Feminist Review: Issue 34: Perverse Politics

Editorial: Perverse Politics 1 Pat Parker: A Tribute Lyndie Brimstone 5 International Lesbianism: Brazil—Nana Mendo...

Author: The Feminist Review Collective

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Editorial: Perverse Politics

1

Pat Parker: A Tribute Lyndie Brimstone

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International Lesbianism: Brazil—Nana Mendonça

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Letter from São Paulo—Marlene Rodrigues

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Israel—Spike Pittsberg

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Italy—Rosanna Fiocchetto

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The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys Margaret Hunt

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Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community A dialogue between Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith

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Lesbianism and the Labour Party: The GLC Experience Ann Tobin

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Skirting the Issue: Lesbian Fashion for the 1990s Inge Blackman and Kathryn Perry

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Butch/Femme Obsessions Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan

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Archives: The Will to Remember—Joan Nestle

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International Archives—Alison Read

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Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations Gail Lewis

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Lesbian Tradition

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Rachael Field Mapping: Lesbianism, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton by Sue O’Sullivan

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Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory Diane Hamer

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The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film Cherry Smyth

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Cartoon—Kate Charlesworth

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Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing Sara Dunn

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Reviews Denise O’Connor on Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis

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Sarah Green on Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories

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Letter

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Noticeboard

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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 by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Alison Light, Annie Whitehead, AnnMarie Wolpe, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Erica Carter, Helen Crowley, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Loretta Loach, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Mica Nava, Naila Kabeer, Sue O’Sullivan. Guest Editors this Issue: Alison Read, Inge Blackman and Pratibha Parmar. Cover image: Denise Vale and Virginia Betts Correspondence and advertising For contributions and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For subscriptions and advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Inland Book Company Inc., 22 Hemingway Avenue, East Haven, CT 06512, USA. Copyright © 1990 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review . Copyright © 1990 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. PHOTOCOPYING AND REPRINT PERMISSIONS Single and multiple photocopies of extracts from this journal may be made without charge in all public and educational institutions or as part of any non-profit educational activity provided that full acknowledgement is made of the source. Requests to reprint in any publication for public sale should be addressed to the publisher, Routledge. ISSN number 0141–7789

ISBN 0-203-99093-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-05272-6 (Print Edition)

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PERVERSE POLITICS

Feminist Review is usually an eclectic mix of feminist academic work and articles about various feminist political and cultural concerns. Occasionally the collective decides to produce a ‘special issue’. Perverse Politics is one of them. Often these special issues are produced from within the collective but increasingly guest editors who have a particular interest or expertise are invited to join the special issue group. Lesbianism has never been forefronted in any systematic way in Feminist Review although there have been significant individual articles from time to time. It seemed extremely pertinent as we approached the end of the 1980s that many of the important theoretical developments and activist interventions lesbians have made be given a forum for exploration and discussion. Right from the outset the need to reflect the racial and cultural diversities that exist in lesbian communities was recognized as crucial. To this end an editorial group was set up which included two Feminist Review members and three outside guest editors. We as a group are responsible for this issue. In what is often portrayed as a monolithically gloomy period, the assertion of lesbian and gay politics has had positive reverberations for all radical movements. The infamous Clause 28 which became law in 1988, has been variously portrayed as a victory for the right or the start of a new wave of lesbian and gay resistance. To date, there have been no test cases brought under Clause 28, so that is still to come; nevertheless, in our assessment the threat of complete suppression of our lives has given a sharp edge to a renewed confidence to challenge each onslaught as it comes. Ironically, far from retreating we have moved more deeply into an exploration of our desires, lusts and ambivalences, highlighting our so-called deviant sexualities. At last we are beginning to have discussions around sex as a separate category rather than subsuming it under the overarching concept of sexuality. As lesbians we have begun to talk about actual sexual practices and begun to formulate a vocabulary which is a prerequisite for the politicization of our varied sexual practices. The AIDS crisis has opened up a variety of spaces for discourses around sex and sexual identity. In the main lesbians have been reluctant to engage with, let alone acknowledge, the implications of AIDS in their own lives. This is primarily because too many assumptions have been made about what constitutes actual lesbian sexual practices and identities.

Feminist Review No 34, Spring 1990

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At the very moment in which we begin to explore all this, it is disquieting that some heterosexual and lesbian feminists are leading a campaign against pornography that calls for state censorship and which seems deliberately to bypass the history of state repression of deviant sexualities. The two British campaigns against pornography founded during 1989, seem particularly dangerous to us, since as lesbians we have continuously challenged any form of censorship which will ultimately rebound negatively on our lives. These campaigners draw heavily on the Dworkin/MacKinnon initiatives in North America and have grossly distorted the issues by relying on a simplistic moralism and a crude essentialism. Perverse Politics is being produced at a time of fluctuations and possibilities. It is all about lesbianism and lesbian politics. It is not about all lesbians nor is it only about lesbian politics. The analysis and arguments in Perverse Politics are relevant to all progressive political and cultural movements. They cannot be marginalized or dismissed as being only the concern of queers. Some of the articles in Perverse Politics were commissioned; others came in spontaneously. There is an emphasis on style, fashion and dress, areas that are of concern to many cultural commentators in the late eighties. These articles indicate how important dress has been in lesbian subcultures where it has functioned as both an overt and covert sign of our sexual identities. Identity has become a crucial category in organizing politically for different social movements. While there have been some legitimate and influential critiques of ‘identity’ politics coming from both the Black communities and the women’s movement, we believe it’s important at this point to reformulate the significance and different meanings of identities within our individual psyches and collective political projects. Identities are fluid categories which are constantly being deconstructed in the process of self-definition. It is not surprising that some of the articles in this issue are grappling with new formulations. The historical absence and invisibility of Black lesbians within white lesbian communities cannot be denied. The assertion of Black lesbian identities has been pivotal to the growth of Black lesbian communities. Our confidence and visibility has irrevocably changed the makeup of the lily-white lesbian community. The strength of this collective identity has given rise to numerous groups and organizations. From the first Black lesbian workshop held at the Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent conference in 1984 to the existence of a many-layered, albeit fragmented network, certain huge steps have been taken. For a number of years questions about the representation of diversity and difference have been part of our theoretical and practical work. In this issue of Feminist Review we did not want to get into a balancing act around representations of race. In other words, for us the importance of an internationalist and Black lesbian sensibility as a whole was paramount. In the last decade of the twentieth century, we want to reaffirm and celebrate radical sexual politics. We believe in the centrality of sexuality in transforming all social and political movements. Make no mistake; we are not ditching class analysis or a recognition of the structured nature of racism. Yet we know from our recent and often bitter experiences that many a coalition and collective has fallen apart at the point that radical sexual politics demanded to be integrated into a given political project. Sexual

EDITORIAL

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subjectivities remain as challenging as ever. We see Perverse Politics as part of that challenge. Inge Blackman Mary McIntosh Sue O’Sullivan Pratibha Parmar Alison Read (Perverse Politics Issue Group) We would like to thank all those lesbians who contributed in different ways to this issue, especially Margaret Hunt and Ines Rieder, who gave many hours of their valuable time at the last editorial stage.

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PAT PARKER: A Tribute Lyndie Brimstone

Pat Parker died on 4 June 1989, but it took more than two months for news of her death to find its way across the Atlantic and into the alternative press. Pat Parker published her first volume of radical poetry, Child of Myself, in 1972, but it took almost two decades for a small handful of her poems to find their way into a British anthology (McEwen, 1988). So who was Pat Parker and what might this failure of respect and reticence to honour mean? A survivor of tin-roofed ‘Texas hell’, ‘soul-searing poverty’ and ‘small town mentality’ (Parker, 1978:141, ‘Womanslaughter’), Pat Parker was one of the first working-class poets to wave two strong womanly fingers at the literary élite and their ‘academic wanderings’ (Parker, 1987:61). Judy Grahn, a ‘class-mate’ and friend for many years, describes her as ‘an outrageous poet, the kind who says things first, and means them’ (Grahn, 1978:13). Audre Lorde, who spent many a long hour talking with Pat Parker before finally bringing her own erotic power and sexual identity to her poetry, feared for her (Grahn, 1984:13; Lorde, 1978:9). For this loud and rich-mouthed poet, who planted her feet firmly on platforms all over America and demanded that her audiences, whoever they may be, pay attention, was not only working class, she was Black and lesbian: the very first to refuse to compromise and speak openly from all her undiluted experience. ‘Goat Child’, the autobiographical story poem that Judy Grahn recalls listening to with amazement in 1970, because it ‘was nearly unheard of’ that ‘a woman’s entire life [could] be the storyline of a poem, a modern epic’, is without doubt a courageous, sinewy work and a fine example of Pat Parker’s skill. Naming the knots on the tightly-stretched string of her first twenty-two years, Pat Parker also begins, with ‘Goat Child’, the relentless search for a definition of self that would allow her to formulate her own vision, her own ‘simple dream’ (Parker, 1978:13). To this end, there is nothing she would not remember and learn through, from the unwelcoming facts of her premature birth to the bloody and painful abortion that betrayed her youthful belief in ‘the buddha’, who had promised to show her ‘the ways of woman’. So many people ready to teach, to say who and what she should be and what she should think—mother, father, sisters, schoolteachers, churchmen, husbands, political leaders, Black comrades and friends, feminists, radical dykes—but ‘I’, says the poet, ‘I, Woman must be/the child of myself’, and she was (Parker, 1978:45).


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Unlike a number of feminist writers, however, whose newly claimed ‘I’ starts between the thighs, luxuriates in the folds of the labia, and then gets lost somewhere in the fascinating twists of the intestines, Pat Parker never lost sight of the context of her life. Nor, it must be said, as a vocal and strikingly visible Black lesbian poet, could she. Beginning with her involvement with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, she poured tremendous energy not only into all the major liberation movements of our time but into her own local community as well. She listened constantly and she learned, she spoke on political platforms, marched, rallied, protested, brought those in need into her home (Parker, 1985:9–10, ‘love isn’t’) and was, at the time of her death, director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Centre. Poet, mother, worker, relentless activist: there was much to be done and, however much the easy answer, the simple formula, may have appealed in moments of exhaustion, nothing short of total revolution would do. Throughout her life, Pat Parker consistently refused to commit herself entirely to any liberation movement that was fighting for only part of who she was, and whose vision could not encompass all of those she loved: A faggot & a dyke, Black

My agent couldn’t book us. It seemed my lesbian audiences were not ready for my faggot brother What is this world we have? Is my house the only safe place for us? (Parker, 1985:20, ‘my brother’) Acutely aware of the daily atrocities perpetrated by a society intent on preserving white supremacist, hetero/sexist values, Pat Parker had no time for empty rhetoric, poetic obscurity or meditations on meaning:

I’m beginning to wonder if the tactics of this revolution is to talk the enemy to death. (Parker, 1978:70) Exploding the words that are stored as ammunition behind skin-tearing teeth—faggot, dyke, nigger, pervert, queer—her work is vital and demands an unequivocal response: ‘Where will you be’, she asks, ‘when they come?’ (Parker, 1978:76). Evasions, distortions, nest-eggs won’t do; there is no time for compromise and there is no place to hide. Pat Parker died of breast cancer at the age of forty-five.

PAT PARKER: A TRIBUTE 7

And her ‘simple dream’? Pat Parker was a powerful woman who, continuing the Black tradition of radical poetry, spoke forcefully on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves and raged at those who would not. She was also an incredibly tender woman who wrote exquisitely sensual love poems:

Now, each morning when i wake i don’t look out of my window to see if the sun is shining— i turn to you—instead (Parker 1978:127). Did you know I watch you as you cuddle with sleep? Propped on my elbow, close… If I close my eyes I can feel your tongue wrap around my nipples tuck them deep in the corner of your mouth and suck them suck them parched flowers (Parker, 1985:35–6; ‘aftermath’). Although there is very little biographical information currently available, Pat Parker’s poetry would suggest that she was not interested in political power or literary status and that if other people had done more of the shouting, she would have been quite content to get on with her own, in many ways, ‘ordinary’, life. (Parker, 1985: Foreword). Her dream, then, was ‘not the dream of the vanguard’ or ‘the dream of the masses’ or even ‘the dream of women’, it was ‘a simple dream’: a dream of being able to ‘walk the streets/ holding hands with [her] lover’; ‘go to a hamburger stand/and not be taunted by bikers on holiday’; ‘go to a public bathroom,/& not be shrieked at by ladies’; ‘walk ghetto streets/& not be beaten up by [her] brothers’. A dream, in short, of being able to take all her parts with her wherever she went ‘and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome’ (Parker, 1985:83, 11). When Pat Parker was advertised as a ‘kill the whites’ poet, she read dyke poetry, when facing a predominantly white middle-class women’s movement audience, she read her Black poetry (Parker, 1987:61). Where does a working-class Black lesbian poet who wants to speak about all aspects of her life, including her children, a white lover and a ‘faggot’ brother stand? ‘Is my house the only safe place/for us?’ A simple dream, perhaps, but who will work for it now Pat Parker has gone? Is it safe, with us?

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Note Born in 1951, Lyndie Brimstone lives in London with her ‘pretended family’. She has published a number of articles and reviews and is currently completing a full-length work on twentieth-century lesbian literature.

References GRAHN, Judy (1978) Introduction to PARKER (1978). GRAHN, Judy (1984) Another Mother Tongue, Boston: Beacon Press. LORDE, Audre (1978) Foreword to PARKER (1978). McEWEN, Christian (1988) editor Naming the Waves: Contemporary Lesbian Poetry, London: Virago. MORAGA, Cherríe and ANZALDÚA, Gloria editors (1981) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, New York: Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press. PARKER, Pat (1978) Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker 1961–1978, New York: The Crossing Press. PARKER, Pat (1983) ‘Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick’ in MORAGA and ANZALDÚA (1983). PARKER, Pat (1985) Jonestown and Other Madness, New York: Firebrand Books. PARKER, Pat (1987) ‘Pat Parker Talks About Her Life and Her Work’. Interview with Libby Woodwoman in Margins, Vol. 23, pp. 60–61.

INTERNATIONAL LESBIANISM

This section contains two reports from Brazil and one each from Israel and Italy. This is an inevitably arbitrary collection. We tried to get reports from lesbians we are in contact with in several other countries and there are many places where we have no contacts at all. So these reports are by no means representative. But they do serve to show how much lesbian life, and lesbianism itself, differs in different social circumstances. Yet some of the same issues seem to arise time and time again all over the world.

BRAZIL Nana Mendonça Translated by Marlene Rodrigues My country is large and complex. This complexity, with all its problems, is a result of that territorial vastness. Brazil is divided into five regions, each with its own geographical and socio-economic characteristics, dialects, customs and traditions. Pernambuco, the north-eastern state I am from, has very bad rain distribution; it rains too much in the coastal area, whereas in the interior there is very little rain and long periods of drought. It is poorly industrialized, the main area of development being agriculture, which suffers from the drought. Over the years this situation has provoked an extensive migration of the population towards the industrialized south which is well developed and rich. The south with its big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro is the ‘promised land’ where everybody wants to go to look for a better life. However, even the promised land now has big problems of its own, with overpopulated cities and a lack of new job opportunities. Pressed by the urge to move on to new areas which are not yet developed, southerners, as well as people from the other regions, turn towards the north, and the Amazon rain forest. The state governments in that area are eager to accept as many people as possible to open up new space for development. They give land away at extremely cheap prices to whoever wants to try his or her luck. Because the land is still covered by forests, the developers have to cut the trees—or, what is easier, burn them—in order to turn the land into agricultural land. This then is the scenario: a permanent noise of power saws and smoke from the burning forest covering the area. With the burning of


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the trees, the mosquitoes which pass on malaria lose their habitat. They attack the invaders, in a last attempt by the forest to stop invasion and destruction. Malaria is an endemic disease which can be deadly if not treated in time. The authorities try to fight back by employing doctors and health professionals from all over the country, offering them very good pay. Being a doctor, with no good career prospects in my state of origin, I was lured towards that scenario of burning forests, disease and illusions—the state of Rondonia. When I arrived I was very surprised by how few members of the native population there were, and the massive presence of people from other regions. They comprise 80 per cent of the present state population. I also discovered that there were a large number of women alone, many of them with that indefinite air about them, that kind of look which maybe wouldn’t mean anything for a heterosexual person. For a homosexual like me, it was obvious enough. These lesbians were from many different areas, living and working in very diverse situations, trying their luck in that god-forsaken region. I would ‘recognize’ them, they would ‘recognize’ me, but over there the game does not go the way it goes at home, where an approach is usually made with an exchange of glances, attempts at conquest, gestures of complicity. In Rondonia, however, the knowledge of having been ‘identified’ brings a reaction of fear, discomfort, withdrawal. Fear because everyone is in a precarious situation. Most of these women have very good jobs, some of them high in the hierarchy. If they lose those jobs, they can not earn as much back in their home state. And many of them have come from places where they have been oppressed because of their sexuality, they had lived a double life, confined in ghettos. This was a new place, everything still to be built, even rules of behaviour. In Rondonia there are still no ghettos, no ‘night-life’. Everybody has the same goal: to build, to make money, to succeed. Two women can live together without being bothered by their families or by society. The thinking is individual, not collective. The fight is for survival before anything else. Maybe in the future, when the forest is gone, the new agricultural projects are set and the society more stratified with its inhabitants thinking more about the present than the future, the scenario will change. Repression and self-protection will set their rules, the ghettos will appear. As yet, Rondonia is a place where one can still have the illusion of being free. I think I can understand these women a little bit because I am one of them. I lived there among them, I had a good job, I was in the same boat, looking for my emotional and financial independence. Sometimes, I would ask myself what would happen if the people I was taking care of discovered that their medical doctor was a radical and stubborn lesbian. I think their reaction would have been to continue under my care. They wouldn’t have had any other option, due to the limited number of doctors in the area. However, I am sure I would have had to live with nasty comments and jokes from my colleagues and subordinates. I don’t think I would have lost my job because they could not afford to lose me. But there would have been no respect for my right to define my own sexuality. I was working for a medical institution. These institutions, wherever they are, carry on the same male politics of discrimination and prejudice. By coming out, I would have had to deal with the oppressive consequences of my gesture—an avalanche of discrimination coming from all these people, men and women, destroying that sense of

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peace and freedom I had achieved after being so tired by my many fights at home. A refuge should not be transformed into hell. The hell of loneliness was enough. It’s difficult to say how the other women, my equals, were dealing with that aspect of their lives. Their eyes didn’t show much happiness, they were restless. I was feeling the same. After work, when I was exhausted from dealing with my patients, the feeling of loneliness would creep up slowly, like a sensation of emptiness, of something missing: the distant home, the warmth of family, the company of the woman I loved. It was impossible to accelerate time. It was useless to try to be close friends with heterosexuals because, if you tried to deepen your friendship with them, they would get to know you were a lesbian and would discriminate, even unconsciously. To try to be friends with those women who I identified as lesbians was also difficult, because their behaviour was very cautious. They did not want to be ‘officially’ recognized as lesbians, they were not interested in forming ghettos. They wanted to be left in peace. I respected their silence, their solitude. I understood them because I behaved like them. Whenever I met one of these women I would feel a mixture of sorrow and sympathy and also a certain anger at everything we were missing. Somehow we were victims, we were sacrificing to society the best aspect of our lives in order to be allowed to participate in the world. One can see this as a defeat. I prefer to think of it as an escape from our previous fights which had left so many deep scars in our souls. Loneliness was our lot for the time being, our minds were in the future. Then, one day, I was offered a job in a small town not far from home. It wasn’t as good as the one I had in Rondonia, but it meant I would be able to come back and be closer to the woman I loved. I had gone to Rondonia to open the path for our future: I would buy a piece of land, build a house, she would join me later, we would live happily forever. At that time, she was jobless, with no prospects in terms of the future. Then, she found a job where she was very happy, and we decided it would be stupid for her to leave everything behind and move on to a place like Rondonia. I have been trying to readapt myself to my own environment, my family, my new job. Now, I work in the interior of my home state, Pernambuco. With my eyes still filled with the exuberance of the rain forest I look at the catinga (the dry lands of the interior of the north-east region). I have changed my medical instruments for an adding machine. In Rondonia I was the chief of a medical centre. Here I’m chief of a tax-collection centre. It’s work without adventures or poetry, but with good pay. If I come out in my present situation I’m almost sure I would be despised, ridiculed and verbally abused. My superiors would talk about ‘scandalous behaviour’, ‘not compatible with my functions’ and so on. The present Brazilian laws forbid discrimination of any kind, but our legislators are good at changing laws as they please. In my country one is never quite sure of one’s rights. Lesbianism in the north-east of Brazil is still a taboo. In this little town where I work, my coming out would provoke a scandal. Everybody would be willing to cast the first stone. Here there is no room for dialogue, there is no space for polemics. Here one doesn’t hear a defence—one condemns. Even though the woman I love is now closer to me, we are still living in different places. I’m still far from my family, I’m still alone, waiting for the day when we will be able to be together again. As for the moment, after working here for ten months, I know that this town will be forever within me—its people, the catinga, the mesmerized look of


its old houses. I will never forget it, I will never forget that, like a sleeping lioness, I could as well wake up and roar with all my boldness and insolence—only to be buried under stones as persona non grata.

LETTER FROM SÃO PAULO Marlene Rodrigues Dear Alison, I have spoken to some women about the FR special dykes issue and I have to tell you honestly that nobody showed much interest in it. I’m not a journalist, I don’t have the urge to make people talk just because something has to be printed, but I like to listen. While I was trying to understand what the hell was going on in Brazil I was also trying to come to terms with my own little miseries. Every time I started to talk with somebody about ‘lesbianism in Brazil’ I wasn’t able to formulate a question, because all seemed so displaced, lacking any sense. The picture I would have in front of my eyes was of women who are at a loss, who are looking for something to hold on to but can’t figure out a way to break the spell that has fallen over our country in the last few years. I would like to understand, for my own sake, what does it mean to be a lesbian in a country like Brazil. I have the impression that in order to come to an understanding, one would have to put aside all attempts at rationalization. Not because we are a chaotic society, but because we are not really ruled by the moral code we learned so dutifully in school and church. There are the rules and the denial of the rules. The average Brazilian survives dealing with denial, not with rules. In a country where nothing seems to be possible, we have to deal with the impossible and make the best of it. When my mother receives me and Ines at home she has a double bed prepared for us. When one of my sisters decided to break her marriage because the husband was not ‘fulfilling his marriage duties’, that means, he hasn’t been fucking with her for more than six years, she moved in with a woman who was her schoolmate. Now my family is praising the woman because she is taking such good care of my sister. The impotent husband has definitely fallen into disgrace. But there is no word about us being ‘lesbians’ in my family. Many of my lesbian friends behave with their lovers in a way that makes it easy to figure out what their relationship is all about. But, if you are a good girl who goes out to work, leads her own life, but respects her parents and doesn’t make scandals around the neighbourhood, everything is all right. However it is common sense (and one can hear that from everybody’s mouth, especially from women) that two women making love is ‘a disgusting thing—God forbid that such a thing would happen in this family’. In the last few years the media has been talking more and more openly about homosexuality, mostly because it is becoming a kind of consumer good which sells well. Even television brought up the subject in one of the most popular soap operas last year, showing the relationship between two women without a shade of prejudice. Things would be very easy if we could apply to the Brazilians the official moral patterns and be able to ask just ‘to be or not to be’, or the line I heard once in a play I saw in the USA, ‘there is only good and bad, there is nothing in between’. Well, down here below the Equator, what holds the fascination of life is what is in between. No

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woman I know in Brazil likes to be called ‘lesbian’ (I’m included in the list). There is a slang word—among many—which is used pretty much all over the country—sapatāo (big shoe)—it gives the idea of masculinity, heaviness, etc. Well, when we want to point out that somebody is a lesbian, we refer to her as sapata, which takes away the heaviness of the word by eliminating the superlative and transforming the word sapato (masc.) into sapata (fem.) One of our favourite pastimes is to figure out who is a lesbian among the people we deal with in our daily life, or among TV artists, singers, politicians, etc. One day I was watching TV and I saw this gorgeous woman playing the wife of some rich guy in the eight o’clock soap opera. She was so attractive, so outstanding, I ran to my friend and asked her—is that actress by any chance a sapata? Of course, she said, she is living with such and such woman singer, they even got married in a special ceremony, they have a marriage contract where their income is equally shared. All this easy-going attitude is not to be taken for granted because it reflects somehow the lifestyle of big cities, of women who come from middle-class families or who ascended from poverty to a better standard of living and can afford to be economically independent. When you start to read the newspapers carefully or listen to women’s stories, it is not difficult to detect cases of discrimination, persecution and actual aggression against lesbians. Many lesbians would rather die than talk openly about their sexual behaviour in their workplace. They fear they would either lose their jobs or become a laughing stock among their colleagues. On the other hand I know some women who are very open about being lesbians, without that many problems. So, what to make of it? Is it hard to be a lesbian in Brazil? Yes, it is as hard as not having good jobs, health care, affordable housing, living under devastating inflation and the fear of dying suffocated by the pollution in the big cities. There is not a lesbian movement in Brazil if one applies the concept of an organized community fighting for a place in the decision-making process of our society. However with the opening up of the political scene many women decided to join different parties and the number of women participating in the political structure at all levels is increasing each year. The problem is that many Brazilians still think that politics means political parties, or in other words, politics are not to be lived outside the frame of these institutional organizations. Once one gets into the party, one is swallowed by its rules, its bureaucracies, its urge to win power at any price. It has been extremely hard for feminists to fight for women’s rights when it comes to the old big issues like equal pay, the right to free abortion, protection against male violence, day care, etc. No woman politician I know at this moment would lift the flag of something like ‘lesbian rights’— and there are many lesbians in very high positions in government as well as in parliament. Once I asked a lesbian who was occupying a high position in the newly founded Council for the Rights of Women, which is controlled by the Ministry of Justice, why she didn’t come out and talk as a lesbian to her colleagues. She laughed and told me that this was no longer necessary, because another woman from the Council who disagreed with her on some issues, had said to the Minister: ‘You should be careful with that woman, because she hates men!’ Well, this is just to give you an idea of things, I could go on and on telling stories and I’m sure things wouldn’t become clearer. Many kisses. Take care. Marlene.


ISRAEL Spike Pittsberg As an ex-North American living for the past dozen years in Israel, I am in the unenviable position of being able to compare the relative depths of the two respective closets. There is, in fact, no comparison at all. While it is true that life as a pre-movement baby butch in the 1960s in the States was a time of confusion and fear, the lesbian movement of the 1970s eventually provided a community identity and a context for our lives. From the moment we named it, many of us were able to escape the closet. However, my decision to move to Israel in 1977 dictated a retreat into the deepest confines of the Middle Eastern sexual underground. Israel is a country of irrational contradictions and confusing combinations. It retains an element of theocracy which is the product of a political system based on opportunistic governing coalitions between partners of opposing political views. The religious parties, increasingly fundamentalist, have been included in the coalitions since the establishment of the State, and their asking price has always included control of the civil code, i.e., birth, death, marriage, and divorce—those events in relation to which the quality of women’s lives is defined. Lately the Ministry of Education has also fallen into the hands of the religious, radically intensifying the gender socialization of children. This situation affects lesbians no less than straight women. With a marriage rate much higher than that of England or North America, a high proportion of Israeli lesbians marry. An Israeli wife cannot divorce her husband at will, since Jewish law gives exclusive rights of divorce to the husbands and rabbis. A married lesbian risks vicious blackmail by husbands who threaten to tell the rabbinical courts of her ‘inversion’. If she has children she wants to keep, she often must surrender all common property in a deal to shut her husband’s mouth. Marriage is not an institution easily avoided by young Israeli women. Without enumerating the plethora of social and religious pressures, the practical considerations alone are daunting. In housing, to take one example, rent subsidies and substantial apartment mortgages are just two of the social provisions exclusive to married couples. Because of the nature of the housing system in Israel, in which only 4 per cent of living units are rented (as opposed to 60 per cent in the United States, for example), and in which the outrageous purchase prices must be fully paid in cash before receipt of the key, wedlock is one of the few options for the average woman looking to move out of her parents’ home (itself not the most conducive location for living as a lesbian). Since there is neither a constitution nor a bill of rights, as in the USA, there is no legal recourse for the woman thrown out of the army (the draft is compulsory for all nonreligious single women of eighteen) or fired for being a lesbian. The traditional women’s jobs are generally civil service positions. In Israel’s mixed economy, a large percentage of the employed work for the government or military establishment. I know of too many cases of women—teachers, social workers, a policewoman, a couple of career army officers and others, who were tossed out for the explicit reason of being

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discovered to be lesbian. Working women must snuggle deeply into the closet to remain employed. In the west there are vocal movements to back up individual heroes and victims, but in Israel there are practically no movements at all. There is no mass, or even visible, gay, antinuke, old people’s, disabled, or environmental movements. There is not even a real trade union movement. There is a small committed feminist movement, which at its height in the 1970s supported lively women’s centres and book stores in the three major cities (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa). Lesbians were and are central to all feminist organizing, of course, but generally not as lesbians. Other than the obligatory lesbian workshop at the annual feminist conference, the L-word has remained unremarked inside the same feminist institutions to which lesbian imput has been crucial. Today, feminist energy is divided between, on the one hand, a woman’s movement which is essentially service oriented, concentrated around battered women, health and rape projects, and on the other hand, the women’s anti-occupation groups such as Women in Black and aid to Palestinian women political prisoners. There is a simple explanation for the lack of political movements around social divisions other than what we here call The Conflict. This is a country in which all political energy, from both the left and right, is tied up in the national question. Because of the Occupation, progressive people, no matter what their individual political priorities, must concentrate on resisting the repression and supporting the intifada. There have been a few attempts among lesbians to organize as lesbians. In 1976–7, a small group of women operating inside the apolitical homosexual organization called, tellingly, The Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Individual, ran Saturday evening dances in the cellar of the Society. There was also an autonomous lesbianfeminist organization called Aleph of about fifty women in 1978, but it was short lived. A few years ago a new group called Community of Lesbian-Feminists (CLaF) was started, to encourage social, cultural and political activities. Within a year the mailing list—the only means of judging our membership—reached the amazing figure of 230 names, more than almost any progressive non-Party group in Israel. CLaF was run by a feminist collective of nine women who developed a political analysis which tied Israeli lesbian oppression directly to the Occupation, in the context of a feminist view of the particular ways in which war and colonialization affect the lives of women. The wellattended bi-weekly general meetings of CLaF, influenced by the energy of the collective, produced perhaps the only extensive process of politicization of Israeli lesbians as lesbians. However, our heightened consciousness led to the phenomenon familiar to political lesbians throughout the Third World. Once we study the gains of the international lesbian movement, life outside the local closet glitters invitingly. Out of nine collective members, four have left to live in the States, and two others were forced by personal circumstances to drop out. The loss meant more than just a weakened organization. One of the women who emigrated had been the only collective member who was totally out of the closet: our only phone contact for the isolated women who needed CLaF, the only one able to do an interview, sign for a PO Box, meet with a café owner to set up a closed afternoon for our members on International Women’s Day, or talk with the authorities. Losing her


meant a substantial loss of communication with the world beyond our own subculture; it was a year before CLaF could continue activities on a regular basis. And what do Israeli lesbians do for fun? Not much. We have our share of private parties, but there is only one disco in Israel—in Tel Aviv, of course—that sets aside one night (Tuesday) for women. Despite the fact that Wednesday is a working day, the club only operates from after midnight till about three in the morning. The hours mean that the regulars are very young and unencumbered by such burdens as jobs and responsibilities. The male club-owners neither know anything or care about lesbians. The price is steep, the atmosphere hostile, and people get very drunk. In twelve years, I have never heard a slow number played. In Haifa, Jerusalem and all the smaller towns, lesbians must simply make do within their own social circle. Because of a strong international element in Jerusalem, the lesbian scene is heavily affected by a constant influx of mostly North American Jewish dykes who are spending one college year abroad or otherwise temporarily trying out life in ‘Zion’. On the one hand they are used to the privilege of being surrounded by women’s culture, and on the other hand their transitory status means they can take risks Israeli women cannot afford. While they impose a certain western chauvinism everywhere they go, they also inject a valuable lesbian exuberance which the rest of us cannot help but catch. Jerusalem has parties unlike the dark, smokey, ear-piercing, heavily posed Tel Aviv nights: parties that are warm, friendly, full of games, establishing an air of relaxation which is a foreign but welcome pause in the uptight life of local lesbians. Couples almost inevitably live together, once they have tested the connection. After about age twenty-five, local lesbians search for a life partner and hang onto her tightly. By building up a small circle of other stable couples, they create a private little world around them, often retreating from public activism if they had been previously involved. The lesbian community has traditionally been a disengaged, if not actually reactionary, community, although less so than that of the gay males. When oppression is so relentless, the response is to be more normal than the ‘normals’. In the general Jewish gay community Zionism and conservatism run high. However, the radicalization of Israelis which began with the invasion of Lebanon and has been intensified by the intifada has affected the lesbian population no less than general society. A visibly increasing number of Jewish lesbians are now identifying as feminist, anti-Occupation, and antiracist. Life has a decidedly village ambience in Israel. Everybody knows everybody else and all of their business. When I first arrived in this country, I discovered that there are practically no laundromats or dryers. All laundry is hung out on lines, and my neighbours immediately asked why there were jockey shorts dripping dry outside my window. They knew quite well there was no man around, for there is no stigma to neighbours opening their door to see who is knocking at yours. I was forced to change, for the first time in fifteen years, to girls’ panties. Because of the intimacy of this tiny country, with its open-door policy of spontaneous visits, even a lesbian’s home is a closet. Incriminating book titles must be turned to the wall, only neutral posters are hung, and lovers are tucked into the expensive but essential spare room whose only role is to display a second bed. A single instance of spontaneous

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Women in Black Demonstration, Israel

affection on the street can and does lead to disaster: harassment at school, exclusion from family, unemployment. Israeli Arab lesbians are in a much worse situation. Israeli Palestinians live almost exclusively in their family homes in villages; women are rarely permitted to leave them unattended by a male relative. Some women get to study or work in the cities but since Jews almost never rent or sell apartments to Arabs, this only happens when the village is in commuting distance from the city. A college girl is closely watched by the male Arab students, and one bad report can hustle her back home quite quickly. Arranged marriages are common in conservative families. The very few Palestinian lesbians I have met have fled in order to live lesbian lives, like so many of their Jewish sisters. The very concept of lesbian is different here. No woman is really blamed for trying to go straight; many of her sisters would wish her luck. In fact, there are waves of soldier-age (18–20) lesbians—that being the only time that women live away from their families— who disappear within a few years, to be replaced by the next wave. The most common location of coming-out stories among Israelis is in the barracks. Many lesbians have occasional relations with men, and few feel glad or proud of an identity which so alienates them from ‘real life’. Talk is mostly about who is with whom, and where the next party might be. Most of the issues prominent in the western lesbian discourse are familiar only to those lesbians who travel abroad and/or read English-language periodicals. The closet itself defines the borders of our concerns, and our greatest efforts are expended in staying safe and inside it. Once we know who and what we are, we try to get the hell out of Israel.


