racism so often identified with men, then it is also essential to make connections between them. In other words, what do the wives, daughters, girlfriends, and mothers do while the men are warring on the streets? To what extent is the racist violence committed mainly, though not exclusively, by men, carried out with the knowledge and support of the women with whom and among whom they live? And what difference does it make if an individual man or woman decides to speak out against racism in a community that defines itself as white—how does gender affect the articulation of anti-racism and the manner in which it is represented? In the spirit of Rich, who counterposed the history of ‘female racism’ with a ‘strong female anti-racist tradition’, I would like to suggest that it is through closer analysis of these sorts of questions


that it might become possible to undo the illusory cohesion of whiteness as an ethnic or racialized form of kinship, whether attached to a local or a national community. Notes Vron Ware teaches cultural geography at the School of Humanities, University of Greenwich. 1 Derek Beackon was elected to represent the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets on 16 September 1993 in a council by-election. He was subsequently ousted by a Labour candidate in the local elections in May 1994. Since then he has stood in other local elections in East London, as the BNP continue to contest seats in targeted areas. 2 Adrienne Rich ‘Disloyal to civilization’ in Lies, Secrets and Silence Norton, New York, 1979. 3 Vron Ware Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History Verso, London/New York, 1992. 4 Adrienne Rich ‘Disloyal to civilization’ in Lies, Secrets and Silence Norton, New York, 1979, p. 284. 5 Kathleen Blee Women of the Klan: Racism & Gender in the 1920s University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991; with regard to colonialism I am thinking of Ann Laura Stoler’s essay ‘Carnal knowledge and imperial power’ in Micaela di Leonardo, editor, Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge University of California Press, 1991; also Alison Blunt Travel, Gender and Imperialism Guilford Press, New York and London, 1994; and Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel Western Women & Imperialism: Complicity & Resistance Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1992; for new work on women in Nazi Germany see Adelheid von Salden ‘Victims or perpetrators? Controversies about the role of women in the Nazi state’ in David F.Crew, editor, Nazism and German Society 1933–1945 Routledge, London and New York, 1994 and Alison Owings Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993. This list is certainly not meant to be exhaustive as this is happily a ‘growth area’. 6 Ruth Frankenberg White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness Routledge, London, 1993. 7 Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream Cresset Press, London, 1950, p. 15. 8 J.Eades The Politics of Community: the Bangladeshi Community in East London Avebury, Aldershot, 1989, pp. 26–9. 9 Centre for Bangladeshi Studies Routes and Beyond: Voices of Educationally Successful Bengalis in Tower Hamlets CBS, London, 1995.

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10 Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson ‘The art of change in Docklands’, in John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner Mapping the Futures, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 137. 11 Stuart Hall New Statesman and Society 1993. 12 Daily Mirror 18 September 1993. 13 The Sun 18 September 1993. EastEnders is a popular TV soap based in a fictional square in East London. 14 The Guardian 18 September 1993. 15 The Independent 18 September 1993. 16 The Observer 19 September 1993. 17 The Observer, 19 September 1993. 18 The Independent 18 September 1993. 19 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White The Politics and Poetics of Transgression Methuen, London, 1986, p. 143. 20 Ibid. 21 In Beyond the Pale I have written at length about how the status of women was (and still is) often cited as an index of how civilized a particular society was (or is). Many early women’s rights campaigners, for example, argued that the roots of women’s oppression lay in primitive societies, and that evolutionary forces would compel them towards greater equality with men (p. 106); I have also argued that many British feminists in the late nineteenth century were convinced of their duty to spread Christian civilization throughout the empire in order to help save some from the patriarchal customs of heathen and therefore ‘backward’ cultures (p. 160). 22 At the time of writing, the deputy leader of the ruling Labour group, Pola Manzila Uddin, is from a Sylheti family. 23 Political Speech and Race Relations in a Liberal Democracy Report of an Inquiry into the Conduct of the Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrats in Publishing Allegedly Racist Election Literature Between 1990 and 1993. December 1993. 24 Following Derek Beackon’s election in 1993 a broad-based women’s group was set up in an attempt to mobilize Bangladeshi women to register to vote against him in the election the following year.

Vera Emily Cargan

A woman’s body found, afternoon, 27 December 1994, in Belfast Lough at Seapark near Holywood, 50–70 years old. Wore a grey tweed coat with a British Legion badge in the lapel and a necklace bearing the name of Vera. What was it? Was the milk off? This Christmas season, winter not shaping at all to freeze the ground and no birds to nurture in thick fell snow with crumbs sugar mixed and hot water wetted. No matter. The chain cool against your neck, your badge from the British Legion high in lapel. Last night you’d led the carol singing. Peace and hope, Hallelulia. The lough bemused. Our swans flown off now. Some say to Iceland. Hadn’t you a friend once who’d moved to Iceland? She’d taken up with a native man, planned to write her poetry while gutting fish to keep herself. Gave up a good job in the city library. You’d no more credit it than salt water on the moon. Never stayed in touch. With any from the past. So much to do, especially now and the weather crowing hot to the strut of game winds. Two trips needed to empty the ashes: one for the pan & another for yourself. Ash in your apron pockets. Vera, the freezer is your enemy full to thawing: dinner left ready.

All Het Up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on the Oprah Winfrey Show Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg

Abstract The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge commonsense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah’s presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. Here we shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualities of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of two of the key discourses which shape the show: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship. Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged.

94 HETEROSEXUALITY ON OPRAH

Keywords feminist media studies; television; therapy; kinship

heterosexuality;

sexuality;

Introduction The Oprah Winfrey Show is one of the United States’ major cultural exports. It enjoys massive popularity in countless countries. Indeed, as Corinne Squire (1994) has pointed out, in one of the very few analytical discussions of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah Winfrey has emerged as a significant cultural icon: one, we would suggest, who is on a scale comparable to that of Madonna; for example, both women have been subjected to an enormous amount of tabloid press attention and both have talked about and are embodiments of female celebrity writ large. However, while Madonna’s life and cultural appeal have been minutely examined within a broad-ranging set of critical and feminist discourses (see, for example, hooks, 1992; Schwichtenberg, 1992), Oprah Winfrey seems to have generated a surprisingly small amount of attention from that quarter. It appears that Madonna’s version of ‘in your face’ transgression has fed into and been fed by the current interest (if not ‘vogue’) in the cultural study of sexuality.1 Madonna not only presents herself as a sexual subject/object, but expressly proposes sexuality (graphic and confrontational) as a praxis of and towards artistic freedom, women’s liberation and indeed, gay liberation. In this sense she can be seen to align herself with queer politics and even queer theory. hooks (1992) has critiqued Madonna’s version of liberation and emancipatory praxis through sexuality as one which draws its substance from its ‘play’ with the boundaries of white femininity counterposed against racialized/ racist controlling myths of black (and we would add, lesbian and gay) sexualities. Oprah, on the other hand, does not present herself, and is not (usually) discussed,2 in explicitly sexualized terms. However, if one examines her programmes, it is clear that her work raises many of the same significant issues as Madonna’s work, including issues around gender and sexuality politics, around classism and racism and around feminism (among many other things). Moreover, while the terrain of the sexual seems to belong to Madonna, Oprah easily stakes an equal claim to this ground. Indeed, sexuality, its negotiation and mediation, is one of the core elements of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

FEMINIST REVIEW NO 54, AUTUMN 1996 95

In this regard, the show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet at the same time, Oprah’s presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. We shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualties of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of the show on a broader scale. There are a number of discourses which shape it. We shall focus specifically on two: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship.3 Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). This programme is characteristic of the show both in the prominence it gives to therapeutic and kinship discourses and in the way it illustrates not only a presumption of universal heterosexuality but an active reinscription of heterosexuality as an idealized institution. Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged. We have chosen to examine this programme, in part because of the prosaic character of problems experienced by each couple. That is to say, the programme ‘treats’ the daily grind of unequal heterosexual relationships, rather than presenting overt or dramatic instances of abuse or violence. In this way, it represents one end of the continuum of problems which the show addresses in relationships between women and men. Indeed, as we shall see, within the programme itself connections are overtly as well as implicitly made (though not necessarily critically) between the ‘mundane’ and the ‘extreme’. Our interest in exploring the sexual politics both of ‘How to Make Love Last’ and of the Oprah Winfrey Show more generally is fuelled by


the ways in which Oprah positions herself and her show within traditions of dissent drawn from feminism, the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary anti-racist struggle. Mellencamp (1992) and Squire (1994), for example, have commented on Oprah’s women-centredness in both topic choice and personal manner; and Squire particularly locates Oprah within the general sphere of black feminism. Moreover, Oprah has consistently explained on the programme that it is her aim that the show be a source of education for personal empowerment and for challenging forms of abuse, discrimination and prejudice. For us, as feminist viewers, these dimensions of the programme are a central part of our investment in and enjoyment of it. They are also the source of some of our frustrations at those moments when or in those ways in which the format and framework of the programme work to undermine its anti-discriminatory possibilities. Our analysis of the ways in which these contradictions are illustrated in ‘How to Make Love Last’, then, is forwarded against the backdrop of the radicalizing, anti-discriminatory potential we see and desire in the programme. It is important to note that in examining dominant discourses which shape and are reproduced in the Oprah Winfrey Show, we are not suggesting that audiences necessarily receive the show in straightforward terms: indeed, the fact that we ourselves have been able to read against the grain of the show is evidence that this is not the case. However, we suggest that the presumption of heterosexuality, heterosexual kinship and discourses of therapy are strongly encoded into the Oprah Winfrey Show in ways which provide contradictory, but nevertheless preferred, readings. Neither have we used audience research for this particular article (although this is part of our much wider project about the show), since what interests us here are the ways in which the strong encodings of heterosexist and therapeutic discourses work within the text of the show itself. This article provides, then, a detailed deconstruction of the text of one Oprah Winfrey Show in relation to several specific but typical discourses in play within it. The fifty-minute hour Therapy is one of the key dimensions of the Oprah Winfrey Show. It is manifested in the format of the programme and it provides a lens through which the programme’s issues are understood. Characteristic of the programme are a number of therapeutic signifiers: for example, the ubiquitous ‘expert’ (usually a psychologist with a Ph.D.); the mediating of a kind of group therapy encounter involving audience and guests


under the direction of the ‘expert’ and Oprah; and the staging of ‘therapy sessions’ for guests (and sometimes for Oprah herself), which are witnessed by the audience (both studio and televisual).4 The invited ‘expert’ has, almost invariably, written a popular self-help book which is repeatedly plugged during the course of the programme and which is used to set the agenda both for the topic of the programme and for the way that topic is handled. There is a certain appeal beyond the solely voyeuristic in the therapeutic format of the programme. First, it provides a space within which personal experience can be aired and validated. The importance of this should not be underestimated, particularly in the context of a programme aimed, as Oprah herself has frequently stated, at empowering people who generally do not have social power (for example, African-Americans and other ‘ethnic minorities’ and women), at challenging discrimination and abuse through public education and at promoting a kind of encapsulated ‘democracy in action’. Second, the Oprah Winfrey Show, along with the efforts of feminist activists, has been instrumental in making issues of violence and abuse by men against women and children publicly speakable. We recognize that making violence and abuse speakable cannot, by itself, solve the problems. Neither is the speakability of abuse unchallenged, as we can see from the recent publicity given to ‘false memory syndrome’ (a notion which has infiltrated more than one of Oprah’s shows). Finally, there is a relationship between the kind of testimony offered by Oprah’s guests and the role which testifying has played in fuelling the organized pursuit of social justice in both the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. Despite this appeal, there are a number of tensions produced when a therapeutic discourse is used as a medium through which to understand personal and social issues. We would suggest that these tensions accrue to therapy as a framework in general as well as to the particular brand of therapy which is characteristic of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Elsewhere, we have explored problems with the discourse of therapy with respect to the show in more detail (see Epstein and Steinberg, 1995a, 1995b). It is beyond the scope of this article to reproduce these discussions. Nevertheless, it is important to outline some of the key issues raised by the therapy dimension of the Oprah Winfrey Show in order to contextualize our analysis of the negotiation of heterosexuality in the programme ‘How to Make Love Last’. The particular mode of therapy employed on the show is one which derives from the popular end of the self-help movement. This is typified


in the ‘how to…’ books which are often used to frame the programme. A common element of both self-help and therapy in general is that it tends to be very individualistic.5 Problems are typically posed as individual pathologies subject to individual solutions. Moreover, within this context, the self and family are seen as the world and this has the effect of erasing both power relations and social context. As will be seen below, for example, issues around abuse are constructed as ‘negative patterns we repeat’ rather than as indictments of unequal social relations. This kind of formulation locates responsibility for suffering, and indeed for abuse, primarily, if not only, within the ‘victim’ and sets up terms of enquiry which do not (and perhaps cannot) interrogate perpetrators. A second and related assumption underpinning the therapy mode of the Oprah Winfrey Show is the notion that ‘we can help ourselves’ (and, indeed, that only we can help ourselves). Thus, if we set up our own destructive patterns in order to repeat them, we can break these cycles by ‘working on ourselves’. Again in this context, the emphasis is on personal healing rather than social change, on individual rather than collective action. Personal healing is clearly a key issue for ‘survivors’6 of abuse and other kinds of damage. But a limited focus on the personal can beg the question of how personal healing can be possible without an analysis of the power relations and social contexts within which sexual, physical or emotional abuses take place. Furthermore, we would hold that even where ‘negative patterns’ do not involve obvious forms of abuse, all relationships are implicated in and bespeak a range of social inequalities. In this context there is an implication that the route to self-healing can be accomplished centrally, if not totally, through a set programme of therapeutic exercises or steps (whether twelve or not). The reliance on this kind of programmatic ‘therapy’ is, inevitably, reductionist and mechanistic. To make a healing process programmatic, in itself implies that all problems can be dealt with in the same way. It mitigates against making necessary distinctions, for example, between different forms or levels of abuse and miscommunication and making necessary connections between the personal and the social/political. Moreover, it implicitly suggests that things can be ‘fixed’ quickly, if not in a fiftyminute television programme, then in the space of a popular book, or, as Oprah wishfully suggests on ‘How to Make Love Last’, seven hours of Harville and Helen Hendrix (the former being the invited expert) talking about their ‘conscious marriage’ on video.