ITALY Rosanna Fiocchetto Translated by Carmela Turchiarelli I belong to a generation of women whose personal and political need for lesbian identity emerged at the end of the seventies. I was part of a movement whose aim was to change the structure of the patriarchal system through sexuality. Nevertheless, the paradox was that within the women’s movement, the same protagonists of liberation tended to reproduce the same patriarchal structure as in the past. How? For instance, by perpetuating the oppression of lesbianism and discrimination against lesbians. The acceptance that we lesbians found in the women’s movement was the same that we would have found in the outside world, if we had tried to be accepted there. While on the one hand I felt more and more proud of my choice to be a lesbian, on the other I discovered that the majority of heterosexual feminists whom I knew were deeply ashamed of lesbianism. They had a low opinion of lesbians (seen either as asexual or hypersexual) and tried to silence us with great determination either by pushing us into the private sphere or devaluing lesbianism simply as a ‘label’. Determined to obtain social and political recognition, many feminists feared that their strength for negotiation could be destroyed by the ‘infamous’ image of lesbianism. I found that many lesbians accepted this model, negating themselves and reproducing the same feeling towards other lesbians, that is to say, dismissing them. Knowing my sisters, it was difficult to believe that this happened due to lack of intelligence. In the end I had to accept that this was premeditated, that even within the women’s movement heterosexual power was based on the oppression of lesbians. I came to understand that, in the same way as heterosexual feminists could not count on the conversion of men, lesbian feminists did not count on the conversion of heterosexual feminists. We had to organize ourselves, gather our strength and if necessary even use it against them, and we knew this would become necessary. To make the women’s movement include lesbianism, lesbians had to act first. It was very hard to understand all this and have to decide whether to pretend not to have understood, in order to keep the peace. It was hard to separate and put ourselves on a different route, as we were already so different, and to become outsiders even to the outsiders. My personal feeling was that I would have felt dishonoured if, knowing what I knew, I had not fought for myself, for my lesbianism and the lesbianism of others. It could be that it is a typical Mediterranean sense of honour, but that’s exactly what pushed me in 1981 to start a group called Identità Lesbica (Lesbian Identity). The following year, I joined the project of the CLI (Collegamento Tra Lesbiche Italiane—Italian Lesbian Link) and am still part of it. My next choice was to found in 1985 the lesbian publishing house ‘Estro’ with Liana Borghi, a woman from Florence who has a background similar to mine. When I became active in the movement I felt that I had to confront myself with other lesbians’ alternatives: women who had decided to be silent; those who had faith in a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of feminism that would also redeem lesbianism; those who had a negative attitude towards their own lesbianism; lesbians who aimed to integrate into the patriarchal system; and finally lesbians who aimed at self-destruction through the destruction of everything around them. These were the components of the Italian lesbian world at the beginning of the eighties.

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‘Lesbian Identity’, image created for the poster of the second national lesbian conference in Rome, 1981

Our movement is a strange one: first, we have to fight ourselves. We are so deeply rooted in heterosexism and that heterosexism is such a big part of us that to challenge it means having to change our structure, dismantle the identity that we have built, starting from an individual security often achieved with great difficulty. The women’s movement seen as the ‘movimento-madre’, able to hold and satisfy the needs of all its political subjects, was the first security that we had to give up. There was between lesbians and heterosexuals a socio-political inequality, deep and unmistakable, that needed to be named so that it could not be denied. We were few, and isolated in this struggle, and above everything else our aim was to join together and grow. In short, to create what we were not: a community. The so-called lesbian ‘minority’, indeed, is the only minority in the world without a community, without connecting bonds among individuals beyond their more or less ephemeral, dual relationships. Therefore we are deprived of the instruments of cultural transmission, deprived of compatible cultural values and of a common knowledge being passed on, and deprived of collective property. We are denied an identity unless defined by other communities. I have thought a lot about whether there are similar examples in history of similar levels of oppression and my conclusion is that there are none. The particular oppression of lesbians is that we do not, and should not, exist. It would be better if we weren’t here. Therefore the issue of lesbian freedom is at the root of female freedom and of sexual self-determination; an issue vital to us as lesbians and to all women. The lesbian movement has developed with great vitality and as time passes we have to face evolving crises caused by changes in our situation, both internal and external.


In contrast to the USA, West Germany and Holland, Italy does not have an alternative scene. In Italy a lesbian can choose (if one can call it choice) only between fitting in or being marginalized. If she chooses the former then there are three possibilities: lesbianism=homosexuality, lesbianism=heterosexuality and lesbianism=feminism. The CLI’s line consists of symbolic gestures, as well as a political practice against these three equations: to join feminist separatist instead of homosexual organizations, to refuse to take the route of claiming ‘civil rights’, to recognise the reality of building an autonomous lesbian group and to work towards the building of a lesbian movement. We try to oppose marginality by encouraging the creation of a lesbian social group and by keeping a connection with the women’s movement regarding common objectives. A third possibility of an antimarginal strategy would be to intervene as lesbians on crucial social issues (i.e., the environment, colonialism, racism, etc.). In Italy that is impeded by the clandestine world in which the majority of us live (i.e., we have to take into account small problems such as who will give the articles to the press, who will carry the banner at the demonstration, who will be willing to be interviewed, who will take the leaflet to the printers, who will take part in the debate, etc.). Perhaps it is relevant that Italian lesbians have absorbed the tradition of the Italian catacombs in which first the Jews and later the Christians took refuge. The subsoil of Rome is full of catacombs. More or less secure with themselves in the maze of the catacombs of feminism or the catacombs of the ‘closet’, lesbians disappear even though lesbians hardly came out. Lesbianism is not subject to overt social repression in Italy because of its social and political invisibility. This invisibility does not mean that conflict is not generated between heterosexuals and lesbians as it is in France or the USA. But it is obvious that conflicts do not explode if carefully avoided, and repression does not spring up if there is no one to repress. When this does happen, it is an ‘exception’ due to the excesses of a few ‘bad individuals’. Lesbianism is not the only branch of Italian feminism that has been made invisible. The women’s movement ignores any other diversity between women that does not fall within the two male national institutions: political parties and religion. There are, in fact, visible and distinct socio-political groups of communist, socialist and Catholic women but there are no groups of workers, unemployed, mothers, black, disabled women, etc. It is important to keep this situation in mind as the great difficulty that Italian women face is in being social autonomous subjects and in being autonomous, therefore able to interact positively in this reciprocal autonomy and in a solid and articulated coalition. Also, it is important to understand the economic, cultural and political poverty of the women’s movement in Mediterranean patriarchal society, and the fact that the differentiation among women is seen as a threat and not as an exchange of strength among individuals, a richness of subjectivity, an increase of consciousness and energy. The lesbian movement distinguishes itself by this same contradiction; the result is a prevailing representation limited to a few women at various levels, from coming out, to the creation of spaces for lesbians, to cultural production and political theory. Our movement is rich in bodies but poor in individuality. The consequence is that these individuals are quickly consumed in a collective meal without there being reciprocal

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nutriment. The only form of current communication, apart from parties and holidays, is in fact established at conferences where the prevailing model is of performers (few) and spectators (many). From 1981 to the present, the groups that form the lesbian movement have organized five national conferences that have inspired social and political dialogue among lesbians and the starting of a few precious spaces for lesbians, but in general, they have not inspired an understanding of political responsibility and creativity in respect of lesbianism. On the contrary, the defence, the practice and the expression of lesbian choice are at present more inhibited than in the recent past, due to the difficult phase that feminist separatism is going through in the context of Italian general politics. Furthermore we have to remember that, with the exception of Rome and Milan, in the majority of Italian cities, separatism is a heresy: a separatist place is not considered ‘public’ as men have no access to it. Also this is the reason that in Italy separatist and lesbian projects do not receive public funds but have to count exclusively on the resources of individual women. Another aspect of the step backward that we share with other countries is the attempt, in Italy lead by the male organization Arci-gay, to organize lesbians outside the feminist movement and against sepa ratism, exploiting both the crisis of feminist values in a cultural climate of the neo-mystical femininity of ‘career women’, emotional blackmail regarding AIDS, as well as the new western appeal to maternity that includes techniques of artificial insemination. In this climate the lesbian groups, from the CLI to Vivere Lesbica and Video Viola (Rome), from L’Amandorla (Florence) to the Collettivi Lesbici Milanesi, from the SeNo (Catania) to the intercollectives Progettualità Lesbica and Le Amanti, work, trying to elaborate a political ground that acknowledges our objective limits but also our unforeseen and luckily unforeseeable excesses.


THE DE-EROTICIZATION OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys Margaret Hunt

The British and North American women’s movements are split by controversies over pornography, over sexual minorities within the movement and over a range of other issues. At the heart of these debates are larger questions about alliances, strategy and ideology. Should the movement focus on building connections primarily or solely with women who identify gender oppression as the main oppression, or should it be seeking alliances with antiracist, anti-imperialist and pro-workingclass forces as well? What role does the particular theory of oppression we adopt play in determining what our strategies will be? And what should the response of feminists be to the increasingly conservative climate of national and international politics? My own views on these questions have been shaped by my political work over the years, and, more recently, by the study of European and American social history, particularly the history of women and the family. Social history as it tends to be written and taught these days shares a number of basic assumptions with feminist political practice at the grass-roots level. One key similarity is in the sense of the political (or historical) actor. Neither the ‘new’ social history nor feminism shrink from hard-hitting accounts of the manipulation and victimization of large groups of people in the past and the present, whether the European and American working classes, African Americans, colonialized groups, or women. At the same time, however, both social history and feminism are deeply suspicious of any philosophy which paints the oppressed as merely the passive victims of forces or groups which are beyond their control. While the social history of the last twenty years has been concerned to uncover evidence of slave revolts, of peasant resistance, of women who have defied patriarchal forces, feminism has relied upon and sought to encourage the strength and militance of rape victims, lesbians, battered women, women on the dole, indeed any woman bowed down under the weight of male oppression. That, at any rate, is the theory. In practice, as I found from many years of working in women’s shelters and programmes for low-income women, it is difficult for feminists (perhaps for anyone) to offer help to people who have been victimized without also infantilizing them. And it is profoundly disempowering to have to accept assistance from people who define you as too passive, ignorant or politically benighted to act on your own behalf. The tendency to confuse processes of victimization which women can and do


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resist, and women as victims, people so fundamentally victimized that they can only benefit from outside intervention, from the ‘protection’ of others, is widespread. And it is often intimately intertwined with racism, class-prejudice and disdain for women who do not define themselves as part of the movement. As feminists, then, our relationship to the rhetoric of victimization is a complicated one. Speaking out, confronting our own and others’ victimization is an essential part of coming to terms individually and collectively with male violence, whether psychic or physical. It forms a crucial basis from which to critique the moral and normative basis of marriage, heterosexuality and male supremacy. But it must be embarked upon with care, because it can be, and is routinely, used to argue that most women are so psychologically brutalized that they cannot know their own interests and must have them defined for them by others. I approach present-day feminist controversies, therefore, with the issue of the historical actor and her empowerment very much in mind. Other questions also guide my thinking, such as, how can the women’s movement answer to the concerns of as many women, and as diverse a group of women as possible? And how can our theory and our political strategies avoid simplifying or reducing the complexity of oppression? And finally, will the strategies we pursue actually free women or do they seem likely to lead to new ways of limiting or confining them in body and spirit? It seems to me that revolutionary feminism (or radical feminism as we tend to call it in the USA) does not stand up well under this kind of critical scrutiny. It displays a strong tendency to define the vast majority of women in the world as helpless victims who need to be saved. It is very susceptible to criticism on grounds of reductionist and exclusionary thinking. And it shows a disturbing willingness to support repressive measures around the control of sexuality. My scepticism about revolutionary feminism has been increased by a recent book by revolutionary feminist Sheila Jeffreys which attempts to ‘reclaim’ the late nineteenth—and early twentieth-century British social purity movement as a model for today’s feminist movement. In The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (Pandora Press, 1985) Jeffreys departs radically from earlier women’s historians who had stressed the moral repressiveness and lack of regard for the civil liberties of the poor characteristic of most of these activists. By contrast Jeffreys praises these middle-class women activists of the social purity movement for their heavy emphasis upon the sexual victimization of women by men. In Jeffreys’ hands the story of social purity becomes an inspirational tale of an earlier generation of women who got their analysis right and then went on to launch a frontal attack upon what she sees as the main underpinning of female subordination—male heterosexual lust. Her more or less implicit message is that feminists today should enter whole-heartedly into comparable efforts to influence sexual practice, using vehicles like antipornography campaigns, opposition to lesbian sadomasochism, opposition to prostitution and opposition to heterosexual inter-course—the programme, in short, of revolutionary feminism. Jeffrey’s way of doing history tells us a great deal about her feminism. Moreover, while Jeffreys does not represent all revolutionary feminists, she is none the less an especially influential propagandist for that wing of the movement, so examining her approach to history in more detail sheds light on the revolutionary programme as a

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whole. My central disagreement with Jeffreys turns on her interpretation of social purity movements, so what I propose to do initially is to look briefly at British social purity over the last three centuries. My purpose here is three-fold: to define what a social purity movement is, to show the importance of sexual victimization arguments within social purity rhetoric, and to demonstrate the centrality of imperialist, patriarchal and heterosexist concerns to these movements. Having established the historical background I go on to examine in detail Sheila Jeffreys’ attempt to turn social purity activists of the late nineteenth century into feminist moral exemplars, looking especially closely at the risks associated with linking feminism to social purity. The second half of the paper looks at the situation today. It examines the ways social purity thought is being revived by conservatives in both the UK and USA in response to fears of national decline, and shows the way that social purity continues to be linked to a profoundly reactionary programme. It looks at the turn revolutionary feminism (and, in the USA, radical feminism) has taken toward ‘social purity’ arguments and suggests some of the problems this raises in terms both of general issues of personal freedom and the treatment of sexual minorities within the movement. Finally it lays out some of the outlines of an alternative course for feminism, while suggesting some of the reasons why revolutionary feminists are unlikely to take up this path.

Social purity movements in Britain, 1690 to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts In simple terms social purity philosophy holds that sex and sexuality are deeply problematic drives, which unless tightly controlled will spill out into society and cause untold harm. Pre-nineteenth-century social purity movements were often scripturally inspired, which meant that their adherents feared direct punishment from God for sexual infractions (this kind of fundamentalism has re-emerged in some present-day social purity thinking in the USA). In the post-Enlightenment era, the more prevalent tendency has been to see uncontrolled sex as socially harmful. Among the typical arguments made are the following: uncontrolled sex leads to overpopulation and social unrest among the poor (the Malthusian argument); it contributes to the breaking down of class or racial barriers; it threatens the integrity of marriage, widely viewed as an essential structural support of civilized society; and it makes it hard to sustain the official male monopoly over sexual decision-making. Sexual victimization arguments have always played a prominent role in social purity rhetoric. It has by no means always been women who have been typed as the victims of men however. In fact the more prevalent tendency in social purity thinking, in line with traditional Judaeo-Christian teachings, has been to do the reverse: to focus on men as the victims of sexually predatory women. A highly illustrative social purity movement is the Movement for the Reformation of Manners, which began in London in the 1690s and lasted into the 1730s. The Movement for the Reformation of Manners (the contemporary meaning of the term ‘manners’ being close to our modern term ‘morals’) coincided historically with a surge of concern about national security occasioned in part by the expansionist military ambitions of Louis XIV. Like most social purity movements, however, its central concern was the

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‘problem’ of uncontrolled and/or deviant sexuality, particularly among the young. The movement’s supporters associated unrestrained sexuality closely with the spectre of social dissolution. Destruction could, they thought, come at the hands of God, just as it had for the corrupt Old Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or it could result from a weakening of the social fabric of the country through venereal disease, addiction to illicit sex, or the blurring of social distinctions thought to stem therefrom (Bahlman, 1957; Bristow, 1977; Isaacs, 1979; Craig, 1980). Like later social purity movements, this movement dwelt heavily on sexual victimization. However it paid only the most cursory attention to the victimization of women. Rather, what it was obsessively preoccupied with was the danger posed to men, either by unchecked female sexuality, or, in some cases, unchecked male sexuality in the form of ‘mollies’, the contemporary term for male homosexuals. Men, followed closely by ‘the family’ and ‘the nation’ were the greatest victims of unbridled lust as far as these reformers were concerned (Craig, 1980; Bray, 1982:81–114; Gilbert, 1976). The theme of the alleged danger women posed to men went along, as it always does, with a pronounced misogyny. The rhetoric of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners was full of ill-concealed hostility to women, especially women who had escaped the confines of the patriarchal household. The mouth of a strange woman is a deep pit; those that are abhorred of the Lord shall fall into it’ a prominent champion of reform intoned; ‘her house inclineth unto death; none that go unto her return again’. He had lifted those particular lines from the book of Proverbs (this type of thinking has a long history) but they are the kind of sentiments that one can find over and over again in literature written by reformers (Woodward, 1704:11, 14–15). Shocking revelations about young men being victimized by sexually assertive women and homosexuals fueled a deep sense of national sexual emergency. Vigilante groups formed to comb the streets for prostitutes. Constables and self-appointed guardians of morals evolved schemes to entrap ‘mollies’ (the populace showed their support by stoning at least one of the latter to death) (Craig, 1980: 103–29). Groups of young men formed themselves into all-male religious societies so as to escape the baneful influence of women and encourage one another in sexual restraint. Well-placed Anglican clergymen turned out hundreds of sermons and tracts on male sexual continence and made attempts to control the diffusion of sexually explicit books and even graffiti, because they implied other purposes for sex beyond that of reproduction contained within the patriarchal family (Bristow, 1977:27–8, 31, 34–5; Foxon, 1965: ix). The characteristic features of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners, like all later social purity movements, were as follows: first the movement defined as dangerous and repugnant any and all sex and sexual fantasies that did not conform to the traditional model of heterosexual intercourse within marriage with the man on top. Second, it identified uncontrolled sexuality closely with lower class and unrespectable women and homosexuals, and despite occasional rhetorical flourishes about the need for general moral reform, in practice it focused its repressive activities on these groups. Third, it displayed strongly misogynist tendencies. In particular its calls for sexual continence for men developed out of fear and hatred of women coupled with the desire to contain their sexuality, not out of some sort of chivalrous or protective concern for them. And finally the movement used the clear and present danger supposedly

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Combining prurience, censoriousness and misogyny, this popular pamphlet is typical of the kind of literature spawned by the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century concern for the reformation of manners.

represented by out-of-control sexuality, as well as the putative inability of the victims to act on their own behalf, to justify very repressive measures. The Movement for the Reformation of Manners was followed by other social purity movements, often springing up in periods of perceived national crisis or military vulnerability. Similar campaigns to encourage male sexual continence and suppress prostitution, obscenity and homosexuality were waged in England from the 1780s and in both England and America beginning in the 1860s (Bristow, 1977; Walkowitz, 1980). Beginning around the mid-nineteenth century, however, social purity in both the USA and the UK became increasingly linked with the burgeoning women’s rights movements. Since then many, though by no means all, feminists have incorporated social purity themes into their writings and political strategies. These women have responded to the theme of women’s sexual victimization, minor though it has tended to be in the mainstream social purity world-view, and they have striven to make women’s concerns more central within these movements. Sometimes this work has borne fruit. A good example is found in the Victorian opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD Acts), a series of initiatives which had been passed in 1864,1866 and 1869 in an effort to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. As was the case in some later sexually

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transmitted disease scares, including the AIDS panic, the CD Acts focused a disproportionate share of the blame on prostitutes. The Acts provided for a special plainclothes police force to identify prostitutes in garrison towns and ports, mandatory fortnightly vaginal examinations on the women so identified, and forcible confinement in locked hospitals for up to nine months for those diagnosed with a venereal disease (Walkowitz, 1980:1–2). Critics of the CD Acts were outraged by the fact that they seemed to sanction prostitutes and hence male vice. But some feminist groups went further to look at and publicize issues such as women’s sexual exploitation, the double-standard implicit in the Acts (males with the disease were not hampered from spreading it to women, nor were they locked up) and the harassment of working-class women and workingclass communities at the hands of doctors and the police. What distinguished the work of the most progressive of these groups, the Ladies’ National Association (LNA) led by Josephine Butler, from that of more conservative reformers, was the LNA’s commitment (not always consistent, to be sure) to poor women’s right to some measure of sexual self-determination over against the coercive power of the state as well as individual men and its willingness to work with workingclass organizations in formulating strategies and aims. Most of the time the LNA was able to draw on social purity thinking without becoming simply another attempt to control the sexual lives of workingclass women under the guise of protecting them from male lust. Unfortunately neither the interest in sexual self-determination for poor women, nor the cross-class coalition-building that the LNA pioneered was carried over into the more pruriently minded, class-bound and morally repressive social purity activity that emerged in the 1880s following the repeal of the Acts (Walkowitz, 1980: 2–3, 146–7, 246–52). It is however this latter movement, stretching from the period immediately post-repeal into the early twentieth century that Sheila Jeffreys would have feminists take as their model.

Social purity from the 1880s: a critique of Sheila Jeffreys Social purity in fin-de-siècle England was a significantly more conservative movement than the opposition to the CD Acts had been. One wing of the movement consisted of organizations for boys and young men and their sponsors, men like Robert BadenPowell of the Boy Scouts. The men’s organizations, usually linked to church or chapel, were essentially men’s purity leagues. Their membership vowed to remain continent and especially to avoid prostitutes, swore to suppress unclean language, and worked to instil protective attitudes towards ‘pure’ women in each other and in the wider community. Baden-Powell and his Boy Scouts were deeply concerned about young men’s vulnerability to prostitutes and masturbation (‘self-abuse’) and convinced of the sacredness of the patriarchal nuclear family and the imperial mission (Rosenthal, 1986; Hillcourt, 1964). Another wing of social purity shared the concern about sex, and often the middleclass and imperialist bias of the first wing, but it focused its attention primarily on the victimization of young girls. W.T. Stead, whose bestselling The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon (1885) details how he set out to ‘buy’ a child virgin, could be classed

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This is typical of turn-of-the-century social purity pledges. It is an appeal to men to protect women from degradation, to ‘put down’ indecent language, and to embrace sexual continence. From John D’Emilio and Estelle B.Freeman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, after p. 274.

here. In Stead’s strikingly voyeuristic stories of child prostitution the theme of sexual victimization looms large (Walkowitz, 1989:26–7). The moral outrage inspired by The Maiden Tribute led to the passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which raised the age of consent for girls, gave law enforcement officials broader powers to arrest and prosecute prostitutes and brothel-keepers, and criminalized homosexual acts between consenting adult men. This act contributed in subsequent years to a fourteenfold increase in prosecutions of brothels and vastly increased efforts to suppress streetwalking in towns and cities all over England and Wales. Overwhelmingly the group punished under the law was working-class women (Walkowitz, 1980:250–2). The feminist or woman’s element in social purity, women like J. Ellice Hopkins, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Frances Swiney and a number of others, shared the men’s focus on helpless victims, and at least some of them shared their appetite for state intervention into the sexual mores and childrearing practices of the poor. However, they laid greater stress than did most of the men on laws and standards which protected women and girls from male sexual demands, and at least some of them made attempts to place social purity concerns within a larger feminist framework. Unfortunately, while placing much of the blame for the sexual victimization of women on men, they tended to retain the fear of sexually assertive women common to the rest of the social purity movement, and indeed to Victorian middle-class culture generally. This explains why social purity feminists, despite their appeals for an end to the double standard in the enforcement of anti-vice laws, ultimately supported police sweeps of brothels and redlight districts, measures which primarily affected working-class women. Out of the confusion of social purity discourse some women do emerge who clearly identified women (or at least girls) as the victims and men as the victimizers, though often their other social views are quite suspect. It is these women whom Sheila Jeffreys

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This social purity tract by the well-known feminist and suffragist Christabel Pankhurst featured sensationalist claims about the incidence of venereal disease and called for male continence. It was one of several attempts in this period to link feminist and social purity aims.

celebrates in her book. Let us then look more closely at one of her heroines, a prominent social purity reformer named J.Ellice Hopkins. Jeffreys claims revolutionary significance for Hopkins’s attempts to get men to embrace sexual continence, a concern which, as we have seen, she shared with much more conservative male social purity activists. In Jeffreys’ view women like Hopkins were engaged in what she terms a ‘massive campaign…to transform male sexual behaviour and protect women from the effects of the exercise of a form of male sexuality damaging to their interests’ (Jeffreys, 1985:1, 15). If true, how does this fit in with the rest of Ellice Hopkins’s thought? Both Hopkins’s personal papers and her public writings give one pause for thought, for they contain numerous appeals to men to protect women, appeals which mix an obvious desire to maintain male supremacy with vague claims for female moral superiority: ‘the man is the head of the woman, and is therefore the servant of the woman’ is a typical remark in this vein (Jeffreys, 1985:13). It is clear that one of Hopkins’s main aims in stressing victimization is precisely to awaken men to their traditional patriarchal responsibility to defend women’s virtue and even Jeffreys has to admit that ‘[Hopkins’s] general attitude to the relationship between the sexes owes more to the principles of chivalry than to those of feminism…’ However in her view Hopkins’s ultimate aims can be ignored or passed over because of her concern with women’s victimization (Jeffreys, 1985:13–15).

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Jeffreys displays a still more serious tendency to obscure the implications of social purity thinking in her treatment of (or, more accurately, her refusal to discuss) Hopkins’s and others complicity with, and sometimes enthusiastic approval for, coercive actions directed against poor women. Like many social purity activists Hopkins was far more concerned about sexual selfdetermination among middle-class women than among the poor of either sex. Thus in 1880 she strongly advocated the passage of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act, which authorized the forcible removal of children from working-class homes suspected of harbouring prostitutes and their placement in so-called industrial schools (actually closer to borstals). The aim of the Industrial Schools Act was to keep the young from being corrupted by proximity to prostitution. But the result was to break up families, to interfere with the keeping of boarders (a traditional means of survival in working-class neighbourhoods), to make it difficult for single women, whether or not they were prostitutes, to find places to live, and to stigmatize prostitutes within their own communities. As with other repressive measures in the past and the present, this measure was justified in terms of what it would do to combat victimization, in this case the alleged victimization of children.1 Meanwhile Ellice Hopkins’s private letters make it clear that one reason she opposed prostitution was that it made working-class girls want something better than jobs as servants, and true to her class she was genuinely concerned about ensuring an abundant supply of obedient and cheap domestic help.2 Hopkins was interested in freeing women from sexual coercion, but she was singularly unconcerned about other sorts of coercion, especially when the women involved were not middle class. Lower class women were permitted limited freedom from coercive measures only if they made the politically correct, morally pure choice—not to be prostitutes. This point is made chillingly clear in a statement from Hopkins’s social purity tract, The Ride of Death which Jeffreys actually quotes in The Spinster and her Enemies, apparently without noticing its meaning. ‘Ay I know that it is often the woman who tempts;’ Ellice Hopkins writes,

these poor creatures [i.e. prostitutes] must tempt or starve. But that does not touch the broad issue, that it is men who endow the degradation of women; it is men who, making the demand, create the supply. Stop the money of men and the whole thing would be starved out in three months time (Jeffreys, 1985:14). The choice is between purity or starvation. Though women are depicted here as the passive ‘supply’ in a ‘demand’-led sexual economy, as the degraded victims of male lust, Hopkins is strangely without compunctions about subjecting ‘these poor creatures’ to economic coercion to make them submit to social purity aims. The very terms Jeffreys uses to describe the social purity programme seem designed to conceal its supporters’ complicity in repression. Social purity feminists were, she writes, committed to giving women ‘real choices around sexuality’, to ensuring for them the ‘right to bodily integrity’ (Jeffreys, 1985:4–5). These sound at the outset like standard feminist tenets: indeed, who could disagree with them? But a closer look reveals that, like the social purity activists of whom she writes, Jeffreys’ concept of ‘real choice’ is a surprisingly constraining one. Women who ‘choose’ heterosexuality, for example, are by

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definition not making a ‘real choice’. Indeed it is not apparent that any genital sexuality constitutes a ‘real choice’. The women whom Jeffreys cites approvingly, women like Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Lucy Re-Bartlett or Frances Swiney, favoured a sexuality which was almost entirely confined to the spiritual plane. As they argued repeatedly, genital sexuality was animal, while ‘psychic’ or ‘spiritual’ sexuality represented women’s (and men’s) higher destiny (Jeffreys, 1985:32, 36–45). A ‘League of Isis’ founded by Francis Swiney had as one of its rules ‘[keeping] as far as possible by individual effort, the Temple of the Body pure and undefiled; raising sex relations from the physical to the spiritual plane, and dedicating the creative life in the body to the highest uses…’ (Jeffreys, 1985:38). Lucy Re-Bartlett developed a stage theory of human evolution which moved from a phase characterized by the ‘uncritical simplicity of the instinct’ (a phase she dubbed ‘spiritual childhood’) to the higher plane of entirely spiritual love. In her view ‘Sex union in the human being should be limited strictly to the actual needs of creation’ (Jeffreys, 1985:41). In the social purity world-view genital sexuality is acceptable largely (and in the view of some, solely) for purposes of reproduction. As one advances through Jeffreys’ lengthy celebration of psychic love, the suspicion grows that this view still has at least one modern-day adherent among revolutionary feminists, and not just when the genital sexuality being referred to is heterosexual. Despite Jeffreys’ stated commitment to ‘a world where many more women would choose to be lesbian’ (Jeffreys, 1985:196) there are no more body-positive lesbians in this book than there are undeluded sex-positive heterosexuals. Jeffreys is utterly uncritical towards the remarkable revival of mind/body dualism enshrined in the concept of ‘psychic love’, one which would gladden the hearts of men like the Apostle Paul, St Augustine, or René Descartes. Indeed she goes out of her way to disparage Dora Russell’s attempt to reconcile the mind/body split (Russell: To me the important task of modern feminism is to accept and proclaim sex; to bury…the lie that the body is a hindrance to the mind…To understand sex—to bring it to dignity and beauty and knowledge born of science…’), dismissing her with the dishonest charge, ‘She [Russell] was not concerned with women’s right not to engage in sex with men’ (Jeffreys, 1985:158). Jeffreys’ most astounding departure from a feminist understanding of ‘real choices around sexuality’ is in her thinly veiled hostility to early twentieth-century birth-control activists and by extension the entire birth-control project in the past and present. In her view birth-control reformers like Stella Browne or Dora Russell, though they had some sympathy for women’s needs, were finally the dupes of the labour movement and of male sexologists, especially sexologists like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, against whom Jeffreys nurses a particular animus and whom she sees as a kind of male homosexual cabal. Birth control itself is simply ‘first aid’ (read ‘retrograde’) or worse, part of a wider conspiracy to force women to have sexual intercourse by taking away their main excuse for avoiding it—fear of pregnancy. Jeffreys, like her social purity activists, sees ‘the avoidance of sexual intercourse as a more effective and palatable form of contraception than…artificial methods.’ The choice is between purity and pregnancy. Once more it is the Victims’ who end up having to pay (Jeffreys, 1985:157–61).