Kith and (un)kin(d) Kinship work, that is, mediating the making, breaking and negotiating of familial and romantic relationships, is another staple of the Oprah Winfrey Show. As with therapy, kinship work is specifically staged. Countless programmes feature reunions of estranged family members, meetings of blood relations who have never met (‘Fathers and the Sons they Never Knew’, 31 October 1990; ‘Baby Selling’, 26 May 1993), introductions of potential (heterosexual) partners (e.g. ‘Desperate Women meet Alaskan Men’, 17 February 1989) and issues around sexual, romantic and family relationships (e.g. ‘Obnoxious Husbands’, 11 January 1989, ‘Raising a Child with Family Values’, 6 April 1993 (Part IV of the ‘Family Series’)). Therapy often provides the conceptual foundations for the evaluation of kinship relations. For example, there seems to be a general assumption that almost all family relationships are, in the language of the show itself, ‘dysfunctional’ (until you work on yourself). It seems to us that when people on the programme say things like ‘I come from a dysfunctional family’, what they are trying to describe is an experience of unhappiness, abuse and/or betrayal in relation to their own families. The term ‘dysfunction’ clearly describes this unhappiness and simultaneously invokes the possibility of change. This, in our view, is an obvious reason for the currency which has been gained by the term ‘dysfunctional family’ on and beyond the programme. Another reason may be the ways in which therapy has become a key part of American popular culture and indeed has provided a kind of lingua franca for discussing personal and emotional difficulties. It is interesting to consider how this particular dimension of the language of the Oprah Winfrey Show translates in a British context where therapy has not become embedded in popular common sense (or experience) to anything like the same extent. Yet, whatever particular participants in the programme might mean when they use it, to invoke the term ‘dysfunction’ nevertheless also calls into play the specifically medicalized, pathological connotations of the word. Furthermore, ‘dysfunction’ implies ‘function’. Because of this, programme participants’ investments in escaping their unhappiness become inextricably entwined with an investment in the fantasy of the ‘functional family’, a notion which has historically been defined as the conventional, nuclear family. Indeed, the discourse of kinship underpinning the Oprah Winfrey Show has particular racialized and class-specific dimensions. It is the


white, middle-class family which is constructed as both the object of desire and project of therapy. In this context, a range of familial relationships are made Other. This is illustrated in programmes such as ‘Lesbian and Gay Baby Boom’ (10 May 1993), in which Oprah places lesbian and gay parents in a defensive position by stating that ‘[t]he big question that a lot of people want to ask, I know, is will their kids also grow up to be gay or will they be emotionally damaged?’ (p. 2). Although the grammar of this sentence may suggest that the children will be emotionally damaged if they are not gay, the meaning of the sentence, in context, is clearly that being gay bespeaks emotional damage and that having a gay parent is, axiomatically, emotionally damaging to children. It is this accusation against which her lesbian and gay guests were required to defend themselves; that is, much of the show was devoted to disproving the accusation. In addition, this programme clearly assumed a heterosexual audience; it was not lesbians and gays who constituted the ‘many people who want[ed] to know’. The ‘Othering’ process is also illustrated in the ways in which working-class parents often come in for audience abuse, being blamed for the oppressions and deprivations that they experience which may be damaging to their children. We would suggest that this process results from an underestimation of the power of common-sense discourses. Oprah frequently frames a programme by posing a question which she clearly wishes to have nullified, for example, ‘won’t children be damaged by having gay parents?’ Effectively, this means she is positioning her audience, herself and her guests inside the discourse. At the same time she lays the responsibility for the overthrow of the discourse at the feet of the very people who are disempowered, thus ironically locking the programme into the very common sense she is trying to challenge. Furthermore, there is a racialization of Oprah’s kinship work which takes place in a number of different ways. First, it is rare to see any but white/ Anglo families presented as the ideal. (In the four months during which we taped every programme transmitted in the UK, there was not one occasion on which a family of colour was held out as a positive example.) Indeed, most of Oprah’s guests are white (although the studio audience is normally mixed). Second, the configuration of the ideal family is itself exclusive. As shown in the programme ‘Raising a Child with Family Values’ (6 April 1993), these values are implicitly linked with wealth, particular assumptions underpinning white middle-class culture and quite conventional heterosexual divisions of labour. Third, Oprah’s invited experts are virtually all white, and where they have


been black that has largely been in the context of programmes about racism. So, in effect, much of Oprah’s work involves the mediation of white expertise and white kinship relations. The combination of expertise and selection of guests thus provides a white heterosexual and middle-class backdrop against which all kinship relations are to be measured. So far then, we have noted that the Oprah Winfrey Show makes the link between kinship and work at two levels. First, there is the work, performed by Oprah and her invited experts, of mediating the relationships of guests and various audience members. Second, kinship is, in itself, posited as work, specifically (and ideally) as therapeutic work on oneself. As numerous feminists have argued, kinship work is generally done by women. Moreover, not only is it gendered (Chodorow, 1978, 1989; Rubin, 1975); it is also racialized and classed within a broader ‘heterosexual matrix’. For example, the maintenance of white families has often been done by black women both under slavery and after its abolition (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1982). Furthermore, the modes of kinship work and conditions under which it takes place are class and culture specific (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Barrett and MacIntosh, 1982; Delphy, 1984). As we shall see on ‘How to Make Love Last’, these dimensions of the politics of kinship work are reflected and reproduced on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The therapeutic kinship work which is done (and promoted) on the programme often takes the form of an attempt to retrieve what is seen as ‘dysfunctional’ in order to make it desirable, ideal and in every way ‘functional’. In other words, the underpinning framework is one which identifies much that is ‘wrong’ in normative heterosexuality, but draws back from using this as a basis of critique of the institutions of heterosexuality. Rather, building on the therapy mode, the Oprah Winfrey Show locates these problems centrally in the individual and the work, on the self and, in the process, maintains the heterosexual family and heterosexual relationships as ideal. In this context, the show could be said to provide a window on ‘the long grey stream of heterosexual misery’ (Duncker, 1993:142).7 The programmes display a continuum of gendered abuse in relationships (from men who don’t listen to women to those who are violent to their female partners and their children).8 However, within the therapeutic/ kinship framework of the show, a gendered analysis of power seems to be resolutely resisted. Thus, for example, while child abuse and domestic violence are regularly interrogated and condemned, they are not examined in relation to gendered social inequalities. This is


typically manifested in the ways in which female ‘survivors’ of domestic violence are invariably subjected to interrogation by expert guests, Oprah and the audience while male perpetrators are taken for granted. In this context, women survivors are typically asked to defend themselves against the accusatory question ‘why didn’t you leave him?’, a question which implicitly constructs the woman as ‘passive’ aggressor and as responsible for the commission of (male) violence against her. We have only viewed two occasions during scores of programme hours on this topic, in which a male perpetrator is asked to explain and defend his choice to injure and violate a (female) partner or a child (who has not injured him). Instead, as noted above, concerns are raised about ‘patterns we set up and repeat’, about misunderstandings and miscommunications, all of which may be remedied by a combination of therapy and ‘rational’ dialogue. Precisely because it does not consider the issues of power and inequality, the currency of the notion of ‘patterns we repeat’ makes comprehensible why women are interrogated for not leaving situations of domestic violence. Leaving could be construed both as ‘breaking the pattern’ and as a ‘rational’ response to the situation. Thus kinship is located not within a matrix of power relations, but rather within one of presumed equality where relationship problems derive only from unresolved and irrational patterns which we (sic) set up in childhood. A stitch in time? Making love last ‘How to Make Love Last’ (broadcast in the UK as ‘Unsuccessful in Love’) invites us, the audience, to observe the mediation of two heterosexual relationships which are ‘having problems’: Cari and Dale are seeking a divorce and Jay and Madelene, a relatively ‘new’ couple, are beginning to run into problems. In the expert seat is Harville Hendrix Ph.D., therapist and author of two self-help books: Getting the Love you Want and Keeping the Love you Find and, as Oprah informs us, ‘he also has this great new series of home videos for couples that [we are] going to be seeing…throughout this program’ (p. 1).9 The show stages each couple undertaking a potted therapy session following the format which we are given to understand is proposed in Harville’s second book. Harville and Oprah put each couple through a series of paces on stage. It is made clear that these are intended to provide a model for us, the audience, to work on ourselves as a way of working on our relationships and ultimately to make love last, or failing that, to dissolve our relationships in a ‘rational’ fashion.


Framing heterosexuality Oprah: OK. So you’re smart and you’re strong. And you’re successful in every area of your life but love. What is it that keeps you from having a happy love life? This show today is going to help you unlock a lot of those fears, ‘cause that’s really what it is. And the beauty of this show is, is that it applies to everybody, whether you’re married, whether you’re divorced, whether you’re single, whether you’re looking, whether you’re looking and single, looking to get rid of the man you already have, the woman you already have—everybody! (Audience laughter) (p. 1). From the start, Oprah invokes a universal ‘you’. This ‘you’ in fact locates the programme squarely within a terrain of heterosexual kinship on at least two levels. First, Oprah’s litany of ‘whethers’ has some obvious omissions. While there are explicit referents for heterosexual partnering (e.g. ‘married’, ‘divorced’) such referents are lacking, for example, for lesbian and gay relationships. It could be argued that this omission is not deliberately exclusive.10 And, indeed, ‘getting rid of the man you already have…etc.’ could conceivably refer to same-sex partners. However, we would suggest that such a reading would necessarily be against the grain of the flow of the list of relational possibilities which purportedly includes ‘everybody’. We would suggest that Oprah’s list assumes heterosexual guests, audience and a heterosexual issue, all of which are taken as universal. Second, there seems to be a related assumption that people whose relationships are excluded from the list can (and should) nevertheless relate to and through the parameters of heterosexuality. Thus, for example, the lesbian or gay viewer is offered a straight subject position through which to understand her or his own relationships and to participate in the ostensible global village of Oprah’s educative democracy. In this context, what is offered at best is a kind of ‘liberal equivalence’11 drawn between (rather conventional) straight relationships and non-straight relationships. To draw this kind of equivalence, which is characteristic of the Oprah Winfrey Show more generally (and in relation to a range of issues), has the effect of erasing social context and material relations of social inequality. It denies that the character of sexual/ intimate/familial/friendship relationships (amongst others) are shaped through the social positions of the people involved in them.12 Furthermore, the presumption of heterosexuality set up in Oprah’s opening speech is reinforced and further narrowed as we


are introduced to Oprah’s guests, the ubiquitous white professional expert and the two white couples whose visual presentations are clearly affluent as well as conventionally attractive.13 Framing therapy After opening the programme in this way, Oprah’s introduction of her expert guest, Harville Hendrix, initiates an interchange which locates the programme firmly within the therapy discourse. Here, we see the key assumptions, discussed above, with respect to the therapeutic discourse of the programme more generally, exemplified in strikingly stark terms. Right from the start, Oprah tells us that Harville is going to help us ‘examine the patterns we set up in our childhood’ (p. 1, our emphasis). Oprah: …there are a lot of things that I like about this [Harville’s work] is that there are a whole lot of cause and effects that you set up. Harville: Yes. Oprah: One that concerns me is if you were abused as a child, you may pick an abusive partner or be an abuser yourself. Harville: Yes. That—that’s always the case. Whatever happens in childhood, whether its mild or intense, there is something that’s going to replicate itself in adulthood in an intimate partnership. Because the early childhood experience where there’s a wound has to be repaired. And it always has to be repaired in adulthood with somebody similar to your parents. Oprah: Now, doesn’t—can’t you get over that, though? Because, see, I believe that—that all of my relationships in my 20s and early 30s were—were—I continued the abusive pattern that I set up in my childhood. Harville: Yes. Oprah: Stedman is not an abusive person. So I think I’ve gotten over that. Harville: Yeah. And that’s the clue, when you’re saying that in the 20s and 30s, you began to work on some things in yourself (p. 2). Here we see a painful example of the theory of the ‘cycle of abuse’ and the way in which it shifts responsibility from the abuser to the abused. Indeed, it is excruciating to see Oprah talking about her experience of being abused as a child in terms of ‘the abusive pattern that I set up in my childhood’. In other programmes Oprah has been clear that abuse is


not the fault of the child and it seems likely that she would extend that to herself. It seems a testament to the seductiveness of the cycle of abuse theory that she could make such a reversal in this context. This shifting of responsibility is reinforced twice more. Not only are those who have been abused effectively held, within this formulation, to be responsible for the original abuse, but they are also held to be responsible for any repetition of these abusive dynamics in their adult relationships. Moreover, it seems as if they are seen as ultimately able to challenge these dynamics only by changing (‘working on’) themselves rather than, for example, calling upon abusers to change (or indeed calling the police). This construction is all the more disquieting for its refusal to acknowledge or consider the gendered character of child abuse (particularly of child sexual abuse) and of abuse within adult relationships. At the very least, if we take into consideration the skewed gender profile of abusers and abused, to posit those who are abused as responsible for ‘setting up the patterns’ implicitly posits girls/women as responsible for what is largely male perpetrated abuse. Thus the call to ‘work on ourselves’ means, in effect, a call primarily for women to be the ones who change. As we shall see below, this responsibility is also located with the women (i.e. Cari and Madelene) in the particular relationships under scrutiny in this programme. Moreover, within this paradigm, there seems to be an extraordinary implication that men have no agency or responsibility in relationships. A second point which emerges from this interchange is the mechanistic and unidimensional construction of cause and effect in the formulation of repeated patterns. It seems, from what Harville says, that the future life of the ‘wounded’ child is pre- indeed, over-determined. This point is driven home through a subsequent exchange in which Oprah asks Harville to explain the outcome of a range of childhood ‘wounds’ (e.g. having a jealous parent, a critical parent, a parent who abandons you and so on). Harville’s response is to explain that all these patterns are invariably repeated by the child-as-adult. More specifically, he posits that: Harville: You either pick ‘em, provoke ‘em or project on to them. But if you had—if you had a problem in childhood, you’re going to pick somebody to help you redo it. If they don’t, then you’ll project on to them that they are. And if they aren’t, you’ll provoke them into doing it. Because we have to resolve that issue…


…It’s like in—in an adult relationship, you’ll either act like the child that you did with your parents or you’ll behave like the parents behaved toward you as a child. Oprah: Isn’t that fascinating? Harville: It’s really fascinating and it’s so predictable (pp. 5–6). In addition to the stark and mechanistic determinism of this posited pattern, we see here a case in point of the construction of parents as world-entire for the child. Moreover, Harville seems to consider two parents as a single entity. If this were not the case, it would not be possible to choose a partner like ‘your parents’. Rescuing heterosexuality What Harville is saying then, is that children are invariably wounded in and through their relationships with their parents and that they are then trapped into repeating those wounding patterns in their adult relationships (and implicitly with their own children). If this is true,14 it could be construed that Harville is making a considerable indictment of normative heterosexual paradigms of ‘the family’. However, it is clear in the context of the programme that this is far from Harville’s (or Oprah’s) intention. This is demonstrated by the way that, having defined ‘the problem’ in these terms, Harville then goes on (with Oprah) to recuperate conventional modes of family and marriage. This recuperation is achieved in two ways. First, through the display of Harville and Helen Hendrix as living the ideal (or as Helen puts it ‘conscious’) marriage. Here a short extract of Harville’s seven hours of instructive self-help video is screened, showing Harville and Helen talking rather mawkishly about their relationship. Oprah shows us how we are meant to respond to this spectacle when she comments: Oprah: So that clip we just saw…that was Harville and his wife. And I was saying that is really—that’s—I mean I got a little goosebump looking at it because that’s what marriage should feel like. You should feel like you’re—it should be like unconditional love. You should feel like you’re totally supported and loved just because of who you are (p. 11). The notion of ‘conscious marriage’ seems a rather odd, if not invidious proposition. At one level it seems to posit that the problem with most marriages is that they are in some basic way ‘irrational’. There is also a connotation here that they are ‘involuntary’. A ‘conscious’


marriage is constructed as an act of rational agency. Together with Oprah’s understanding of this as a state of (implicitly egalitarian) ‘unconditional’ love and acceptance, there is the implication that we can determine the fundamental character of our relationships abstracted from the conditions in which they occur, that we can, as male and female individuals, for example, simply choose to be equal. Indeed, this would posit that individual ‘consciousness’ can supersede or cancel out the social/legal/economic meanings of marriage as a contract historically premised upon sexual/ gender inequality. In sum, the notion of ‘conscious’ marriage either presumes a gendered social equality that does not exist and/or it promises that individualized ‘consciousness’ is a route to interpersonal equality which, in itself, implicitly overrides social inequalities. We are not suggesting that heterosexual couples have no agency in their relationships. However, we would argue that all choices are constrained by and through social conditions and the complex social positions of the actors. In addition to the romanticization of the very relationships which were earlier problematized by Harville (and Oprah), a second way that conventional heterosexuality is recuperated is through the notion of self-help. The idea of self-help, as we noted earlier in this article, is premised upon those therapies adopting programmatic approaches to individual change. Harville’s books (and videos) are seen to provide a rational route to the realization of this ideal of heterosexual love. Underlying the process is the assumption of equality within heterosexual relationships and it is presumably necessary that both men and women undertake this work. However, as we shall see, the primary responsibility for the work of self-help is clearly laid at the feet of the women in the relationships shown on the programme.15 Setting the women up (1) The next phase of the programme begins with Oprah introducing Dale and Cari Reporto who are about to get a divorce. As noted above, what will follow is that Dale and Cari will undertake a brief therapy session, mediated by Harville, for the dissolution of their marriage. It is therefore necessary for Oprah and Harville first to locate Dale and Cari’s relationship problems within Harville’s framework. Thus, Oprah’s opening sentence to Dale and Cari is: ‘Did any of this sound familiar to you?’ (p. 14). Cari responds by saying that she recognized the pattern of herself being critiqued by Dale, a pattern which she had experienced from her parents. Dale agrees:


Dale: Oprah: Dale: Oprah:

Yeah. Well, I know I’m very critical of her. Uh huh. So that’s exactly what you’re talking about. And you were criticised a lot as a child? (p. 15).

At this point, one might have expected Dale to answer Oprah’s question (‘And you were criticised a lot as a child?’) since it was his comment that provoked it (and since within Harville’s framework either/both being criticized and/or being a critic would be the result of having critical parents). In other words, it would have been logical for the ‘you’ in Oprah’s question to have referred to Dale. Yet what actually happens is that it is Cari who responds by saying: Cari: In a lot of ways, it was for the betterment…(ibid.). So, within the space of a moment, the emphasis on the problems of the couple shifted to an emphasis on Cari’s problematic patterns; that is, the ‘you’, as the object of enquiry, became female. In viewing the programme, we were initially perplexed about how the shift of attention from Dale to Cari as the object of the ‘you’ had been accomplished. With the camera focused on Dale, what was immediately visible was that, following Oprah’s question, he looked towards Cari to answer. What we were not clear about at first was whether he or whether Oprah had instituted the shift. It was only when we watched the video in slow motion that we were able to detect that Oprah, herself, had turned her gaze on Cari as she asked the question. After being introduced in this way, there follows a ‘good-bye process’. Harville explains the purpose of the exercise: Harville: The—the whole point is that you need—in preparation for marriage, you need to finish what you didn’t finish or what’s left over from another relationship. And this good-bye process is, in a sense, an essential ingredient in getting ready to go on to your next relationship or to go on with your life if you decide not to go on to another relationship, but to finish that (p. 18). This suggests that although a marriage may have been negative and therefore in need of dissolution, the desirable outcome is the repetition of the pattern of getting married. This is despite Harville’s disclaimer which, as one views the programme, clearly comes through as an afterthought. In other words, while marriage is understood at one level to be constituted out of negative patterns by the individuals involved in


it, at another level the institution of marriage is seen as being a positive pattern and (re)marriage is set up again as an unquestioned object of desire. (Interestingly, Harville’s view that one needs to resolve problems in one relationship before moving on to another one through a ‘good-bye process’ excludes the very relationship, i.e. with the parents, which Harville identifies as the origin of all ‘problem patterns’.) The staged therapy that follows illustrates the implicit assumption that problematic patterns are located in the woman. The actual exercise consists of each partner in turn going through a set sequence of ‘saying good-bye’, first to the ‘bad parts’ of the marriage, then to the ‘good parts’, then to the dream of what might have been and finally to the marriage as a whole. The other partner is asked to ‘mirror’ back what has just been said (i.e. ‘if I’m hearing you right, you are saying goodbye to…’). In this process, there is an appearance and, indeed, an ostensible assumption of equality between the two partners. With Dale and Cari, this is visually reinforced by the way they are sitting: each faces the other (squared off) and in profile to the audience with Harville, facing front, between them. There are two particular interchanges in which the gender bias of the process becomes poignantly clear. In the first exchange, Cari has just been asked to begin the ‘goodbye’ to the ‘bad things’ in the marriage. Cari: I’d like to say good-bye to being critiqued as often as I was. To always having to prove that I’m better than what you thought I was. And I’d like to say good-bye to some of the frugality that existed between us. And I’ll be happy to say good-bye to the struggling with who I am on the one hand to make you happy and on the other hand to make me happy. Harville: OK. So just—just briefly, can you paraphrase back the part— the bad part she’s saying good-bye to in the relationship? Dale: Sure. As to the critiquing, she’s right I…. Harville: Yeah. And don’t explain it. Just say, so I’m hearing you say— you’re saying good-bye to the critiquing. Dale: Right. Harville: Just mirror it back and paraphrase it back. Dale: To the living up to my standards instead of yours and doing what I want you to do. And I really don’t feel any of that’s true. Harville: No. I don’t want you to comment. (audience laughter) (pp. 18–19).


In a later exchange, Dale is ‘saying good-bye’ to the ‘good stuff’ about the marriage: Harville: OK. Now shift to the good stuff that won’t ever be again with the end of this marriage. Oprah: (whispering off camera) Oh this is so sad. Dale: OK. The good stuff…. Harville: Say good-bye to that. Dale: (looking at Harville) With a lot of fun, a lot of good conversations. Harville: And tell it to her. Dale: Your enthusiasm about everything you did from who you came in to [sic] work and who you talked to. And that I never really had to carry a conversation, that you could carry the whole conversation; that you’re always smiling; you’re always up. You were never depressed. That when you were depressed, it was over minor things, like—oh, just nonsense things. I can’t even think of them. And that we could go places and do things and I never had to be embarrassed of you or that you would never be, you know…(p. 25). It is interesting to note that Dale finds is difficult both to listen to Cari and to address her. Not only does he need repeated reminders to paraphrase what Cari has said, he also often fails to talk to her when he is saying his good-byes. By contrast, Cari addresses Dale throughout and, when it comes to her turn to paraphrase, does so with great articulacy and accuracy.16 This would suggest that what we are seeing here, ironically, is a pattern in the relationship, but one which is not commented upon by Harville, Oprah or, indeed, by Dale or Cari: that is, a pattern of relating in which the listening is mostly one way (i.e. Cari listens to Dale but not vice versa). We would argue that in a performance situation (such as appearing on television or in front of an audience) it is difficult to do that which you have not rehearsed. It seemed to us that the reason Cari was able to perform the exercise easily and Dale was not was because she was practised in listening to and engaging with someone else and he was not. Indeed, this seems precisely what Dale means when he tells us that he ‘never had to really carry a conversation, that [Cari] could carry the whole conversation’. Not only does this seem to be a pattern in Dale and Cari’s particular relationship, it is well documented that active listening is gendered (see, for example, Cameron, 1985; Spender, 1980).


Second, it is striking that Dale describes, as one of the good things about the marriage, that Cari was depressed only over minor things which he was unable to remember. In the context of everything they had both said about the relationship, this appears to represent a trivialization of Cari’s feelings. It seems likely that Cari’s experiences of depression were not ‘trivial’ to her (and indeed, it is likely that the experience of being married to someone who has difficulty listening to you and who criticizes you constantly would be profoundly depressing). It is also possible that Cari had been depressed over ‘serious things’ (like being constantly critiqued/put down) and Dale did not register it. Cari’s body language and facial expression (shown in reaction shots) during this speech seemed to emanate considerable frustration and anger, suggesting that her experience was quite different from Dale’s version of it. This seems to be another pattern of gendered inequality between Dale and Cari which escapes comment in the programme. Finally, and most importantly, what is made clear here is that Dale’s problem in the marriage concerns the sort of person Cari is. Cari’s problem, on the other hand, is Dale’s problem with her, as she indicates in her comment about ‘always having to prove that I’m better than what you thought I was’. In other words, Cari is, in herself, the territory of dispute here. This is clear even when Dale is saying good-bye to the good parts of the marriage. The blatant arrogance of the statement that one of the good things was ‘never [having] to be embarrassed of [her]’ is a clear indication that she was expected to live out his fantasies of what marriage should be and of what a wife should be. Her inevitable ‘failure’ to do so is obviously the subject of his constant criticism of her. Moreover, it is reinforced throughout the rest of the exercise that Dale also has a problem with Cari having a life and relationships outside of her relationship with him. More specifically, Dale criticizes Cari for having friendships which, in his view she prioritizes over him, and indeed, he points out that even her son Drake claims more of Cari’s attention than he does (though he superficially acknowledges that this is understandable). Setting the women up (2) The final segment of the programme involves what Harville terms ‘a process called changing our frustration into a positive communication— a behaviour change request’ (p. 31) in relation to the second (recently formed) couple, Jay and Madelene. As with Dale and Cari, the segment begins with an identification of the couple’s ‘problem’ within Harville’s


therapeutic framework. The exercise then follows the same pattern as the good-bye exercise in two ways: first, what they are asked to do is programmatic in the same terms (i.e. involving the mirroring process); and second, the terrain of the problem is located in the woman. Oprah: Joining us are Jay and Madelene. They’ve been going out now for about a year, but they already have minor conflicts. She’s shy and he’s the life of the party. And how’s that bringing about conflict, guys? Madelene: When we go out—before we go out, I usually ask him who will be there. And if there’s anyone I know that will be there. And he gets mad at me that I ask him that. And I’m the type—well, he’ll go to a party, he’ll walk in. And he’ll just —he won’t know anyone, but he’ll just talk to anyone. And I’m the type where I’ll walk in, I’ll talk to people, but it takes me a while to warm up. Oprah: And isn’t that what attracted you to him? Madelene: Yes. (audience laughter) Oprah: So why is there now conflict? Madelene: He—’cause he gets mad at me. Oprah: For not being.… Madelene: For—well, he gets mad at me when I ask him about—when I ask him questions, ‘well, who’s going to be there?’ (p. 28). What we see here is that Madelene is describing a dynamic similar to the one between Dale and Cari; that is, as Madelene puts it, Jay has a problem with her shyness and Madelene has a problem with Jay’s problem with her. The subject of the whole interchange was supposedly Madelene’s frustration with Jay. However, this is quickly turned into an enquiry into Madelene herself when Oprah asks ‘isn’t that what attracted you to him?’, a question which is not at any time asked of Jay. Jay, by contrast, is never asked what attracted him to Madelene. The shift of scrutiny is reinforced when Harville then explains: Harville: You always are attracted to somebody who has a strength you don’t have. Then, when you get involved in the relationship, that strength becomes a problem to you and then you criticise them and ask them to give that strength away (p. 30). Clearly, Harville’s comment cannot be ascribed to Jay. It can only be Jay’s ability to ‘get on with people’, not Madelene’s shyness, which is construed as the strength the other partner does not have. Nor, within these parameters can we know what ‘strength’ (if any) Jay is attracted to