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Many of the women whom Jeffreys wants us to claim as our spiritual foremothers had a genuine desire to end the sexual victimization of women, but this was mingled with some considerably less palatable views. Feminists will not argue with the principle that no woman should be coerced into submitting to sexual intercourse. The problem with these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social purity women was that they had difficulty conceiving of, indeed were repelled by any woman actively desiring sexual intercourse at all. They were, in fact, far more comfortable with the idea of woman as total victim, since in that role she could be represented as being devoid of any unclean desires at all. The ‘right to bodily integrity’ was the purely negative right not to be physically penetrated by a man. It was not the positive right to choose with whom one would be physically intimate, to determine the acts in which one would engage, or to have sex without fear of pregnancy. ‘Bodily integrity’ was, in short, an obligation, not a ‘right’ in the sense that most of us understand that term. The social purity feminists feared and loathed independent female sexuality as much as Baden-Powell or the evangelical men’s purity leagues did, and they were every bit as willing to use coercion to stamp it out. Social purity feminists ultimately failed to achieve their larger objectives, and it is revealing to see Jeffreys try to account for this. One might have expected her to place part of the blame for the demise of social purity feminism on reactionary elements within social purity generally. After all, the ultimate aim of the reactionaries (to strengthen Empire, the patriarchal family, and the class system) and those of feminists (to work for a better position for women) were somewhat divergent. However, because she is fully aware that the working programme of the more reactionary social purity activists and the social purity feminists was almost identical, even if their ends sometimes differed, she cannot bring herself to formulate a serious indictment of the conservatives. Instead she blames two other groups, socialists and sex reformers. For Jeffreys, socialism and feminism, as she defines it, are simply not compatible, either in the past or the present. Socialist feminists of the early twentieth century, constrained by having to work with men and the Labour Party, were diverted away from ‘real’ feminist issues, like the attack on male sexuality, into ‘welfarism’ and organizing around working women. Sex reformers, particularly male homosexuals, played an even more central role in the decline of social purity feminism. Sex reformers not only made the error of arguing that genital sexuality was not inherently bad, but they advocated sexual fulfilment for women in marriage, thus pulling the rug out from under the social purity critique of sexuality in general. Jeffreys believes that sex reform represented a new form of mind control, a way to bind women even more closely to marriage and male sexual abuse than they had been before. Though the heterosexist bias of much, though by no means all, late nineteenthand early twentieth-century sex reform is undeniable, Jeffreys’ argument is undercut at this point by what she conveniently neglects to tell her readers, namely that conservative social purity forces, those same people she is so reluctant to criticize in her book, supported an even more overtly male supremacist model of marriage than the sex reformers did. But no matter. For Jeffreys the conservatives clearly make better bedfellows, even, or especially, if the love is only spiritual (Jeffreys, 1985:84–5, 128–64).

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Social purity in the 1980s Today, fears about national decline and military weakness are widespread in both Britain and the USA, though they take different forms in the two countries. There is a growing temptation, not confined to the right-wing fringe, to attribute the ills of both nations to some combination of feminism, the sexual revolution, the ready availability of pornography, and the rise of a gay and lesbian movement. Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic has not only encouraged the tendency to see uncontrolled sexuality as one of the major causes of social disorder but inspired a whole host of repressive actions by governments worldwide, actions aimed especially at sexual minorities, racial minorities and prostitutes. All the elements of a classic sexual panic have moved into position. The social purity programmes which have arisen in response to this perceived crisis are both depressingly traditional and, in their way, quite modern. In eighteenth-century England moral reformers declared war on sodomites and prostitutes; today the British government is on a quest to eliminate ‘pretend families’, AIDS patients are shunned or poorly treated, and right-wing publications call for HIV-positive people to be placed in concentration camps. Eighteenth-century churchmen tried to censor obscene books and graffiti; in the modern day moral vigilante groups have gone after album covers, rock n’ roll lyrics, and gay poetry. Present-day social purity forces, like those of the past, rely heavily upon the rhetoric of sexual victimization and they often exploit it for antifeminist purposes. A striking American example of this is the recent Meese Commission on Pornography. The Meese Commission was a US Attorney General’s commission (somewhat akin to a Royal commission) convened at the special request of President Reagan in 1985 to ‘determine the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States, and to make specific recommendations to the Attorney General concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained, consistent with constitutional guarantees’ (Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission, 1986:3). The Commission came in direct response to New Right agitation for greater controls on sexual expression. It forms part of a larger New Right and, increasingly, a mainstream Republican attack upon the gains made in the last twenty-five years by people of colour, women, and lesbians and gays in the USA. This challenge had included the official condoning of antiblack and antigay violence, across-the-board cuts in social welfare programmes, presidential support of tax credits for all-white private schools and, most recently, in a Supreme Court heavy with Reagan appointees, successful attacks on women’s right to abortion and on the enforcement of civil rights. How do arguments about sexual victimization fit into the Meese Commission’s deliberations, and how, if at all, do they intersect with feminist, as opposed to New Right principles? The Commission transcripts contain quite a few testimonials about the victimization and degradation of women by men, among them statements by leading antipornography feminist, Andrea Dworkin. They contain almost as many testifying to the alleged victimization of men by women: The Woman whose House is Death’ still lurks in the fantasies of the Meese Commissioners even as it did among their eighteenthand nineteenth-century predecessors. And what some of the Commissioners mean by degradation bears little resemblance to feminist understandings of that term. Degradation follows from any sexual act not sanctified by marriage and not tied to

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reproduction (shades of Lucy Re-Bartlett). Women and men are degraded and victimized by engaging in, reading about, or viewing on film teenage or premarital sex, lesbian or gay sex, or sex with a vibrator (one of the proposed recommendations of the Commission, though not one that was finally approved by the full group, was to ban vibrators) (Vance, 1986:65, 77–9). Many of the people responsible for gathering the Commission together, including some of the Commission members, also see as degrading any and all nudity, oral sex, masturbation, sex in which any of the parties uses birth control, sex which leads to abortion, and sex in any position but the missionary position (Vance, 1986:79). The people behind the Commission are some of the same people who are demanding the closure of shelters for battered women (because they encourage women to abandon marriage), stringent crackdowns on lesbian and gay publications, social institutions, and civil liberties, ending teenagers’ access to birth-control devices and information, and banning all abortions under any circumstances whatsoever. What radical feminists who have allowed their work to be used by groups like these seem to be anticipating is either that this social purity movement is going to be converted to feminism, or that it will manage to institute some measures, like the banning of pornography, which will, in their view, benefit women regardless of who administers the laws. The first of these is highly unlikely; the second deeply problematic. The lesson of past social purity movements is that conservatives end up co-opting feminists, not the other way around. The fact that conservatives use the rhetoric of woman as victim to buttress their reactionary message means little. This brand of rhetoric has always been used more readily to confine and ‘protect’ women within patriarchal institutions and justify repressive measures against them than to ensure their safety or their personal autonomy. And it indicates incredible naivety for lesbians, in particular, to think that it makes no real difference who controls the definition of obscenity or, for that matter, the definition of what constitutes degradation and victimization. And lastly, the question needs to be asked, just what would we get in the unlikely event that feminists (and one presumes it would be very specific radical or revolutionary feminists) did get a place on the boards of censorship, the vice squads or the other repressive institutions modern conservatives both in the USA and Britain are champing at the bit to establish?

Revolutionary feminism as a modern-day social purity movement Sheila Jeffreys is right. There are striking parallels between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social purity feminists and revolutionary feminism today. The key similarity lies in revolutionary feminism’s (and, in the US, radical feminism’s) view of sex. In recent years this wing of the movement has decisively abandoned broader, more complex analyses of oppression and exploitation for the argument that the specifically sexual victimization of women constitutes the basis upon which the entire system of male supremacy (and by extension all other oppression) is constructed. According to this view, expressed analytically in terms like American radical feminist Julia Penelope’s ‘heteropatriarchy’ (Penelope, 1986), most sex acts that occur in the world are irrevocably

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corrupted or corrupting. In particular, heterosexual sex, which is indistinguishable from rape, supplies the paradigm for all other forms of oppression, and in an endlessly worked out dialectic, perpetuates and reflects the oppressive structures we see all around us. Revolutionary feminists tend to conceive of all of reality as a sort of gigantic pornographic movie in which the main scene revolves around rape. In the words of American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, one of revolutionary feminism’s major influences, speaking here about pornography:

Male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting;…sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history’ (Dworkin, 1979:69). It goes without saying that explanations for oppression that invoke economics, or ones that use analytic categories like class or race, or ones that see male power in a more complicated way than simply the ethos of abusive heterosexual sex writ large, play little or no part in this world-view. With a cosmology like the one just mentioned one might think this wing of the women’s movement would be antisex, and it has sometimes been accused of being so. But this is not quite true. Like past social purity theorists revolutionary feminists consider some kinds of sex to be acceptable. In fact they are convinced that by pushing a purified sexual practice they can break out of the rape dialectic which has the world in its grip. Pure sex is politically correct sex. It is a kind of sex which radically rejects anything which by word or deed, by image, or by suggestion might seem to perpetuate victimization. But since victimization is so very broadly conceived in this system, containing within its compass the vast majority of the sex acts and sexual representations that occur in the world, and most, perhaps all male/female interactions, this is no easy task. Pure sex includes sexual asceticism or continence for both women and men. It also includes intense friendships for one or several other women, not involving genital contact (Raymond, 1986:73–114), a sort of updated version of psychic love. And it apparently includes a purified form of lesbianism, though revolutionary feminists are better at saying what lesbian physicality is not than what it is. Pure lesbian sexuality is not lesbianism infected with phallocentric fantasies or phallic objects (e.g., dildoes). It is not role-playing (butch/fem). And it is emphatically not anything suggesting dominance and submission (an ever-proliferating hit-list of sexual acts, styles of dress, and erotic reading preferences). The status of many acts still remains unclear. Some consider vibrators acceptable as long as they are not the elongated type which you can insert. Many people are unsure as to how much leather you have to be wearing in what style and colour to be one of those ‘women in fascist regalia’ not welcome at a growing number of feminist events. And there is the perennial problem of distinguishing a butch from someone who simply looks androgynous. Politically correct sex demands constant

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vigilance over oneself and over others. The less confident among us might well conclude that an entirely spiritual love represented the safest course. The more sceptical might wonder what, if anything, all this had to do with social change. Revolutionary feminism has a programme of action which any late nineteenth-century social purity activist would recognize: first, protecting women from male lust, and second, purifying sexual relations in the movement itself (tomorrow the world!). With respect to male lust these new social purity feminists have now taken the fairly traditional lesbian/feminist suspicion of heterosexuality to new lengths. Some revolutionary feminists are now arguing that there are almost no circumstances under which heterosexuality is an acceptable sexual choice. Sheila Jeffreys herself has suggested that one feminist aim should be to try to discourage women from having orgasms with men because this represent in her words the ‘eroticization of their own oppression’ (Jeffreys, 1986). She and other revolutionary feminists want to get away from the earlier feminist stress on birth control because they see it as a crutch to keep women in sexual thraldom to men. The other front on the war against male lust is of course the antipornography movement, also that area where some feminists have been willing to co-operate with neoconservative groups. Most of us—some of us to our great personal distress—are familiar with the attempts revolutionary and radical feminists have made to purify sexual practices within the British and North American women’s movements. These have included hostility to butch/fem relationships, the systematic defaming of lesbians who do sado-masochism coupled with efforts to excommunicate them from the movement, attempts to hinder political alliances between lesbians and gay men, and a pointedly suspicious attitude toward feminists who sleep with men. The resemblance to past social purity practice is, once more, striking. It can be seen most readily in the revolutionary feminist insistence that only a very few kinds of sexuality are acceptable, and that even a suggestion of other kinds whether via the printed word or by other sorts of representations including the clothes one wears, poses a clear and present danger to women. Revolutionary feminism is similar also to older moral purity movements in its tendency to attribute tremendous power to sex, and especially to ‘deviant’ sex, to define the entirety of the rest of the practitioner’s life. This is true whether one is talking about heterosexuality, the new ‘deviant sexuality’ for revolutionary feminists, or sado-masochism, an old ‘deviant sexuality’ they’ve hit upon because it suits their current purpose. It used to be said, and not so very long ago either, that homosexuality went along with an uncontrollable desire to molest small children, suicidal and homicidal tendencies, and an inability to think of anything except sex. These assertions were buttressed by very complex, symbolically rich analogies between sexual acts that people were alleged to engage in, and the rest of their lives. Using equally absurd logic revolutionary feminists claim that lesbians who practice SM have no problems with rape, wife battering, or the sexual abuse of children, and suggest repeatedly that were the Nazis to reappear tomorrow, people who practice SM would be the first to sign up for duty in the camps.3 The persistent and thoroughly erroneous attempts to link lesbian SM to Britain’s fascist National Front fit in with this pattern. It has apparently still not occurred to revolutionary feminists to wonder why any lesbian would be drawn to a movement that would like to wipe out all lesbians and gays, quite apart from the National Front’s other

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racist, anti-Semitic, antiwoman and antiworking-class aims. But quite apart from revolutionary feminists’ cavalier attitude to the facts, claims like these raise some serious ethical questions. Revolutionary feminists are perfectly aware that lesbians who do SM, like other women, experience a multitude of forms of oppression based on their gender, race, class and sexual preference. They know that lesbians who practice SM are just as likely as any other women to have been victims of rape, incest and physical abuse. And finally they know that lesbians who practice SM, like other women, have come to the movement out of their experiences as women, and that they have contributed to and continue to be involved in every part of the women’s movement. Yet revolutionary feminists repeatedly accuse them of condoning, or worse, encouraging crimes against women. They try to transform them into nonwomen, nonlesbians, nonfeminists and nonhuman beings. Why, after all, did the Nazi analogy arise at all? When people reach for such extreme rhetoric one instinctively looks for what is churning around underneath. The fear revolutionary feminists feel has to do with the question of who SM lesbians really are. Sheila Jeffreys et. al ., would like to make us think that there is a clearly definable group of lesbians who spend every waking minute devising weirdly oppressive scenes with whips and handcuffs, buying out leather shops and plotting to put one another in the hospital. If this clearly identifiable group can be purged the movement will be ‘pure,’ or at least ‘purer’. Reality is, as usual, rather different. Some people are certainly attracted to leather, handcuffs, spanking, etc., though not unremarkably these same people spend most of their waking minutes doing the same thing everyone else does: going to their jobs, paying their rent, dealing with their families, lovers, friends, doing politics, and trying to make their way. They certainly do not plot to put people in the hospital. Safe sex has always played a central part in SM culture, and people who are a part of that culture are much more knowledgeable about and likely to practice safe sex of all kinds than the average lesbian or straight woman (gay and lesbian AIDS activists have repeatedly turned to the SM community for models of how to develop clear sexual information and ethical norms around sexuality and safety that people will actually use to change their behaviour). But even more troubling to the revolutionary feminist, because more inchoate and hard to identify, are all the other lesbians, most of whom have never seen a whip or handcuffs and who may have no interest in leather, but who engage in acts that are difficult or impossible to distinguish from SM. (By the way, people into leather are not necessarily into SM, and vice versa.) A lot of us have, at one time or another, gotten off on giving someone else pleasure while holding back on our own, or played at wrestling, or wanted to take the initiative, or looked forward to giving it up entirely. SM involves creating (or taking advantage of) temporary power differentials in order to heighten sexual arousal. These differentials can be, usually are, very subtle. They can also, through role-playing and the use of various props, be made to seem quite extreme. The line between SM and ‘vanilla’, despite what some individuals from both sides of the debate have claimed, is very indistinct. Large numbers of women occasionally engage in acts which by some peoples’ definition would be SM. They just don’t talk about them, either because they don’t want to call down criticism upon themselves, or because they don’t

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think of them as SM. Others engage in SM with one lover but not with another. Still others like to read about some kinds of SM but have no interest in acting out what they read. None of these people have turned into Nazis overnight as a result of what they like to do or fantasize about. The constructing of lesbians who do SM as a group separate from and less human than everyone else, a group totally unworthy of consideration, a colony of sexual lepers, is essentially a move to intimidate ‘all the rest of us’ into letting someone else define what is acceptable sexual practice. It is precisely to make us wonder exactly what ‘fascist regalia’ is (that fake-leather vest my aunt gave me? maybe I can get away with that because it’s partly crocheted—no, better not chance it). It is to get us worrying about whether what we like to do, or might like to try in bed is politically correct (I’d better not suggest that, she’ll think I’m sick). It is to keep us tied to the most cautious, conformist, guilt-ridden and rigid of personal, ideological and sexual styles by making a painful example of people who don’t fit the mould. Who, after all, wants to be treated like a sexual leper? For revolutionary feminists victimization is so pervasive that conditional consent to, negotiation around or localized resistance to any part of what they define as the system of oppression is impossible. To think one can do any of these things is simply a form of false consciousness. Like many contemporary socialists, socialist feminists, and poststructuralists, revolutionary feminists lay a heavy emphasis upon the pervasiveness of power, the complexity of the ideological systems that reinforce it, and the way these infect our most intimate thoughts. However, unlike the former groups, who typically see power relations as being in a constant state of flux and historical renegotiation, revolutionary feminists see power relations as static, ahistorical, not susceptible to alteration by the people who are victimized by them. There can be neither resistance nor autonomous decision-making from within the system. All change must come from outside, and it must be on their terms. This presumption of total powerlessness gives rise to the final, and most disturbing parallel between revolutionary feminism and social purity activism, their shared willingness to resort to coercion, not only against the victimizer, but against his or her victim. This victim, it is said, is so caught up in her victimization she cannot know what she is doing, and must be saved, if necessary against what she thinks is her will.4 The history of social purity shows clearly that people who focus upon sexual victimization as the root of the problem (rather than as part or symptom of a larger problem) tend to be unusually willing to infringe on other people’s freedoms, whether a woman’s freedom to control her own sexuality and reproductive capacities or freedom of the press. Revolutionary feminists have indeed turned decisively away from the early radical feminist principle of sexual freedom, as is indicated both by their hostility to heterosexuality as a personal choice and their growing antipathy to birth control, not to mention their loathing for any kind of sex they consider ‘incorrect’. As Sheila Jeffreys herself remarked at a recent conference in the States, ‘personal freedom is not the sort of thing that fits into my idea of what we can do around sexuality’.5 A recent example of feminists in the UK abandoning freedom of the press is the brand new Campaign Against Pornography, heavily influenced by revolutionary feminist thought. CAP argues that porn plays a causal role in job discrimination, violence against

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This is a flyer from the Campaign Against Pornography urging action. Very much for public consumption, it recommends a broad-based system of economic boycotts but declines to mention the organization’s support for the statutory abolition of obscenity. (1989)

women and the conditioning of women to be subordinate. In response to the argument that porn cannot be banned because it cannot be strictly defined, a recent CAP position paper pushed for the adoption of a definition of porn taken almost verbatim from Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s notorious 1983 Minneapolis ordinance, a type of law which was subsequently struck down in US federal court on the grounds that it constituted an infringement of freedom of the press.6 Then, claiming that they are ‘totally against censorship in every form’ the authors go on to argue that what censorship ‘really’ is is porn itself, since it limits women’s freedom, including their freedom of expression. Therefore porn, like murder and rape, must be eliminated by direct legislation. Through this imaginative redefining of terms one can be ‘totally against censorship’ yet be in favour of banning pornography. It is worth noting that what is being suggested here is even more sweeping than the local ordinances proposed in the USA (Campaign Against Pornography, 1988:272). It would involve the direct legislative elimination of porn, with all the vast law enforcement apparatus that would require, as opposed to simply permitting individuals, offended by a piece of pornography to bring suit in civil court against its makers, sellers, or distributors. This approach is not only misguided, it is diversionary. Degrading representations of women are all over the place. Why focus simply on the sexually explicit ones? One reason, surely, is that revolutionary feminists think sexually explicit material will be easier to eradicate than, say, TV commercials which, however, far more people actually see. So, to eliminate a tiny proportion of the degrading images, revolutionary feminists like Sheila Jeffreys, American radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, and groups like CAP are willing to put themselves at the mercy of conservative ideologues who possess a very different conception of degradation than do most feminists.

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Feminists should be casting their nets both more carefully and more widely. It is madness to put new repressive tools into the hands of the state at a time when conservatism is riding high (perhaps at any time). A better strategy, which some feminists in both England and North America are already pursuing, is to infiltrate the TV and radio networks, develop alternative media, formulate subtler and better analyses of the intersections of power and representation, break straight white male monopolies on all kinds of image production, not just pornography, and make coalitions with other groups traditionally excluded from the making of images. These new social purity feminists are reluctant to embark on this larger course however, and it is time to ask ourselves why.

A new course? First, a change of course would require that revolutionary feminists confront differences of opinion. For example, some women like and feel empowered by pornography. They like reading or watching it, and they like producing it. No one disagrees that a lot of porn is male-centred, woman-hating and racist, it would be strange, in a male-centred, woman-hating, racist world if this were not true; the same after all, could be said about mainstream television, or religion, or western literature. Plenty of people, including many feminists, doubt that porn is inherently that way, simply because it is sexually explicit, and increasing numbers of them are actively involved in producing porn which is woman-centred, woman-loving, and antiracist. Most revolutionary feminists refuse to get involved in discussions with these people because they don’t want to give up their right to dictate what other women’s preferences should be. Taking a different course would mean having to listen respectfully to women whose life experiences differ profoundly from theirs and who have a different take on life, sex, sexuality, oppression, and men than they do. Encountering diversity of opinion, really listening to what a wide range of women—and even some men—have to say, might mean revolutionary feminists would have to reassess their own position as to what constitutes oppression. They might have to begin to take seriously victimization based on race, class, nationality and immigrant status, and recognize the fact that for many women these and other factors play at least as powerful a role in their lives as gender does. In the face of more complex, multivalent experiences and analyses, even with a greater familiarity with competing theories of gender oppression, revolutionary feminists might have to face squarely the unbelievably reductionist character of the stress on sexuality alone. Having been forced to abandon the idea that there is a ‘universal women’s experience’ with which they alone are in touch, revolutionary feminists might actually have to consider making alliances. They might have to spend some time on issues which primarily affect working-class women, or black women, or women in Third World countries, or even gay men or men of colour. They might have to compromise themselves by spending a little time on an issue which doesn’t touch them directly or speak plainly to their own personal experience of victimization. They might even have to spend some time fighting forms of oppression which affect both men and women. They would have to embrace a theory of social change which relies on rich analyses and

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diverse coalitions, instead of on simple solutions which require straight, rich, white, conservative men to carry them out. In the final analysis what we need to do as feminists is not to protect women (or get others to do it for us on their terms) but to empower them, erotically as well as politically, economically and spiritually. But in doing this we need to be aware that to empower people is to let them develop their own course, it is not simply to breed up clones to a single political perspective. To embrace one’s own and others’ empowerment is to embrace diversity (including sexual diversity), theoretical complexity, and strategies based on coalitions, not on a self-styled revolutionary vanguard that considers itself purer and more politically correct than everyone else. The course I’m suggesting is not an easy one, but it holds out a far better chance of liberating women—all women—than the one social purity feminists of the past or of the present would have us choose.

Notes Margaret Hunt has worked for the last fifteen years as a fundraiser, counsellor and collective member in shelters and other women’s projects throughout the United States. Her work has focused on violence against women, welfare advocacy, lesbian and gay issues, adult literacy, racism, and the concerns of low-income women. She has published articles on battered women, on grassroots fundraising, on feminist theory, on lesbian and gay issues and on women’s history, and is the co-author of a book entitled Life Skills for Women in Transition (1982). She currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she teaches history and women’s studies. I would like to thank the following people for their comments and criticisms at different stages of the writing of this paper: Cindy Patton, Sue O’Sullivan, Sigrid Nielsen, Jill Lewis, Catherine Hall, Richard Wilson and Judith Walkowitz. The opinions expressed in it are, of course, my own. 1 Jeffreys is noncommittal about Hopkins’s willingness to, in Jeffreys’ words, ‘endorse some actions which infringed upon the civil liberties of [prostitutes],’ possibly because of her (Jeffreys’) own sense that issues of personal liberty are largely irrelevant to the liberation of women (see below). For a more thorough discussion of the impact of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act and of Hopkins’s enthusiasm for authoritarian tactics see Walkowitz, 1980:211, 238–44. 2 Here, for example, is the way that Hopkins expresses concern about the sensationalism of some moral purity propaganda: ‘those dear friends of ours are adding to the love of excitement that makes our little girls find the only respectable life open to them [i.e., domestic service] simply intolerable, and that loathsome “five pounds” [for an act of prostitution] irresistible’ (Walkowitz, 1987). I am grateful to Judith Walkowitz for allowing me to consult some of her unpublished work and for her sympathetic guidance on the subject of Hopkins’s life and ideas. 3 For a typical example of the identification of lesbian SM with Nazism and violence against women see Jeffreys, 1986. This theme is, however, ubiquitous in radical feminist writing about SM. I am grateful to Gayle Rubin for bringing the Jeffreys article to my attention.

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4 In the US the most striking example of this kind of activity has been the willingness of some radical feminists to assist vice squads in rounding up prostitutes. See for example The West Side Spirit for 17 June 1985 where Captain Jerome Piazzo of the Manhattan South Public Morals Division quotes statistics on call girls in Manhattan, noting that they were provided to him by Women Against Pornography. I am grateful to Joan Nestle for bringing this article to my attention. 5 Jeffreys, ‘The Eroticization of Women’s Subordination…’ (quote taken verbatim from tape of speech and subsequent discussion. Feminism, Sexuality and Power conference, Mount Holyoke College, 30 October 1986. 6 I am especially indebted here to Duggan, Hunter and Vance (1985). I am very conscious of having left Canada entirely out of my discussion of social purity, and especially of pornography. Readers who would like to find out what the recent intensification of censorship (supported by many feminists) has done for Canada are directed to Burstyn (1985).

References BAHLMAN, Dudley W.R. (1957) The Moral Revolution of 1688, New Haven: Yale University Press. BRAY, Alan (1982) Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men’s Press. BRISTOW, Edward (1977) Vice and Vigilance; Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700, Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, Rowman & Littlefield. BURSTYN, Varda (1985) editor, Women Against Censorship, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. CAMPAIGN AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY (1988) Policy Statement in CHESTER and DICKEY (1988). CAPLAN, Jane, De GRAZIA, Victoria, FRADER, Laura and HOWELL, Martha (1989) ‘Patrolling the Border: Feminist Historiography and the New Historicism’, Radical History Review 43. CHESTER, Gail and DICKEY, Julienne (1988) editors Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate, Bridport, Dorset: Prism. CRAIG, A.G. (1980) ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. DUGGAN, Lisa, HUNTER, Nan and VANCE, Carole, S. (1985) ‘False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation in the U.S.’ in BURSTYN (1985), pp. 130–51. DWORKIN, Andrea (1979) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Perigee Books. FINAL REPORT TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S COMMISSION ON PORNOGRAPHY (1986) Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press. FOXON, David (1965) Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745, New Hyde Park, NY: University Books. HILLCOURT, William with BADEN-POWELL, Lady Olave (1964) Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero, London: Heinemann. ISAACS, Tina Beth (1979) ‘Moral Crime, Moral Reform, and the State in Early Eighteenth Century England: A Study of Piety and Politics’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Rochester. JEFFREYS, Sheila (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930, London, Boston and Henley: Pandora Press.

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JEFFREYS, Sheila (1986) ‘Sado-masochism: The Erotic Cult of Fascism’, Lesbian Ethics Vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 65–82. PENELOPE, Julia (1986) ‘Controlling Interests and Consuming Passions: Sexual Metaphors’, unpublished talk delivered at the Feminism, Sexuality and Power conference at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 27 October 1986. RAYMOND, Janice (1986) A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, Boston: Beacon Press. ROSENTHAL, Michael (1986) The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement, New York: Pantheon Books. VANCE, Carole S. (1986) ‘Porn in the U.S.A: The Meese Commission on the Road’, The Nation Vol. 243, 2 August, pp. 65–79. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1980) Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1987) ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, unpublished paper. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1989) Untitled presentation in CAPLAN, De GRAZIA, FRADER and HOWELL (1989) pp. 26–7. WOODWARD, Josiah, (1704) Rebuke to the Sin of Uncleanness, London.

TALKING ABOUT IT: Homophobia in the Black Community

A dialogue between Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith Barbara: One of the things we’ve been asked to talk about is how homophobia affects Black women’s mental health. I think that in addition to affecting lesbians’ emotional health, homophobia also affects the mental health of heterosexual people. In other words, being homophobic is not a healthy state for people to be in. It’s just like being a racist. I don’t think that most Blacks or other people of colour would vouch for the mental health of somebody who is a rabid and snarling racist. Because that’s like dismissing a part of the human family. Particularly within the African American community, when we are so embattled, it’s just boloney to dismiss or say that a certain segment is expendable because of their sexual orientation. Anyone who would do that hasn’t grown up, they’re just not mature. I think that homophobia, particularly rabidly and violently expressed homophobia, is a sign of arrested development. And I mean that quite seriously. (Laughter) Because a well-adjusted heterosexual doesn’t care what anybody else is doing. Jewelle: I think it’s even more dangerous for people of colour to embrace homophobia than it is for whites to embrace racism, simply because we’re embattled psychologically and economically as an ethnic group. We leave ourselves in a very weakened position if we allow the system to pit us against each other. I also think it renders Black people politically smug. That’s the thing about homophobia, racism, antiSemitism, any of the ‘isms’—once you embrace those you tend to be kind of smug. Barbara: Not to say arrogant and overbearing. Jewelle: Yeah. And once you take a position of smugness you lose your fighting edge. I think Afro-Americans who’ve taken the position of ‘we are the major victim in this society and nobody else has suffered like we’ve suffered’, lose their edge. They don’t have the perspective that will allow us to fight through all the issues.