in Madelene since only her ‘weakness’ (shyness) is mentioned. We would argue, furthermore, that there is a mis-ascription here. Harville seems to be saying that Madelene is both attracted to (if not envious of) and critical of Jay’s outgoing personality and ability to mix. However, it seems to us that while she is indeed attracted to his gregariousness, what angers her is his insensitivity to her feelings. Harville conflates extroversion and insensitivity—two quite different qualities. Furthermore, according to Harville’s analysis, Madelene seems to have constructed (or projected) her own frustration with herself on to Jay. In other words, Madelene only has a problem because she is the problem. Jay, on the other hand, has a problem because Madelene is a problem. Given this reversal, it is hardly surprising that the exercise which ensues becomes a parody of itself: Harville: Madelene is going to communicate a frustration to Jay. Madelene: Jay, it gets me really mad when we are going out that you jump down on me and say, ‘Why do you get that way?’ I want to—it gets me mad that you know how I am but you yell at me for how I—I am. Harville: So then, the next process is to mirror that back so you’re sure you’ve got it, Jay. So, if I got it right…. Jay: If I got it right, I—I understand that I shouldn’t be getting all over you for, you know, not being more aggressive or— or not being as loud as I am. Harville: Did I get it? Jay: Did I get that right? Madelene: Yes. Harville: OK. Now, we want you to change that frustration into what you would want instead, which if you had it, you wouldn’t be frustrated. We call that ‘the desire hidden in the frustration’. Madelene: Jay, when we go out, I wish that when we’re at a party or somewhere where I don’t know a lot of people, that you would come up to me and put your arm around me and say ‘How’re you doing?’ (pp. 31–2). At this point, it seems clear that what Madelene is asking for is for Jay to be aware of how she is feeling, to notice her when they are in company and, in fact, to be with her. It is significant that she describes her feeling about Jay’s behaviour as anger (‘it makes me mad’) while Harville again mis-ascribes to her a very different emotion. ‘Frustration’ is defined as ‘having a sense of discouragement and


dissatisfaction’ (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary) which may indeed lead to anger but is not the same thing. In attributing to Madelene frustration rather than anger, Harville effectively trivializes what she actually says. It is also important to note that, while Harville seems to construct Madelene as ‘criticis[ing Jay’s strength]’, Jay, by contrast, seems to understand that Madelene is criticizing his insensitivity in expecting her to be ‘aggressive or—…as loud as [he is]’. However, in the exchange which follows, Harville and Oprah, between them, subvert Jay’s understanding by requiring from Madelene a mechanistic, behaviour modification type of demand. Harville says: Harville: OK. Now I want you to refine it a little more. And say how many—usually we give a timeframe to it, which is the practice, the training period. Like for the next month, each time we’re at a party, I’d like you to come up to me once or twice or three times or whatever…. This forces Madelene into the rather absurd position of saying: Madelene: Jay, for the next month, I’d like—when we do go to a party, I’d like you to come up to me and introduce me to people and to…. Oprah: How—how many times? Harville: Once—once or twice or three times? Madelene: Three times. Harville: Three times (audience laughter). All right. Jay: OK. If I—Madelene, if I got it right, you want me to, in the course of the next month, when we go to these parties, I’ll come up to you at least three times and tell you that I’m thinking of you and that I know you’re there. Do I have this right? Madelene: You got it right. Harville: OK. And now…. Oprah: Can I just stop you here and say—and make note of how important this is? The reason why this struck me—I don’t know if it struck you guys, too, and you guys watching at home—is because so many times—like when she said that at first…. Harville: Yes. Oprah: …Like, ‘I’d like you to come up to me at a party’. You have in your own mind about how many times it would make you comfortable. Harville: That’s right.


Oprah:

But he doesn’t know what those times are unless you say it. But you assume that because you’ve now said, ‘I want you to come up to me at the party’, that he knows how many times. That’s why the how many times, although it sounded a little corny, really was really effective and essential (p. 33).

Once more, Jay seems, despite the mention of frequency, to understand the gist of what Madelene was really saying. But Harville and Oprah’s insistence on putting a number on Madelene’s request again makes light of what is a far from trivial problem. It misconstrues as quantitative a problem which is, in fact, qualitative. As with Dale and Cari, what seems at issue here is a pattern of male expectations of ideal wife/ girlfriend imposed on his partner through critique of her person. The audience’s laughter during this exchange seems to indicate an awareness of how inappropriate the quantification of the request is. This is perhaps why Oprah seems to feel impelled to justify it in order to re-place the audience with the flow of the programme. Furthermore, it is disquieting to note that the misconstruction of what Madelene wants places her in an invidious position. Although this is clearly not their intention, Oprah and Harville nevertheless set up conditions for the further disempowerment of Madelene within the relationship. If Jay and Madelene follow through with the exercise for the next month, Madelene will not get the kind of consideration she (quite reasonably) wants and yet Jay will have done exactly what he was supposed to do (to the number). In other words, she will have no come-back if she is still angry or unhappy; it will be even more her problem than it was before. Rather than a recipe for improved relations, as was intended, it seems to us that the couple have been given a recipe for disaster. Recuperations We are not trying to argue here that the ideas put forward by Harville and Oprah have nothing of value to offer. It makes sense to us to recognize that good relationships require work, that people carry their previous experiences with them and that these experiences affect how they behave in the present. It is also clear that active listening is important and needs to be demonstrated in the course of dialogue, particularly where people are struggling with problems in their relationships. However, for both couples, we can see that the exercises they are asked to undertake are, at best, problematic and, at worst, damaging. Just how dubious they can be as ways of ‘solving’ problems or ‘saying good-bye’ can be seen if we


apply them to situations involving violence and abuse. Imagine, for example, the good-bye process redeployed: Her: I’m saying good-bye to the times you came home drunk, to the beatings, to the rapes, to the terror you inflicted on me and the children…. Harville: Now say good-bye to the good stuff that won’t ever be again. Any attempt to rewrite either of these exercises, or indeed Harville’s self-help approach as a whole, to apply to patterns of severe abuse would inevitably emerge, at the very least, as inappropriate. This is precisely because of the absence of a framework which could recognize inequality as a central problem in heterosexual relationships.17 As we have seen, ‘How to Make Love Last’ is characterized by a repeated pattern of mis-ascription, misrecognition and misunderstanding. Power relations are understood only in terms of individual unresolved patterns from childhood; problems between couples are construed as the problems of the woman; problems within marriage are dissected without reference to the institutional character of marriage. In a similar vein, choice and responsibility are invoked in ways which assume equality of position between men and women but inequality of responsibility. Women are seen to be responsible both for the origin and solution of problems within heterosexual relationships. Indeed, women are effectively seen to be the problem and to be the site for and agent of remedial work. Moreover, heterosexuality is assumed to be a site of dysfunction and the ‘repetition of [women’s] bad patterns’ on the one hand, and yet on the other hand the universal ideal. Furthermore, because of the lack of a critical framework which considers power relations, it is possible at one and the same time both to invoke and to deny the continuities between ‘extreme’ forms of abuse and ‘mundane’ misunderstandings. Clearly, then, the model of self-help therapy underpinning the programme is not capable of resolving the issues raised within it precisely because it rules out the possibility of considering the social character of the relationships under scrutiny and the social positions of the actors involved. In this context, the exercise of ‘mirroring’ back can be not only mechanical, but can also be a way of appearing to understand the other while in fact reinscribing (her) Otherness. All this is demonstrated forcibly in Oprah and Harville’s final summary of the lessons of the programme: Harville: That’s why marriages don’t work. There’s no commitment to mutual healing and mutual helping. Oprah: ‘Cause that’s what marriage is? A commitment to….


Harville: That’s what marriage is. Marriage—marriage is a structure for healing. And if you do meet each other’s childhood needs, you’ll have the marriage of your dreams. And if you don’t, you’ll have the marriage of your nightmares. And you can predict that (p. 38). To posit marriage as ‘a structure for healing’ seems, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, actively deceitful. Surely it contradicts the evidence amply provided in this and many other Oprah Winfrey Shows that, far from being a structure for healing, marriage can be seen as a structure for ‘wounding’ and for the disempowerment of women and children. Harville himself makes this point, albeit not with the intention of critiquing the institution or framework of marriage in itself. Not only does this facile exchange contradict the predominant experience of marriage, but it also contradicts the historical meaning of the legal/ economic/social contract of marriage which has served as a structure for ensuring patrilineal inheritance and for the inscription of women (and their children) as property. (Marriage has also served as a structure for the eugenic reproduction of particular social and cultural formations, i.e. ‘desirable’ populations. This is reflected in rules or social conventions about who is allowed, disallowed or forced to marry whom.) In other words, it contradicts the history of marriage as an institution which has emerged from and reproduces a range of social inequalities. Conclusions As our analysis shows, the twin frameworks of therapy and presumed heterosexuality have all but ruled out the possibility for questions to be raised about power relationships and patterns of social inequality. It seems to us that it inevitably becomes a contradiction in terms to seek to challenge common sense and common forms of oppression through frameworks which mitigate against such questions. We would suggest that a very different picture of Dale, Cari, Jay and Madelene’s situations would have emerged, given a framework which questions the social character of individual patterns in relationships, which interrogates gendered and other forms of inequality and which challenges expertise and dominant social institutions. The close reading which we have given to this one programme reveals a significant disjuncture between Oprah’s explicit goals for her show and the contradictory effects of its framework. Indeed, what we


have seen is that the framework and format of the show can easily subvert the challenging educational objectives of the kind of socially responsible television which Oprah is aiming to produce and can disempower precisely those people whom she is aiming, through the show, to empower. Notes Debbie Epstein is Senior Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of London Institute of Education. She has written widely on questions of sexuality, ‘race’ and gender, particularly with regard to education. Recent books include Changing Classroom Cultures: Anti-racism, Politics and Schools (1993, Trentham) and Challenging Lesbian and Gay Inequalities in Education (1994, Open University Press). She has several books forthcoming, including Sexual Subjects co-written with Richard Johnson (Open University Press) and A Question of Discipline: Pedagogy, Power and Praxis in Cultural Studies co-edited with Joyce E.Canaan (Westview Press). Deborah Lynn Steinberg lectures in feminist studies at Warwick University (Department of Sociology) and is a Regional Tutor for the Open University. She has written widely on the subjects of science, eugenics and sexuality politics. Her forthcoming books include Border Patrols: Policing the Boundaries of Heterosexuality co-edited with Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson (Cassell) and Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics (Manchester University Press). This article is part of a larger project on the Oprah Winfrey Show. We have carried out this study as part of our contribution to the work of the Politics of Sexuality Group (Steinberg et al., in press). We would like to thank members of the group for their critical support and the many people, including the readers for Feminist Review, who have encouraged us to continue with this work. We would also like to thank staff at the British distributors of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Midlantic Films and Vicky Spiratos at Burrelle’s Transcription Services for their patient assistance in finding programme titles, first transmission dates and transcripts. A version of the paper was presented at the Women’s Studies Network Conference (Portsmouth, July 1994). 1 Of course, this article could be said to be part of that vogue. 2 A notable exception is the tabloid obsession with Oprah’s body size and, to a somewhat lesser extent, her long-standing engagement to Stedman.


3 We use the term ‘kinship’ in this article to describe both relationships between people in general and relatedness (or what is seen to count as being related to another person in familial terms). 4 It is beyond the scope of this article to consider this issue in depth. However, it is important to at least note that the presentation of therapeutic interactions as entertainment in itself constitutes a breach of the confidentiality which is considered to be axiomatic to any school of therapy or counselling. 5 Even within schools of psychoanalysis which attempt to locate the individual psyche within the social (e.g. R.D.Laing and existentialist approaches; Nancy Chodorow and other feminist approaches), there are none the less tensions between the overall propensity of treatment towards individualism and the attempt to theorize behaviours, emotions, experience, etc. in relation to the social. 6 Note, however, Kelly et al.’s (1994) argument that neither ‘victim’ nor ‘survivor’ are appropriate descriptors for people who have experienced sexual abuse. 7 Duncker uses this phrase to describe a central theme she sees in Margaret Atwood’s fiction. 8 The Oprah Winfrey Show does also occasionally feature issues about women’s abusive behaviour towards male partners or children. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine these programmes and the ways in which they challenge or reinforce feminist critiques of patriarchal power. In any case, they do not represent either the vast majority of shows or the more general picture of the ways abuse is gendered. 9 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations have been drawn from the programme transcript produced by Burrelle’s Transcription Services. However, where there were obvious mistakes in the transcript, we have made the appropriate corrections. 10 This is, of course, a liberal humanist argument in its assumption of a universal subject and in its presumption of human equality abstracted from the material inequalities which actually pertain in any given situation or between any given subjects. Elsewhere (Epstein and Steinberg, in press), we have discussed the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show is characterized more generally by liberal politics. 11 We use the term ‘liberal equivalence’ to describe the tendency to equate situations which involve unequal power relations as if they were equal. We see this as characteristic of liberal politics more generally and of the Oprah Winfrey Show specifically. 12 These kinds of relationships are typically, within liberal thought, understood as ‘private’ and therefore not political or beyond politics. It is an interesting dimension of the Oprah Winfrey Show that it both challenges the public/ private distinction of liberal politics (for example,


by putting relationships on a public stage) and at the same time reinscribes it by examining relationships in terms which effectively exclude a consideration of power relations. 13 For example, Cari was wearing an obviously expensive (possibly designer) suede outfit and Dale a suede jacket. All the guests looked as if they were very well-heeled indeed. This was reinforced in more subtle ways by their manners of self-presentation, the language they used to describe themselves and the activities they referred to in their day-to-day lives. 14 Although we would disagree with an individualized cycle of abuse approach and with Harville’s particular version of it, it is nevertheless clear that many children, if not most, are indeed damaged by ‘family life’. 15 This includes Harville and Helen’s ‘ideal relationship’. For example, in a subsequent extract from their video, it emerges that they have been in conflict about Helen’s habitual lateness, but while Helen has had to learn to accept Harville’s impatience with this, he has apparently not had to learn anything:

Helen:

Harville: Helen:

Harville:

I mean, you know, he can pick up a paper. He’s always complaining that he doesn’t have time to read. And he could just flow with it. And I had to learn to first acknowledge that you were never going to flow with my being late. Yeah. Then second, really respect and honour it. And then—and now, I think it’s rather charming that you—and dear. That I won’t flow with your being late (p. 27).

16 For example:

Dale: Harville: Dale:

Harville: Dale: Harville: Dale: Harville:

I want to say good-bye to feeling third and fourth choice… And tell her. …where our son came first, which was understandable. But her parents came second; her friends came third. And say your friends. Your friends. Your friends. Your parents. Your parents came third, and then me in every consideration and every way she… You. You.


Dale: Harville: Dale:

Cari:

…handled all of our…. Say you. You—in every way that you handled all of our—our friendships. It was always your friends…. If I got it, you are saying good-bye to being third, fourth, and fifth. My putting our son, which was understandable, but my family and friends ahead of you…. And basically to sum it up, that I never, ever made you number one (pp. 24–5).