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Barbara: Right. From the time we get here, we are steeped in the knowledge that we are the victims of a really bigoted and racist society. That’s really good sense for us. It represents a grasp on reality and a clear understanding of what it means to be Black in the United States. But we also have to acknowledge that there are ways that we can be oppressive to other groups whose identities we don’t share. So I think that one of the challenges we face in trying to raise the issue of lesbian and gay identity within the Black community is to try to get our people to the place where they see that they can indeed oppress someone after having spent a life seeing themselves as being oppressed. I mean that’s a very hard transition to make. Jewelle: At this point it seems almost impossible because the issue of sexism has become such a major stumbling block for the Black community. I think we saw the beginning of it in the 1970s with Ntozake Shange’s play For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The play really prompted Black women to embrace the idea of independent thinking, to begin looking at each other for sustenance and to start appreciating and celebrating each other in ways that we’ve always done naturally. I think that the Black male community was so horrified to discover too that they were not at the centre of Black women’s thoughts, that they could only perceive the play as a negative attack upon themselves. I think that for the first time, that play made the Black community look at its sexism. And many people rejected Ntozake Shange and things having to do with feminism in a very cruel way. So I don’t think we should be surprised about homophobia. It sneaks in in a very subtle and destructive way. Because as far as I can tell, homosexuality has always been an intrinsic part of the Black community. When I was growing up, everyone always knew who was gay. When the guys came to my father’s bar, I knew which ones were gay. It was clear as day. For instance, there was Miss Kay who was a big queen, and Maurice. These were people that everybody knew. They came and went in my father’s bar just like everybody else. This was a so-called lower-class community—the working poor in Boston. It was a community in which people did not talk about who was gay, but I knew who the lesbians were. It was always unspoken and I think that there’s something about leaving it unspoken that leaves us unprepared. Barbara: Indeed. That’s the breakpoint for this part of the twentieth century, as far as I’m concerned. There’ve been lesbians and gay men, Black ones, as long as there’ve been African people. So that’s not even a question. You know how they say that the human race was supposed to have been started by an African woman. Well, since she had so many children, some of them were undoubtedly queer. (Laughter) Black lesbian writer Ann Allen Shockley has a wonderful line about that, which I use often: ‘Play it, but don’t say it.’ That’s the line that capsulizes the general stance of the Black community on sexual identity and orientation. If you’re a lesbian, you can have as many women as you want. If you’re a gay man, you can have all the men you want. But just don’t say anything about it or make it political. The difference today is that the lesbian and gay movement prides itself on being out, on verbalizing one’s identity and organizing around our oppression. With the advent of this movement, the African American community has really been confronted with some stuff that they’ve never had

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to deal with before. That’s why they’re so upset. I grew up in Cleveland in a community very similar to the one you described. Today the issue is not whether gay people have been here since forever, but that we are saying that you have to deal with us differently than before. That’s what contemporary Black gay and lesbian activists are doing. And the Black community doesn’t like it one bit. (Laughter) Jewelle: I was thinking as you were saying that, that if one embraces the principle of liberation, gay liberation and feminism, then you have to assault the sexual stereotype that young Black girls have been forced to live out in the African American community. The stereotype that mandates that you develop into the well-groomed Essence girl who pursues a profession and a husband. Or the snappy baby machine. You tend to go one way or the other. You’re either fast or you’re well groomed. (Laughter) I think that for so many young Black women, the idea of finding their place in society has been defined by having a man or a baby. And, usually, these two things don’t come together. So if you begin to espouse a proud lesbian growth, you find yourself going against the grain. That makes embracing your lesbianism doubly frightening, because you then have to discard the mythology that’s been developed around what it means to be a young Black woman. Barbara: And that you got to have a man. The urgency of which probably can’t even be conveyed on the printed page. (Laughter) I was just going to talk about being younger and meeting people who would want to know about me. Not so much about my sexual orientation, because they weren’t even dealing with the fact that somebody could be a lesbian. But I always noticed they were more surprised to find out I didn’t have children than that I wasn’t married. Marriage was not the operative thing. It was like, ‘Why don’t you have any children?’ That really made them curious. Jewelle: Right. They had no understanding at all that you could reach a certain age and not have any children. Barbara: Indeed. And not having children doesn’t mean we’re selfish. It means we’re self-referenced. Many Black lesbians and gay men have children. Those of us who don’t may not have had the opportunity. Or we may have made the conscious choice not to have children. One of the things about being a Black lesbian is that we’re very conscious. At least those of us who are politicized about what we will and will not have in our lives. Coming out is such a conscious choice that the process manifests itself in other areas of our lives. Jewelle: Yes, it’s healthy. Having grown up with a lot of Black women who had children at an early age, I’ve noticed a contradictory element in that that’s the way many of them come into their own. I have younger cousins who have two, three, four children and are not married and will probably never be married. It seems that the moment they have the baby is when they come into their own and everything after that is the longsuffering Black mother. I think it recreates a cycle of victimization because these young women carry the burden of being on a road that wasn’t really a conscious choice. On the other hand, when I look at Black lesbian mothers, I see that yes, many of them are

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struggling with their children. But there is also a sense of real choice because they’ve made a conscious decision to be out and have children. They are not long-suffering victims. They are not women who have been abandoned by their men. They are lesbian mothers who have made a place in the world that is not a victim’s place. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that things are any easier or simpler for them. For instance, they haven’t inherited any money. (Laughter) But there is a psychological difference because most Black lesbian mothers have made a choice and have a community they can look to for support. Barbara: Yes. In talking about choice, another thing we’ve been asked to address is why do people become lesbians, or why did we become lesbians, or why do we think there is such a thing as lesbianism? (Laughter). There was a notion in the early women’s movement that you could choose to be a lesbian. But I think the important point is whether you choose to be out, or to act on your lesbian feelings. Those of us who were coming out before there was a women’s or lesbian and gay movement, understand this a little bit better. I teach students who are in their early twenties and they really perceive their coming out as say, a political choice because they are doing it in such a supportive context. Those of us who were coming out just before Stonewall knew that we had the feelings, passion and lust for other women. We didn’t necessarily have a place for our feelings that felt safe. But we did know, and not because we read it in a book somewhere, that gay was good. Today people have women’s studies courses, out lesbian teachers, all kinds of stuff that we didn’t have. So they can indeed perceive their coming out as following in the footsteps of a role model. That’s something we just didn’t have. Jewelle: The only role model you might have had would be so far from who you were. As I’ve mentioned, I grew up in a bar community and I knew I was a lesbian when I was quite young. But the only available role models weren’t anything like who I thought I was going to be when I grew up. I knew I wasn’t going to be sitting in a bar all day or hustling on the streets. So what was I going to be? There were no other role models. Barbara: That was the complete terror. Talking about how homophobia and being a lesbian affects one’s mental health—I lived my adolescence and young adulthood in terror. I knew I was a lesbian too. But likewise I saw no way to act on it and stay on the path. This was a path that I had not necessarily chosen for myself, but that my family had worked very hard to give me the option of choosing. I’d think, ‘How the hell can I excel in school, go to college, graduate school…’ Jewelle: Be an exemplary Black woman. Barbara: Indeed. And then become lowlife by sleeping with women. I mean it just didn’t jibe. Some people think that when I came out during the women’s movement it was an easy thing. But I’d just like to say right here for the record, that from puberty on, I had screaming nightmares because I was having dreams of being sexual with women. I would wake up and my grandmother would be standing over me looking and I thought


she knew what I was dreaming. She knew that I was disturbed about something, even though I never revealed to her what it was. So, I was really terrified. Back to homophobia and how it affects our health—I think that conscious lesbianism, lived in a context of community, is a positive thing. It can be a really affirming choice for women. The connection to sexism is deep though. Homophobia is a logical extension of sexual oppression because sexual oppression is about roles—one gender does this, the other does that. One’s on top, the other is on the bottom. You can’t eradicate one without the other. Jewelle: I think the interconnection of racism and sexism has been so profound that we don’t even know how homophobia is going to be difficult for us as Black women. I’ve just recently begun to separate them out. I didn’t really come out through the women’s movement. For me my sexuality didn’t have a political context until later. I always had a sexual identity that I tried to sift out, but I was most concerned about how I was going to fit it in with being a Black Catholic, which was very difficult. Once I realized that one of them had to go—sexuality or Catholicism—it took me about five or ten minutes to drop Catholicism. (Laughter) Then I focused on racism, to the exclusion of homophobia and everything else. That left me unprepared. I had a woman lover very early. Then I slept with men until my mid-twenties. They were kind of like the entertainment until I found another girlfriend and got my bearings. I didn’t have the political context to deal with what it meant to want to sleep with both men and women. I kind of skipped past feminism until much later. So homophobia came as a total shock to me, because I had never experienced it. Nobody seemed to be homophobic in my community, because no one ever talked about it. I hadn’t experienced it because I wasn’t out. I didn’t know that I wasn’t out. But I wasn’t. Barbara: I think it’s easier for two Black women who are lovers to be together publicly than it is for a mixed couple. To me, that’s a dead giveaway because this is such a completely segregated society. Whenever I had a lover of a different race, I felt that it was like having a sign or a billboard over my head that said, These are dykes. Right here.’ Because you don’t usually see people of different races together in this country, it was almost by definition telling the world that we were lesbians. I think the same is true for interracial gay male couples. I attended a conference several years ago for women organizing around poverty and economic issues in the deep South. The women who came to the conference were, as a friend said, not the women who went to Sears to buy things. They could only afford to go to Woolworth’s or K-Mart to buy the new clothes they were wearing. They were wonderful Black women and they treated me gloriously. As usual, I was out as a lesbian at this conference. Homophobia was the one issue they had not considered as a barrier to women’s leadership. Funny thing, they skipped that. (Laughter) But there was a little group of white and Black lesbians and we raised the issue. We got up on the stage and read a statement about homophobia. Then we invited other lesbians and people in solidarity with us to stand up. Almost everybody in the room stood up. Later we were talking about the incident in our small groups and a woman said something I’ll never forget. She said that what we’d done had taken a lot of courage. And I have never

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forgotten those words because they came from a woman who was in a position to know the meaning of courage. She knew what it meant because she had been hounded by crazy white people all her life. For her to recognize our being out as courage meant a lot to me. Because it came from the horse’s mouth. Jewelle: That’s a very important point. I think that for those of us in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Albany, we have a certain leeway in being out. We have a diverse women’s community that supports us in our efforts to be honest about being lesbians. I find it sad that there is a larger proportion of Black lesbians in small, rural communities who won’t and can’t come out because they don’t have this support. I think they suffer an isolation and even a kind of perversion of their own desires. That’s one of the things that Ann Allen Shockley writes about so well—the Black lesbian who is isolated and psychically destroyed because she doesn’t have a positive reflection of herself. These are the stories that aren’t often told. Such Black lesbians don’t get many opportunities to share what is going on for them. Barbara: Yes, class is a factor, too. Jewelle: Certainly. Your whole view about what it means to be lesbian is coloured by whether you were able to get an education—to read different things about the experience. That’s one of the reasons I’d like to do some video stuff. My medium has primarily been literary—that’s a product of my education and my aspirations. But we can reach more Black women if we go to them where they are. Barbara: I’m as committed as you are to the written word. But I’ve thought about this for many, many years and I think that the basic thing is to get the word out. Not just about lesbian identity, but about liberation and freedom in general. We have to use every means necessary. I think that Kitchen Table Press will make audio-tapes eventually, because that’s a way of making our work more accessible. Another point I want to make is that the people who are not out and have the privilege of a good education and jobs need to be more accountable. There are Black lesbians all over this country and our existence poses a challenge to business as usual. It really bothers me that there are closeted people who are perceived as leaders within the Black community. This is something I find very annoying, because I think they are skating. Jewelle: Yes. They are skating on our efforts and devotion. It happens all the time. It’s comparable (and this is kind of a trivial thing) to musical artists like Donna Summer who make it to the top on the backs of gay people and then turn around and talk about AIDS as the retribution for our sins. This is the thing that pisses me off. Another thing we need to talk about is religion in the Black community and how it has been such a sustainer in our lives. I find it despicable and a desecration that our spiritual beliefs are perverted and used against Black gay people. Anyone who understands what the spirit of Christianity is supposed to be, would never use it against gays. Barbara: Love thy neighbour as thyself.


Jewelle: Right. Christianity does not say pick and choose which neighbours you’re going to love. And those biblical quotes that are used against Black gays need to be looked at in the context that the selfsame Bible has been used to depict Blacks as inhuman. Racists use Christianity against Black people and then Black people turn around and use Christianity against gays. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Barbara: Another thing I wanted to add is how the ‘Black Pack’ is functioning. They are of course, the young Black men who are getting over like fat rats in the Hollywood movie and television industry. People like Arsenio Hall, Eddie Murphy, etc. I think they are homophobic to their hearts. Jewelle: And sexist. I think it’s telling that Spike Lee, the most popular Black filmmaker in the country today, includes the rape of a Black woman in two of his films. Sexism is so pervasive in our community that we don’t even think of this as awful. Imagine what it feels like to sit in a Times Square movie theatre watching School Daze in which this Black woman is being raped. The so-called Black brothers in the movie are saying, ‘Yeah, bone her. Bone her.’ And the Black women in the audience are giggling. When you witness this, it is hard to see what we are doing to end our own victimization. I think that, as Black lesbians, we are, in a way, very fortunate. This is because we are in a community that supports us in growing past racism, sexism and homophobia. I’d like to wrap up by saying that homophobia is particularly dangerous for Black lesbians because it is so insidious. There have always been acceptable places for gay Black men to retreat and escape (relatively speaking) from the danger, i.e., the choir queen or the Black gay man who embraces the white gay male community. But as Black gay women, we haven’t been interested in removing ourselves from our families or communities because we understand the importance of that connection. The insidiousness of homophobia lies in the fact that we’ve been forced to find ways to balance our contact with the community with our need to continue to grow as Black lesbians. We straddle the fence that says we cannot be the uplifters of the race and lesbians at the same time—that’s what makes it so dangerous for our emotional health as Black lesbians. But you know, I think that our ability to see the need to keep the family intact is what is going to be our saviour and help preserve the Black community. As lesbians, we have so much to teach the Black community about survival. Barbara: I’m very glad that you said that about family. One of the myths that’s put out about Black lesbians and gay men is that we go into the white gay community and forsake our racial roots. People say that to be lesbian or gay is to be somehow racially denatured. I have real problems with that because that’s never been where I was coming from. And that’s not the place that the Black lesbians and gays I love, respect and work with are coming from either. We are as Black as anybody ever thought about being. Just because we are committed to passionate and ongoing relationships with members of our own gender, does not mean that we are not Black. In fact, the cultural and political leadership of the Black community has always had a very high percentage of lesbian and gay men. If they want to destroy all Black lesbians and gay men then they would alter

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the entire history of the race. Though closeted in many cases, Black lesbians and gays have been central in building our freedom. Jewelle: It’s very important that all our voices be heard. Everyone asks why do we have to talk about homophobia? Why can’t we be quiet about it? The fact that we have to talk about it means that a lot of people don’t want to hear it. And as soon as there’s something they don’t want to hear, it’s very important that we say it. I learned that as a Black person. Barbara: What I’d like to leave with is the truth. People really do need to tell the truth. I want to challenge all the nonlesbians who are reading this to think about what they’ve done yesterday, what they’re doing today and what they’re going to do tomorrow to try to improve the chances that we’ll all be free and sisters.

Notes This dialogue is from a Black Women’s Health anthology edited by Evelyn C. White and published by Seal Press, 1990. Barbara Smith is a Black feminist writer and activist and a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Jewelle Gomez is a Black feminist writer, activist and critic who is currently completing her first novel.

LESBIANISM AND THE LABOUR PARTY: The GLC Experience Ann Tobin

Although this article is part of a Feminist Review special on lesbians, I have found it impossible to discuss lesbians and the British Labour Party without placing it within the overall context of gay rights and the Labour Party. Whilst lesbian feminists may see themselves and their politics as quite separate from gay male politics, the Labour movement has never really taken on board the differences, largely because the Labour movement has not yet come to terms with feminist politics, despite all their current promises to create a Ministry for Women should Labour ever win another election. I should also point out that the article is mostly about the Greater London Council and its approach to gay rights, mainly because it draws upon my own experience of working at the GLC in the year prior to its abolition in March 1986 by the Thatcher Government, followed by another year at the London Strategic Policy Unit (a sort of GLC-in-exile funded by eight London Labour Local Councils for two years following the GLC’s abolition). Under Ken Livingstone, who was elected to be the Council’s leader following the Labour Party’s GLC victory in May 1981, the GLC became, until its abolition, the focus of the Labour movement’s support for gay rights. With one or two exceptions, then (principally my involvement as an out lesbian in the Woolwich Constituency and Greenwich Borough Labour Parties), my views on gay rights and the Labour movement arise out of the GLC experience.

‘The gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear’ Although both the tabloid and quality press managed to convey the impression during the 1980s that the Labour Party concerned itself with little else other than gay rights, support for gay politics was in fact confined to a remarkably small section of the Labour movement. Indeed, probably no more than twenty or so Labour Local Authorities were really part of the process, together with one or two trade unions, particularly the National Association of Local Government Officers. There was also the odd resolution passed at Party and trade union annual conferences. The Labour leadership, at best embarrassed by Local Authority support for gay rights, was more often than not quite happy to agree more or less with whatever the Tories cared to claim about gay rights and Labour Councils.


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When, on 17 November 1986, Nicholas Ridley, then Minister for the Environment mounted a furious attack on local government as a precursor to another piece of local government legislation, he drew quite openly upon the Sun’s ‘loony lefty’ stories. The Sun, the most scurrilously right wing of Britain’s tabloid press had made itself the selfappointed mouthpiece for the Conservatives’ political and cultural prejudices and had run a long series of stories attacking both the GLC’s and other London Labour Authorities’ support for gay rights. Haringey Labour Council was one of the Sun’s favourite targets after the GLC and, amongst the paper’s more fanciful tales, was the one Nicholas Ridley quoted about Haringey planning to place a gay teacher in every school. Rather than laughing this and other fantasies out of court, Labour’s Parliamentary Spokesman on Local Government, John Cunningham, agreed that Ridley’s only fault lay in exaggeration, since his accusations only ‘applied to about one tenth of one per cent of Labour Councillors’. A year later, when Clause 28, aimed at banning Local Authority expenditure upon activities or materials which ‘promoted’ homosexuality, was moved by two Tory backbench MPs, Cunningham announced that he and his Party would support it. And although the Labour Party withdrew its formal support for the Clause following the swift and effective lobby mounted by gays on Parliament and some intense back-bench pressure, Cunningham still persisted in giving credence to the Tories’ case by stating in the debate on the Clause that it was ‘only the Inner London Education Authority and the London Borough of Haringey’ that ‘spent millions of pounds promoting homosexuality’. It was also during this period that Patricia Hewitt, Political Adviser to Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock, wrote him a letter of advice on electoral strategy (the contents of which were fortuitously leaked to the Sun) suggesting that ‘the gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear’. Even where gay rights were apparently firmly established as part and parcel of Labour Council policy, Labour politicians were frequently unwilling to follow through their statements of support with practical policies. In November 1985, the same month that the GLC’s Lesbian and Gay Charter was launched in a flurry of publicity by Ken Livingstone et al., the Housing Committee rejected a research project into the housing needs of lesbians and gay men. And although Clause 28 has not, yet, been followed by any of the threatened prosecutions against Councils who continue to ‘promote’ gay rights, it has in the main achieved the ambitions of its proposers—gay rights on the rates have largely disappeared from view. The end to the left’s public espousal of gay rights is in part due to the strength of the right’s attack on the left. After ten years of unremitting attack on all aspects of left policy, be it the Welfare State, civil liberties in general, or trade union liberties in particular, coupled with the Labour Party’s acquiescence to the values of Thatcherism, it is not surprising that libertarian radicals in the Labour Party have retreated, if only to gather strength to rejoin the battle at a more opportune time. However, the main reason for the inability or unwillingness of the Party to continue to uphold or defend gay rights is the fact that the Party never really understood what gay rights actually meant. They were largely seen as an exercise in upholding civil liberties, and Labour politicians often had

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no greater justification for adding gay rights to their pantheon of causes beyond the simple statement that since many gays were working class, it was a class issue. This approach was central to the Party’s support of gay rights, indeed to the Party’s espousal of all the politics of identity that led to the creation of the new equalities strategies and equalities units. There had been no real organic growth of feminist, Black or gay politics within the Labour movement. The new politics were forced upon an often unwilling and certainly unenthusiastic Labour Party by socialists who were also feminist, by socialists who were also Black and by socialists who were also gay. New Left politicians who started to adopt the equalities strategies often had not the slightest idea of what they had let themselves in for.

The example of the women’s committees: ‘In no shape or f orm a lesbian’ This was more true, I think, of the Women’s Committees than of the other new committees. Women’s Committees were created as a result of pressure from feminists outside the Councils, and many of the people who volunteered to take on the responsibility of chairing the committees were feminist sympathizers but had no particular involvement or experience in the Women’s movement itself. Valerie Wise, appointed as Chair of the new Women’s Committee at the GLC in May 1982, was in this position, and like many other Women’s Committee chairs, was initially hostile to the inclusion of lesbian rights in the committee’s work. When the first consultative meetings were held at County Hall with the aim of producing a programme of action for London’s women, all the various groupings turned up in force to re-fight the old battles, but this time with the possible prize being enormous influence in one of the institutions of patriarchal power. Without any experience or knowledge of the internecine struggles of the Women’s movement, Valerie Wise was frequently unable to follow the arguments and tended to obey the dictum that if women said it, it must be true. In the early months of the committee, groups such as the King’s Cross Women’s Centre were able to wield an influence far beyond what their isolated and unrepresentative position within the Women’s movement should have dictated. The Labour Women’s Committee found itself in the position of supporting and financing groups who not only had an off-the-wall, separatist perspective on the world, but who were totally and irretrievably hostile to class politics and to the Labour movement. The Labour Party had happily opened Pandora’s box without having a clue as to what was inside. Straight Labour women also had considerable difficulty in allying themselves with their lesbian sisters, again demonstrating their lack of understanding of what precisely it was they were supporting, and their ignorance of the long debate about lesbianism in the Women’s movement. In particular, straight Labour women found themselves colluding with the oppression of lesbians without realizing that they too were being lined up on the firing line. Councillor Jenni Fletcher, for example, Vice-Chair of the GLC Women’s Committee in 1984, defended a controversial committee statement on heterosexism, but found it necessary to stress that she was ‘in no shape or form a lesbian’. (The choice of the words

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Launch of ‘Changing the World’, GLC’s Lesbian and Gay Charter, County Hall October 1985

‘shape’ and ‘form’ are particularly revealing.) Then there was the Labour Women’s Conference in 1986 at Rothesay. One of Glasgow’s Sunday papers devoted a substantial chunk of its front page to an attack on the conference. Delegates were, said the paper, a bunch of hairy lesbians so unappealing that even sex-starved sailors on shore leave would turn them down. The conference was initially united in fury against this report, but anger amongst lesbians in the hall soon turned from the press to the conference platform, which included many of the senior women in the Party. For in attacking the article, the platform speakers argued that the majority of women present were not lesbians, and those that were were almost all very attractive! The Party’s women did not understand that the article, like most of the press attacks on lesbians throughout the 1980s was an attack on all women. They could not comprehend that it was in effect stating that women could not be, nor would they wish to be, strong and independent women unless they were lesbians, i.e., unless they were freaks. A similar attack upon women is to be found in the Daily Mail’s account of the GLC Women’s Unit weekend conference in Brighton in 1984. Along with coy references to women being doubled up in bedrooms at night, the Mail described all the GLC women as wearing boiler suits and spiky hair. This was also the substance of the attacks on Labour’s candidate Dierdre Woods during the Greenwich by-election campaign. In all the press accounts of Labour women, the smear is the same. Women who dare to step outside the very narrow male-defined view of womanhood are at worst lesbians, at best lesbian lookalikes.

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The GLC grapples with gay rights Having opened Pandora’s box, and been bemused by its contents, Labour politicians were deeply puzzled as to what to do next. With one or two exceptions such as Haringey which instituted a Lesbian and Gay Rights Unit, they never worked out precisely where the responsibility for gay rights should be located in their Local Authority structure. Certainly the GLC, for all that it liked to proclaim itself as the leading public defender of gay rights, never moved beyond having a Lesbian and Gay Working Party composed of some officers located elsewhere in the GLC, plus some non-GLC advisers. As a result, formal support for gay rights often ended up coming from either the Women’s Committee which encompassed lesbianism within its remit or from the Ethnic Minorities Unit which employed gay rights workers. (It was these two committees which led the protest against the decision of the Housing Committee to reject the research into gay housing needs.) Since straight Labour politicians assumed that gay rights were a homogeneous whole—that lesbians and gay men shared the same interests and politics, and that Black lesbians and Black gay men shared the same interests and politics as white gays—they assumed that employing gay rights workers in the various specialized units met all the needs of gays. The divisions between lesbians and gay men also produced an interesting situation in that the gay male activists who became involved in Labour’s support for gay rights tended to do so because they were committed socialists as well as gay. Often they had a long history of membership in the Labour Party itself. Many of the lesbians involved in local government, on the other hand, were there first and foremost as feminists. Quite often they had no particular commitment to socialism (indeed rejected socialism as just another patriarchal/racist ideology), and many of those who were socialist had no commitment at all to the Labour Party. Whilst gay men involved in local government politics devoted considerable energy and attention to discussing the relationship of the politics of sexuality to the politics of socialism, lesbians were more concerned with the politics of sexuality and feminism. If the GLC could never quite decide where to locate gay rights within its structure, it failed even more dismally to work out precisely what its support for gays actually meant in policy terms; nor did it foresee how its support for gay rights might affect its class politics. This last was not peculiar to gay rights, however, for the GLC as the staunch upholder of local socialism was often strangely unable to talk about class. Its Statement of Practice for Equal Opportunities omitted mention of class altogether, and although the Women’s Committees policy statements did include class in the list of oppressions that headed such statements, the class dimension was rarely a central part of policy discussion. In at least one document discussing heterosexism, the drafters decided to leave class out because they found it too difficult to define class within both the document’s context and the overall context of the committee’s approach to policy.

The old versus the new GLC: class and sexuality Perhaps more than any other issue, class became a major source of dissension, and a catalyst for creating hostility between the old and new GLC. Whilst some of the opposition to the Women’s Committee was openly misogynistic and homophobic, there

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was also a lack of sense of identification with the politics of class within the Women’s Committees themselves. As a result the legitimate responses of trade union workforces, and of working-class ratepayers, were often dismissed out of hand. The attitudes of some old die-hard trade unionists made it difficult for the new groups to work with them. There was the Chief Shop Steward in one of London’s Labour Councils who announced that ‘perverts’ would be employed in ‘his’ workforce over his dead body. And the branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union led a boycott of the Greenwich Women’s Unit for several weeks following the unit’s protest against crude pin-ups adorning office walls. But there were also genuine grounds for conflict between the old and the new GLC, not least of which was the fact that local authorities were facing massive cuts throughout their services whilst the new units were enjoying a remarkable period of growth. In the GLC, for example, whilst 4 per cent cuts were being imposed throughout Council services, the Women’s Committee was enjoying a huge growth in its budget (from £332,000 and a staff of 3 to £16 millions and a staff of 96 in its final and fourth year of existence). The trade union reaction to a growth which was not only at odds with the rest of the Council’s experience, but also apparently at the expense of other sections of the workforce was rather cavalierly disregarded by feminists as a reactionary response which could safely be ignored. Recruitment of Women’s Committee support staff also caused hostility. Most of the women were recruited directly from the women’s movement, a deliberate policy aimed at ensuring that workers felt loyalty to the women they represented, rather than to the bureaucracy that employed them. The new employees came in at high levels of pay and on high professional grades, again a deliberate policy to combat the traditional expectation of women’s work being low grade and low paid. The continuing cuts on the services, however, combined with the fact that the manual workers (often at the hard end of dealing with a public complaining about reduced services) remained at their same low grades and low rates of pay, meant that many GLC blue-collar workers experienced a considerable gulf between their interests and the interests of the Women’s Unit. This was not helped by the tendency of the Women’s Unit (like the other new support units of the various innovative committees introduced by the Livingstone regime) to stay in its small isolated enclave distanced from the rest of the Council—whilst enjoying direct access to leading members. This position of privilege added to the resentment when the Council started introducing equalities policies at all levels throughout the workforce, with many of the long-standing employees feeling that they were having doctrines imposed upon them by a new élite group who had no great understanding of, or any desire to share in, the day-to-day grind of the Council’s work. The rapid growth of the Committee reflected the nonorganic relationship between the Labour movement and feminism. There was a kind of fever on the part of the New Left Councillors to demonstrate their commitment to the new politics, to build the Rainbow Alliance, but in so doing they lost sight of their class-based support. The sight of lesbians and gay men suddenly feeling able to ‘flaunt’ their sexuality and their existence, added to the belief that Labour Councils were abandoning their traditional constituency and concerns in favour of a bunch of social deviants who showed little interest in working-class concerns. Council tenants living in deteriorating public sector housing stock with a reduced repairs service saw no reason why a bunch of

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dykes should have ‘dances on the rates’ (one Tory Councillor’s well-publicized description of a GLC grant to Lesbian Line) whilst they were waiting months for a door or window to be replaced, the stairs to be cleaned, or the lifts to be repaired. One of the problems, of course, was the huge difference in publicity accorded to these initiatives and the actual amount of money being spent. In 1984 GLC expenditure on all lesbian and gay initiatives amounted to 0.8 per cent of the Council’s overall budget. Nor did public proclamation of gay rights really amount to a major change in service provision as the GLC Housing Committee’s response to the gay housing needs research project demonstrated. The Housing Committee’s refusal to undertake the research project was indicative of the failure of the new Local Government left to really assess the purpose and value of their support for gay rights. Basic questions were never debated: Was it the role of Local Authorities to help raise gay consciousness? And if so, what form should that help take? Should it be confined to a welfare role, such as funding Lesbian Line, or should it take on an educative role through the schools, or by producing Local Authority literature such as the Lesbian and Gay Charter? The Grant Aid policy adopted by the GLC during the Livingstone years was aimed directly at redistributing resources and wealth throughout London. But should gays be part of that redistribution? And if so, which gays? And from whom should the resources be removed? Should Local Authority revenue raised from the rates of the poor working class in the deprived inner cities really go to funding a lesbian and gay social centre in London? And if so, what services should be reduced to make way for this expenditure? Whilst the theories behind the policies were never raised by the Labour Party as a whole (though they were constantly discussed by lesbian and gay activists), the practicalities of putting support for gay rights into action was never really discussed either. In part this was because, in the period leading up to abolition, the GLC lost all control over direct service provision. As a result its policies were theoretical and advisory rather than statutory. For example, the GLC no longer had direct housing into which it could introduce joint tenancy rights for gay couples.

Deteriorating relations A more deep-seated problem was the fact that gay rights, along with many of the other equalities strategies, were tagged on to policy approaches rather than being integral to the formulation of the policies in the first place. Equalities Officers ended up as attackers of already formulated policy documents, rather than being involved in their creation. A GLC officer, having spent weeks or months on writing a new policy document, would forward it for comment to the various Equalities Units. Similarly, internal unit documents would be circulated to the Unit’s Equalities Officers for comment. This process emerged out of the longstanding method of dealing with cross-department documents long before equalities were dreamed of and the system was simply adopted. But within the equalities context the system inevitably created considerable tension. Officers who had thought carefully and sensitively through the issues were upset to find their painstaking drafts returned with dismissive and frequently unhelpful comments attached. Equally, the Rights Workers who felt they were engaged in an unequal

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struggle to get their politics integrated into the overall policy of the GLC were frustrated and angered by reading yet another policy statement written by officers who clearly had no idea of what the equalities issues entailed. The situation seemed designed to encourage jealousies, anger and the playing off of one oppression against another, as lesbian rights officers commented on the work of Black Rights Officers and vice versa. It was also a system that was ripe for guilt-tripping and denunciations. GLC equalities at times resembled a wartime bunker or a city under siege, riven by internal strife whilst the Tory enemy outside massed its forces around the city’s or County Hall’s walls. The pressure on staff was so intense, the demand so great, both to fulfil a heavy workload and to get the politics right, that there was little time given to a learning process. Some workers cracked under the intensity, spending their days in quiet misery; others learned simply to say the right words. I cannot number many of my ex-colleagues who have happy memories of working in the GLC equalities field. For many, including myself, it was a deeply traumatic experience. And at this stage I still find it difficult to assess how successful the GLC’s support for gay rights was. Many lesbians who benefited directly or indirectly from Labour Councils’ support for gay rights saw no reason why they should give their support to the Labour Councils in return. Livingstone’s Rainbow Alliance may have gained support from lesbian and gays who were already Labour movement activists, but it failed to win over the support of gays who had never supported Labour. This was revealed most clearly at the time of the campaign against Clause 28. Some members of the Arts Lobby, in particular, found it difficult to associate themselves with the Labour Councils who were as much the target of Clause 28 as were gay rights. They found it easier to have tea with Tory peers on the terrace of the House of Lords than to work with the Labour Councillors who had funded gay rights on the rates in the first place. Again the identification of gay rights as just a civil liberties matter was key to this approach and there were considerable differences between those who wanted to relate the issue to the long process of attack on local democracy carried out by the Thatcher Government and those who wanted to keep their hands free from left extremism. Much sophistry was engaged in by gays who, having largely gone along with the right-wing propaganda about ‘loony leftism’, were now suddenly faced with the realization that one of the key elements that defined ‘loony leftism’ was support for gay rights. Many of the campaigners tried to treat Clause 28 as a separate issue, ignoring the fact that the Clause was itself contained in another piece of punitive anti-Local Government legislation, and refusing to see that Clause 28 was a multiple weapon aimed not only against the civil rights of gays, but against all civil liberties in general, and against Labour Councils in particular. But then why should gays be expected to work this out, when the Labour movement as a whole had signally failed to do so? One of the most important symptoms of this failure was the ‘Black one-legged lesbians’ syndrome. Labour activists who were sympathetic to lesbian and gay rights fell all too easily into using this pernicious phraseology as shorthand for all the equalities policies. It was a good joke at endless Party and trade union meetings. Even supporters of the equalities policies failed to realize that by conflating the equalities issues to produce this singular and obviously absurd figure, they were belittling the entire equalities strategy. The phrase was also a useful tool for those on the left who never wanted equalities in the first place. Apart from a few unrepentant Labour hacks of the old school, few dared to

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speak openly against Black people. Even fewer wanted to oppose provision for people with disabilities. Lesbians, however, were a suitable target for attack, with the added advantage that those who opposed the whole idea of equalities could do so obliquely without ever having to spell it out. The phrase ‘Black lesbians’ was also central to the right-wing press attacks on Labour Councils. Indeed some papers when referring to Labour Councils, never seemed to use the word lesbian without preceding it by the word ‘Black’, for whilst even the likes of the Sun were reluctant to openly attack Black people, the phrase ‘Black lesbians’ served as an excellent cover for their racism. But lesbianism was also central to Thatcherism. The Thatcher Government is, after all, in the business of asserting social control (forget all that nonsense about controlling inflation or defeating employment). It is no accident that Clause 28 contained within it the infamous reference to ‘pretended families’. The family is a cornerstone of the New Right’s philosophy, the magic talisman that will bind society together, enabling order to be maintained and discipline to be preserved. Gay rights in general, and lesbianism in particular (men have always allowed themselves the privilege of stepping outside the boundaries of the family) challenged the supremacy of the family as a unit of social control.

Conclusion The New Left’s support for gay rights was one of the most sustained post-Falklands challenges to Thatcher values. It was also part of a long-overdue but genuine response on the part of the left to the problems created by a hack Labour bureaucracy that was top heavy and unable to deliver a good service. In particular it was a response to the fact that specific groups were excluded from full participation in local government, both as users and decision-makers. Race Committees, Women’s Committees, co-opted members, grant aid, gay rights were all part of an effort to make local Labour democracy more accountable and more representative. The Thatcher response to the rise of the New Left was to adopt the simple expedient of doing away with local democracy altogether. The New Left was stymied from the start by the Labour leadership’s decision to surrender itself as a hostage to Thatcher fortune, allowing her to claim the high moral ground. As the decade developed the Labour Party’s only real strategy was to try and claw out a place on the foothills of Thatcherite morality. It was a stance which, long before the introduction of Clause 28, smothered the Party leadership’s ability to support gay rights. So the decade has turned full circle. In 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, few would have believed that gay rights would play such an important part in Labour politics during the 1980s. In 1989 it is sometimes difficult to remember that they did. When the GLC was abolished, the response of much of the Labour movement was to blame the GLC’s support for gay rights. When Clause 28 was introduced, many gays blamed the loony left for going too far. After twenty-eight years of membership in the Labour Party, beginning when I was sixteen years old, I resigned my membership this year. There are many reasons, not least of which is the Party’s departure from unilateralism, and its inability to take on board

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environmental policies other than with cynical opportunism. But the Labour Leadership’s pusillanimous response to Clause 28 was the final straw. Its continuing attitude to gay rights will, I suspect, be as good a bench mark as any against which to judge both its approach to civil liberties, and its desire to produce a genuine alternative to Thatcherism. Whether it wins the next General Election or not, I can’t say I have much optimism about the future of the Labour Party.

Note Ann Tobin is forty-four years old. She joined the Labour Party in 1960 when she was sixteen, came out as a lesbian at the age of thirty-three, and left the Party in 1989. Prior to going to university where she studied history as a mature student in 1977, she worked in television, for BBC Television’s Current Affairs Department. She joined the GLC some nine months prior to its abolition working in the Women’s Committee Support Unit. During that same period she was also Vice-Chair of the Woolwich Constituency Labour Party. She is now working again in television, this time as a freelance producer of documentaries and drama.

Suggested further reading BODDY, Martin and FUDGE, Colin (1984) editors, Local Socialism?, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. CANT, Bob and HEMMINGS, Susan (1988) editors, Radical Records, Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History, London: Routledge. CARVEL, John (1984) Citizen Ken, London: The Hogarth Press. FORRESTER, Lansley and FORRESTER, Pauley (1985) Beyond Our Ken, Fourth Estate. LIVINGSTONE, Ken (1987) If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It, London: Collins. WAINWRIGHT, Hilary (1987) Labour, A Tale of Two Parties, London: The Hogarth Press.