17 This is not to suggest that lesbian and gay relationships are not characterized by problems relating to a range of inequalities, or that sexist inequality is the only form of inequality inscribing compulsory heterosexuality. We are also well aware that heterosexual couples (and all couples) can actively struggle against sexist and other forms of inequality within their relationships. By ‘struggle’ here, we are not arguing that individuals can simply opt for their relationships to be exempt from being shaped by social inequalities. What we are suggesting is that the personal is political and that relationships are therefore a site of personal/political struggle.

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EPSTEIN, D. and STEINBERG, D.L. (1995a) ‘12 steps to heterosexuality: common-sensibilities on the Oprah Winfrey Show’ Feminism and Psychology Vol. 5, No. 2:275–80. ——(1995b) ‘Heterosensibilities on the Oprah Winfrey Show’ in Purvis and Maynard, editors. ——(in press) ‘Love’s labours: playing it straight on the Oprah Winfrey Show’ in Steinberg, Johnson and Epstein, editors. ——(in preparation) ‘American Dreamin’: Discoursing Liberally on the Oprah Winfrey Show’. hooks, b. (1982) Ain’t I a Woman London: Pluto. ——(1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation London: Turnaround. KELLY, L. (1986) Surviving Sexual Abuse London: Polity. KELLY, L., REGAN, S. and BURTON, L. (1991) ‘Short summary of findings from an exploratory study of the prevalence of sexual abuse in a sample of 16–18 year olds’. Mimeograph. Polytechnic (now University) of North London. ——(1994) ‘The victim/survivor dichotomy: beyond an identity defined by violation’. Paper given at the British Sociological Association Conference, University of Central Lancashire. MELLENCAMP, P. (1992) High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. PURVIS, J. and MAYNARD, M. (1995) editors, (Hetero)Sexual Politics London: Taylor & Francis. REITER, R. (1975) editor, Toward an Anthropology of Women New York: Monthly Review Press. RUBIN, G. (1975) ‘The traffic in women’ in Reiter, editor. SCHWICHTENBERG, C. (1992) editor, The Madonna Connection Boulder: Westview Press. SPENDER, D. (1980) Man Made Language London: Routledge. SQUIRE, C. (1994) ‘Empowering women? The Oprah Winfrey Show’ Feminism and Psychology: ‘Shifting Identities: Shifting Racisms, (Special Issue) Vol. 4, No. 1:63–79. STEINBERG, D.L., EPSTEIN, D. and JOHNSON, R. (in press) editors, Border Patrols: Policing the Boundaries of Heterosexuality London: Cassell. WILKINSON, S. and KITZINGER, C. (1993) editors, Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader London: Sage. The Oprah Winfrey Show (Dates of first USA transmission of programmes referred to in this article) ‘Baby Selling’, 26 May 1993. ‘Desperate Women meet Alaskan Men’, 17 February 1989. ‘Dr. Martin Luther King: A Tribute’, 16 January 1989.


‘Fathers and the Sons they Never Knew’, 31 October 1990. ‘How to Make Love Last’, 18 January 1993. ‘Lesbian and Gay Baby Boom’, 10 May 1993. ‘Obnoxious Husbands’, 11 January 1989. ‘Raising a Child with Family Values’, 6 April 1993. ‘Would you Leave Your Child Home Alone?’, 11 January 1993.

Reviews

Space, Time and Perversion Elizabeth Grosz Routledge: London, 1995 ISBN 0 415 91137 0, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 91136 2, £40.00 Hbk Emptiness of the Image Parveen Adams Routledge: London, 1995 ISBN 0 415 04622 X, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 04621 1, £37.50 Hbk New sexualities: new questions The fortuitous appearance of these two collections of essays brings together revisions of previously published papers from the last decade by Grosz and Adams plus a recent paper by the latter on the artist Orlan. They both address common concerns: the relation of body to psyche; space, interiority, and the exterior; sexual difference and female sexuality. There are, however, marked differences in terms of their epistemological aims and their engagement with feminism. Grosz introduces herself as ‘feminist, Australian, philosophical’. Her project is described in optimistic polemic as one which seeks to relocate the corporal body as central to sexuality and to free sexual pleasure from the strictures of the phallic constraints of psychoanalysis. Adams, writing as a Lacanian theorist, also criticizes the phallic basis of the psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference but, in contradistinction to


Grosz, her task is to extend Lacanian theory rigorously without disinvesting psychoanalytic terms of explanatory value. The critical question that I find implied by these two books is that of the relation between theories of ‘new’ or ‘radical’ sexualities and the ethical. By the ethical here I do not wish to imply the maintenance of a status quo, but rather to ask: what could be the ethics of the body, the ethics of intimate relationships, and the relation between jouissance and desire? Grosz achieves her aim through a thorough and systematic reworking of patriarchal theories, deconstructing and exposing the male metaphorization of knowledge. In this process the central insight, that all knowledge is itself sexually differentiated, emerges. The task of feminism is therefore to deconstruct and oppose theories of patriarchy, which she terms ‘the enemy’. As an epistemologist, Grosz agrees that there is a crisis at the heart of reason in the quest for the legitimation of knowledge. As a feminist she points to the danger of a solution which repeats a masculinist rationalism or an identification with the irrational. Both are positions which in effect shore up patriarchy. It follows therefore that the account of sexual difference is central to epistemology. The first section ‘Bodies and Knowledge’, in divorcing the corporal from the psychic, privileges the body. Eschewing psychoanalytic theory Grosz addresses the question of the state of primary being, as in Heidegger and Levinas, but such an ontology is paradoxically reconceived as being capable of supporting plural differences. Attempting to grapple with plural sexualities and differences exceeding binary division, Grosz cannot simply avoid an engagement with psychoanalytic theory. The final section ‘Perverse Desire’ develops her overriding critique of psychoanalysis, that phallic difference is insufficient to explain female sexuality. Taking lesbian sexuality as paradigmatic of the unrepresented in female desire, Grosz extends Freud’s theory of fetishism to explain female desire for the body of the female other as fetish. This is the argument developed by Teresa de Lauretis in Practices of Love which interprets castration as loss of the female body, as opposed to loss of the phallus. Grosz points out that this avoids the force castration, or rather symbolic castration in Lacan’s metaphysical divisions, the symbolic, imaginary, and that which lies outside representation, the real. As Grosz herself states, she is ‘not revolutionary’ or ‘radical’ and, rather than an up-front lesbian exhibitionism, it is lesbian ‘inarticulateness’ and ‘indeterminancy’ which in her view has the best

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chance of maintaining political freedom. Competing theories are evaluated from a pragmatic feminist perspective mindful of the current backlash and with an awareness of the repetitions of history. At those stages of her argument when deconstruction of patriarchy becomes insufficient, Grosz cites the work of such theorists as Spivak, Deleuze, and Irigaray for ‘other ways of proceeding’. Grosz states that she is not seeking an explanatory theory of desire but wishes to extend the boundaries of sexual pleasure. The very terms ‘perversion’, ‘desire’, and ‘castration’ thus lose the force of psychoanalytic concepts and tend towards social description. Nonphallic sexuality is therefore easily attained through transferable eroticism: the phallus then appears to be simply irrelevant. Citing the work of Bersani and Lingis, Grosz severs the historical alliance of sex and death by pluralizing sexual pleasures from male description. The politics of Irigaray’s antiphallic theories are thus ameliorated and the darkness of the death drive forgotten. Although Grosz emphasizes that lesbian and gay practices intrinsically challenge the politics of heterosexuality, this is accompanied by the argument that sexuality should be free from a political agenda. This rather surprising conclusion follows both as a consequence of her emphasis on erotic pleasure and resistance to sexuality carrying any metaphorical or symbolic value, even within feminism. Adams confronts perversion within the conceptual framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis. These papers are not for those uninitiated into Lacanian terms and theory, although complex concepts such as ‘anamorphosis’ and ‘alienation’—‘separation’ are carefully explained within the context of looking at art and film. Essays on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, the paintings of Francis Bacon and the performances and videos by the artist Orlan raise the question of the limits of representation and visibility. At the basis of this extension of Freudian theory a parallel is drawn between viewing an artwork and the process of psychoanalysis itself. The analysand is described by Lacan as participating in a particular relation to her/himself and an other, termed ‘discourse of the Analyst’. Adams applies this to the viewer of artist Mary Kelly’s work. A moment is reached in analysis when the analysand is brought to the experience of acknowledging her/his lost attachments which Lacan terms objet a. Through severing early phallic identifications, a process of separation takes place which allows her/his own desire to emerge. In this artwork it is the clothing entitled ‘Body’ which signifies the


absence of the corporal body. No one including the artist has this lost object with the net result that the viewer of the artwork is enabled to discover new meaning through the emptiness of the image. The analysis of the photograph The Three Graces by Della Grace brings together Adams’ work on representation and sexuality. Unlike the patriarchal history of the idealizing portraiture of women, the three bald figures grouped before the lens are ‘beyond recognition’ in terms of gender and sexual difference. The concept of ‘anamorphosis’ as in Holbein’s The Ambassadors reveals the duplicitous illusion of reality. In this painting the perspective of the skull is incompatible with the viewpoint of the main image. Two different vanishing points thus give rise to different constructions of reality. In psychoanalytic theory it is the oedipal phallus which acts as the reference point and guarantor of reality. The central hieratic figure of The Three Graces gazes at the spectator, denying the scopophilic pleasure of viewing the image and creating a blind spot. It is this gaze which functions anamorphically, demonstrating that patriarchal representation is a form of illusion and therefore allowing the viewer access to new objects. Both Lacan’s first account of sexuation as being or having the phallus and the second based on difference in jouissance of the Other are here rejected as inadequate. Adams is not afraid of addressing the full gamut of sexuality, an experience which emerges through the text as not always pleasurable. ‘Jouissance’ as Adams reminds us ‘isn’t very nice’, that which ‘your mother should have warned you against’. The essays ‘Of female bondage’ and ‘The bald truth’ construct an argument that non-phallic sexuality is confined to a particular form of perversion: the practice of lesbian sadomasochism. Only in this scenario is the use of the dildo free from the phallus and indifferent to masculine or feminine choices. Adams applies this argument to the naked bodies of The Three Graces as an explanation of the disturbing quality of the image. The recognition of the body as phallus is here contradicted by the crucial realization that no one, of whatever gender or sexuality, has the phallus. The originality and radicality of Adams’ thinking brings the reader to the uncomfortable boundary of what is pleasurable and desirable. Both Adams and Grosz point out that there can be no idealization of woman as feminist; feminist norms necessarily become a part of patriarchy. The central feminist task therefore remains one of continual separation from patriarchal identifications. The broader question of feminist ideals remains. As the ‘radical’ during the last decade has become the dynamism of right-wing

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revolutionary ideology, do feminists now have something to conserve? I am left with the following questions: ‘Does a non-phallic sexuality necessarily give rise to a non-phallic ethics?’ and furthermore, ‘What is good for us?’ Sharon Morris Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the ‘Feminine’ Kelly Oliver Routledge: London, 1995 ISBN 0 415 90682 2, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 90681, £37.50 Hbk Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory Rosi Braidotti Columbia University Press: New York, 1995 ISBN 0 231 08235 5, £12.00 Pbk ISBN 0 231 08234 7, £34.50 Hbk How, if you are a postmodern feminist committed to the deconstruction of the unified subject, do you seek to retain and register some sort of feminine identity? What is the appropriate response of the feminist critic to those moves, initiated (so many would claim) in Nietzsche’s writings, and continued in the contemporary neo-Nietzschean project of Derrida and others, to ‘feminize’ philosophy? Are these to be applauded as the beginning of the reversal of its longstanding male bias, or to be deplored as the continuation of the same hostilities by other, more covert and ingenious, means? Both these works either themselves directly pose these questions or implicitly raise them; and both invite us to believe that it is only by bringing the perspective of sexual difference theory to bear (that of Irigaray especially, though Kristeva is also an important influence) that feminists can expect to reach any satisfactory resolution of them. Kelly Oliver’s study is the more focused of the two, though it goes under a rather ugly and misleading title (it is not so much about making a woman of Nietzsche as about exposing his womb-envious fear and fascination with the female; it is also, one might add, a text addressed as much to Freud and Derrida on the feminine as directly to the views of Nietzsche himself). The essential thesis of the book is that even those,


like Nietzsche and Derrida, who more than other male thinkers have opened philosophy to its negated or marginalized ‘others’ (the unconscious, the body, non-meaning, even the feminine in some sense), remain closed to what she calls a ‘specific feminine’ and particularly to the registering of a positive, vocal, cultural, desiring maternal subject. Their engagement with ‘woman’ is abstract, appropriative, and inherently phallic in outlook, both in the sense that their texts tacitly presuppose the masculinity of their readers (and hence exclude a feminine subject), and in the sense that they refuse to acknowledge any feminine which is not conceived simply as the negative of the masculine. This Irigarayan critique is pressed home in a series of dense and convoluted discussions of the self-parodying rhetorical strategies whereby philosophy is ‘feminized’ in this Nietzschean mode only through a process of emasculation which erases sexual difference and can recognize no woman or feminine other than the all-powerful phallic mother identified with mother nature. What is needed as a corrective, Oliver suggests, is a ‘maternal model’ or revision of thinking about the maternal such that the social and relational dimensions of mothering are fully recognized in philosophy and allowed to provide the basis for a new ethic. All this will probably be acceptable enough to those already persuaded of the absoluteness of sexual difference and agreeable to the ultimate tracing of this in the maternal function. To those less ready to adopt the unqualified view that ‘subjects and their experiences are always sexed’ or to accept that the mothering role is inherently feminine, it will seem dogmatic, based on challengeable premises and politically troubling in its apparent exclusion of male participation in nurturing. It is also surely a touch idealist of Oliver to argue that ‘if the traditional account of the child’s relation to its mother is taken as a prototype for all other relationships, then we need an account of the mother-child relationship that sets up rather than cuts off, the possibility of a reciprocal relation of exchange’. Here, as elsewhere in her book, the tendency is to suppose that the task is purely one of theoretical accounting—as if appropriately erotic descriptions of early experiences would ensure the loving quality of adult relations. Unfortunately, the world is a harsher place than some of these academic recommendations seem ready to acknowledge. Finally, one might note a number of equivocations in Oliver’s reading of Derrida. Thus, within the space of a couple of pages, we are told both that ‘in the name of undecidability every sex becomes masculine’ and

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that Derrida ‘turns all sexuality, insofar as it is undecidable, into the feminine’. But no doubt exposing the phallogocentrism at the heart of deconstruction’s major theorist is bound to involve some tight manoeuvres, and in the end Oliver’s point seems to be that Derrida does well to demolish the unified subject but should not have begun by dismantling the female—since it is necessary, she claims, in some sense to continue to rally round the identity of ‘woman’. This strikes me as a pretty questionable ‘having your cake and eating it’ version of deconstruction, but one, I suspect, to which Braidotti would also want, if possible, to subscribe. At any rate in a collection of essays crowded with large (and, perhaps understandably, largely unanswered) questions, that of how to reconcile the death of the subject with the realization of the ‘feminine’ is the most frequently repeated. Like Oliver, too, Braidotti is inclined to overestimate the contribution of theoretical rectitude to providing resolutions of these issues and thus correcting the oppression of women. In this spirit she recommends the shift to a ‘nomadic’ understanding of the subject as alone able to resist the potential ‘microfascism’ of all ‘hegemonies’ whatever their size, and however local. Such nomadic shifts, she argues ‘designate a creative sort of becoming; a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge’. They also, one might argue, make it difficult to see how you would defend any positive form of hegemony or constructive solidarity (where does it leave, for example, the politics of the neo-Gramscians and advocates of ‘radical democracy’?). Braidotti clearly intends to entice us with this vision of the territories and transgressions opened up to the ‘nomadic’ subject, and makes a number of astute points in the course of its elaboration. But overall I found these essays rather flatly written and repetitious in their argument. A little more self-irony and some more exacting editing would have considerably added to the pleasures of this particular voyage of discovery. Kate Soper


The Practice of Love, Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire Teresa de Lauretis Indiana University Press, 1994 ISBN 0 253 20878 5, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 253 31681 2, $36.95 Cloth This book is a passionate rendering of Teresa de Lauretis’ journey through psychoanalysis, structuralism, and semiotics. Her search is guided by her desire to represent her experiences of lesbian sexuality. The author consistently and vibrantly expresses her own stake in the questions she raises; this is not an abstract, ungendered, unsexualized, pseudo-scientific quest for the foundational ‘truth’ of lesbianism. Part One of the book presents a critical reading of psychoanalytic texts focusing on their analyses of lesbian sexuality. De Lauretis stresses that her aim in re-reading Freud is to exemplify the discontinuities and ambiguities of his theories of sexuality: the complexities which engage our interest and allow for new questions and formulations of desire. She argues that Freud’s theory of sexuality could be seen to construe sexuality in terms of independent modalities. This would not be an opposition of normal—perverse but, rather, a notion of sexual instinct as having different component instincts. ‘Normal’ would refer to a function of the social norm whereas the concept of perversion offers, in de Lauretis’ view, a model of sexuality as it is subjectively lived through, that is, in fantasy and desire. Throughout the book de Lauretis is fascinated by how it is that we become sexual subjects, embodied psychic beings, and this leads to her interest in Freud’s notion of instinct, ‘the psychical representation of an endosomatic, continuous flowing source of stimulation’ (Three Essays on Sexuality). Here ‘instinct’ is the pivot between the mental and the physical. Following Laplanche and Pontalis, de Lauretis stresses the constitutive role of fantasies for subjectivity. Psychoanalytic theory offers three major fantasies of origin: the primal scene, seduction, and castration. She stresses that the fantasies are not innate facts but are historically constituted. Theories of sexuality in the early followers of Freud, Lampl de Groot, Deutsch, and Jones, are critically analysed. De Lauretis is particularly interested in Deutsch because of her emphasis on the problem of representing women’s desire for women. Lesbianism, for Deutsch, is a return to ‘the mother’. Here the return to ‘the mother’ is far from being interpreted as a longing for pre-Oedipal bliss and is seen

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as a complex movement through the instinctual vicissitudes of sadomasochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and fetishism. Although de Lauretis shares Deutsch’s privileging of the concept of the Oedipus complex for human development, she disagrees with her notion of lesbian object-choice. For Deutsch a lesbian’s desire for another woman is interpreted as desire for a mother or mother substitute. De Lauretis argues that, within the perspective of perverse desire, the ‘fantasmic object’ of lesbian desire is the subject’s own body image. She maintains that the castration complex instantiates sexual difference. For the lesbian the threat of castration is not the threat of not having a penis but, rather, it is the wished-for female body that is threatened with non-existence. A major argument of this book is that a rejection or refusal to re-think the notion of castration is a foreclosure on the possibility of signifying desire. De Lauretis construes desire in terms of a lack to be fulfilled. The lack is bridged by fantasies, in the case of a lesbian it is not the paternal phallus that is desired but the fetish which resolves the Oedipus complex because it carries an instinctual investment in the female bodyimage. The fetish makes satisfaction possible because it stands for what is absent but what is wished for in fantasy, thus expressing its absence and the subject’s desire for it. Erotic power represented, for example, in butch and femme roles functions as fetish of desire that can carry women sexually to a more fulfilled experience of their femaleness: ‘In my view, then, lesbian desire is not the identification with another woman’s desire, but the desire for her desire as signified in her fetish and the fantasy scenario it evokes’ (p. 251). De Lauretis presents extensive analyses of texts and films which represent lesbianism. In her analysis of Sheila McLaughlin’s film She Must be Seeing Things the author elaborates her critique of the relationship between sexuality and fantasy. De Lauretis sees the film as being about two women who share a common fantasy of lesbian origins; this scenario sustains their respective and mutual desire. The film constructs the looking at lesbian desire in a non-objectifying way and opens out a way in which women look at each other with desire and where the spectator-woman sees their look and is alive to their desire. The author’s aim is to offer a theory of sexuality which is nonheterosexual and non-normatively homosexual, a theory of sexuality as perversion which is not pathological. She interprets psychoanalytic theory and practice as based on a logic of seduction. The fantasy of seduction, in de Lauretis’ view, is the condition of the possibility of transference and countertransference. She insistently distinguishes


perversion from pathology and she also insists on the specificity and contingency of desires. The danger is that, in remaining preoccupied with questions of origins, she risks reinstating the kind of universalist psychoanalytic interpretations that have, traditionally, been so destructive to lesbians as well as to gay men and to heterosexual and bisexual women and men. How does de Lauretis know that the concepts of seduction, castration, and the Oedipus complex are necessary for the symbolization, the expression, and satisfaction, of desire? Noreen O’Connor Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique Judith Newton University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994 ISBN 0 4720 6482 7, £11.95 Pbk ISBN 0 4720 9482 3, £31.60 Hbk I have been reading Judith Newton’s work for some years now, and have always been stimulated and touched by it. Indeed, she is one of the people I have turned to for answers or for ways of approaching troublesome questions. This collection of essays is a useful map of her ideas and interventions in debates on both sides of the Atlantic about gender, class, race, history, and culture. Committed primarily to examining how power differentials of gender, class, and race inhere in the social field, Newton ranges over literary and other representations and social practice. As one of the proponents of materialist-feminism (Towards a Materialist-Feminist Criticism, with Deborah Rosenfelt, 1985) Newton has long endeavoured to show the links between high and popular cultures and between the cultural and the material. The clarion call to analyse ‘meaning in the service of power’ has not outworn its usefulness, while the attempt to position readings of ‘literary texts in relation to other forms of public written representation and other forms of the material, in relation to (always constructed) social and economic relations’ has had many followers. This leaves Newton in a particularly good position to comment on new historicism and the new history, developments in the fields of literary and historical studies respectively. Indeed, I remember turning in 1987 to her piece ‘History as usual? Feminism and the New Historicism’, in the hope that she would explain to me this apparently

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new but disconcertingly familiar phenomenon. True to form, Newton argued that, despite its evident usefulness, new historicism was another version of what some of ‘us’ were doing all along (whether it was labelled the new art history, gender or ethnic studies, or, indeed, materialist-feminism). The often unacknowledged debt to feminist theory and practice on the part of both new historicism and the new history is a central theme of two other essays in the book. Newton manages to avoid sour grapes on this count, and instead lays out with devastating clarity how proponents of these methodologies who fail either to recognize their debt to, or to build on the implications of, feminist studies terminally limit the scope and effect of their work. On related but different lines, her analysis of feminist approaches to the textual (Mary Poovey and Nancy Armstrong) and social (Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall) inscription of nineteenth-century middleclass gender relations both analyses what is at stake in the differences between them but also shows how in combination their emphasis on the mutual dependency of the public and the private has broken a ‘taboo’ of history. ‘For there has been much less resistance (among women and men) to seeing class, race, or economic development as a force in constructing gender than to seeing gender or sexuality as a force in constructing race or class.’ In terms of ethnicity particularly Newton is frank about the positive impact of challenges to white feminism and writes stirringly of the importance of developing alliances, some of them unlikely, that can bring about change in the academy at the very least. Newton’s concern with the material impact of scholarly work makes her discussion of recent trends in literary and historical studies particularly powerful. When so much of literary studies requires an élite education (Newton talks of the work required to translate the worst excesses of deconstruction so that her students can form an opinion of it) even to make sense of potentially radical critical practices, it is timely to read in Newton’s preface a reminder that cultural criticism is a ‘terrain of power’. Her work is informed by the recognition that this is a terrain in which ‘some voices, themes, and reading strategies are more successfully authorized than others…[and] in which struggles over resources and unequal relations of gender, class, nationhood, and race enter into the production of competing public knowledges and expertise’. As I work with colleagues to redevelop the literature programme at my university, Newton’s work lends support to our determination to study the high literary alongside the popular, the centre alongside the margins and to see literary texts in relation to other forms


of representation and material practice. But it also emphasizes the need to prioritize this type of intervention in the academy so that a system of mass higher education (however poorly funded and contested) can actually address the material conditions of its production and the reading and critical practices that are undertaken by its participants. The collection closes with a piece that tells fragments of Newton’s own history. This was, of course, the piece that I turned to first and I found it charming, intriguing, and provocative. Her determination to inscribe the personal into her writing practice allows Newton the breadth and generosity of vision to recognize that the author of the text is never the whole story. This, in the context of building strategic alliances, means, in the case of male academics, finding a way to theorize the relationship between their texts that marginalize feminism and their daily support for women colleagues, students, equal opportunities initiatives, and/or antiracist struggles. It is this type of work, detailed, personalized, textual, and material that characterizes the value of this book. Reina Lewis The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory Deborah E.McDowell Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995 ISBN 0 253 33629 5, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 253 20926 9, £27.50 Hbk What a pleasure! Deborah McDowell is good indeed. This is more than just a miscellany of occasional critical writings—here she looks at defining moments in African-American women’s fiction and its reception including the ‘Woman’s Era of the 1890s’, the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance and the new Black Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. All these essays were composed during the 1980s when African-American women’s writing was subject to intense debate both within the academy and further afield. In representing these excursions into that debate, McDowell has also critiqued her earlier positions, commenting on feedback from other critics, and sometimes modifying and updating her own opinions in the light of new work. The original essays themselves contain much that is insightful and theoretically engaging, but it is the italicized inserts that hold the real guts and force.

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For instance, ‘New directions for black feminist criticism’, the 1980 essay which responded to Barbara Smith’s brave ‘Toward a black feminist criticism’ (1977), is now tempered with the view that ‘there is no criticism without ideology’, a sign that McDowell has pulled back from her ‘fairly harsh judgement of ideology’ made fifteen years ago. It is heartening to find that her respect for ideological perspectives is also seeing her through the ‘Age of Theory’. ‘Transferences’ (1989), the last essay in this book, debates the theory/practice division showing how both ‘Feminist Theory’ and ‘African-American Theory’ have reproduced strategies of dominance both of which misrecognize black feminist theory; its relevance has implications not only for Literary Studies but for other academic disciplines. McDowell is not, however, shying away from poststructuralist theory, nor preferring oversimplifications of ‘for’ and ‘against’, but, as she makes clear in her introduction: I accept this moment’s critical axiom that self ‘identity’ always gives way to ‘difference’, thus making difficult any easy and clear cut identifications and alliances…this study does not fit neatly within either conceptual or disciplinary boundaries, but rather selects aspects from a variety of discourses in order to formulate its questions and reading strategies. Methodologically, McDowell is more and more inclined to espouse poststructuralism within her interpretative framework. The Woman’s Era is re-evaluated in the light of Iola Leroy by Frances Harper and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, both of which explore race, gender, and sexuality; and, although the outer-directed Harper novel is critiqued against Walker’s inner-directed focus, McDowell regards attempts to recuperate the mulatta figure as a component of a larger interventionist strategy by nineteenth-century authors. The focal points of Part III, ‘Undercover: Passing and Other Disguises’, are the Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen whose middle-class preoccupations are granted a generous reconsideration against the background of the artistic politics of the 1920s and 1930s. These essays are valuable introductions to representing questions of ‘race’, gender, and sexuality in the period. (More recent detailed work such as Thadious M.Davis’ full-length biography of Nella Larsen Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (Louisiana State University Press, 1994) attest to sustained growth in


the field of black feminist criticism.) McDowell has now revised her view that ‘gender and sexuality are subordinated to race’ in Larsen’s novellas and, informed by more recent history of sexuality, recognizes Larsen’s own dilemma in exploring black female sexual desire, ‘especially lesbian desire without becoming an icon of racist projection’. The defence of black women writers in the contemporary scene begins in Part IV, ‘The Reader and the Text’, in which Toni Morrison’s Sula provides the context for discussing fluid identities, multiple selves, and dialogic models of reading and thus dismisses the critics who (misguidedly) accuse black women writers of negatively targeting black men. McDowell is retrieving black ‘feminist’ perspectives from the onslaught of masculinist anxieties, appeals to ‘race’, ‘wholeness’, and ‘community’ which at points during the 1980s aimed to censor the African-American woman writer from questioning that supposedly selfevident unity. ‘The Changing Same’ pulls the reader in two directions. First, we are back in the 1980s when attempts to establish a black feminist literary tradition and appropriate critical perspectives to works such as Walker’s The Color Purple and Morrison’s Sula dominated. Second, we are drawn inevitably towards the present through the counterpoint of more recent discourse. This dual action is fine, but I was always aware that times had changed even more than this book can suggest: after all these same authors, Morrison with Beloved and Jazz, Walker with Temple of My Familiar, are leading canon transformation for the 1990s. This is not, then, a book that will instruct feminist scholars already working in the field; they can enjoy the exchange and the evolution of this particular critic. McDowell’s real audience are those critics and students who need to be alerted to 1980s questions on critical methodology for black women’s literature and unquestioned assumptions about ‘tradition’. However, for both readerships, this can be categorized alongside other single-authored classics of 1980s African-American feminist criticism such as Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism (Pergamon Press, 1985). Delia Jarrett-Macauley