SKIRTING THE ISSUE: Lesbian Fashion for the 1990s Inge Blackman and Kathryn Perry

The contemporary lesbian is considered to be ‘congenitally’ unfashionable: too busy propping up Havelock Ellis’s eternal mantlepiece, pipe in hand, gently flicking ash off her tweeds, to spare a thought for trend. Although lesbians do model in fashion magazines such as Elle, Marie-Claire and Vogue, these fabulous creatures are always assumed to be heterosexual because they ‘look heterosexual’. So what do lesbians look like? Unsurprisingly, the majority look exactly the same as heterosexual women. Mainstream fashion rather than lesbianism exerts the strongest influence over their style. However, there are others who cast only a sideways glance at the mainstream, lesbians for whom style is a conscious statement of gay identity. For these women, dress provides a visible connection with their lesbian subcultures; identifying their politics and sexuality in relation to other lesbians. Many of these styles are controversial; displaying lesbians’ new preoccupation with sexual practice. And with ‘lipstick’ lesbians and SM lesbians set against revolutionary lesbian feminists, their ‘style wars’ reveal deep ideological disagreement. There seem to be more ways of looking like a lesbian than ever before. But do they have anything new to say about our identities and politics? Certainly, lesbian fashion is making statements, and as such, invites interpretation. The feminist hostility towards fashion, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, is still alive in the late 1980s but it no longer enjoys universal support among all feminists. The argument has been that fashion epitomized women’s constant striving towards the feminine. Seasonal adjustments of style kept them as much on their toes as the high heels that ruined their spines. As femininity symbolized women’s oppression by men, so fashion was seen to be the gilded cage that had ensnared them in the mutilations of the feminine. Feminism celebrated the ‘real’ woman beneath her makeup and aimed to set her free from the confines of tight skirts and high heels.

Faces bare of makeup Although many lesbians are still uncomfortable with many of the trappings of femininity it is revolutionary lesbian feminists who remain most loyal to a 1970s feminist analysis of fashion and femininity. They no longer dress in 1970s fashion (which might have got them into last year’s most trendy acid house parties), yet their styles echo that decade of


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feminism in their self-conscious rejection of a femininity constructed by ‘heteropatriarchy’. With flat shoes, baggy trousers, unshaven legs and faces bare of makeup, their style combines practicality with a strong statement about not dressing for men. Consistent with the belief that fashion reinforces the gender distinctions between men and women, they reject those aspects of women’s fashion that signal the oppressive hierarchy of heterosexuality. Instead, their supposedly ‘androgynous’ style signifies an equal relationship between women. This kind of revolutionary feminism emphasizes the ‘natural’ and functional aspects of dress, while it rejects the view that fashion is an aspect of popular culture to be enjoyed by the majority. Rather than indulging in consumerist fantasy, it echoes the nineteenth-century movements for dress reform and links the search for a style that is ‘authentic’ to the creation of ‘women’s utopias’. (Wilson, 1985) This revolutionary feminist analysis seems contradictory because it draws on two opposing ways of seeing the world: a ‘social constructionism’ which claims that people are the product of their environment, and an ‘essentialism’ which claims that people possess innate characteristics. Revolutionary feminists accept that femininity is socially constructed. Consistent with this view, they believe that femininity can therefore be deconstructed. It should follow that one construction can only be exchanged for another more acceptable construction. However, revolutionary feminists claim that innate, womanly qualities underlie femininity. For instance, they are critical of the cosmetics industry and the way that patriarchy connects makeup with femininity, but they then go on to falsely claim that a face bare of makeup is more ‘natural’. There is scarcely a society in the world that does not practice some form of body painting, and it is difficult to imagine anything short of total nakedness that could be ‘natural’ for humans (and even that is questionable). The view that revolutionary lesbian fashion liberates the ‘real’ woman and is thereby appropriate for all women, is hotly denied by those who see it as culturally specific. Few Black lesbians, for instance, are satisfied with a politics that prioritizes gender over race, and thus many reject aspects of the ideology that underlies revolutionary feminist style.

Scarlet starlets The popularity of this revolutionary lesbian style in the 1970s coincided with a mainstream trend toward naturalism. Current fashion is retrospective of Riviera chic in its glamorous echo of 1930s South of France. For the ‘lipstick’ lesbians, culture rather than nature underlies this high fashion urban look, with its starlet lipstick, widebottomed trousers, crisp white shirts and square or round-toes shoes (with or without heels). It is street-wise and hip, with Levis, often cut-offs, short, tight dresses or skirts, big jewellery and the Haircut. But what does this have to do with lesbian politics? ‘Lipstick’ lesbians with feminist leanings argue that the feminine has been engaged with on new terms; that there is a subtle but crucial distinction between a femininity that is imposed on women and one that is controlled by women who possess the confidence to subvert it. Twinning short skirts with Doctor Martens (DMs) or lacy underwear with men’s trousers, offers a different reading of femininity. Using the feminine to attract women rather than men, these lesbians flirt with the symbols of heterosexuality, constantly changing their meaning within the context of a lesbian subculture.

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To revolutionary lesbian feminists, this subtle distinction is questionable. They accuse the ‘lipstick’ lesbians of libertarianism, false consciousness, ‘passing’ for heterosexual or, worse, of being sexually ambiguous. They, in their turn, are accused of being aesthetically dull and sexually unattractive, intent upon ‘policing’ desire and denying pleasure. In fact, revolutionary feminist imperatives lack consensus. Contemporary lesbian communities are engaged in a continuing project of actually challenging the low profile of sexuality within lesbianism. And the time has passed when lesbian and heterosexual women would dance in a circle, breasts not touching, uniting feminism through the ‘woman-identified-woman’. With lesbianism no longer feminism’s symbol of liberation, many lesbians are making it clear that revolutionary feminism can no longer claim to speak for all women. It has failed to address their concerns in the 1980s and they interpret its assumed consensus as authoritarian.

The power principle Many of today’s diverse self-definitions and styles reflect lesbians’ renewed preoccupation with sexuality. Yet many lesbians interpret these styles—often controversial—with a mixture of fascination and horror. The sado-masochistic (SM) style, perhaps the most controversial, presents an image that many associate with an aggressive or violent sexuality. The style differs depending on whether the wearer wants to indicate that she is the top/butch or the bottom/femme. Top dress will reveal the body from the waist upwards: light vest, waistcoat (no shirt) or no clothing at all. By exposing her breasts, the top defies the pervasive western fetish of the female breast and flirts with the demand that breasts be kept hidden. She declares her sexuality, but at the same time she makes herself vulnerable. As the context is nearly always a club where this exposure is a familiar code it becomes both safe and sexually blatant; a combination that would be impossible in any other situation. Leather and rubber are de rigeur for jackets, trousers, cowboy chaps and wristbands. Leather has a particular erotic appeal, reinforced by the glamour industries of film and popular music, and rubber has had a long association with ‘kinky’ sex. The lesbian who wears leather or rubber finds it thrilling to play the pervert, feeling the charge of sexual power as she eases into her second skin. The onlooker is drawn into a web of fantasy; sex promised and control taken, mingled with the sight, smell and feel of leather or rubber. For the lesbian on the streets, the leather jacket can become protective armour, concealing her body and asserting her strength. Footwear includes boots of all descriptions, although favourites are DMs, biker boots and cowboy boots. Accessories might include peaked ‘muir’ caps (with or without military uniform), handcuffs, riding crops and weapons. Y-fronts and snug briefs are essential when ‘packing’ (wearing a dildo). The bottom may wear similar clothes in addition to skirts, dresses, lingerie and high heels. SM fashion also includes uniforms. These are a metaphor for rigid controls: strict discipline, with rewards for obedience and punishment for breaking the rules. Their connotations differ. Military and police uniforms are associated with aggression, power and the threat of violence, nurses’ and maids’ uniforms with subservience, and school uniforms with sexual naivety. Within this culture, wearing uniforms for sex implies an

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exchange of power. They fix the lesbian into a particular erotic role and may act as a restraint from which she will only be released when she removes the costume. This complex erotic exchange takes place consensually and can be ended at any time by saying a prearranged ‘safe word’. With dress codes an intrinsic part of their sexual practice, SM lesbians claim to be putting the sex back into lesbianism. Some argue that this represents an important challenge to feminism’s essentialist tendency to ascribe violence and aggression to men and caring and nurturing to women. Certainly, SM sexuality is as far removed from the soft-focus caresses of Bilitis as it is from the straight notion of lesbian sex as a warm-up routine for heterosexual sex. But for lesbians who are not part of the SM scene, these images may be too alien or offensive to arouse. Of course, strongly negative feelings could conceal unacknowledged desires. However, for those lesbians who are ‘clean-living citizens’ and ambivalent about being ‘out’, the existence of ‘porn-book perverts’, proclaiming both their lesbianism and their sexual practice, is deeply troubling. Some SM lesbians claim that their sexual radicalism is also political radicalism. However, most lesbians think that it is libertarianism taken to an extreme when doing your own thing involves chains and swastikas. It has been pointed out that in India the swastika has religious connotations, and it was even known as an ‘Indian good luck symbol’ in the west before the 1930s, yet it is now associated with the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and in contemporary society it is the emblem of extreme right-wing groups. Likewise, chains can be associated with the shackling of enslaved African peoples in the ‘New World’. SM lesbians who use symbols associated with mass torture and genocide within a sexual context might argue that they give those symbols a new meaning. It remains important to question whether their use is racist and anti-Semitic. However it should not be assumed that all SM sex is thereby racist or anti-Semitic, nor should the debate be used to obscure the challenges of SM sex and style. Some SM lesbians claim that sexual practice enables them to break through to the ‘real’ sexual being underneath. This is not dissimilar from radical feminism’s discovery of the ‘natural’ woman. Both envisage personal transformation—the one through therapy and consciousness-raising, the other through sexual practice—and see this as the basis of new social relations. But apart from self-empowerment, there is no clear strategy in therapy or ‘good’ sex that will enable lesbians to challenge discrimination. It is not evident that personal change will inevitably become political.

Aping heterosexuality? A marginally less controversial contemporary lesbian style is butchfemme. The butch look ranges from the courtly 1920s and 1930s Radclyffe Hall—trousers, jacket, optional tie/cravat, and short back and sides—to the more everyday leather jacket, white T-shirt, jeans (501s) and boots. Looking like James Dean and Marlon Brando, butches capture these film stars’ macho image, which was always undercut by an ambiguous masculinity on screen and bisexuality in real life. The butch (stud, daddy) bears the closest resemblance to the fantasy ‘masculine’ lesbian; exciting with her up-front sexuality and threatening with her obvious lesbianism. The femme (fish) style can combine short

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skirts with either big boots or high heels, suggesting the creative menace of punk or the high camp of exaggerated femininity:

Punk fashion was especially good at injecting a kind of violent aura into femme chic that made it trashy and threatening instead of submissive and vulnerable to wear a skirt. (Anon, 1989:42) I like bridal outfits. I wore one because my friend had got married and I was upset that she was getting all that approval. I wanted to distort it. I love the texture of the net and the feeling of my legs concealed under the long skirt, yet free. Butch/femme style is assumed to relate to role-playing, and to involve two women locked in a drama that reworks classic heterosexual dominant/submissive behaviour. It has received vociferous condemnation from revolutionary feminists.

The ‘male-female polarity’ is a polarity of dominance and submission. That is why difference in this context cannot be benign. Under male supremacy it is the subordination of women and male power that are eroticized. Sexual attraction is constructed around ‘difference’, i.e., dominance and submission. Those lesbians who are revalidating butch and femme are not discovering that they are innately butch or femme, they are engaging in an erotic communication based on sado-masochism, the eroticizing of power difference. (Jeffreys, 1987:84) Butch-femme may allude to heterosexuality, but it does not mirror male-female roles as Sheila Jeffreys suggests. The assumption that feminine clothing casts the femme into a submissive heterosexuality (currently more controversial than the assumption that masculine clothing casts the butch into a dominant heterosexuality) can only be made if one first accepts that gender is the only explanation for the erotic pull of difference. Few Black women (or men) in their relationships with white people would agree. For them, the power relations of dominance and submission are rendered complex by the interaction of gender and race. When gender inevitably combines with other social relations of power in a fluid exchange, it can no longer be maintained as the primary or exclusive term of analysis. Nor should it be assumed that lesbianism so closely mirrors heterosexuality. Even if dominance/submission are essential to the gendered power relations between men and women, as Sheila Jeffreys suggests, it is not evidence that her interpretation will transfer so readily to lesbian relationships. Lesbians who acknowledge and enjoy the complex exchange of power between women stress that the experience bears little resemblance to hetero-sexuality. Yet revolutionary feminists who believe that gender is potentially the great equalizer between women, can only ascribe this exchange to false consciousness. In butch-femme relationships, both butches and femmes exert their own distinct power. Moreover, a tension between the roles can exist within one person in a way that would be unthinkable for most heterosexual women, as Joan Nestle explains:

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In the late 1950s I walked the streets looking so butch that straight teenagers called me bulldyke: however, when I went to the Sea Colony, a working-class bar in Greenwich Village, looking for my friends and sometimes for a lover, I was a femme…(Nestle, 1987:100) Butches are on display and are looked at by femmes; a reversal of expectation of where the dominant ‘male gaze’ should reside. By catching the butch’s eye, the femme takes the initiative and so makes herself vulnerable to the butch. The butch’s power is in the sexual arena. She takes the sexual initiative, but in taking this risk, makes herself vulnerable to the femme. Yet the femme will not limit her responses to become the passive partner in sex. In sexuality, as in style, any allusion to heterosexuality is undercut by the creative tension deriving from this specifically lesbian exchange.

Roots Many lesbian styles are located specifically within a western cultural context. Some Black women who want to dress butch-femme or SM may incorporate aspects of clothing from their cultures of origin into these fashions. However, the majority of Black lesbians who claim the identities of these subcultures will not. To others, marginalized by racism and anti-Semitism within lesbian communities and wider society, these styles may appear white-identified or fascistic. For them, it is a priority to assert their racial and cultural identities in response to invisibility and exclusion. The imperialist legacy has often meant that fashion from colonized countries is not markedly different from ‘British fashion’. For these lesbians, their search for identity will take them back to the homes of their ancestors. Wearing the clothing of their societies of origin is an act of resistance to assimilation into British society. The cultures of their ancestors may have been stripped bare, but the body remains to be adorned in the fight against further cultural erosion. For first-generation lesbians, the choice of dress from their parental cultures is less selfconscious, but carries with it the same sense of resistance to cultural imperialism. This style includes headwraps, clothing made out of African fabric, dashikis, saris, punjabi suits, Asian/African jewellery and hairstyles such as dreadlocks, cane/corn rows (maybe with extensions) and unstraightened Afro hair. Mingled with various western fashions, this fusion of styles reflects the tension of belonging to both Black and gay cultures but being prevented by homophobia and racism from complete acceptance by either. It is by maintaining this tension—in part through styles of dress—that many Black lesbians sustain their identities as Black women and lesbians without having to deny one at the expense of the other. If the revolutionary lesbian style is often seen to denote lesbian separatism, then the ‘roots’ of Black lesbians’ style can signal its own separatism. ‘Roots’ lesbians are often considered to be harshly critical of Black lesbians who are ‘not Black enough’: who straighten their hair, don’t speak their mother tongue, have a light skin and don’t associate exclusively with Black women; and Black lesbians who have relationships with white women are thought to have betrayed their sisters. This philosophy of a pure and essential ‘Blackness’, with its own prescribed appearance and lifestyle, has its roots in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although it comes from a different

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power base, it ironically echoes white supremacist beliefs of racial segregation and purity. It is important for Black lesbians to support and affirm each other away from white lesbians. However, separatism as a long-term political strategy has many times proved unsuccessful, leading only to further marginalization.

The blank page Most lesbians will dress like the majority of the population; as unobtrusively and conventionally as possible. Although all fashion makes a statement, the lesbian style that is perceived to say the least about the wearer is the high-street casual look. This may include track suit, jeans, slacks, shirts and sweatshirts, loafers, brogues, trackshoes, DMs and sandals. If any makeup is worn at all, it is understated. If fashion were a text that is presented to the world, then this would be lesbians’ blank page. It is difficult to read into this fashion any indication of sexual politics or practice, and it will not always be clear whether the wearer is a lesbian. Many other lesbian fashions do present a text to be interpreted through the onlooker’s prejudice, desires and knowledge of the codes. But with mainstream fashion overwhelmingly casual since the 1960s, this lesbian style is significant in its capacity to blend in. For the professional lesbian who wants to stay in the closet, to be comfortable but not to stand out, this style is the ultimate disguise: ‘I’m just trying to get on with my life. I feel that I can be more subversive as a lesbian by appearing normal.’

Just like a man Not every lesbian wishes to wear her fashion as a badge of courage. When pushed to think what ‘appearing normal’ will entail, most lesbians admit that the image to be most strenuously avoided is that of the mannish woman of popular fantasy. Although the fantasy of what a lesbian looks like has undergone many costume changes over the years, it is this masculine aspect that has remained the most enduring characteristic in a tradition extending back to the late nineteenth-century sexologists. Havelock Ellis, who repeatedly associated lesbianism with tranvestism, explained how to recognize a lesbian:

There is…a very pronounced tendency among sexually inverted women to adopt male attire when practicable. In such cases male garments are not usually regarded as desirable chiefly on account of practical convenience, nor even in order to make an impression on other women, but because the wearer feels more at home in them. And when they still retain female garments these usually show some traits of masculine simplicity, and there is nearly always disdain for the petty feminine artifices of the toilet. (Ellis and Symonds, 1897:96) Although the accusation of tranvestism predated the sexologists, it acquired influence as it became encoded in the scientific language of the late nineteenth-century discourse on sexuality. Michel Foucault’s work has been useful in highlighting the way that the location of ‘perversion’ among marginal types and communities—communities defined

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by their identity as sexual, racial, class or other kinds of ‘deviants’—reinforced the notion of the bourgeois heterosexual family. To facilitate the intervention of all kinds of regulatory forces into the family (Foucault refers to doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, social welfare workers) there was a need to distinguish between ‘perversion’ and ‘normality’. One of the ‘deviant’ identities against which the family was defined was the lesbian. Thus the supposed affinity for male attire among lesbians took its place alongside other physical and behavioural characteristics of lesbian ‘perversion’. Masculine clothing (or a generally masculine appearance) remains associated with ‘deviance’ as the visible sign of lesbianism. The stereotypical lesbian of today is not the fashionable cross-dresser in Ralph Lauren riding breeches or Armani suit and tie, but an unglamorous creature whose masculine attire is symptomatic of her pathology. The function of this popular fantasy is one of regulation and control. With the attributes of lesbianism encoded in pseudo-scientific discourse, the lesbian can be recognized from within her guise of normality and exposed for treatment (‘cures’ ranging from psychiatry to electric shock treatment) or punishment (losing job, home, child, or suffering physical violence). Despite the self-empowerment of ‘gay pride’, many lesbians will conflate the choice of whether to ‘come out’ or ‘stay in the closet’ with the contradictory desires to confess and avoid censure. Accordingly, they will feel a high degree of ambivalence about the fantasy lesbian who can, on the one hand, provide valuable selfdefinition but who might also mean unwelcome exposure. Although this fantasy lesbian may bear little relation to what lesbians actually look like, she continues to confront us in the external realm of social relations as much as in the internal realm of the psyche.

Identity Some lesbians welcome the ways in which their choice of style enables them to be recognized as gay. When their style makes an obvious statement about sexuality and politics, this is commonly used to identify the wearer with a particular subculture. SM gear, for instance, will locate the wearer within an SM subculture and identify her as an ‘SM lesbian’. In this way, style and lifestyle are considered to be windows to the lesbian’s ‘real’ self. But is it possible for fashion to be transparent in that way? Style will encode all the cultural messages of our communities, but it is as incapable as our autobiographies of revealing the ‘real’ self. Fashion cannot indicate a fixed identity; it is a constantly changing set of statements to be interpreted by the onlooker’s own transforming perceptions. Individual style, for instance, may change frequently in relation to circumstances. A lesbian who wishes to challenge directly her marginality within the lesbian community may wear clothes associated with SM practices to a debate on lesbian sexuality, or remind white lesbians of her Blackness at the same meeting by wearing a sari. A lesbian with multiple sclerosis who once wore makeup may be unable to do so now because of lack of muscle control. Lesbians may change their style with age, either experimenting with a new-found confidence or relaxing after years of time and money spent on appearance. However, in wearing the styles associated with particular identities, lesbians are still assumed to be defined by those identities: by dressing ‘butch’, for instance, they become entirely butch. Yet butches may wear femme styles and vice versa, and they may also exchange roles. A lesbian who wears SM top

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clothes to London’s SM lesbian club, Chain Reaction, may lounge around and go shopping in a tracksuit, go to work in a tailored suit and dress up in ‘roots’ style for a party. Each lesbian views the style/role she most immediately identifies with as a point of reference from which she is free to deviate at any time. Being aware of how style is used to identify, lesbians may confound expectations by subverting the image they project. The ‘lipstick’ lesbian may be aware of looking ‘heterosexual’. This could protect her from homophobic harassment and ease her entry into straight circles. She may even get some transgressive pleasure out of fooling gullible heterosexuals. But to subvert her heterosexual femininity she may be cool with men, she may have a severely short haircut and wear aftershave. Likewise a Black lesbian who wishes to show that her roots lie elsewhere while her feet are firmly planted in Britain, may choose to do so with style. Mixing traditional African/Asian dress with male western attire, she shatters expectations of herself as a Black woman. Each time the onlooker tries to place her by her colour and her headwrap, the fantasy around her identity will be disrupted by her DM boots:

It gives me a huge kick to wear earrings my grandmother used to wear in her village in India, with Indian trousers, a biker’s jacket, anti-apartheid T-Shirt and DMs. I like that hard edge with my femininity. I will wear aftershave because it gives that subtle indicator of my lesbianism. I also like the clean-cut tailored look, which has the atmosphere of men’s clothes. Sometimes I will go to Chain Reaction dressed all in white, not wearing any leather at all. As the credibility of identity politics becomes eroded and new challenges are presented by the right, it becomes possible to acknowledge that identity is not fixed. In the early 1990s the political landscape is changing. Rather than exclude those groups primarily associated with identity politics, the party-political left is reluctantly facing up to the fact that it needs all the support it can get from its natural allies. However, identity politics, which suggested that legitimate political insight could only be claimed through direct experience, has left these groups fragmented. Women have asserted that they do not all experience male power in the same way, and even male power is immersed in complexities. All this has forced feminism to question its assumption of gender’s universality. Yet even though an acknowledgement of our multiple identities is now on the agenda, our discourse is still dominated by the conviction that these identities are fixed in relation to an unchanging hierarchy of oppression. Many women have greeted these insights with pessimism, believing that a fragmented women’s movement can only campaign ineffectually. Is this the price we pay for our recognition that identity is neither single nor fixed? Today’s lesbian ‘self is a thoroughly urban creature who interprets fashion as something to be worn and discarded. Nothing is sacred for very long. Constantly changing, she dabbles in fashion, constructing one self after another, expressing her

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desires in a continual process of experimentation. How do we assess that fluidity politically? Now that political lesbianism no longer calls the shots within feminism and the concept of a unified sisterhood has all but disappeared, it is conceivable that feminism is fading and that a ‘post-feminist’ state is evolving. In this context, the proliferation of lesbian styles is often viewed as nothing more than a symptom of political disengagement. To a beleaguered left, difference and diversity often appears as no more than hedonistic frivolity. Certainly it is ironic that the freedom to dress up has occurred under Thatcherism, which has curtailed our lives under Section 28 and allowed AIDS to fan the flames of an even greater hostility to lesbian and gay sexuality. Is selfexpression through fashion the only freedom we have left?

Identification The Tory Party encourages us to market ourselves through the example of its own carefully and expensively constructed image. One of the messages it puts across is a variation on the rags-to-riches story: that anything is possible in a world where a grocer’s daughter becomes Prime Minister. The key is self-presentation, the carefully constructed appearance that says you have dressed for success, you look the part and opportunity lies before you. Amid accusations of designer socialism, even the left is developing new ways of selling its message to the disenchanted. Revolutionary lesbian feminists are smartening up: it is no longer so easy to survive on the dole or as chic to look as though you do. Opting out of capitalism does not carry the same weight as it did. You are more likely to be thought a loser than a freedom fighter. Even the ‘lipstick’ lesbians, those urbane media creatures, may use style as a smokescreen for their lesbianism so that the good life does not pass them by. Lesbians feel less guilty about keeping their options open. There is a new circumspection about coming out and it is no longer a prerequisite for political credibility. Black lesbians have to face the realities of life in racist Britain, and lesbians in provincial towns and rural areas find it almost impossible to be non-conformist. Amid a growing attitude that lesbians should not be denied the fruits of success, there is even a certain sympathy for rich, powerful and famous ‘designer dykes’ who would never risk their privilege to ‘come out’. Is it really conceivable, as the Thatcherite rhetoric would have it, that we are more free than ever before? Victorian values and the renewed sanctity of the family bring with them an increased intolerance of homosexuality, demonstrating that our individual freedom as gay people is as much an illusion as many of Thatcher’s other promises. Fashion may be personally liberating, but style is not sufficient in itself. The real degree of choice that is open to lesbians depends on the wider political context. You might look like Radclyffe Hall (if you want to), but will you ever be able to keep yourself in the style to which she was accustomed? Style may be subversive, but it can never become a substitute for direct political campaigning. If identity is a constantly shifting and changing phenomenon, it can no longer be a useful rallying cry for mobilizing people into action. The motivation can only come through identification, where gay people identify with a range of oppressions and heterosexual people can fight for gay rights. The personal is political, but it should be politicized across a number of struggles. Then our

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lifestyle—the buzz-word of the 1980s—will reflect the options in our life as well as in our style.

Notes Inge Blackman is training to be a film technician. She writes on film and is currently editing a book on women in film for Virago. Kathryn Perry has researched on women and autobiography, and works in publishing. We would like to thank all the lesbians who talked to us about style, and provided us with many of the quotations found in this article. We would also like to thank Erica Carter for her useful suggestions.

References ANONYMOUS (1989) ‘S/M Aesthetic’, Outlook, Vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 42–3. ELLIS, Havelock and SYMONDS, John Addington (1897) Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume I—Sexual Inversion, London: Wilson & Macmillan. JEFFREYS, Sheila (1987) ‘Butch and Femme: Now and Then; Gossip, no. 5, London: Onlywomen Press. NESTLE, Joan (1987) A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories, London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. WILSON, Elizabeth (1985) Adorned in Dreams, London: Virago.

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BUTCH/FEMME OBSESSIONS Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan

Now that butch/femme has finally achieved respectability and is sweeping sections of the visible British urban lesbian cultures, we find ourselves reacting against it. These days it all seems like hot air and style. Last gasp of the 1980s or new wave for the 90s, it hardly seems to matter—there’s something shallow going on. What appears to be happening is a definition of who’s butch and who’s femme through trial by clothing, or haircuts, or makeup. All us tarted up femmes running around in cocktail dresses, and all them butches dressed à la Radclyffe Hall. Or black leather or whatever. A great big mess of dress style, top-bottom terminology—and what else? Butch/femme now runs the risk of becoming as de rigeur for parts of the lesbian subculture as androgyny, short hair for all, and a clean scrubbed face was a decade ago. Also holding sway at the moment is a theoretical strand which emphasizes the fluidity of sexual identity, the impossibility of pinning it down. When it comes to the resurgence of butch/femme (or, perhaps more properly, the resurgence of femme) the ‘fluidity’ school seems to champion a celebratory approach, a refusal to consider any deeper, or problematic, elements. ‘Gender play’ is all the rage, but, in all this, where is a feminist consciousness and challenge to gender divisions and inequalities? We don’t want to dichotomize the two, or suggest that one precludes the other. We just wonder how all this playing with appearances—in clothes and behaviour—impinges on our relationships and sense of our lesbian selves in the world. While we don’t believe for a moment that we’re literally born butch or femme, we do think that what happens to us as babies, as little girls, can give us a lot to think about in relation to our later lives as lesbians, butch, femme or whatever. We suspect that butch/ femme is a lot more than style or ‘roles’, which are what the current vogue seems to emphasize. Considering it all just a matter of choice, fun and flair might go some way however towards enabling lesbian desires to be brought into the open. At the same time, there now seems to be a consensus of avoidance around some of the serious issues involved. We’d like to see a discussion begin which would consider the meanings of butch/ femme in the context of the social and psychic construction of lesbianism, its relationship to masculinity and femininity. A massive project, of course—the whole


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subject is very tangled and confusing. In this article we can only ask some pointed questions and suggest other paths we would like to go down in the future. We do think butch and femme exist in some form as a set of social behaviours, meanings and codes within many modern lesbian cultures, although these are not static across race, class and national boundaries. Underpinning this, for some lesbians, we think there may also exist some internal psychic structure, a way of organizing sexual desire, which maybe we can also describe as butch/femme (or perhaps we should be calling it something else?). But there is no necessarily simple or obvious link between these two spheres—internal and external. We don’t think that every lesbian who is either butch or femme either acknowledges this or want to be identified as such. We think that some lesbians around who call themselves butch or femme are the opposite of what they claim. We know that some lesbians believe they are neither butch nor femme and don’t need those categories on any level. And it seems that there are butches in successful relationships with other butches and femmes with femmes. One of us thinks that at this point in the historical development of a lesbian identity/psyche, butch/femme may be part of the very infrastructure of lesbian desire. The other one thinks that it’s all more tenuous, changing and slippery than that, and believes that other forces may be as powerful in defining lesbian desire. A central question has to be whether butch/femme is liberating or constricting for lesbians. Are some elements of it inevitable in relationships between women? Is the new embrace of ‘femmeness’ subversive in the same way the clone look was for gay men a decade ago—so that femininity is no longer essentially a position in relation to men: you can be a lesbian and a ‘real’ woman. The absence of any precise or agreed definition about what butch and femme are produces endless heated arguments among lesbians. One straightforward and fairly widespread view is that they are merely methods of dress and behaviour—roles, in other words. Another view is that butch/femme are metaphors for subject/object in lesbian relationships: that talking about ourselves or others as butch/femme essentially describes how we negotiate desire. Because lesbian experience is so untheorized and unsupported, even within radical or alternative cultures, any lesbian language of self-description and selfanalysis has tended to remain underdeveloped. So these two words (and their equivalents in other cultures and contexts) have become dreadfully overburdened. They have to be infinitely elastic terms—living slang, taking on endless nuances of meaning. What interests us—we use the words in both the senses above, and many more—is the relationship between the different meanings. If we describe someone as ‘femmeing it up’ (the way they dress) are we also assuming, implying or guessing that she takes certain emotional positions in her relationship or that she will behave in a particular way in bed? Does everything proceed along simple, predictable lines, even in disguised forms? Or is it all more contradictory, fluid?

Psychic mysteries We wonder what psychoanalysis has to offer us on these questions. Very little psychoanalytic theory has been produced which looks at les bianism from a nonpathologizing viewpoint, let alone at butch and femme. Can we extrapolate from

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recent feminist analytic work on femininity? Or are heterosexual feminist theoreticians missing a very important boat by largely leaving lesbians out of their calculations? We’re not on very sure ground when we discuss psychoanalysis, but there are some areas we’d love to see developed. If difference is necessary for desire to exist, what difference? Are butch and femme ways of organizing certain differences between women and then eroticizing them? Is butch/femme a simple matter of masculine and feminine identifications? In a psychoanalytic account of the girl’s ‘achievement’ of her proper feminine position, this attainment seems to go hand in hand with the establishment of the psychic conditions necessary for later female heterosexuality—so, how can psychoanalysis account for femme lesbians? Does an unconscious refusal to recognize their status as ‘castrated’ girls underly the butchness of some women? Are butches driven by the necessity to maintain that fantasy to themselves and others? Can femmes have the same fantasy, with a different outcome? Do butch lesbians hate women? What is a femme’s relationship to a butch’s masculine identification? What distinguishes a femme from a heterosexual woman—why does she desire a woman? (Or does she want to be desired by a woman?) Are there more femmes than butches in modern western societies and if so why? Are there (as we guess) butch heterosexual women, and what does that say about heterosexual relationships? Inevitably, where does bisexuality fit into it all? What impact does current feminism have on butch and femme psychic identities of today, if any? All we can do here is ask these questions—we’re nowhere near being able to provide comprehensive answers.

Social meanings At this point we return to considering lesbianism as a social identity, as socially constructed, and butch/femme in that light as well. In so doing we could approach it from many angles, but here we are content to throw in bits and pieces from different directions. Some of the questions echo ones we tried to articulate above, in thinking about the psychic sphere. The answers we could come up with have different resonances and meanings when the questions are asked in a social context. We look at ourselves, and the lesbians we know, or observe, or are told about, many of whom we think of as butch or femme. This is what we wonder:

• Who wanted to be a boy? Who was a tomboy? Looking at stories of lesbian lives, there seems to be no correlation between having been a tomboy and whether or not a lesbian is butch or femme. Wanting to be a boy is a different kettle of fish. • Does being a woman cause psychic distress to some women? What are the different meanings of femme, femininity and being a woman and how are their meanings culturally and historically specific? • When it comes to sex, do butch and femme have something to do with who is the object for the other and who looks at who? If butches are often caught in the Catch 22 of wanting a femme as the object of their desire at the same time that they are compelled to merge with that object, to domesticate the situation, what does that signify? Does the butch in the woman want the objectification of the

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feminine in her lover, the woman in the butch the domestication of her relationship? (And the lesbian loses it all in the end because the two are mutually exclusive?) • And what about the femme? Does she want to be the object of desire? Does she desire the butch only as her objectifier? Is she better placed to resist the merging? Is it the femme who can keep the butch at arm’s length and prolong desire? • Who pursues who? Who fucks who? What with? Here are some stabs in the dark: do butches tend to particularly like and initiate tribadism? Do butches want to penetrate? Are femmes more attached to penetration?