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Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women Paula E.Hyman University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 1995 ISBN 0 295 97426 5, $14.95 Pbk ISBN 0 295 97425 7, $30.00 Hbk Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture Maurie Sacks (ed.) University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1995 ISBN 0 252 06453 4, $12.95 Pbk ISBN 0 252 02154 1, $34.95 Hbk ‘Women are, in a certain sense, like the Jewish people,’ wrote Chaim Malitz, an immigrant journalist to New York in 1918. These books, in a certain sense, invert this statement to transform the way we think about Jewish societies—Maurie Sacks’s by placing centre-stage women as agents and Paula Hyman’s by examining the conceptualization of gender in Jewish communal writing. Both Sacks and Hyman use their introductions as part-confessional vehicle to situate their own development as politically and culturally conscious Jewish women. Given her focus on Judaism (in contrast to Hyman’s on Jewishness), Sacks has a clear idea of her readers, who come from a relatively conservative Jewish tradition and are suspicious of attempts to dismantle their hierarchized vision of Judaism. Indeed, Sacks’s explanation of feminism takes little account of recent studies of the politics of gender, or of more radical work on Jewish women and sexuality, published largely in the United States since the 1980s. The subject and methodological range of the edited anthology Active Voices is extensive: essays examine the Talmudic representation of wives; pre-1930s European Zionist women, and women in the American Reform synagogue during the same period; the early nineteenth-century British writer, Grace Aguilar; women’s Holocaust testimony; newly Orthodox women; mothers’ organization of bar mitzvahs; new inventions of ritual; Tunisian women, and piety among Middle Eastern women in Israel; an Orthodox girls’ school play; and Judeo-Spanish folk-song. An ethnomusicologist and a family therapist write alongside historians, literary critics, and anthropologists. As with many such volumes, there is some unevenness in quality and approach: Susan Starr


Sered and Debra Renee Kaufmann, for example, each argue for a refinement of their very discipline (in this case anthropology) and their breadth and capacity to engage with the theoretical limitations by which they feel confronted sit a little uneasily with papers of a lesser quality. Agency and assertiveness are such crucial concepts in this volume that they are in danger of becoming synonymous with liberation. All the essays concentrate on the internal dynamics of Jewish culture—I worry about the use of the singular—and there is no implication that the ‘active voices’ were heard particularly loudly beyond. The essays link by positioning their subjects as inheritors and recreators of an old tradition, Judaism. This is shown to be more malleable and subject to specifically feminine interpretations and, hence, transformative influence, than might be imagined from a reading of the ‘patriarchal’ canon, though this term is never clearly defined. Central to their socalled ‘gynocentric’ interpretation is the view, outlined by Sered, that, while Jewish women in any given culture probably bear greater similarity to other women in the same milieu than to other Jewish women across time and space, what binds them ‘as Jewish women’ rather than ‘women who happen to be Jewish’ is their relationship to Jewish tradition and texts. In arguing for the necessity of a positive relationship to this tradition, she underplays its inimical elements. In so doing, she repositions but re-ignites the definitional conflicts and exclusionary tendencies characterizing the—not necessarily uncreative —tension between Judaism and modernity. The century 1850 to 1950 forms the basis for Paula Hyman’s illuminating exploration of gender and assimilation, disrupting assumptions implicit within former works that ‘the Jews’ are homogeneously male. There are only four chapters—on Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the arrival of Eastern Jews in the West, principally the US, and a final chapter on the sexual politics of Jewish identity—but the book is no less worthy for that. Less condemnatory of assimilation than earlier writers, and refreshingly sceptical of claims to an essentially feminine spirituality which can be historically traced as providing a route for female expression, Hyman enlarges our total understanding by analysing the highly gendered nature of arguments about assimilation which were played out during the process itself. She distinguishes two trends: first, the sociological assimilatory process whereby the larger society’s basic markers such as language, dress, and mores are adopted, and which culminates in the intermixing via marriage of the two groups who inevitably both agree on the desirability of such fusion; and, second, the assimilatory project, the Jewish

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establishment’s official response which, she argues, never involved the wholesale disappearance of Jewish particularism within larger Western societies but was intended to expunge the last vestiges of prejudice against Jews. Thematically complementary to the Sacks volume, Gender and Assimilation’s multi-lingual sources (in English, French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish) are employed in a skilled and convincing investigation not only to lay bare the inadequacy of our prior understanding of assimilation but to expose little-known aspects of contemporary Jewish and women’s history. I was fascinated, for example, by the account of the autonomous Polish Jewish feminist movement in the 1920s. Claiming both particularist and universal rights —as Jews, as women, and as human beings—these activists demanded full political and social equality and challenged the male leadership of Jewish communal and political organizations at roughly the same time as their more celebrated German counterparts. If her reading of autobiographies is untroubled by recent theorizations of that genre, Hyman’s thematic concentration on educational opportunities discussed by the authors provides a subtle vision of girls’ secular and Jewish education as the site of special anxieties about women’s relationship to the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Class is key here, and the push for education carried different meanings: in a poor and religiously orthodox Eastern Europe where women were economically active in public, girls were more likely than boys to receive secular education, a situation regretted by some women organizing girls’ education; in bourgeois Western Europe during the invention of Judaism as a domestic religion, women were idolized as guardians of the home and transmitters of Jewish education to their assimilating sons—and then condemned for the speed at which assimilation was proceeding. To an extent, though without being reductive, the book traces the changing configuration of the Jewish mother, from her responsibility in Western Europe for the very Jewishness of an entire community, to her literary appearance in post-Second World War North America as a constraint to vigorous Jewish masculinity. This creates a certain disparity between the ardent new young American woman epitomized by Mary Antin (whose precocity led her to publish her autobiography at the age of 30) and the ubiquity of the normative female as mother. The study of Jewish history has been hindered too long for want of a work of this kind. Meticulous and generous, not only is it a necessary book but one that will inspire further research and ought to render


impossible a disregard for gender in future studies of Jewish communities and their articulations for a place in the modern Diaspora. Karen Adler Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of California Press, 1994 ISBN 0 520 07514 5, £12.95 Pbk ISBN 0 520 0075 137, £37.50 Hbk Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexican Maquila Industry Susan Triano Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1994 ISBN 1 56639 196 2, £16.95 Pbk ISBN 156639 195 4, £44.95 Hbk Both of these books are meticulously researched but theoretically offer very little that is new. I think part of the theoretical problem is that the research was designed and the fieldwork carried out some time ago, in the case of Susan Triano’s study 1983–4 and Pierrette HondagneuSotelo’s 1986–8. Thus, while the theoretical framework is entirely appropriate in both cases, neither engages with the more contemporary debates around diversity and identity, opting instead for a ‘safe’ human agency and structure approach. In fact Susan Triano spells out quite clearly in her study of women export-processing workers that ‘In my opinion, the primary purpose of contemporary research is the refining, elaborating, and evaluating of earlier work to produce empirically accurate and theoretically coherent accounts of women’s roles within the new international division of labour’ (1994:2). Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s study of the interaction between gender relations, immigration, and settlement patterns among undocumented Mexicans in one Californian barrio is PhD-based research at its best, presented in a clear, compelling style. Theoretically Hondagneu-Sotelo’s analysis reworks extant migration theory in a systematically gender-sensitive way, and she explores this empirically through an ethnography of settlement. The book is basically organized around three questions: how does gender organize and shape migration? what are the implications for gender relations among this particular

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group of undocumented immigrants to the US? and how do women help to establish family and community life in the US? Having critiqued the extremes of both equilibrium and macro-political economic models of migration, Hondagneu-Sotelo steers an agency and structure intermediate approach to migration and settlement which emphasizes the importance of family and community relations as gendered institutions. One of the real strengths in using ethnographic methods to explore the gendered process of migration among this particular group of undocumented immigrants is that the author is able to provide detailed evidence of the diversity of migratory models, the ways in which these are shaped by familial and social networks (male and female) and how these in turn transform gender relations in the migration setting. The richness of the empirical material not only puts ‘gendered subjects’ in the frame but underlines the inadequacy of the ‘household strategy’ paradigm as it was developed during the 1980s. Perhaps where I am most critical of this study is in its initial emphasis on the importance of taking legal status into simultaneous account with factors such as ‘race’, gender, age, etc., but then saying little more in the conclusion than that the women in the study found being poor, illegal, overworked, and denied access to proper medical treatment for their children more problematic than gender inequality. Susan Triano’s study of women workers in Mexicali, Baja California, looks at whether there is any empirical support for the stereotype of the young, single, ‘green’ woman assembly worker and if the ‘integrationist’ or the ‘exploitation’ thesis best explains their situation at home and at work. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with women assemblers in US electronics subsidiaries and Mexicanowned clothing firms. The pay, conditions, work histories, and attitudes of these manufacturing workers are compared with those of a sample of service sector workers. Triano argues that, while the stereotypical view of the woman export-processing worker may have held thirty years ago, it is no longer a valid description where flight into service work and households that have become dependent on women’s wages have led to far greater heterogeneity among the assembler work-force. She concludes that, at least as far as gender relations at home are concerned, or what she calls private patriarchy, women’s access to a regular wage has meant more control over their lives and more autonomy in relation to men in households, thus providing support for the ‘integrationist’ thesis. But on the job front she remains highly critical of this approach, arguing that ‘the integration perspective’s neglect of the systemic foundations making public patriarchy so tenacious leads to a distorted


picture of the probable consequences of women’s rising labor-force participation’ (1994:224). Despite the fact that neither study treads particularly new theoretical ground, both are well researched and provide excellent empirical insights into the complexity and dynamics of different dimensions of gender relations. Annie Phizacklea Abortion in the New Europe: A Comparative Handbook Bill Rolston and Anna Eggert (eds) Greenwood Press: Westport, Connecticut, 1994 ISBN 0 313 28723 6 £67.50 Hbk One of the first pieces of state socialist legislation to be dismantled in many of the countries of the former Soviet bloc was legal abortion. It was an extraordinary paradoxical spectacle—the politicians of the new democracies asserting that the exigencies of the transition to market economies must take top priority over the frivolities of women’s rights. Somehow, however, they found time to put this attack on women’s reproductive rights at the top of the agenda—in Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. It was a grim object lesson in the dangers of complacency about the security of laws protecting abortion. For many feminists in Britain and much of Europe, abortion is yesterday’s issue. Despite the shortcomings in the 1967 Act, which gives women the right only to plead with two doctors for abortion, it is incredibly hard to get up a political head of steam to extend or change the law, and almost as hard to impress on the public that the antiabortion lobby has not relinquished its campaign to erode the law by backdoor stratagems, court cases, seemingly minor changes to regulations, and so on. I know this from my own experience, having just completed a book on the international politics of abortion and seen the glaze come across feminists’ eyes when they hear the word. It’s old hat: the politics of reproductive technology is what lights fires in the 1990s. Not so for Bill Rolston and Anna Eggert, who have patiently assembled this commentary on abortion laws in Europe. They live and work in a context where abortion remains as contentious as ever— Northern Ireland. No one can be complacent there, since the final sentence of the 1967 Abortion Act states, ‘This Act does not extend to Northern Ireland’, and women of the province have to ‘take the boat’ to

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Liverpool or London in exactly the same way as their sisters from the South. Rolston and Eggert are both founder members of Northern Ireland’s Abortion Law Reform Association, and also work in the faculty of health and social sciences at the University of Ulster. Their book is divided into chapters—one for almost every country in Europe. The format is consistent and enables the reader easily to compare the history of the national abortion law, the current law, practice, and the politics of abortion. Each contributor also gazes into the crystal ball to assay what the future may hold. It is a fast changing scene—several countries, such as Hungary and Poland, contain a final update section. Already, by the time of writing this review, the scene has changed again. With arch opponent of abortion (and father of eight) Lech Walesa thrown out by the Polish electorate in November 1995, the knife-edge balance of Polish abortion politics has shifted yet again and the stage is poised for a fresh round of attempts to restore legal abortion. Despite the consistent format, the book’s coverage is patchy. The quality of the contributions is rather uneven—an inevitable hazard in a book in which you have to rely on finding a contact and hoping that he/ she will provide a bone-clear, well-written analysis. For some countries there is no coverage at all, which is particularly regrettable in the case of Greece and Italy. In Greece, there is a very high abortion rate and low use of contraception: doctors, happy to receive fat fees for abortions, do little to promote contraception or to pressure the government towards investment in health education. In Italy—‘so close to the Vatican, so far from God’ goes the quip—abortion is openly practised and the law turns a blind eye. It is all too easy to think that access to abortion resides in what the law says—if it is legal, women can get it, if it is illegal, women will get maimed and die and racketeering will flourish. It ain’t necessarily so. In The Netherlands, for example, abortion was not legal until the early 1980s, but for more than a decade before that, abortion had been available in pristine, no-profit clinics, and no one had been jailed or martyred for the cause. What this book shows clearly is that the law is only half the story; and that, even though law which recognizes abortion is always to be preferred to having it outside the law, getting legal abortion on to the statute books does not put an end to the politics. There will always be a political fight threatening abortion and women will have to maintain constant watchfulness to protect this essential element of women’s reproductive freedom.