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We know that some butches don’t like to be penetrated at all, or even to have their genitals touched—why is this? (On the other hand, what about the famous butches ‘on the streets’, who are infamously femme ‘between the sheets’?) Don’t misunderstand: we are not suggesting that a ‘real’ femme never really is wet to fuck her lover, and we know that many butches live in hope that their femme lover will want to fuck them too. • Is it possible that butches and femmes experience penetration and orgasm in different ways? If femmes find the womanly masculinity or androgyny of the butch attractive, where then is the exact location of the femme’s sexual desire for the butch? In other words, how does a femme actually desire the butch’s breasts, her cunt, her womanness? Is the contradiction between butchness and femaleness the exciting ingredient for the femme?

• Some lesbians who take on aspects of a butch identity may do so to hold at bay a desire to be passive, submissive, to give up control. They may be frightened of these things. But these ‘butches’ may be scared by the overt nature of butch/ femme too. Is lack of self-awareness integral to the butch persona? Conversely, are we implying that femmes are more self-aware? What are femmes frightened of? • If it’s all about looks, the look, the gaze, then what is it that we enjoy about looking like lesbians or having lovers who look lesbian and/or butch? (Has butch, up until recently, equalled lesbian?) Is it necessarily part of butch/femme that the femme look feminine and the butch masculine? What about those classically narcissistic lesbian couples who look like each other, dress like each other? Is the butch/femme component of their relationship played out in private? • Who is emotionally fluid? Who is strong and protective? Who takes care of who? We know femmes who complain (or not) of being the ones who take responsibility for the emotional well-being of the relationship. Sometimes this seems to be mixed up with aspects of a parent/child dynamic, but at others, it seems more about self-consciousness and the classic ‘femininity’ of the femme. However, there are the persuasive voices of butches who maintain that they enable the femme to feel safe and to be the baby.

• We wonder what sort of parent/child, mother/daughter, father/ daughter narratives butch/femme is giving voice to. One of us thinks that in these scenarios, femme definitely seems to occupy the infantilized position. Maybe this reveals both its charm and its potentially self-destructive nature. The other emphatically thinks it’s often butches who are the babies. Freeing or freezing? When lesbians used to talk about their own experiences of butch/femme, it was set in the past, about specific times in their histories, about having to take on certain social roles in order to make it. These days talk is about the here and now, and among many

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lesbians we know, chiefly about the pleasure and powerfulness of being femme—of being free to be seductive, looked after, adored, as well as adoring. The flip side of that of course is the cost in terms of real social power—in a relationship and in the wider world—if you are restricted to, or your emotional happiness depends upon, that way of being. Maybe femmes are in the ascendant now—but are we going to see a lot of sapped, insecure and above all resentful women around in ten years’ time? Maybe sooner—we’ve recently heard anecdotes about women (young, feminist) being told to more or less stay in line in a relationship in the name of butch/femme positions. Where do we end up? Over the last decade we’ve both embraced butch/femme, sometimes overtly, sometimes secretly, found it made sense of strong drives, was fun, enhanced the excitement, was a useful tool for analysing what went on. It can also be a trap, a drain, a smokescreen, too rigid for what’s really felt and experienced in our relationships. The opening out of the complexities of our sexual, social and psychic lives as lesbians should lead to opportunities for deeper understanding, not new confining orthodoxies. So we end up ambivalent as usual, and leave it at that. For now.

Notes We would like to thank Diane Hamer and Clara Connolly and the FR lesbian issue group for detailed comments and advice. Thanks from Susan to Alison and Wendy for arguing it out, and from Sue to Mitch. Sue O’Sullivan lives in King’s Cross, is a member of the Feminist Review collective and works at Sheba Feminist Publishers. Susan Ardill lives in Brixton and is a producer of Channel 4’s lesbian and gay series Out on Tuesday.

ARCHIVES

THE WILL TO REMEMBER: The Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York Joan Nestle Dedicated to the over thirty co-ordinators and volunteers who make the on-going activities of the archives possible. We should add that [she] draws less and less from [her] past. The colonizer never even recognized that [she] had one; everyone knows that the commoner whose origins are unknown has no history. Let us ask the colonized [herself]: who are [her] folk heroes? [her] great popular leaders? [her] sages? At most [she] may be able to give us a few names, in complete disarray, and fewer and fewer as one goes down the generations. The colonized seems condemned to lose [her] memory. (The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi) The Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York City, which began in 1973, grew out of a consciousness-raising group among the lesbian members of an organization called the Gay Academic Union. Concerned with the plight of gay students and teachers in high schools and colleges, the GAU was a rallying point for gay scholarship and battles against isolation and homophobia in the city’s schools. Most of us were part of the city and state university system but soon we split into the usual early seventies factions: sexist gay men, Marxists, and lesbian-separatists. I was a member of the latter two. Several of us in the CR group who had come out before the Stonewall Rebellion and the advent of a formal feminist movement felt the need to establish a grass-roots lesbian archives project. We remembered a world of lesbian culture that had nourished us but that was rapidly disappearing. We also knew, in this early heyday of lesbian publishing, that our presses and publishers were fragile undertakings and we were concerned about preserving all their precious productions. But the strongest reason for creating the archives was to end the silence of patriarchal history about us—women who loved women. Furthermore, we wanted our story to be told by us, shared by us and preserved by us. We were tired of Feminist Review No 34, Spring 1990

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being the medical, legal and religious other. In 1974 The Lesbian Herstory Archives became a reality. In 1975 the archives took up residence in what was to become the home I would share with Deborah Edel, another member of the founding group whose dedication has been unmeasurable. From our newsletter, No. 1, 1975: The Lesbian Herstory Archives exist to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities so that future generations will have ready access to materials relevant to their lives, The process of gathering this material will also serve to uncover and collect our herstory denied to us previously by patriarchal historians in the interests of the culture which they serve. The existence of these Archives will enable us to analyze and reevaluate the Lesbian experience; we also anticipate that the existence of these archives will encourage lesbians to record their experiences in order to formulate our living Herstory. We will collect and preserve any materials that are relevant to the lives and experiences of Lesbians: books, magazines, journals, news clippings (from establishment, Feminist or Lesbian media), bibliog raphies, photos, herstorical information, tapes, films, diaries, oral herstories, poetry and prose, biographies, autobiographies, notices of events, posters, graphics, and other memorabilia and obscure references to our lives. Early on in our organizing work, we realized that because the word ‘archives’ sounded formal and distancing to many of the women we wanted to reach, we would have to dedicate many years to spreading the word about this new undertaking. At first we carted samples of the archives holdings to homes, bars, churches, synagogues, anywhere we were asked to speak. However, we soon realized that our copy of the first edition of The Ladder as well as other memorabilia would not survive these trips, and that more needed to be said than we could cover in the show-and-tell method. So we created a travelling slide-show to bring home the message that all lesbians were worthy of inclusion in herstory, that as we have said a thousand times over, if you have the courage to touch another woman, you are a famous lesbian. This slide-show became our major organizing tool, our most powerful way to work against feelings of cultural deprivation and personal isolation. It also allowed us to make our vision clear—what was a lesbian archives, how was it different from traditional archives and how did it fit into the political struggles of our people? We each had our own way of introducing the show: I would dedicate the presentation to the lesbians who had sat next to me on the barstools of the Sea Colony, a working-class lesbian bar of the late fifties and early sixties. I always wanted to remind the progressively younger women in our audiences of the generations before them, of the different language and style of an earlier courage. I would say ‘I am a femme of the fifties’, or I would use the word ‘queer’ to describe myself, the word I came out into. Particularly when I was speaking to lesbians in college settings or at women’s conferences held at posh campuses or to gay and lesbian student groups on campuses at universities like Yale or Harvard, it was very important for me to remind them that once I was a sexual criminal who stood on a bathroom line. I wanted the slide-show to be seen as a challenge to whatever complacency the audience derived from their respectable surroundings, and I wanted the

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voices, images, ideas to make them proud of the complexity of the lesbian experience and sure that they had a place in it, no matter what kind of lesbian they were. Different settings, different presenters would change the introduction, but the core of the slideshow stayed the same. Our main task was to bring the collection alive, to show its inclusiveness, its respect for lesbians of all colours, classes, physical abilities, cultural backgrounds and sexual styles. We had to clarify that our archives, our family album, our library, was not primarily for academic scholars but for any lesbian woman who needed an image or a word to survive the day. No letter of introduction was ever needed to gain access, browsing was as important as research, but we also had to convey the seriousness of our undertaking, why we should be trusted with the photograph of a dead lover or diaries that spanned twenty years. We had to combine passion with responsibility and openness with hard hard work. We had to be personal and public, political and confidential. Always we were asked, but you don’t mean my work, my poems, my letters, my photograph? Always there was incredulity at our assertion that her life was the important one. But I had known this deprivation so searingly in my own life that it was a question that brought out all my fire and love—Yes, yes, you are the lesbian the archives exist for, to tell and share your story. From our visitor’s book, 1979: For two days I have been thinking up wise and pithy things that I should include—no dice. So perhaps, Joan and Deb, the honest will work better. Only once before have I felt like I’ve come home. This is the second time. I never thought I would be that lucky again—and I realize it is my right to come home to the world. Thanks to you and all the lives in this room for showing me that right! [Judy Reagan] The slide-show helped us make the point that one of our battles was to change secrecy into disclosure, shame into memory. We spoke of how families burned letters and diaries, how our cultural artifacts were often found in piles of garbage or on bargain tables. When we first started the archives, these were new ideas but now with the international lesbian and gay archives movement, with the flourishing of a lesbian and gay social history movement and with a raised consciousness about the importance of sexual choices in biographical studies, we hope the message has been given—no more pyres of same-sex love letters. An excerpt from a love letter (c. 1920) found in a Greenwich Village gutter after the family had cleaned out the apartment of Eleanor C., a labour educator of the thirties and forties: This is a ‘very quiet’ letter, Eleanor dear, and you won’t read it when you are dashing off somewhere in a hurry, will you—please.

Thursday night Best Beloved I’m writing by the light of the two tall candles on my desk, with the flamey chrysanthemums you arranged, before me. It’s such a lovely soft glow and I’m glad because this is a ‘candle light’ letter. I wish you could know what a wonderful person you are, Eleanor darling, and what joy your letter written last night gave me. Not the part about me—that is pitifully

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From the Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York

wrong and only a standard for me to measure up to—but you make it all so wonderful and are clear about it. You know I feel terribly much the way you do about it all, but I could never say so, even in incoherent fashion, and so many times back of my nobler resolves I am just plain selfish about wanting you to look at and talk to…. And I’m not afraid dear, I

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know our love will help—oh so much—and hinder, it never does that, not even in my weakest moments… The candles are burning low, dear heart and the world is very still and beautiful outside. And I am so, oh so happy that I know you and love you. May God bless you through all time. Alice The images in the slide-show are as important as the words. They make the point that lesbians from different decades had different modes of self-presentation, that the collection represents lesbians from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds in their own image. Stone butches and lesbian separatists, leather women and Goddess-worshippers, passing women and lipstick lesbians, all carrying their other identities, look out at the audience, forming a mosaic of the lesbian community. A cross-generational, crosscultural bridge is created, one that is of utmost importance if no one segment of our community is to be singled out for societal repression. During the slide-show, we stress the need to open the doors of the contemporary lesbian community to lesbians of difference, to passing women, to lesbian sex-trade workers, to an international and multilingual perspective. We try to avoid the hypocrisy of commemorating lesbians of the past while exiling their living representatives in the name of a selected herstory. Passing women, for instance, hold a great historical fascination but as we explain the ‘husband-wife’ image on the screen—a Daily News centrefold photo from 1937—we stress the need to recognize the passing women of our time. As we show the tatooed blue stars of the Buffalo working-class lesbian community of the forties, we make a plea for groups to start their own oral history projects to discover the lesbian folklore of their area. Always our goal is to connect the present struggles of lesbian women of all backgrounds to the past, to show the legacy of resistance and to give the keys needed to unlock the sometimes coded language of liberation battles of another time. From our newsletter, No. 7, 1981: If we ask decorous questions of history, we will get a genteel history. If we assume that because sex was a secret it did not exist, we will get a sexless history. If we assume that in periods of oppression, Lesbians lost their autonomy and acted as victims only, we destroy not only history but lives. For many years the psychologists told us we were both emotionally and physically deviant; they measured our nipples and clitorises to chart our queerness, they talked about how we wanted to be men and how our sexual styles were pathetic imitations of the real thing and all along under this barrage of hatred and fear, we loved. They told us that we should hate ourselves and sometimes we did, but we were also angry, resilient and creative. We were part of a community that took care of itself. And most of all we were Lesbian women, revolutionizing each of these terms. We create history as much as we discover it. What we call history becomes history and since this is a naming time, we must be on guard against our own class prejudices and discomforts. If close friends and devoted companions are to be part of Lesbian history, so must be also the Lesbians of the fifties who left no doubt about their sexuality or their courage.

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We have shown this slide-show now in hundreds of cities and towns in America, covering the span of our country; we have taken it to international audiences in Holland and England. We have shown it to an audience of one and to audiences of thousands. It has taken us to living rooms of rural homes, where we all had to take a pledge not to reveal any woman’s identity, to social work training sessions, to bars where we competed with the ring of the register and the dance music throbbing in the background. Always our message has been ‘You, the women listening and watching, are our Lesbian herstory. You must send the photo, copy the letter, make the tape. You must cherish the courage of your own days, of your ways of loving, and not be intimidated by the thought of being part of a people’s memory.’ From our newsletter, No. 3, 1976: Summer was an interesting time for the Archives with a record number of visitors including women from California, England, and Italy. I found that whether I was talking with Lesbians from Manhattan or Europe the concern expressed for the preservation of our herstory creates an energy that whisks the archives from the past into our daily lives. There is motivation and activity everywhere. In London women are producing street theater in the Punch and Judy tradition in support of Wages for Housework. In Italy Lesbian groups are beginning to meet in the high schools. Some of our visitors organized Lesbian centers or were respon sible for coordinating such notable events as the Lesbian Herstory Exploration near Los Angeles. Of course in many cases the enthusiasm was closer to home, taking the shape of a ‘Hello. I just found out that the Archives is a few blocks away and I’d like to stop by tomorrow.’ This summer brought a feeling of universal Lesbian power—women united in the celebration and adventure of pursuing our identity. Valerie In order to survive in America as an archives we have had to call ourselves a not-forprofit information resource centre because the New York State Board of Regents maintains control over educational institutions and could therefore confiscate the collection for ‘just cause’. We take no money from the government, believing that such an action would be an exercise in neocolonialism, believing that the society that ruled us out of history should never be relied upon to make it possible for us to exist. All the technology the archives has—the computer, the xeroxing machine—comes from lesbian, gay, feminist and radical funding sources. With its library of over 10,000 volumes, 12, 000 photographs, 200 special collections, 1,400 periodical titles, 1,000 organizational and subject files, thousands of feet of film and video footage, art and artifacts, posters and T-shirts, buttons and personal memorabilia, the collection is now too large for its home of fifteen years, and we are trying to raise funds to purchase a building that will be a research centre for lesbian culture with the archives collection at its heart. Our model for this is the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture which started as one Black man’s refusal to accept a teacher’s edict that Black people have no history. The archives had never just been a home for the markings of the past. Our At-HomeWith-the-Archives series allows lesbian cultural workers to try out first-time creations, gives space for open debates and discussions where women know that all are welcomed, and encourages political organizing. Our newsletter and displays in bookstores, libraries

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and gay community centres, our participation in demonstrations and marches, all make clear that a lesbian archives is a participant in the creation of culture and social change as well as a preserver of our people’s story. From our statement of purpose, 1974: 1. All women must have access to the archives 2. The collection must never be bartered or sold 3. The collection must be housed in a Lesbian community space and be staffed by Lesbians We, the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, always took as our working principles that we were not interested in a role-model lesbian herstory, that we wanted the collection, and hence the record, to be as inclusive as possible. Since many of us who work with the archives are working-class women, we were not hampered by class censorship. We actively sort out documentation of the lives of lesbian factory workers, butch-femme communities of the forties and fifties, lesbian prostitutes and sex performers. Now hard hats and hob-nail boots sit next to pasties and glossy prints of a famous lesbian stripper of the fifties. They, in turn, are joined by the lesbian-feminist artifacts of the seventies. We hope the discussion of lesbian strategies and identities that these objects represent will go on for generations to come, each decade adding its layer of complexity. The fullest record we can leave is the best legacy for the political and social survival of our lesbian daughters around the world. A simplified, homogenized past will not be rich enough in ideas, inspirations, actions or images to nourish a diverse and embattled lesbian community of the future. We also believed that we could go about our personal lives without harming the image of the archives in the community. I have worked very hard to make clear that what I write about as Joan Nestle, the femme, is not in any way an official voice of the archives, but as an archivist I have also made clear that the lives of all lesbian women are worthy of being documented. We have all put thousands of hours of work into the archives, many times not very glamorous work, but as I have said before, there is a passion in what we do. For me, part of that passionate commitment to lesbian archiving is to say thank you to a generation of women who gave me love and showed me my first portraits of lesbian courage. Our archives belongs to no one group of lesbians and to no one selected image or formula for liberation; it will eventually pass into the hands of a new generation of rememberers who we hope will keep the door open to the multiplicities of lesbian identity. Our will to remember is our will to change the world, to continually reconstruct the words ‘woman’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘gender’ so they reflect the complex creations which we call our lives. From the visitor’s book, 1983:

I am here among women who breathe softly in my ear who speak gently in a voice that will not be stilled.

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I am here in a cradle or a womb, or a lap, on a knee that is shapely under my thigh leaving the impression that I will never be alone. I am here to remember faces I have never seen before and I do love, Jewelle Gomez Note Joan Nestle is forty-nine years old, Jewish, a feminist, co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City and author of A Restricted Country which tells everything else.

INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES Alison Read The idea for a questionnaire of international lesbian archives developed from my involvement in the London Lesbian Archive Summer School in July 1988. The political upheavals and the dispute which followed from debates which came to the surface at the summer school, along with an ongoing conflict on race politics, left me wondering how other archives dealt with the issues around representation and content as well as control of the archive. The questionnaire was therefore biased to a London archive agenda. In all, there were forty questions varied across a range of topics from funding to materials collected, legal and management structures to representation, use of the archive and newsletters and other material published. Forty-five questionnaires were sent out, ten were returned ‘no forwarding address’, etc., one archive wrote to say why they did not want to participate and I received twelve replies. There is too much material to be reproduced here, a complete record of all the replies will be available from the London archive. What follows is a digest to show the diversity and resourcefulness of the archives. Most of the archives also serve their communities as information centres and contact points, as well as taking on the task of making lesbians more visible in the world. Unless otherwise specified, all the archives are open to visitors, either at designated ‘drop in’ times or by appointment. Visitors are advised to phone or

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write first. Most archives without full access are able to make available items from the collections for wheelchair users. I have included addresses of archives that I know are working but did not reply to the questionnaire. There are many more archives in operation; the London Archive will maintain on computer a current list, so please send information and updates to that address. Thank you to the archives who took the time to reply, especially those for whom English is not their first language, in some cases reports are not so detailed, not because less work was happening but because of language. All the archives welcome donations of all lesbian materials, not just printed word but photos, badges, postcards, diaries and letters, etc., and will make contracts with donors about the use of the material. Volunteers are always welcome, skilled or unskilled. Reading the replies I don’t know if I found the answers to my original doubts and questions. My concerns are around whose history we are collecting to leave for lesbians in the future to give a true and accurate picture of lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s. Historians and researchers add their own priorities and selection to archive material— how much do we blur and disjoint the picture of all our lives by our choice of what we select and prioritize in the archives? Surely, archives must actively search out all materials from all the lesbian communities—including the writing and images, the books and magazines we find difficult, disagree with and strongly object to. It is easy to collect and catalogue the products of our own community and friendship groups. Many of the archives have their roots in the lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s and in academia. In Britain, neither of these groups represent in any way the diversity of the lesbian communities. The answers to questions on race and representation amongst workers, management groups and users reflected how these archives are not part of the life of the Black lesbian communities. It was only the Lesbisch Archief Nijmegen in the Netherlands which made a point of stating they had ‘no political restrictions’ on the material they collect. All the archives make hard choices governed by money and attempts to stretch limited resources and time. I would hope that for the 1990s we would all try to take on the questions around full representation so that the picture we leave for lesbians in the future is not obscured and partially blocked by restrictions in our vision and experience.

Notes Alison Read is a part-time bookseller, lesbian studies teacher and office worker at Feminist Review. Thanks to Maree Gladwin and Marie McShea for their work on the questionnaire and our discussions on the issues.

Spinnboden e.V.Lesbenarchiv Burgsdorfstrabe 1 D—000 Berlin 65 Germany. Tel: 030 465 20 21 Access: X Spinnboden grew from the beginnings of the lesbian movement of the 1970s. Now well established, with five paid workers, they also function as a contact and information centre, do their own research and publish an 80-page illustrated journal twice a year. Eighty-five per cent of the archive is on card catalogue.

ALI (Archivi Lesbici Italiani) Via S.Francesco di Sales 1A 00165 Rome Italy Tel: 6864201 Access: P Started in 1986 and funded by income from parties, holidays and exhibitions they organize, and the sale of books and papers they publish. Bollettino del CLI (Collegamento tra Lesbiche Italiane) is published monthly with news, articles, letters and book reviews, available by subscription. Film and video material is given to the lesbian group Video Viola for their archive. The archive is for women only. Dokumentatiecentrum Homo- studies (Homodok) University of Amsterdam Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 NL 1012DK Amsterdam The Netherlands

Tel: (0)20–5252601 Access: P The only archive to reply with a publicity leaflet in three languages, the archive was started in 1978 as part of a move to establish Lesbian and Gay Studies at the university. A mixed lesbian and gay project used mainly for research and recreational reading, usage is 30 per cent lesbian, 60 per cent gay men; overall 39 per cent women, 61 per cent men. Seventy-five per cent of the material is catalogued on computer. Special focus on Dutch and foreign newspaper and magazine articles on homosexuality. Also publish a documentary and bibliographic column, ‘Relevant’, in the magazine Ho mologie.

Orlando Schalmstraat 2B 5614 AD Eindhoven The Netherlands Tel: 040 11 15 78 Access: F Orlando was started in 1988 by a group of seven lesbians. Currently housed at the Women’s Centre, they are looking for premises. Funded by a support group of sixty-five people who make a monthly donation, their first priorities are to document lesbians in the south of the Netherlands and a project to record interviews with older lesbians. Their work is equally divided between archiving and acting as an information centre and action group. Newsletter three times a year. The archive is for women only. Lesbisch Archief Nijmegen Postbus 1220

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6501 BE Nijmegen The Netherlands Tel: 080–234459 Access: X Started in 1982, the archive was opened in 1985. They prioritize collecting material on lesbians from the Nijmegen area and gather all materials on lesbian lives, both public and personal, with no political restrictions. They receive some state funding to cover costs and publish a newsletter twice a year.

Lezbiška sekcija c/o SKUC SKUC-Forum Kersnikova 4 61000 Ljubljana Yugoslavia Tel: (061) 31 96 62 (Friday 8–10pm) Access: X Housed and supported financially by ŠŠKUC (Students’ Cultural Centre), Lesbiška sekcija is 40 per cent archive, 60 per cent information and organization centre, and was started in 1987. They publish an annual bulletin and organize lectures, discussions, a film festival and disco dances. Lesbian Archive and Infor mation Centre —LAIC Box BM 7005

London WC1N 3XX Tel: 01 405 6475 Access: X Started in 1984, LAIC currently has state funding for three part-time workers and to cover some costs. After a political split in 1988/9 a new organizational structure and equal opportunities policy have been adopted to ensure full representation of all groups in the lesbian communities. There is a register of all materials held, 35 per cent is catalogued by card or computer. Separate bibliographies on Black lesbians, young lesbians and health matters available.

Gerber-Hart Library 3238 North Sheffield Chicago Illinois 60657, USA. Tel: 312/883–3003 Access: X Founded in 1981, Gerber-Hart is a lesbian and gay lending library and resource centre as well as an archive. They hold 4,000 books, an extensive periodical collection, a healthinformation and resource centre and an expanding collection of records, video and audio-tapes. They organize a lesbian book discussion group. Founding member of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Archives and Libraries. All staff are volunteers, the archive is financed by $15 annual membership. For Gay Pride 1988, the library float was on the theme ‘Take a Book to Bed’ and was crowned by the Statue of Liberty reading a copy of ‘Lesbian Sex’!

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Kentucky Collection of Lesbian Her-story PO Box 1701 Louisville Kentucky 40201, USA Tel: (502) 895–3127 Access: X Started in 1980 ‘to collect and preserve Lesbian culture in the form of writings’, the collection also operates as a lending library, a research resource for lesbians and for networking contacts. They fundraise with talks, discussions, poetry and literary readings and social events. Very little material is catalogued as yet, they are still filing…For women only.

Matrices Lesbian-Feminist Re source Network Women’s Studies Dept 492 Ford Hall University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN 55455, USA Access: F Matrices, a Lesbian-Feminist resource, started in 1969 as a networking newsletter for lesbian researchers inside and out of acade-mia. Archiving forms 25 per cent of their work. They aim to catalogue conferences, archival news, research projects, journals and books, bibliographies, lesbian artists and artworks, etc. They also encourage exchange on controversial lesbian issues by circulating bibliographies and reading lists on those issues and hope to help create a forum for a wide range of responses, criticism, speculation and debate. Not open to visitors. June Mazer Lesbian Collection 626 N. Robertson Blvd. W. Hollywood

California 90069, USA. Tel: 213 659 2478 Access: X Originally The West Coast Lesbian Collections, Oakland, they were started in 1981 and are now under the wing of Connexxus Women’s Center—Centro de Mujares of Los Angeles. The collection documents lesbian history from the 1890s to the present. They hold a complete run of Vice-Versa the earliest known lesbian periodical (Los Angeles 1947–8) and the records of Diana Press, one of the first independent lesbian publishers, in their large collection of books, periodicals, etc. They are particularly interested in the role of lesbians in society and in social change movements.

If you were new in the area in 1954 and a women came up to you, flashed her pinky ring and suggested that you wear green next Thursday and meet her at Miss Smith’s Tea Room if you want to drop your hairpins—she would be telling you, in not so subtle terms, that she was ‘In the Life’. (From the JMLC brochure)

Lesbian Herstory Archive PO Box 1258 New York NY 10116 USA Tel: 212 874 7232 Archives, Recherches Lesbiennes Boite Postale 662 75531 Paris cedex 11

et

Cul

tures

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Amazonian sleeping lioness

France Tel: 48 05 25 89 II Centro Cassero (Lesbian & Gay) CP 691 40100 Bologna Italy Access code:

F=Wheelchair accessible, X=No wheelchair access, P=SPartial access.

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AUDRE LORDE: Vignettes and Mental Conversations Gail Lewis

For my mother and Pat Parker Audre Lorde, African American, is a writer. She is a professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where in 1987 she became the first woman to be Thomas Hunter Professor. So important is she to the students at Hunter that when they established a women’s poetry centre there, the students named it after Lorde. She has published thirteen volumes of work and in 1974 her book of poetry, From A Land Where Other People Live (Lorde, 1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. She is also a lesbian, feminist and activist poet, who dedicates her work to an acceptance, understanding and use of difference in the struggle to change the world. Seemingly simple, this work is practically, intellectually and emotionally enormous because it involves the creation of new ways of seeing and being from within the interstices, the very fabric, of our current social realities. She is a poet and as such there is both an aural and visual quality to all her work including her essays and biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde, 1982a). The texture of her writing, the rhythms and tones of her voice and the economy, precision, yet multiplicity of meaning of her words, are those of the poet. To fully comprehend her, to feel the impact of her work, one needs to hear her, if not in the person then to be able to conjure up her voice. To hear how she delivers the words that we can see on the written page. How then is it possible to write in connection with Lorde in the absence of the voice and when, for much of the time, I find her poems beyond the bounds of my comprehension? Surely it is both audacious and partial, and can only lead to a one-sided and superficial engagement with her work. Well that might be the case if this were an exercise in literary criticism, but it is not. Rather it is part of a longer piece which attempts to critically engage with a small part of Lorde’s work. Edward Said defines criticism as the task occupying itself ‘with the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge is made possible’ (Said, 1983:182). Clearly this essay is not concerned with this. Rather the impetus comes from a desire to consider some of the ways in which I, a black lesbian, living in London, converse with and attempt to use Lorde’s work when I am trying to come to grips with things that befuddle or concern me. By engaging with Lorde’s work in an effort to develop a greater understanding of the requirements of change,


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my article is a personal tribute to the importance of the work of this woman. Nothing more or less than this.

Mothering It’s the winter of 1983, seven months after our mother’s death, and my sister, my grandmother and I are in New Jersey to visit my mother’s sister. It’s good to be in the States; even better to be able to talk with my aunt about my mother’s illness and death; and great to see my friend from New York. Somehow being in the country my mother loved so much aids the slow and painful process of waking up to both the reality of her absence and that of her continued and loving presence. My intellect does nothing to help me through, my sensibilities do everything, later I’ll be able to make better sense of the swirl of confused emotions, even the despair. For the moment the need of and comfort from ritual is sharp: a candle in St Patrick’s cathedral (much to the incomprehension of my sister and grandmother) and a quiet dinner in an Indian restaurant in Brooklyn with my sister, my friend and some of the other women from Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Audre Lorde is one of the women. We say hello and proceed to order; we talk about publishing; the state of racism in the USA and Britain; compare Brooklyn to Brixton; the West Indian bakery round the corner to that uptown in Harlem, and proceed to eat. Audre plays mother and we all settle, in varying degrees of comfort and ease, under her wing. This was the setting in which I first met Audre Lorde, ‘founding mother of Black feminism’, as a recent radio profile called her (Lorde, 1988), and it is this which structures my memory of the emotions running through that evening. Certainly, memory tells me, there was that curious mix of contradictory feelings often directed towards our mothers—respect, grudging indulgence and deference, irritation and a kind of reticence, as though we weren’t, for the time being, quite grown up anymore. There is a kind of ambivalence through which, prism-like, our love is projected and refracted. Perhaps this is in part the result of the scrutiny with which our mothers see us and love us. Because the scrutiny of Audre’s perception is a necessary and guiding force for her, she engages with us in the same way as this, carefully watching the speakers as she listens, absorbing and considering the things they are saying, watching their movements as if she were ‘listening’ not just with her ears but with her eyes as well. She once remarked that, as a child, her poor vision resulted in light breaking down into its component parts, giving her an entry into the colour within light. (Lorde, 1988). Perhaps it is this which enables her to see the connexions that can lie behind difference. Certainly it was this poor vision, this physical condition, which led to her intense scrutiny of things and people. Her perception is both powerful and a little frightening. How then should I write of the relevance of Lorde’s work? It feels alien to write of this. I cannot own it, this concept of being a writer, however momentarily. The piece makes demands of me. I must work to produce it (my mother always knew I was lazy but not a coward), and Lorde would expect—no, demand—nothing less than work, than the best of oneself. Like a mother, one might say that she has adopted the concern that we ‘make the best of ourselves’. Only for her it is a kind of political motto stemming

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from the belief that it is through the pursuit of the best of and in oneself that the seeds of change may spring. For Audre Lorde is a mother. Not only of that multi-faceted complex of black feminisms (we cannot speak of it in the singular), but also in the sense that she has as her concern the construction of futures. One of the identities she owns and uses in the struggle to change the order of things is that of ‘mother’, and she does so in a double sense. One as a ‘real’ mother of woman and man children. The other in a metaphorical sense, as a ‘mother’ of black lesbians, and feminists, and black people and others of us struggling to own the present. Her aim is that our individual and collective futures may be different and not mere repetitions of the current choicelessness. Gods of our own selves is what she would have us be. Ain’t that something. But she does not stop there. In her work she gives us some insight into her view of what the responsibilities accompanying motherhood are and reminds us that what constitutes motherhood is contested territory, a contest in which the combatants are not confined to mothers and children. Rather ‘motherhood’ is a terrain in which the defining content itself is battled over among mothers themselves:

I can see your daughter walking down streets of love in revelation; but raising her up to be a correct little sister is doing your mama’s job all over again, And who did you make on the edge of Harlem’s winter hard and black While the inside was undetermined swirls of color and need shifting, remembering were you making another self to rediscover in a new house and a new name in a new place next to a river of blood or were you putting the past together pooling everything learned into a new and continuous woman divorced from the old shit we share and shared and sharing need not share again? (Lorde, 1982b: 56) Mothers then bear the awesome responsibility of gathering the past into a pedagogical package, not as a means of controlling but rather as a gift from which their children may fashion their own visions, their own selves.

Since then I can only distinguish one thread within running hours

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you, flowing through selves toward you (Lorde, 1982b: 13). What more beautiful gift for the child, what greater source of joy for the mother? Listen (as Dylan Thomas says) to the challenge in that. The challenge to those of us who are actually mothers; the challenge to the heterosexist order of things which opposes the categories ‘mother’ and ‘lesbian’. The challenge to those of us whose political and life experience is older, and maybe wider, to both recognize our responsibility to analyse and pass on the lessons of that experience, and yet to work with and learn from those who follow us. For it is only by doing so that together we deliver the possibility of selfdetermined futures. Since we bequeath what we do today we owe it to ourselves and our inheritors that we leave the best that we can.

It has rained for five days running the world is a round puddle of sunless water where small islands are only beginning to cope a young boy in my garden is bailing out water from his flower patch when I ask him why he tells me young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily (Lorde, 1978:45). Whilst Lorde uses her position as a mother as a metaphor for the responsibilities we have to our collective daughters, nieces, etc., she is also concerned that our sons and nephews are not denied their birthrights and have the possibility of self-definition. In this aspect of her work she challenges black men to take care of business and accept their responsibilities towards the younger generations. She writes:

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognise that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self (Lorde, 1984:74).

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As the mother of her son Lorde tells us that her starting point for achieving this aim is to teach her son to acknowledge, take responsibility for, and respect his own feelings. For when, as an adult, the distance between them as man and woman is fully and sharply defined, this lesson will be all he has left of her. It will provide the tools from which he can make his self-definition without premising that on the subordination and oppression of others. What Lorde is concerned with here is the fact that the difference between them as woman and man is a socially constructed one. As such it requires conscious action on the part of those who occupy the spaces ‘mother’ and ‘son’ to break down the barriers which, at present, preclude empathetic and respectful communication between them. At present a mother’s ability to equip her son with an alternative or subversive discourse within which his views of and relations with women are framed is limited. Other black men, however, can provide a more continuous and sympathetic support system, and it is this work that Lorde challenges them to do. In conversation with James Baldwin, Lorde asked him how he was meeting his responsibility of speaking to the sons of black America. In response Baldwin didn’t have much to say, despite his tremendous importance as a purveyor of much-needed representations of AfricanAmerican life in the northern states, which spoke to many of us children of the diaspora. In asking this question, Lorde generalized the demand many black feminists have been making of those men who say they are concerned with turning the world around, that they take care of intergenerational business. I am not sure if Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen (Baldwin, 1985), was written before or after that question to him; either way, perhaps this book was in part one indirect way in which he sought to meet that responsibility. But others have taken up the call. Joe Beam, our respected and thanked brother who died in December 1988, consciously responded to her challenge, saying:

Black men aren’t any less sexist than other men…and as I look at my writing that’s one of my charges, which she (Lorde) has given me. To speak to other black men as best as I can to begin creating a dialogue (Lorde, 1988). Of course Joe Beam was an out and progressive gay man and he knew not only that he owed much to black lesbian and heterosexual feminists for being able to be out, but also that he was never going to be liberated while black women, all women, were abused and battered and oppressed within the hierarchy of relations called the status quo. Like many of us, Beam was a child of one generation responding to and hoping to extend the work begun by earlier ones, so that the next might follow with everbroadening visions. But the relationship between generations, actual or metaphorical, is contradictory. Certainly relations between parents and children, if that is the analogy and identity we are adopting, are unequal, and as a result we do often feel ambivalent towards our parents even when we acknowledge and respect what they have given us. So maybe the use of the identity of ‘mother’ is not unproblematic, even when it is used in the pursuit of transforming social relations. There are two levels of unease which I have which are at least in part the result of the fact that I am childless and of the age where we resist passing over from being ‘young’, and anyway have no appropriate rite of passage to entice us. Such is the time and place. My points follow from each other but are not of the same import. The first concerns the

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extent to which the adoption of the categories ‘mother’/‘child’, older/younger generation, are at once exclusive and reified. Let me expand. Despite the tensions, ambivalences and contradictions within the parent/child relation there is a suggestion of belongingness, of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and by extension of an ‘other’ into which ‘outsiders’, in this case ‘nonmothers/nonchildren’, fall. Perhaps the use of familial terminology and metaphor has felt comfortable to black people of the diaspora because of our condition in ‘the west’. Certainly use of such imagery has served as both a sign of community and a mobilizer to action: think of the action of black women as ‘mothers’ in defence of the young of our communities in, for example, antipolicing or education campaigns. But what of those amongst us for whom the label or identity of ‘mother’, actual or symbolic, not only doesn’t fit but excludes from the orbit of political dialogue? After all, isn’t it this dialogue which we hope to achieve? The problem lies in charting a course between stultifying and oppressive assumptions of homogeneity and the equally debilitating and oppressive ascriptions of ‘otherness’. What concerns me is the extent to which it is possible to chart this course towards dialogue if one acts according to an identity as ‘mother’, given that within the relation one is assuming, one is adopting the position of the powerful? I mean, hell, there comes a time when ‘children’ resent being directed by their ‘mothers’ and so cannot hear them, no matter what the content of the conversation. The second point has to do with the strategic implications which derive from the first. If we are adopting familial categories which are contradictory and unequal how will we achieve the harmonization of community and class that we need to achieve our aims of freedom? How will we even be able to hear and respect the differences in our visions of freedom and the futures we want if we adopt categories as though they themselves were unproblematic? If we want to influence not only people’s capacity for fulfilment, but also the way that they think and act (isn’t that at least a part of what Lorde challenged Baldwin to do?), then don’t we have to subvert and redefine the very identities which also propel us to action, in order that we may constantly move toward ever-broadening visions of freedom? A practical example. In Britain over the last fifteen years or so black women have been organizing as women and feminists to change not just the state of race and class relations, but also the state of gender relations within our various communities. More and more women have become involved in that process, coming from various backgrounds and offering a variety of methods and analyses for action. Sometimes it has been exciting, at others depressing, but always challenging. Those of us ‘older’ women—in the ‘mother’s’ role—often refer to a whole other group of women, as diverse as we are, as ‘younger women coming up’. An ambivalent phrase, with at least a hint of condescension. But what I find the most disturbing in this is that we ‘older’ women sometimes talk and act as though we expect these ‘younger’ women to follow exactly in our footsteps, adopting the same concerns and tactics, and if they don’t then we often tend to dismiss their concerns and contributions to black women’s struggle and development in this country. Certainly, after a black women’s forum organized by Sheba Feminist Publishers as part of the 1989 Feminist Book Fortnight, many of the women present, who had been involved in establishing the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the late 1970s, felt an enormous amount of despondency because so

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much of the discussion was taken up with what they considered basics, things assumed to have been settled once and for all. Obviously one does not want to continually go over old ground, but two things seem to me to arise from this. One is that it is wrong to see the asking of the same questions as repeat performance, because 1989 is not 1979 and the answers we come up with, collectively, will not be the same. Nor indeed will the process by which we do so necessarily be the same. The other is that if we do regard the asking of old questions in this way, surely we absolve ourselves of any responsibility of examining our past contributions, including the many mistakes we made. I believe breaking down the barrier between those of the OWAAD generation and women who came after us to be one of the most urgent political tasks facing black women concerned with questions of gender and sexuality. I think using Lorde’s work can help us move in the right direction, but if not examined closely can also help to lock us in an impasse that we seem to have created.

Difference and contradiction London, October 1987—The Shaw Theatre is full of black women who have come to hear Audre Lorde. The atmosphere is pregnant with expectancy. Many women contribute to the event which has been organized to celebrate Lorde in aid of Azania. It is a tribute to the work that Lorde and others in SISA, Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, have been doing in solidarity with sisters in South Africa (Azania). Though focusing on Audre we celebrate the urge to freedom of the people of South Africa, we celebrate ourselves. Some of us think of other parts of the globe also—Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Palestine, Guatemala—but these are not mentioned. Finally Lorde comes on to read. She includes her poem ‘For the Record’ (Lorde, 1986:63–4), It jars. I wonder if others feel as I do: that the only equivalence between Eleanor Bumpers and Indira Gandhi is the manner of the death, nothing else. But who will question her authority? April 1989, ninety-five die at Hillsborough. They had wanted to watch football. It was a Saturday—free time, their time. The media, orchestrated by the police attempt to debase them and their deaths: hooligans, drunk, animals, Liverpudlians—the messages are a scourge on our eyes, our compassion. Later the tables will turn, we will know a little more of the truth, and the resurrected humanity of the dead and bereaved will rise to haunt its would-be assassins. The portrayal of people as animals to be coralled and penned, of people to be despised, invokes images of slavery. So does its refusal, We black people know this. We lesbians and gays know this. That day football died. Liverpool died. We died. Subverting and redefining the politics of ‘difference’ is Lorde’s work. To destroy the mission whereby the many are reduced to the one is the thread which binds her politics, aesthetics, love. The recognition of difference is both a means to begin to undermine the system which exploits and oppresses, and a mechanism through which we might come to know and construct our visions. But more than this, for Lorde a redefined politics of difference is also a strategy for harmonizing, without threat or subordination, the diverse impulses to freedom felt by the oppressed and exploited. In one of the few essays where exploitation in the Marxist sense is alluded to she writes:

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Institutionalised rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion (Lorde, 1984:115). One is reminded here of the opposition between capital’s desire for a pool of easily substitutable and homogeneous labour power and its need to maintain divisions between the suppliers of that labour power, workers. We are reminded of how, outside of the ‘factory’, oppression turns around the loci of dehumanized inferiors, constructed as a hierarchy of oppositions: white/black, male/female, heterosexual/lesbian/gay, old/ young, able/disabled. So, in Lorde’s analysis, just as the recognition and acceptance of difference outside the ‘factory’ becomes a way of turning that system of ‘seeing’ around and replacing it with a system where ‘human’ difference is joyously embraced, so too inside the ‘factory’. Such an approach to the use of difference as a means to unity is particularly pertinent to black people in Britain at the moment. And this not only because, as the identities of ‘English’ and ‘British’ crumble, the question of whether we can be both black and ‘British’ refocuses with particular sharpness. As we carve out black British identities and forms of expression, we are having to deconstruct the old and established axioms of our various communities about what it means to be black (a struggle not new to the many black lesbians and gays who have been told that it is not possible to be both) just as much as we are having to fight over the terrains of the forms and uses of’ ethnicity’ and our rights to civil society and the state. To put it another way, we are putting ourselves both in (i.e., ‘Britishness’) and out (i.e., ‘Blackness’) of the picture as it has been traditionally drawn. We are subverting accepted notions of both what it means to be British and black and redefining the agenda and terrain of black struggle. To paraphrase Lorde, who argues the sentiment in terms of restricting notions of sisterhood, we are moving beyond the pretence of a homogeneity of experience, a notion of blackness that does not exist, whilst simultaneously subverting and refusing the label of ‘other’. For black women in Britain, and especially for black lesbians, this task is both enormous and vital if we are to be able to construct our lives without fear. It is not easy and often it is lonely. For we are having to place ourselves within the orbit of concentric circles, unsure which way the forces will pull, and it is tiring. More than this we have to try to do it without giving any ammunition to the power structure which would have us fight with our own, that would tell us that Hillsborough is not to do with us, and immigration and racism not to do with Hillsborough. In this Lorde is a source of direction and a source of strength. More; she has warned of the costs of silence. She also knows that the task is not simple because the ideological and material hierarchy of dominant/ subordinate has eaten its way into the fabric of consciousness held and manifested by the exploited and oppressed. She has described the

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consequences of our acceptance of the vision of the world given by the powers that be. She has warned us that acceptance of this vision results in us extinguishing the urge to freedom under the delusion of our security in the power system. The essay and speeches in Sister Outsider (1984) are all about this, so are many of her poems. Here is one illustration:

Down Wall Street the students marched for peace Above, construction workers looking on remembered how it was for them in the old days before their closed shop white security and daddy pays the bills so they climbed down the girders and taught their sons a lesson called Marx as a victim of the generation gap called I grew up the hard way so will you called the limits of sentimental vision. When the passion play was over and the dust had cleared on Wall Street 500 Union workers together with police had mopped up Foley Square with 2000 of their striking sons who broke and ran before their fathers chains. Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students. (Lorde, 1982b: 85–6) So in equipping ourselves to transcend the history and experience of division, a politics of difference is an essential tool. But sometimes the pain has dulled our sense of self so much that it makes it impossible to respond to the suffering and brutality experienced by others. Why didn’t we black people, lesbians, gays, women, rise up as of one voice and condemn the attempt by the police and others to rewrite and justify the tactics used at Hillsborough when it led to so many deaths? Why didn’t football fans rise up and condemn the attacks made during the European cup last year in Germany on black, Arab and Turkish people by some of the English who said they were fans? How do we forgive those whom we hold responsible for the pain and turmoil that bloodies our

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collective histories, so that we can move across the divides and grieve at another’s pain and loss, in order that we can act in future to prevent repeat performances? This vexed and tortuous question is one which Lorde addresses in what is perhaps one of her most profound and beautifully constructed pieces of work—the poem ‘Afterimages’. The poem is centred around two events which take place in Jackson, Mississippi,—the lynching of Emmett Till and, twenty-four years later, the despair of a white woman at the destruction of her home by the flooding of a river. In this poem Lorde forcefully reminds us that past atrocities imposed on one people by another lead to enduring destruction. She recreates the atmosphere of terror produced by the media images of Till’s murder, veiled warnings to black people that any one of us is a potential lynching victim if we dare to ‘step out of line’. But more than this—and this is where the power of the poem lies—she describes the difficulty she has in transcending the memory of pain in order to be able to meet another woman in her time of loss and destruction. Like most of her poems it is not easy to grasp at first, but as one gains entry into it, its force and the horrors of its implications hit you fully. It is a long poem and needs to be read in its entirety, but the first verse conveys much of its overall sentiment.

However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve wild for life, relentless and acquisitive learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a black boy hacked into murderous lesson recalled in me forever like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep etched into my visions food for dragonfish that learn to live upon whatever they must eat fused images beneath my pain. (Lorde, 1982b: 102–5) Clearly then, Lorde’s work, the questions she asks, are useful resources in our struggle to rise to the task of creating our humanity and to find unity in difference. This struggle is as much about a refutation of essentialism as it is against enforced homogeneity. In this respect I find difficulties in her work. In part this springs from her notion of ‘human’ difference. Because just as our differences (whether used against us or by us, on their terms or ours) are socially constructed, so I believe is our ‘humanity’. Perhaps the only ‘essential’ element which we all share is that we do indeed construct our humanity,

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which is why it is diverse and, thank God(!), subject to alteration. Our selves are constructed out of our quest for humanity. In contrast to this way of looking at things, Lorde talks of ‘the human differences between us’, ‘our human differences as equals’, or the ‘effects upon human behaviour and expectation’, as though what constitutes ‘human’ is a given, is unproblematic. But just as some of us believe (following Foucault) that there is no prior existence of sexuality outside of the social matrix within which we practice our sexual relationships, the same may be true of our humanness. That is, that one of the forms in which we enact or construct our humanity is through the production and reproduction of differences. To say this is to suggest that we come to terms with and use differences amongst us not to reveal human essences once the layers of oppression have been lifted, but in order to construct visions of what our humanities might become. If, as a collectivity, black people in Britain respond to the slander of the Hillsborough people with a ringing condemnation of the slanderers, in spite of the racism of some of the terraces, in spite of the terror that some of those who went to Germany last year imposed on black people, are we not constructing our humanity rather than expressing it? When any group takes up the fight of those deemed to be ‘not us’, do they not do the same? It may be that such responses are mobilized by a recognition of the connections which arise from the fact that many of us are different from ‘the mythical norm’ (Lorde, 1984:116), but that mobilization is not an indication of an essential humanity. In the end love and security are just as constructed as hate and fear. People then, in all the diverse forms of humanity, have to be historicized, socialized and politicized, and this is a process not an essence. Lorde is at times aware of this, as her frequent criticism of white feminists who believe that their experience and analysis is the one which is constitutive of ‘womanhood’ shows. But in her critique she stops just short of challenging the category ‘woman’, and suggests that all that is needed is for ‘woman’ to be racialized (or for that matter ‘black’ to be gendered) and sexualized along a continuum of sexual orientations. Of course this limitation is, I think, something that many of us black feminists, on both sides of the Atlantic, have shared. The time has come for us to try and move beyond it. In Lorde’s schema the category ‘woman’ will simply be given greater depth and breadth—but it will not be deconstructed and redefined. The agenda will not be radically reconstituted. This quote from ‘“Age, Race, Class, and Sex.” Women Redefining Difference’, shows what I am talking about:

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become ‘other’, the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend. An example of this is the signal absence of the experience of women of color as a resource for women’s studies courses…This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities—as individuals, as women, as human—rather than as one of those

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problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genuine images of Black women (Lorde, 1984:117–8). Perhaps my point becomes a little clearer if we concentrate on her reference to ‘genuine images of Black women’. For surely the question is begged as to what such images would be. Images of black women cleaners, nurses or conductresses? Militant black women confronting fascists and racists? Black lesbians sporting some of the more problematic SM regalia such as slave/mistress? Battered black women? Black mother, girls, academics? Exactly what is a ‘genuine image’ and, beyond anatomical constants, how do these relate to the construction of diverse and self-defined womanhoods? It is these questions which are raised more than addressed in much of Lorde’s work—and it is these questions which I feel are as central to our struggle for self-defined humanity as is the struggle against racism, exploitation, women’s oppression, homophobia and heterosexism. Questions such as these not only help to move us away from essentialism, but also force us to stop seeing all women as somehow equivalent in their position in the world. They urge us to consider how we decide and measure the relationships between women whilst simultaneously refusing to use methods commensurate with the existing power structure. Yet Lorde, despite her exploration of the tenacity of division in ‘AfterImages’, often fails to distinguish between women who occupy very different and opposing positions within the power structure. This is why the poem ‘For the Record’ jarred so when I heard Audre read it that October afternoon in London.

Call out the colored girls and the ones who call themselves Black and the ones who hate the word nigger and the ones who are very pale Who will count the big fleshy women the grandmother weighing 22 stone with the rusty braids and a gap-toothed scowl who wasn’t afraid of Armageddon the first shotgun blast tore her right arm off the one with the butcher knife the second blew out her heart through the back of her chest and I am going to keep writing it down how they carried her body out of the house dress torn up around her waist uncovered past tenants and the neighborhood children a mountain of Black Woman

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and I am going to keep telling this if it kills me and it might in ways I am learning The next day Indira Gandhi was shot down in her garden and I wonder what these two 67-year-old colored girls are saying to each other now planning their return and they weren’t even sisters. (Lorde, 1986:63–4) I do not believe we are in the business of making equivalences between people because they share the same sex, are both ‘colored’, and the manner of their death is similar. Rather we need to be looking for a common interest in undermining systems of oppression and exploitation. Yet Lorde, in refusing to allow the memory of Eleanor Bumpers to be lost, seems to be saying that the murder, sex and colour of these two women mean they should occupy a similar place in a popular, self-defined and progressive women’s history. But surely the only thing which these women did have in common was a shared biology and death. Nothing else. One was a poor and dispossessed black woman, subjected to institutionalized humiliation and marginalization. The other, in stark contrast, was the head of the world’s tenth industrial power and was responsible for the dispossession, humiliation and marginalization of millions of Indian Eleanor Bumpers. Gandhi’s introduction of a state of emergency led to conditions similar to those currently prevailing under the South African state of emergency. The rights of workers and peasants to organize were suspended, fundamentalist movements were encouraged at the expense of democratic movements, and the Indian economy was further opened up to US investment and control. In addition to this we should never forget that Indira Gandhi was in power when the programme of enforced sterilization was introduced in the 1970s in which ten million women and men were sterilized. Gandhi may have been martyred by her death but this does not negate the fact she was an enemy of the Eleanor Bumpers of this world. That both were murdered does not make them socially equivalent. Those of us who wish to urge the move towards freedom along, to make the conditions for self-definition and control possible, cannot be in the business of applauding, however subtly or indirectly, women who because of their own place in the power structure, stand against us in this. Despite tendencies to essentialism, Audre Lorde offers much to progressive feminism, to the struggle for black liberation, and to the general struggle to create a world where difference does not mean subordination, and where the need to eat doesn’t mean exploitation. She offers us her vision of a new world and of at least some of the elements that need to be considered to achieve it. She also challenges us to use her work to push

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forward in our visions of what we want to be. She challenges us to act, which will include arguing the point, standing up to be counted. But perhaps more important than any of this, she offers us her work as an out and proud black lesbian so that in those moments when we think we are alone, we can know that there is at least one other. Another who dared, and who survived, and who created.

Note Gail Lewis is thirty-eight, lives in London and has been involved in black and feminist politics for many years.

References BALDWIN, James (1985) Evidence of Things Not Seen, London: Michael Joseph Ltd. LORDE, Audre (1973) From A Land Where Other People Live, New York: Broadside Press. LORDE, Audre (1978) The Black Unicorn, New York: W.W.Norton & Co. LORDE, Audre (1982a) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, New York: The Crossing Press; London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. LORDE, Audre (1982b) Chosen Poems—Old and New, New York: W.W.Norton & Co. LORDE, Audre (1984) Sister Outsider, New York: The Crossing Press. LORDE, Audre (1986) Our Dead Behind Us, London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. LORDE, Audre (1988) A Radio Profile of Audre Lorde, Cambridge, MA: Profile Productions. SAID, Edward (1983) The World, The Text, and The Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

LESBIAN TRADITION Rachael Field

I define myself as a lesbian artist and even when lesbianism is not the central theme of a piece of work it leaves its resonances. My sexuality is a fundamental part of my life and perceptions. Depicting my sexuality was like accepting it, a leap into the glorious dark. In the past my work was mainly concerned with self-portraiture, a way to affirm my sense of self as a woman artist in a male-dominated art college. Then I relied on the reinterpretation of work by old mistresses such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Gwen John. The 1920s and 1930s artists, Gluck and Romaine Brooks portrayed their preference for women in their work. Although they were an exciting discovery, I found their work limited as a role model because it was not politically engaged, and concentrated on the glorification of wealth, voyeurism and female transvestitism. ‘Gluck’s women wear their hats, jewellery and clothes, to show their self assurance, assertiveness, status and style.’ (Souhami, 1988). Male homoerotica is sublimated throughout cultural history, reaffirming the phallocracy. It is dissipated throughout the mainstream because of the dominance and control of masculinity, whilst lesbians have remained anonymous. ‘Hockney’s work appeals to a great many people…the subject matter of leisure and exoticism provides an escape from the mundanities of everyday life.’ (Livingstone, 1981). Feminist art of the 1970s and early 1980s has been monopolized by heterosexual women. ‘Nobody wants an informer in the kitchen or bedroom and as wives, mothers and lovers, women know far too much about men to be allowed to speak freely.’ (Kent and Morreau, 1985) Heterosexual women have used their art as a palliative to the male ego, seemingly to attack but always presenting themselves in relationship to men and never rejecting the privileges of heterosexuality. Heterosexual women artists have shown a fear of the ‘aggressive and predatory’ lesbian in a similar way to the rejection lesbians experienced in the Women’s Liberation movement in the early 1970s.

I withdrew unhappily from a movement (WLM) that was determined to make the lesbians within its ranks invisible in order to ‘reach out’ to all women when the phrase ‘all women’ clearly excluded lesbians as members and potential beneficiaries of political action.’ (Penelope, 1986)


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Small Square One, 1986, oil/canvas

In contrast, because of the double oppression of racism, Black women artists have produced work fuelled with anger and their own sense of worth. ‘We will be who we want to be. The time is now and the word is freedom’ (Sulter, 1989). Black women artists have been producing work that is challenging both politically and artistically. The work of contemporary Black women artists has made me re-evaluate the use of narrative. For me, drawing on the realities of my life experiences and illustrating them is a means of taking control. Hopefully lesbians viewing my work are empowered by the representation of our realities and our struggle to survive with strength. To those who have little or no awareness of lesbianism, they are confronted by the bold statement of my existence as a lesbian. Ignorance is widespread and many people do not realize what a devastating force heterosexism is, the laws which restrict our lives, the open hostility and indirect assumptions with which men/heterosexual women abuse us.

As such lesbians are not, ‘just like heterosexual women’, but are subjected to specific oppressions as lesbians that shape and mould lesbian consciousness, so that lesbians may have greater insights into the functioning of male power.’ (Kitzinger, 1987) Using the traditional form of painting and drawing, my work is, as much as art ever is, accessible, whilst promoting what to many will be an incomprehensible message. I use the conventions of the familiar (Christian) religious icon, stripping it of any glorification of the heteropatriarchy. ‘Degenerate Icons’ was the title of my one-woman exhibition, in May 1988. The title refers to the 1937 exhibition of art by undesirable subversives, held by the German Nazi Party. Ironical since my exhibition was on the eve of Clause 28 becoming law.

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Illegal on the Street, 1987, oil/canvas

Degenerate Icons boldly explores the until now secreted realms of real womens lives, living together, enjoying each others company and loving each other. These are facets of womens lives which have been deliberately and consistently ignored right across the spectrum of visual imagery. (Lawrence, 1988). I have stopped worrying about academic accuracy, allowing my work a freedom and immediacy of Art Brut (psychotic art) and other nonassimilated art forms. The art of the dispossessed. The suggestion of form can reinterpret the essence far more than an exact reproduction. A recognizable image changed, however slightly, is a revelation.

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Degenerate Icon, 1989, oil/canvas

The criticisms of my work have varied: ‘Her figures are almost without the attribute of sex’ (Morris, 1988); ‘Rachael Field’s painting didn’t really articulate for me anything about what it must feel like to be a lesbian…I wasn’t sure what the two figures were doing, or if they were women.’ (Pearson, 1989). Interestingly both the female reviewers state clearly in their articles their heterosexuality and therefore their nonaffiliation with the sexuality I am portraying. Clause 28 has increased the danger of censorship and can be used as an excuse for not representing lesbian art. But the campaign against the Clause has awakened a few galleries to their responsibility and they have created a space within mainstream exhibitions for lesbian art. There is a danger of tokenism and our politics being submerged within the acceptable face of ‘human relationships’. ‘Along the Lines of Resistance’, a contemporary feminist art exhibition, included several lesbian artists. Our work was presented within an environment which encouraged full expression of its political arguments. It is significant that the touring dates have been severely limited for this overtly feminist show. ‘Here women speak as the Other and through their artistic and visual languages place themselves within traditions of their own making.’ (Parmar, 1988)

Notes Rachael Field, born 1965. Now lives in Manchester. Exhibited in: The Wedding; Along The Lines of Resistance; Resonances; North West Frontiers and Images of Women. One-woman shows include: Degenerate Icons; Struggle, Survival and Strength and

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Domestic Scene Whalley Range 1989, oil/canvas

Cheshire Arts Tour 1989, Drawing Near. Lives and works with puppeteer Nenagh Watson. They have two cats, a rabbit, and two canaries.

References KENT, S. and MORREAU, J. (1985) Women’s Images of Men, London: Writers and Readers. KITZINGER, Celia (1987) The Social Construction of Lesbianism, London: Sage Publications. LAWRENCE, Geni (1988) Feminist Arts Review, Vol. 2, no. 7 , London. LIVINGSTONE, Marco (1981) David Hockney, London: Thames & Hudson. MORRIS, Araminta (1988) Women Artists Slide Library Journal, London. PARMAR, Pratibha (1988) Introduction to the catalogue of exhibition titled ‘Along the Lines of Resistance: An exhibition of contemporary feminist art’,London. PEARSON, Jo (1989) Women Artists Slide Library Journal, London. PENELOPE, Julia (1986) ‘The Mystery of Lesbians’, Gossip, Onlywomen Press, London. SOUHAMI, Diana (1988) Gluck: Her Biography, London: Pandora. SULTER, Maud (1989) ‘Passion, Blackwomens Creativity of the African Diaspora’, Elbow Room catalogue.

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MAPPING: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton by Sue O’Sullivan

In this wide-ranging interview, Cindy Patton explores some of the cultural determinants of lesbian sexuality which affect discussions about the meaning of AIDS to lesbians. Cindy: I’d like to talk first about the history of safe sex—in particular about the lesbian safe sex discussion, and how it’s developed. It was in San Francisco, in late 1985 or early 1986, that the SF AIDS Foundation decided to do what became the first brochure on safe sex for lesbians. When you read the brochure now it feels like a gay male brochure changed to fit the technicalities needed to correspond to lesbians, rather than written from the subject position of women. It caused quite a furore at the time. In Boston, Gay Community News quickly ran a lesbians and AIDS article, and other periodicals carried their own pieces. It really was as if lesbians had suddenly been brought into a debate about safe sex which had evolved from gay male sensibilities. Gay men had had to go through a whole process of thinking, ‘My community is changing, I’m going to have to make some changes’. That entire preliminary phase did not happen in the lesbian community—if you can use that phrase—a brochure just appeared. I think that was one of the reasons why it was so divisive at the time. It almost seems as if gay men as a community had an opportunity to process developments around AIDS and then suddenly AIDS workers thought, ‘We should do something about the lesbians’. There were two accusations immediately levelled. One was that men were making lesbians do something they really didn’t need to do. The second was that lesbians who believed in safe sex were being hysterical. Sue: Yes, there were articles in lesbian publications in this country questioning the relevance, or the political desirability for lesbians to take on AIDS in any way. Cindy: I think how the discussion of AIDS is played out in various lesbian communities depends on how those communities have dealt with sexuality in the first place. In communities where race and class divisions are primary, safe sex issues tend to intensify racism and classism. In communities where divisions are around pornography, the debate on safer sex circulates around its status as ‘pornographic’. It’s as if a little sexbomb gets dropped and its explosion throws up and makes visible existing divisions about sexuality, which are then available for—often angry—debate.


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I didn’t realize the depth and the dynamics of some of that to begin with. But what I did notice was that the first lesbian debates on AIDS often circulated around strangely esoteric questions about scientific data. Women would ask stranger things than I’d ever heard from a gay man, like, ‘Has there ever been a study on having warts on your hand and what happens then if you stick your fingers in your lover’s cunt?’ There were certainly things to be said about lesbians and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases), but the emotions behind the questions and the extreme reactions they evoked had to do with issues which had not been resolved in the lesbian community. There are, for example, some real differences in how the gay male community has been able to progress and construct itself and its sexuality, as compared with lesbians, who remain comparatively invisible. This complicated the whole issue of lesbian safe sex. Sue: Don’t you think as well though, that women have, and have had in different cultural and historical moments, health conversations which are a lot more detailed than the ones men usually have? The discourse around health, in women’s magazines, in feminist magazines, in books like Our Bodies Ourselves, may well mean that women are more likely to ask the sort of question which you found bizarre or extreme. I agree that the tendency to question the relevance of safe sex for lesbians, which I’ve expressed myself, as well as heard expressed by other lesbians, can mask a much deeper sense of fear, antagonism and confusion, but I also think women are differently placed in relation to questions around health and are much more likely to become riveted by details of the body and the transmission of infection. Cindy: That’s possible, but it didn’t feel like that. What it really felt like was that even lesbians didn’t know what it was that lesbians did in sex, so there was no way that we could come up with a formula for figuring out what lesbian safe sex was. In groups of gay men there was a more generally accepted idea of what the range of sexual practice might be; there seemed to be a kind of menu of gay male sex acts, and you could go through the menu and figure out what needed to get changed. With lesbians there never seemed to be an perceived baseline of what lesbian sexuality was. I felt completely at sea compared with the work I had done with gay men. Women were either fearful of saying anything—‘What if everyone thinks it’s weird’?—or so convinced that whatever they did was normal that they would just pop out with bizarre questions. I think that it does get down to the fact that lesbian sexuality exists in a kind of void. We haven’t had the opportunity to talk about sexuality in groups and to articulate it as a collective within which different modalities are given time to emerge. It’s only recently that we’ve talked for example, about butch/femme or SM (sado-masochism) or other labelled activities, and even in those debates it’s never quite clear what women are really doing. I think the prior question is, do lesbians really want to talk? As a community, do we want to have the kind of discussions or cultural space and activities which produce different shades of sexuality? In early American lesbian-feminist culture, lesbian sex was thought of as having the possibility of being completely egalitarian; it would be undifferentiated and oceanic. On one level it’s tempting to say we just haven’t had time to get our act together and develop more differentiated categories of lesbian sexuality, but in fact many lesbians of that particular theoretical persuasion would in any case be

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opposed to having discussions that would lead to the differentiation of lesbian sexuality. On another level—and this is a historical development—AIDS has in some ways deflected attention from debates about sexuality. Instead of pursuing discussions of lesbian sexuality, the lesbian community has tended to subsume those discussions under the heading of safe sex. There are also some aspects of lesbian sexual practice which help to exclude the larger questions of lesbian sexuality from discussions of safe sex—things like lower partner turnover and engaging in activities which in general are less likely to transmit a whole range of pathogens. Very few lesbians know another lesbian who is HIV positive and even fewer have the experience of knowing someone who had contacted HIV from their female lover. So the debates feel theoretical, unlike the debates around gay men’s sex issues. I think once you realize there is a woman in the community who has contracted HIV from a partner it changes the whole debate. A really interesting example of this came from a physician friend of mine who had been pretty much of the This is going to freak lesbians out, we shouldn’t get too het up about this, we were just getting to express ourselves and if we talk about safe sex it really makes women shut down’ school of thought. Eventually she had a lesbian client who said, ‘I have HIV and I want to know what I have to do’, and she started to lay out her whole theoretical argument and the woman said, ‘Fine, but I have to go home to my lover tonight and I want to know what’s safe and not safe’. My friend was put on the spot. I think as lesbians emerge who are HIV positive, who feel like they can actually talk about their experience (which very few of those women feel able to do), it is going to become clear that there are still some very practical questions which remain unanswered.