This book provides an invaluable resource—a benchmark of abortion laws and policies in a context of turmoil and controversy. For lawyers and social scientists alike, Rolston and Eggert have compiled an excellent book of reference. Janet Hadley Women in the Housing Service Marion Brion Routledge: London, 1995 ISBN 0 415 08094 0, £45.00 Hbk I can remember Miss Samuel pleading, with tears in her eyes ‘If you let men in, they’ll take over all the best jobs, they’ll be Directors of Housing, you’ll be the rent collectors’. (Former member of the Society for Women Housing Managers) Women in the Housing Service is a rare example of an account of the housing movement which is actually interesting and enjoyable to read. Brion attempts to cover eighty years of women’s employment in housing and provides the reader with much more than a dry historical account of British housing policy and practice. Her book brings to life the era between the time when Octavia Hill first identified women’s role in housing management and the present day. It identifies factors which influenced women’s employment in housing at the various stages, records the contribution of the Society of Housing Managers to this, and examines the implications for women working in housing today and in the future. The book traces the gradual development of organized groups of women housing managers after the death of Octavia Hill in 1912 and looks critically at the inception of the Association of Women Housing Managers in 1916. The work of the Association is considered with reference to its role in training and supporting women. There is a discussion of the rapid expansion of state involvement in housing provision between 1932 and 1939 as well as the increase in opposition to women’s employment. Unlike all other existing accounts of housing histories, Brion pays considerable attention to the period during the Second World War, including debates during 1943 concerning the admission of men to the Society of Women Housing Managers. Brion’s work covers the post-war expansion, the changing role of the now

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mixed Society of Housing Managers, and the amalgamation with the Institute of Housing in 1965. Brion then looks critically at women in the Institute of Housing from 1965 to the 1980s. Finally the research considers women in the professions associated with housing: planning, architecture, chartered surveying, and accounting. Brion’s work addresses the scarcity of information around the development of housing management. While housing policy is covered in many standard texts, this is not true for administration. Brion, aided by the careful integration of different methods and theories from history, psychology, and sociology manages to produce a rich text of considerable depth, which will be of interest to a wider audience than just students of housing. The book provides a fascinating insight into the development, purpose, and use of sexual stereotyping. In order to overcome discrimination, the Society used to discuss women’s employment in housing management in terms of the ‘special aptitude’ of women for the work which implicitly reinforced the common idea that women had inherently different mental capabilities from men. This argument, based on sex role stereotyping, could and was frequently used against them. The book offers similar insights into the nature and origins of psychological differences between men and women, dominance and leadership, male and female styles of organization and how gender is played out in the process of professionalization. The book works because Brion has given considerable thought to locating and using her primary data and the research process in general. Brion has collected information from the minutes, annual reports, and journals of the Society of Housing Managers as well as articles in The Times. She was also able to interview ex-Society members (nearly all of whom were in their eighties and nineties). Brion also makes good use of staff surveys conducted by the Institute of Housing and the National Federation of Housing Associations and other associated professions. She gives an excellent account of the methodology employed, which contributes to the now growing body of how to carry out ‘feminist’ research. What I found very attractive about Brion’s work was that she steered away from adding to the body of mythology surrounding the ‘ministering angel’ Octavia Hill but rather dealt specifically with her legacy: the women she trained who formed the Association of Women Housing Managers. Brion does not shrink from acknowledging that the society was an élite of well-to-do middle-class women, many of whom were opposed to state intervention in housing, to the extension of suffrage, and who admired the home-making virtues of women. Brion


successfully records their struggle in relation to the male-dominated world in which the achievement of women housing managers was constantly subverted and submerged. Juliet Mountford

Noticeboard

Please note that we compile the noticeboard three times each in January, April and September. There is a lag of at least 4 months between compilation and publication. We are unable to publish a number of the items sent to us because dates and deadlines will have passed by the time the issue is published. Call for Papers Gender in the Making: Indian Contexts Special Issue of Thamyris on Mythmaking in India Guest Editor: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan The interdisciplinary journal Thamyris is planning a special issue devoted to the theme of ‘Gender in the Making: Indian Contexts’. Postcoloniality is marked by radical changes in many areas of the ‘social’. Recent feminist work in India argues that, in the colonial period, Indian women were conspicuously ‘recast’, primarily on the contested ground of tradition (conformity to indigenous religious custom) versus modernity (reform). Decolonization has been a process equally marked by the shaping, deliberate as well as unconscious, of economic and political policy, social relations, developmental agendas, and cultural debates in the ‘new’ nation-state, and this has consequences for the formation of gender identities, roles, and ideologies in postIndependence India. The ‘constructionist’ position in feminist theory is generally acknowledged as holding out more progressive and emancipatory possibilities for women than the widespread opposed argument of biological destiny. But constructionism can come to appear equally fixed and deterministic if it does not attend to the dialectic of gendering. The aim of this collection will, therefore, be to identify and explore

FEMINIST REVIEW NO 54, AUTUMN 1996, PP. 141–149 149

some aspects of gender in the ‘making’ in recent Indian history, a dynamic process of extraordinary complexity and interest. This special issue solicits essays that will identify and investigate the various sites of the fashioning of gendered identities, such as cinema, literature, law, work, and religion, in national, regional, and diasporic contexts—while at the same time remaining attentive to the methods of investigation that we, as feminist ethnographers (in the broadest sense), deploy in these endeavours. Deadline for submission: 1 January 1997 Scheduled date of publication: May 1997 An Instruction to Contributors and any further information are available on request. Requests, proposals, and/or abstracts should be sent to the editors: Jan Best and Nanny de Vries, Najade Press, PO Box 75933, 1070 AX Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Back Issues

1 Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodal. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh. OUT OF PRINT. 2 Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal and Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. 3 English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. 4 Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. 5 Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. 6 ‘The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay. 7 Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breiten-bach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson 8 Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble. 9 Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male

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Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. 10 Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh. Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. 11 Sexuality issue Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. 12 ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. 13 Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. 14 Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie. The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. 15 Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. 16 Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and ‘The Family’, Caldwell. 17 Many voices, one chant: black feminist perspectives Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black Women Organizing Autonomously: a collection. 18 Cultural politics Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films,


Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. 19 The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. 20 Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh. What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. 21 Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. 22 Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. 23 Socialist-feminism: out of the blue Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. 24 Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. 25 Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v.Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. 26 Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For

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and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir. 27 Women, feminism and the third term Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips. Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt & Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. 28 Family secrets: child sexual abuse Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & MacLeod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. 29 Abortion: the international agenda Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism— or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey. 30 Capital, gender and skill Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of


Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. 31 The past before us: 20 years of feminism Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32 ‘Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The ‘Dark Continent’: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: the Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the PseudoPluralists, Gorelick. 33 Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. 34 Perverse politics: lesbian issues Pat Parker: a tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the Issue: Lesbian Fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian Tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality: An Interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. 35 Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The

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House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. 36 ‘The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair and Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood: Anti-racism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Toth, Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter. 37 Theme issue: Women, religion and dissent Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?, Tang Nain. Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves, McMahon. The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State of Bangladesh, Kabeer. Born Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement, McCrickard. Washing our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism, Connolly. Siddiqui on Letter to Christendom, Bard on Generations of Memories, Patel on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman. 38 The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag, McRobbie. Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, Fraser and Boffin. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in Trinidad, Mohammed. Fashion, Representation and Femininity, Evans & Thornton. The European Women’s Lobby, Hoskyns. Hendessi on Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran, Kaveney on Mercy. 39 Shifting territories: feminism & Europe Between Hope and Helplessness: Women in the GDR, Dölling. Where Have All the Women Gone? Women and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe, Einborn. The End of Socialism in Europe—A New Challenge For Socialist Feminism?, Haug. The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary, Kiss. The Citizenship Debate: Women, the State and Ethnic Processes, Yuval-Davis. Fortress Europe and Migrant Women, Morokvasíc. Racial Equality and 1992, Dummett. Questioning Perestroika: A Socialist Feminist Interrogation, Pearson. Postmodernism and its Discontents, Soper Feminists and Socialism: After the Cold War, Kaldor. Socialism Out of the Common Pots, Mitter. 1989 and All That, Campbell. In Listening Mode, Cockburn. Women in Action: Country by Country: The Soviet Union; Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Poland. Reports: International Gay and Lesbian Association: Black Women and Europe 1992.


40 Fleurs du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Elliott & Wallace. Poem, TylerBennett. Feminism and Motherhood: An American ‘Reading’, Snitow. Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the ‘Other’ and Empowerment, Opie. Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda, Begum. Postcard From the Edge: Thoughts on the ‘Feminist Theory: An International Debate’ Conference at Glasgow University, July 1991, Radstone. Review Essay, Munt. 41 Editorial. The Selling of HRT: Playing on the Fear Factor, Worcester & Whatley. The Cancer Drawings of Catherine Arthur, Sebastyen. Ten years of Women’s Health 1982–92, James. AIDS Activism: Women and AIDS activism in Victoria, Australia, Mitchell. A Woman’s Subject, Friedli. HIV and the Invisibility of Women: Is there a Need to Redefine AIDS?, Scharf & Toole. Lesbians Evolving Health Care: Cancer and AIDS, Winnow. Now is the Time for Feminist Criticism: A Review of Asinimali!, Steinberg. Ibu or the Beast?: Gender Interests in Two Indonesian Women’s Organizations, Wieringa. Reports on Motherlands: Symposium on African, Caribbean and Asian Women’s Writing, Smart. The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, Bruegel. Review Essay, Gamman. 42 Feminist fictions Editorial. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality, Makinen. Feminist Writing: Working with Women’s Experience, Haug. Three Aspects of Sex in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home, Hauser. Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction, Bard. Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction, Hermes. A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism, Castendyk. Mary Wollstone-craft and the Problematic of Slavery, Ferguson. Reviews. 43 Issues f or feminism Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: the Politics of the Inkatha Women’s Brigade, Hassim. Postcolonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference, Abu Odeh. Feminism, the Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy, Lewis. Feminism and Disability, Morris. ‘What is Pornography?’: An Analysis of the Policy Statement of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship, Smith. Reviews. 44 Nationalisms and national identities Women, Nationalism and Islam in Contemporary Political Discourse in Iran, Yeganeh. Feminism, Citizenship and National Identity, Curthoys. Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland, Nash. Rap Poem: Easter 1991, Medbh. Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family, McClintock. Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement, Thapar. Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities: Bellagio Symposium Report, Hall. Culture or Citizenship? Notes from the Gender and Colonialism Conference, Galway, Ireland, May 1992, Connolly. Reviews. 45 Thinking through ethnicities

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Audre Lorde: Reflections. Re-framing Europe: Engendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe, Brah. Towards a Multicultural Europe? ‘Race’ Nation and Identity in 1992 and Beyond, Bhavnani. Another View: Photo Essay, Pollard. Growing Up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood, Frankenberg. Poem, Kay. Looking Beyond the Violent Break-up of Yugoslavia, Coulson. Personal Reactions of a Bosnian Woman to the War in Bosnia, Harper. Serbian Nationalism: Nationalism of My Own People, Korac. Belgrade Feminists 1992: Separation, Guilt and Identity Crisis, Mladjenovic and Litricin. Report on a Council of Europe Minority Youth Committee Seminar on Sexism and Racism in Western Europe, Walker. Reviews. 46 Sexualities: challenge and change Chips, Coke and Rock-’n-Roll: Children’s Mediation of an Invitation to a First Dance Party, Rossiter. Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality, Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe, Thomson. Two Poems, Janzen. A Girton Girl on the Throne: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism 1906–1933. Changing Interpretations of the Sexuality of Queen Christina of Sweden, Waters. The Pervert’s Progress: An Analysis of ‘The Story of O’ and The Beauty Trilogy, Ziv. Dis-Graceful Images: Della Grace and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Lewis. Reviews. 47 Virgin Territories and Motherlands: Colonial and Nationalist Representations of Africa, Innes. The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt, Shukrallah. Mothering on the Lam: Politics, Gender Fantasies and Maternal Thinking in Women Associated with Armed, Clandestine Organizations in the US, Zwerman. Treading the Traces of Discarded History: Photo-Essay, Marchant. The Feminist Production of Knowledge: Is Deconstruction a Practice for Women?, Nash. ‘Divided We Stand’: Sex, Gender and Sexual Difference, Moore. Reviews. 48 Sex and the state Editorial. Not Just (Any) Body Can be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas, Alexander. State, Family and Personal Responsibility: The Changing Balance for Lone Mothers in the United Kingdom, Millar. Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education, Thomson. Through the Parliamentary Looking Glass: ‘Real’ and ‘Pretend’ Families in Contemporary British Politics, Reinhold. In Search of Gender Justice: Sexual Assault and the Criminal Justice System, Gregory and Lees. God’s Bullies: Attacks on Abortion, Hadley. Sex Work, HIV and the State: an Interview with Nel Druce, Overs. Reviews. 49 Feminist politics—Colonial/postcolonial worlds Women on the March: Right-Wing Mobilization in Contemporary India, Mazumdar. Colonial Encounters in Late-Victorian England: Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage, Burton. Subversive Intent: A Social Theory of Gender, Maharaj. My Discourse/My Self: Therapy as Possibility


(for women who eat compulsively), Hopwood. Poems, Donohue. Review Essays. Reviews. 50 The Irish issue: the British question Editorial. Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain, Hickman and Walter. Poem, Smyth. States of Change: Reflections of Ireland in Several Uncertain Parts, Smyth. Silences: Irish Women and Abortion, Fletcher. Poem, Higgins. Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine, Mills. Irish/ Woman/Artwork: Selective Readings, Robinson. Self-Determination: The Republican Feminist Agenda, Hackett. Ourselves Alone? Clár na mBan Conference Report, Connolly. Conflicting Interests: The British and Irish Suffrage Movements, Ward. Women Disarmed: The Militarization of Politics in Ireland 1913–23, Benton. The Crying Game’, Edge. 51 In Love with I Inspector Morse Beleagured but Determined: Irish Women Writers in Irish, Harris. In Love with Inspector Morse: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television, Thomas. Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets, Plain. Creating a Space for Absent Voices: Disabled Women’s Experience of Receiving Assistance with their Daily Living Activities, Morris. Imagining (the) Difference: Gender Ethnicity and Metaphors of Nation, Molloy. Poems, Sharp. 52 The world upside down: feminisms in the Antipodes Feminism and Institutionalized Racism, Wilson. At the Back of the Class. At the Front of the Class, Behrendt. The Curse of the Smile, Ang. Mururoa, Brownlee. Of Mail-Order Brides and ‘Boys’ Own’ Tales, Robinson. Warmth and Unity with all Women? Murdolo. The Republic is a Feminist Issue, Irving. Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion, Johnson. Gender, Metaphor and State, Sawer. Unravelling Identities, Genovese. Feminism and Sexual Abuse, Guy. Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Jolly. 53 Speaking out: researching and representing women Who’s Who and Where’s Where: Constructing Feminist Literary Studies, Eagleton. Situated Voices, Lewis. Insider Perspectives or Stealing Words out of Women’s Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process, Reay. Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley 1940–43, Ellis. Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca, Harbord. Poem, Nicol.

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