‘No semen in the anus or vagina’ Sue: Does that mean that your recent safe sex slogan for everyone, ‘No semen in the anus or vagina’, still stands? When you come down to the questions a lesbian like that might have, that slogan doesn’t give her much to go on. Cindy: At the time I wrote that, what I was trying to do was break down, or help people break down, the idea that belonging to the category ‘lesbian’ meant that your sexual practices by definition did not transmit HIV. There is, for example, a relatively new study of heterosexuals which suggest a connexion between vaginal fluids, yeast infections and HIV; so medical data does need to be re-examined in the light of alleged oral transmission or manual transmission between heterosexuals and between women. It’s certainly true that lesbian sex involves a lower range of risk than any activities which get semen in your anus or vagina, but I still think there are some questions to be asked. For instance, if vaginal fluid is highly infected how much of it gets smeared and where does it go? You can’t use the male model of a single ‘glob’ of semen that moves from point A to point B. That’s not how lesbians practice sex; it tends to be a lot wetter and if they’re women who get very wet then vaginal fluid tends to get smeared around various places—but this isn’t an issue that’s been factored into any of the studies. The

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assumption seems to be, ‘What’s the concentration in X amount of whatever fluid and how long does it sit in any one place?’ In these kinds of calculations, lesbian sexuality simply isn’t accounted for—nor, I suspect, is heterosexual oral sex. Studies of transmission are simply based on an intercourse model. In so far as they consider vaginal fluid, what they’re interested in is how much of it might have seeped into the penis. They don’t look at how much might have got on the hands or the face. Sue: You’ve said to me quite emphatically that you tell everyone to practise safe sex. But haven’t we just been talking about how difficult it is for lesbians to talk about their sexuality let alone approach lovers with the idea that you negotiate safe sex or even decide if that’s necessary? Cindy: I’m frequently being called in to talk about safe sex, which immediately sets me up into a pedagogic situation—and as an educator, you’re often thrown into situations in which people want to be rather passively educated, though you feel fundamentally that for people to become liberated or to address an issue they need to look at it in a different manner. It’s much more a matter of getting people to unframe the question they themselves have already framed. I try hard now not to get sucked into situations where people ask, ‘Should we or shouldn’t we?’ I don’t understand what safe sex means to them. I don’t understand what’s at stake for them. The basic modality in which decisions are made about safe sex seems to involve making a list of certain types of people and asking, ‘Am I one of the people it applies to?’ So when I go to do an educational intervention, or whatever you want to call it, I try to get people uncentred from that and to understand that as responsible people this is an issue that they are obligated to engage with. They may come to a different set of decisions in the end than I would, but it is not morally correct to say, ‘I’m exempt from this’. And this goes for lesbians as much as anyone else. Even though many lesbians will decide in the end that the techniques of safe sex are not something they need or want, there is something very callous about saying, ‘I don’t need to know about this, it doesn’t concern me’. We are in the midst of a huge cultural upheaval around sexuality. At a time when so many people’s lives are being ruined not just by getting AIDS but by the cultural backlash of the epidemic, to refuse to participate in a cultural event which is so politically charged, to decide it doesn’t apply to you, is very strange and wrong.

Identities Sue: What you say about semen and vaginas raises interesting questions about the way lesbian identities might change with shifts in our understanding of sexuality. Cindy: The reason I came up with that little catch phrase about not getting semen in vaginas or anuses was because there has been such a proliferation of safe sex guidelines. What I wanted to do was figure out a very simple way to give the one piece of information that had the critical logic and information. Maybe for another year I will


use that particular catch phrase. When people have danced around that one, if things have evolved then I’ll try something else. On the issue of changing understandings of sexuality, many women who came out as lesbians thought we weren’t going to have to deal with bad old baggage about heterosexuality that we had never really resolved. For many lesbians, entering the ‘Lesbian Nation’ meant shedding the detritus from issues like pregnancy, or sexual abuse, or having a hard time dealing with men because they’re hard to deal with; they didn’t see that those unresolved conflicts would be retained as part of the psyche. The discussion of safe sex has brought them to the fore again. I hear a lot of interesting responses when I suggest to women that they should practise safe sex; you can feel them tracking back to unresolved issues about pregnancy, sexual abuse, menopause, feeling bad about their body in general. All of that then gets hung on to the issue of safe sex. What is coming out for example in the US lesbian community is the issue of child sexual abuse. The statistics you see of sexual abuse of women and sexual abuse of gay people, about which there have been a number of studies lately, suggest that people in these two categories are particularly likely to have been sexually abused. What’s happening with AIDS is that the discussions it gives rise to about safe sex have triggered much more wide-ranging discussion, of which the child sexual abuse debate is one example. Sue: I think the debate on child sexual abuse has surfaced around different issues in Britain; it’s tended to be discussed much more in the context of struggles around SM. What’s emphasized in discussions of child sexual abuse is the pain, both psychic and physical, for the survivor. The fact that child sexual abuse is then unproblematically linked to adult SM often makes it impossible for SM even to be discussed, let alone admitted as a category of lesbian sexual desire and practice. There has been no room yet, as far as I am aware, to engage in an open discussion about why you might, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, choose to practise SM in your sexual relationship. The survivor who is into SM is seen as continuing her victimization, or maybe as suffering from the disease of false consciousness. Lesbians are seen as deluded if they think they’re able to deal with the trauma of abuse within or through SM activity. Child sexual abuse is so fused to SM that they cannot be seen separately. I find this frustrating because I would really like to be able to have a discussion which looked nonjudgementally at the emotional and cultural components of lesbian SM and admitted the possibilities that for individual lesbians SM has the potential to be both positive and negative. Cindy: I think there has been a little more space in the US because the SM battle was waged a bit earlier on, in 1982 or 1981. You have to understand that in the US we love a testimonial format We’re much more involved in grounding our legitimacy in personal experience than British people seem to be. In the US it’s much more common for people to say all sorts of personal things publicly, so very quickly a fairly large number of male and female SM practitioners emerged in the mid-eighties who talked about having been sexually abused as children. There has also been an interesting development in politically progressive SM culture more recently, particularly around these new studies which seem to indicate that gay people have been more sexually abused than other people. As a

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result, there’s now a real ‘claiming’ of childhood sexual abuse by SM practitioners. Some say, ‘Well. I work this out through my SM’, and some say ‘Well, SM and child sexual abuse are simply two distinct features of my life’; either way, there have certainly been attempts to ‘reclaim’ child sexual abuse.

The power to interpret Sue: But do you find any of this problematic? There’s certainly something about the current discussion on child sexual abuse which makes me itchy. I don’t want to let abusers off the hook or suggest all over again that children lie, or wipe away the fact that millions of people, mainly girls, have been and continue to be sexually abused, mainly by men. But I do wonder if there hasn’t been a strange disowning of the complexity and importance of fantasy; a misunderstanding of how fantasy can work in the construction of present reality and, as importantly, in the reconstruction of the past. It has become a feminist heresy to suggest that there may be an element of fantasy that is being claimed as a physical reality, particularly in recollections of child sexual abuse. The possibility of fantasy muddies the waters, puts men in a marginally less clear position and generally makes things more complicated—but surely ultimately it does no one a service to deny the importance of fantasy? Cindy: The best way to answer that question is perhaps to talk a little about the psychoanalysis of child sexual abuse—though I certainly can’t do a survey of psychoanalysts. The more responsible feminist therapists I know don’t try to essentialize the perceptions their clients have—and that contrasts sharply with mainstream psychoanalysis. The US is a very pop psychoanalytic culture; it has had a heavy dose of very bad Freudian psychoanalysis. The dominant model is a mixture of Freudian psychoanalysis and American philosophical pragmatism; so in cases of child sexual abuse, it’s simply assumed that the stories the adult tells have to be really true. That denies the child, or the adult recalling the child, the power to interpret—which is ultimately very damaging because in this framework sexual abuse has to be claimed as a real event which was enormously formative. The confusion comes from not distinguishing something which happened in space and time over which we had no control, with the story into which it was written which we do have some control over. So within feminism, for example, there is a tendency to encourage women to claim victimhood—which means that child sexual experiences are rewritten as narratives of victimization. Sue: That’s true; I have several recollections of childhood experiences with my father which could indicate the possibility of sexual abuse. However, I’m confident there was none. In one case I was sitting on my father’s lap in a very crowded car when he got an erection. I was horrified and very embarrassed. From everything I know about my father, so was he, but neither of us could say anything. We were both trapped by the situation. Who knows what his unconscious feelings about his young daughter were, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. I think if I had a different kind of personality and history, that perhaps I could take that relatively harmless memory and a few others


as clues that I might have been sexually abused by my father. I think if I had a different kind of personality and history, that perhaps I would take that relatively harmless memory as a clue that I had been sexually abused by my father. Cindy: What more sophisticated psychotherapists and self-narratives do is to look at larger family patterns around the events. Are there systematic events, or are there single events—or events that happen no more than a couple of times—which for the child may have some psychic similarity but aren’t part of a larger pattern or process? So to be trapped in the car and have your father get a hard on is one thing and it might be upsetting, but it doesn’t necessarily become psychically structuring unless you’re always being trapped by adults in one way or another. I also think it’s a mistake to focus too much on events which become sexualized, rather than looking at discipline and control in general. A child may be subjected to one instance of abuse but may experience twenty-five occasions when she can’t have her room as she wants it—and that form of disciplinary control is just as much a part of what forms the child’s sexuality as are more obviously ‘sexual’ events. I think the tendency is to focus too much on sexual abuse as an essential category rather than understanding that, though this is something that has a particular set of resonances in our culture, there may be other forms of abuse that deserve attention. It seems damaging to me to privilege sexual abuse over other sorts of psychic abuse or control. In the past, we had a very deterministic view of sexuality. You yourself talked just now about how it’s generally been assumed that if you were sexually abused, that’s why you would be into SM, or, if you were sexually abused, why you would never be into SM. There was assumed to be a finite set of fixed events in early childhood that determined one’s sexuality. I think that there are events that occur throughout one’s life that determine or inform sexuality but I think they’re much less predictable and less determining. In fact, they’re constantly open to reinterpretation. The trick is to have narrative control and poetic licence about your own sexuality. If we stick to a narrative that says, ‘there was once heterosexuality, then we invented lesbian liberation and somehow we’re always going forward towards a point at which we’ll reach a perfect sexuality’, then we’re mistaken. I think a lot of times what comes next may be regression.

Sexual mapping Sue: Can you say some more about the relationship between narrative—the stories we tell about ourselves—and safe sex? Cindy: A little aphorism I once wrote says, ‘Sex actually begins and ends in the grocery store and what we do later with someone else is just a re-enactment of that memory’. Which is a rhetorical thing to say, but I think it’s important to maintain. It’s unclear to me that having sex with someone is any more than the parallel play of two different people’s vastly different memories. Sometimes it is obviously more than that, but the substantive part of the decision-making and cognitive process involved in sex has to do with something else. So the idea that you can rationally discuss safe sex is inconsistent

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with what most people are in relation to their own sexuality. That’s why I try to get people to identify for themselves what it is that makes sex hang together for them in the first place. It’s only then that they can look at what they have to do to stop themselves getting diseases. What you always have to be aware of is that safe sex is really different for different people. For example, I’ve recently discovered an interesting thing about gay men. I’ve generally worked on the principle that, ‘You have to negotiate safe sex and then you do it’, and for the vast majority of gay men I know, this is how it works. But I’ve started hearing stories from men who have been practising safe sex, who tell me about times they’d had sex and suddenly just haven’t put the condom on. No decision was made, it wasn’t as if one person didn’t want to have safe sex; the whole perception was that it would be a safe sex event—but then all of a sudden it became something different. Clearly there is some narrative structure in those men’s lives which demands that unsafe sex be linked to very high levels of anxiety before they reach a point at which, when the condom doesn’t go on, they just stop. In order for safe sex to work, phase one seems to be to normalize it so that it’s OK to practice safe sex; but then we have to reconstruct anxiety at the threshold of unsafe sex so that people don’t accidently forget the condom just because the framework ‘safe sex’ feels normal. People say that’s horrible, that sexuality should just be ‘natural’ and fun, but that denies an intrinsic sexual narrativity. Everyone has something that makes them anxious. We need to get the red flags to go up before unsafe sex. Sue: Unsafe sex for many heterosexual women has always been tremendously anxiety producing in terms of unwanted pregnancy, but it hasn’t necessarily stopped them fucking. Cindy: That’s because phase one of normalization never took place, whereas with many gay men safe sex has become the norm. Sue: How, in the context you’ve outlined, would lesbians be enabled to negotiate safe sex? We seem to be in such a double-edged situation, where lots of women know the guidelines but hardly anyone has integrated them into their daily lives. In a context where many lesbians haven’t even tentatively mapped out collective sexual categories, it seems what you describe as the normalization process—the opening up of sexual discussion—still has to be the baseline from which we start. Cindy: I think you’re right. Let me give an example of the absence of a mapping of sexual categories; it seems to me that it’s rare for lesbians to base their relationship decisions on sexual compatibility. It’s just assumed that two women can work it out, and that there is nothing in the sexual narrative of either partner that makes them incompatible. I think two things are going on here. One is that we don’t have a discourse which allows us to say that category X and category Q are going to be hard to match up. But I believe a deeper problem is that we don’t take our sexuality seriously enough as a project, in the charming way gay men did in the seventies. We think of that period now


as one of crass hedonism; but to take one’s sexuality seriously surely can be a revolutionary act. Lesbian feminists like to think we’re the ones who put egalitarian sexuality on the map, but really gay men in some very profound ways did it just as much or even more. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, for example, it was very uncool for a man never to get fucked. He might have a preference for fucking, but to refuse to get fucked was to be very uptight and withholding. According to studies being done now by people like Gayle Rubin in the US, it seems that in Gay Liberation, post-Stonewall days, with the influence of feminism, the progressive left and ideas of free love, there was an increase in ideas of sexual mutuality in the US urban gay cultures. There was an emphasis on ‘democratic fucking’, with both partners being able to fuck and be fucked. The result was that younger gay men were socialized into fucking at an earlier point in their sexual development. Younger gay men were coming out into a culture where intercourse was the dominant practice. That’s changing now, of course; my sense is that young gay men now inhabit environments where safe sex is a major topic of discussion, and they are being socialized into intercourse a lot later. Intercourse is becoming something you do when you’re in a ‘real’ relationship. What I’m seeing is something like the return of an eighteenth-century romantic sexuality where you do bundling and cuddling and hand jobs—all those quaint pre-Victorian activities. When you decide to have intercourse you actually do it ‘properly’. And having intercourse isn’t simply the end point of foreplay; it is more like a personal development choice. There are gay men I’ve worked with in their early twenties who’ve never had intercourse. They think they’d like to try it out sometime but it neither seems to be a native desire nor an act that they’ve necessarily eroticized. Sue: There must be many gay men who are too frightened to have intercourse even with a condom. Does that mean that they’re looking for other forms of anal penetration, such as using a dildo? Cindy: Well, curiously no. People tend to essentialize the penis as the implement of penetration; but what I often say jokingly when I’m speaking on safe sex is that it has given many men an excuse not to get fucked. Friends have said to me, ‘I never get fucked now with safe sex’, and I say, ‘Well, you never liked it before anyway’. There is a way in which the safe sex discussion has enabled men who didn’t want to have anal sex to avoid it. To put it another way: I think what’s happening is a process of deessentializing anal stimulation as intercourse. Sue: And yet I think for lesbians the safe sex discussion has the possibility of making desires for anal stimulation more possible to speak about and to do. It’s ironic.

Race, sexuality and AIDS Sue: Can you say something about how you think about race in relation to the kinds of questions you’ve been raising about sexuality?

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Cindy: In the States we’ve tended to treat race, gender and sexuality together (sometimes we’ve treated race and class together, but our class structure is so different that it is difficult to do class analysis in the way that you’re able to do in Europe). The similarity between race and sexuality is that they are two cultural notions which seem to be represented in the body, rather than necessarily conceptualized at the level of language. They’re also not necessarily structured around binary divisions. There are certainly always two poles—you have black and white, straight and gay—but they’re more available to become part of a continuum than gender. Gender is always bipolar; even the problematization of gender produced by transsexuals or cross-dressers is so minimal that it never really rocks the gender boat. The bipolar categories of sexuality and race are not only more immediately unstable, they’re also often merged at the level of metaphor. For example, both bisexuality and interracial sexuality get represented in similar ways as liminal sexualities. I’m doing some work now on the representation of ‘miscegenation’ in US films, and the person of colour, like the ‘true homosexual’, gets brutally killed in the end. In AIDS work the cultural anxieties around sexuality and raciality meet again in the liminal space with polarizing effects. To give an example: Black community groups in Boston are finally able to get government funding for AIDS work. Everybody is recognizing that, in the Black community in particular, and the Latino community in different ways, large numbers of men of colour who have AIDS are being identified as bisexual or gay. That’s a really stunning and difficult cultural transition for those communities, in the sense that it involves acknowledging the category ‘gay’; it means saying, ‘We’re going to take these members of our community who we’ve always known about, but whom in the past we’ve called the hairdresser or the preacher—and we’ll call them gay. Funding is in some sense contingent upon the application of essentially white, western categories of sexuality on to very culturally diverse communities. Many of the people doing AIDS work in the Black community have traditionally lived between two roles: their leadership position in roles which have been traditional homosexual roles within Black culture; and their roles as Black people in a largely white, gay male community. In addition, the greater power of Black women meant more women in leadership positions, especially in health care, and thus a number of women who have female partners but who are not at all out as lesbians. But it’s not as if they’re in the closet either. People in the white gay community say, ‘Why don’t these women come out?’, but what they don’t understand is that ‘gay’ is not a stable and meaningful category in the communities of colour. What’s happening slowly is that some of the white educators who are little more sensitive (and I hope I’m one of them), are no longer saying, ‘you better conform to my categories’, or ‘Our community is not going to work with your community’; we’re saying instead, ‘What is AIDS doing for our ability to construct categories? What’s the effect of the AIDS crisis on our ability to construct our identity?’ In some cases, AIDS is creating a whole new domain of categories. There are a number of largely professional Black men’s gay groups in Boston, for example, which are going through a very interesting consciousness-raising process in trying to deal with the issue of how to relate to Black men who are not of their socio-economic class, and who also don’t necessarily identify as gay. Professional Black gay men have now begun to recognize the need to


address the class issues highlighted by sexuality within the Black community. They’re saying, ‘We call ourselves gay and we’re comfortable with that but we’re professionals. What about these other Black men; are they, for example, really bisexual? Is their sexuality really about thinking, “I’m a Black man and that means I can have sex with whoever I want?”’

Will lesbians talk? Sue: I want finally to return to the question of future directions for a discussion of lesbian sexuality. Something you said before the interview started implied that women who were into SM or butch/femme were the ones who had taken on the issue of safe sex; what I’m curious about is whether that is really true and also how much the safe sex discussion for lesbians has been formed through gay erotic symbolism. Cindy: What I was saying before about SM and butch/femme is that they are the corners of lesbian culture where the boundaries of erotic space and fantasy have been most consciously mapped. I think that SM lesbians picked up on safe sex because they have more interaction with the gay male SM community. That’s partly an historical phenomenon having to do with the oppression of SM people. Women who have erotic charges from SM often came out in the context either of gay men’s SM culture or at least of contact with gay men generally. There is actually a fair amount of sociology done on SM as a career in the sense of an entry into a subculture where you’re expected to learn rules and norms from someone who has been there longer. You progress through developmental stages in that culture, from being a novice to being someone who can be let loose on their own, to someone who can actually teach others. SM culture tends to be very much oriented around that career process. I think all of that is antithetical to what we know as lesbian sexuality and is much more common in gay men’s culture. Joan Nestle has of course written about femmes becoming butches at a certain age, but I think what she’s talking about is not so much a career, as the acquisition of a set of competences. It may be that certain sexual practices in our culture require expertise, or knowledge of your own body that takes time, or requires particular social experiences, to master. I don’t want to be essentialist and say that this is a biological development, but it may be that there are cultural structures in place that make it easier to navigate sexuality in predetermined ways than to choose a different trajectory. One of the problems is the paucity of sexual imagery for lesbians; the available pervert or queer imagery has been gay male porn. Some lesbian porn made for men does have an edge to it that defies heterosexuality and so appeals to lesbian experience, but I think it’s more common for lesbians to enter porn culture through gay male porn. Many of us have the experience or can tell stories about wandering through a Playboy which sparked our lesbian imagination, without having led us to become connoisseurs of that particular type of pornography. Looking at gay male porn doesn’t have to be the beginning of a particular ‘career path’; I think it’s possible at this point politically and culturally for lesbians to start looking at gay male porn… Sue: A recent On Our Backs has a spread on girls looking at boys doing it.

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Cindy: There is clearly a fascination among some lesbians about what men do, which is an interesting turnabout. It may be that within lesbian/gay culture gay men’s sexuality has moved to a position of prominence because of AIDS. There are a lot of changes happening in gay male sexuality, and it may be that this offers a vocabulary that lesbians can take on and try out. But there are other strategies: when I was working on Bad Attitude, (a lesbian porn magazine coming out of Boston), for example, we tried really hard to get women to do their own work around their sexuality for the magazine. We used images that were produced by the women themselves, that were very much what women were doing sexually at grass-roots level, rather than what was acceptable. One image, I don’t know if you recall it, was of very beautiful smallish, athletic breasts, with a nipple ring and a very very sharp stiletto between the nipple ring. It was an elegant, stunning photograph but some women were really offended, and thought it was abusive to women. It got more of a reaction than the very stylized stuff in On Our Backs. Bad Attitude was trying to speak out of a set of authentic subject positions and to give women space to talk about their sexuality and develop a language, not impose one. It would be nice to do some consciousness-raising involving, say, art therapy work, to begin to find a language of our own somehow, to map our sexualities. Sue: I think that would be fun and risky—which can be a fruitful and explosive combination.

Notes Cindy Patton is a long-time feminist and gay activist. She has been involved in AIDS organizing since 1982. Formally an editor of Boston’s (US) Gay Com munity News, she is author of Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985) and Making It: A Women’s Guide to Sex in the Age of AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1987). Her article, ‘AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community’ appeared in FR 30. Sue O’Sullivan has written about AIDS since 1984. She works as an editor at Sheba Feminist Publishers and is currently working on a book called Positively Women with women from the group of that name. Thanks to Erica Carter for applying her valuable editorial skills at the last moment.

Background reading CARTER, Erica and WATNEY, Simon (1989) editors, Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, London: Serpent’s Tail. RICHARDSON, Diane (1987) Women and the AIDS Crisis, London: Pandora. RIEDER, Ines and RUPPELT, Patricia (1989) editors, Matters of Life and Death: Women Speak About AIDS, London: Virago.


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SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: Lesbianism and Psychoanalytic Theory Diane Hamer

Introduction: lesbians and therapy Of all the conversations I have had with friends lately, the one which raised the most passionate and the most violent emotions is that which concerns the function of my therapist in my life. Our discussions have all the elements of political debate— investment, contestation, fracture, gaping abysses of opinion. Therapy seems to be the new terrain for the working out of a politics of personal life. It even threatens to eclipse the status of lovers as conversation topics. More and more of us are going into therapy and it is almost becoming unfashionable not to be in it. Yet there is still an antipsychoanalysis consensus amongst lesbians, despite the fact that the theoretical bases of many of our therapies will have been informed by psychoanalysis at some point. Perhaps as a result of this consensus of feeling the relationship between psychoanalysis and lesbianism remains largely untheorized. The most recent articulation of a political position on psychoanalysis was in the radical feminist journal Trouble and Strife (Rondot, 1989) in which Freud’s case of ‘Dora’ was once more found to embody all that is most oppressive about psychoanalysis to lesbians and to all women. According to that author at least, the implication seemed to be that psychoanalysis has nothing to say to lesbians—and vice versa. Many of the criticisms directed at the theory and practice of psychoanalysis are undoubtedly accurate. However, such wholesale dismissal (mainly through silence) does not answer what some lesbians find extremely useful about psychoanalytic theory in accounting for how we make sense of ourselves. In this article I want to attempt to bring the two, lesbianism and psychoanalysis, together—in part along the axis of a personal account of therapy—to see what it is they might have to say to each other. There is a difficulty inherent in entering psychoanalytic discourse from a position of identification as a lesbian. Historically, for lesbians entering analysis, it has been their lesbianism which has been assumed to be ‘the problem’ for which they seek help. To enter therapy as a lesbian is not to automatically presuppose a problem with our identity—but since a central function of therapy is to problematize our conscious and


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fixed senses of self, our lesbian identity does come up for grabs within the therapeutic relationship. There is a real danger here that in the process, our lesbianism will once again be read as ‘the problem’. This remains one of the central contradictions in my own therapy and it dominates the attempt to establish a dialogue between psychoanalysis and lesbianism. How do we move towards a psychoanalytic understanding of lesbian identity—and by that I mean how do we begin to think about the history of the formation of our lesbianism, as a contingent identity constructed from individual biographical details rather than as something authentic, natural or pre-given—without pathologizing it, without making it a symptom of a sickness?

Uses of psychoanalysis within f eminist theory Although psychoanalysis so far has not found a place within a specifically lesbian politics or theory, it currently occupies a central position within contemporary feminist theory. Feminists have turned to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, initially imported to Britain via the work of feminists Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (Mitchell and Rose, 1982), as a way of addressing the internal psychic construction of women’s identity in patriarchal culture. Psychoanalysis has been understood as a way of addressing the psychic cost to women of entering a culture in which our subordination is a sine qua non. Jacqueline Rose has argued that

psychoanalysis becomes one of the few places in our culture where it is recognised as more than a fact of individual pathology that most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all. (Rose, 1983:9) For psychoanalysis to recognize that women’s subordination is achieved only at a cost suggests that within psychoanalytic theory it is understood that women’s oppression is not guaranteed by any natural inferiority, but is a forced condition. This reading of psychoanalysis assumes that things could be otherwise and thus addresses patriarchal authority and women’s apparent acquiescence to it as fundamentally fragile and precarious. To quote Jacqueline Rose once more, she suggests that ‘Feminism’s affinity with psychoanalysis rests above all […] with this recognition that there is resistance to identity which lies at the heart of psychic life’ (Rose, 1983:9). It is at this level that I see psychoanalysis as potentially having most to offer to us, in terms of a radical reading of lesbianism. I want, therefore to outline how feminists have understood psychoanalysis’s implicit offerings on the instability of identities and positions within patriarchal culture.

Taking on gender identities Feminists have adopted a psychoanalytic account of individual sexuality and psychic life in an attempt to account for the psychic formation of gender identities. They use psychoanalysis to describe how each one of us comes to recognize ourselves as members of one or other gender category, as women or as men. This process of recognition (or mis-recognition, we might say) is not understood as guaranteed according to the details

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of our biological sex but is a process dependent on a series of splits and about-turns in our psychic life. This symbolic moment of rupture, the inaugural moment in which our gender identities are brought into being is designated as the Oedipus complex.1 According to Juliet Mitchell, ‘It is the crucial acquisition of the story of (her) life that (a) person is undergoing at the Oedipal moment, and that repeats itself in different ways throughout (her) days in human culture’ (Mitchell, 1986:14). In the sense in which Mitchell describes it, we never entirely leave this Oedipal moment behind—it is not a stage we pass through—but something we constantly re-live or re-enact in the relationships we enter into in our adult lives as in those of our childhood. The Oepidal moment represents a split with pre-existing psychic configurations in which any notion of a singular or coherent gender identity is not yet in play. This earlier state is one in which there is no psychic distinction between girls and boys; therefore, it is marked, according to Freud, by a ‘sameness between the sexes’ which eclipses their differences. Sexuality, in this stage, is not organized according to any heterosexual, genital or reproductive imperatives which later will figure large in the cultural organization of adult sexuality. Rather, sexuality is a diffuse set of pleasures experienced across the body and intimately bound up with the presence of the mother; breastfeeding, bum-wiping, potty training and so on. As the child seeks to repeat the pleasures associated with these activities, beyond the biological need which brought them into being, and in the inevitable absence of the mother who was the original source of satisfaction, sexuality emerges as a symbolic substitution which stands in for this lost object. John Fletcher has argued that in this way, psychoanalysis ‘conceives sexuality not as a fixed biological instinct to reproduce, but as a highly mobile psychical reality that is organized symbolically, and so is always in excess of the realm of biological needs’ (Fletcher 1989:94). As such it is in excess of any heterosexual reproductive urge which is frequently ascribed as ‘natural’ to human subjects. Insofar as pre-Oedipal sexuality is active and pleasure-seeking, Freud designated this stage in both sexes as the ‘masculine period’ and accordingly described the little girl at this level as a ‘little man’ (Freud, 1933:116). So far, this is relevant for our purposes because it indicates how the sexual pleasures we derive from our lesbian identifications in our adult lives, which are in opposition to the cultural imperatives to heterosexual reproductive sexuality, have their roots in the polymorphous sexuality of the pre-Oedipal phase. This phase, it must be remembered, is not one which disappears from our psychic lives with the onslaught of cultural prohibitions, but coexists with them. However, the route from pre-Oedipal sexuality is not a straight-forward one and no individual subject stands outside of culture’s injunctions upon it. In order to take up a place at all within the cultural organization of gender and sexuality requires a negotiation with its terms. To become a member of the social order, there is an insistence that we make an identification with one gender or another, with the category ‘woman’ or with ‘man’. It is within the Oedipus complex that cultural prohibitions upon forms of sexuality other than heterosexual reproductive sexuality are imposed. The Oedipal moment represents the individual’s ‘taking in’ of our culture’s laws as regards gender and sexuality. In order for the child to adapt her or himself to the laws of a culture which is

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both patriarchal (that is, organized around a hierarchical difference between the sexes) and heterosexual, she or he must repress those desires and identifications which are in excess of, or in contradiction with these terms. Clearly, there is a cost to both girls and boys in this process of fitting oneself into the prescribed categories of gender and overturning multifarious sexual aims and identifications in favour of a single heterosexual aim. But since the fate of girls and boys is not equivalent in our culture—as men and women do not enjoy an equal status—the cost to each is not the same. John Fletcher (1989) and others (Eardley, 1985; Ryan, 1985) have examined the cost to boys of succumbing to this process. For girls, the price extracted in return for ‘fitting in’ is high; arguably a great deal higher than for the boy. For him at least, acceptance of the terms of patriarchal culture promises his eventual accession to the privileges of masculinity, which include, above all, the right to possess a woman (if not his own mother, then another woman in her place). For the girl, all she can look forward to in accepting culture’s demand for her femininity, is a subordinate place in the social organization of gender, in which now any claim she makes to ‘masculine’ privilege must be mediated through a relationship to a man. Because of the high price women pay in return for their femininity, Jacqueline Rose has described femininity as an ‘injury’ and a ‘“catastrophe” for the complexity of [the girl’s] earlier psychic and sexual life (“injury” as its price)’ (Rose 1983:9).

Femininity—an impossible identity? The injury which is femininity is entered into via the recognition of castration, a recognition which introduces the girl into Oedipal re lations. This means that for girls, acceptance of the position prescribed for her in patriarchal culture entails an acceptance that not only is she different from the boy but also that she is inferior to him, ‘castrated’; that he has something which she lacks. How else is she to make sense of the inferior position which seems to be her fate as a woman, except by this means? (She could, of course, reject the conclusion that she is inferior to him, an option on which female homosexuality hinges and which I will examine in the rest of the paper.) In contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is the metaphor of the ‘phallus’ (as a reference to, but not straightforwardly equated with, the penis) which is the register of this difference from men, and her apparent lack. Jacqueline Rose distinguishes this apparent difference from any real existing biological difference:

Sexual difference is assigned according to whether individual subjects do or do not possess the phallus, which means not that anatomical difference is sexual difference but that anatomical difference comes to figure sexual difference, that is, becomes the sole representative of what that difference is allowed to be. It thus covers over the complexity of the child’s early sexual life with a crude opposition in which that very complexity is refused or repressed. (Rose, 1983:42).

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Insofar as the girl ascribes possession of the phallus first to her father and then to all men, and regards herself, her mother, and all other women as lacking it, she has accepted the Oedipal law. Lacan designates this as ‘the Law of the Father’ and it is fundamentally a heterosexual law. The girl’s pre-Oedipal psychic similarity to boys is now overturned and replaced by an emphasis on their difference from each other. However, a girl’s acquiescence to this violent splitting within her psychic life is by no means guaranteed. Given the high cost for girls of entering Oedipal relations, it is not surprising that never is this complicated series of splits and ruptures embarked upon without resistance, nor is it ever perfectly completed. After all, the girl has a great deal to lose (her rightful claim to equality with men, and to so-called ‘masculine’ activity) and only ever a vicarious authority (through being linked to a man in heterosexual relations) to gain in the ‘successful’ resolution of the Oedipus complex. It is the existence of the unconscious, forced into being at the moment of this violent split, which makes it impossible that femininity should ever completely succeed and which is the site of women’s resistance to the cultural injunctions of the Oedipal law. Regardless of women’s apparent identification with the ideal of femininity, residues of that which she has given up continually disrupt and undermine any conscious or fixed sense of self from the place of the unconscious. Because of the impossibility for psychoanalysis of any unified or coherent gender identity feminists have argued that therefore our culture’s ideal version of femininity—unified in its passivity and heterosexual form—is a fiction, unattainable by real women. To the extent that the apparently secure categories of gender are constantly disrupted in this way, psychoanalysis points to the constructedness and mythical nature of the social category ‘woman’ itself.

Privileging heterosexuality within feminist psychoanalysis Despite the emphasis on the fragility of femininity in the writing of Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and other feminists working with psychoanalytic theory, there has been an enormous reluctance to address heterosexuality in the same way. This is ironic since heterosexuality and femininity are formed in the same moment of violent rupture around which the Oedipal injunctions turn. For women, taking on an exclusive heterosexual identity is contingent upon the acceptance of the ‘fact’ of her castration, and, like femininity, represents an enormous cost to her psychic life. Freud’s early essay on ‘“Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908) describes heterosexuality as ‘a casualty ward of psychic cripples and walking wounded, of male impotence and female frigidity.’ (Quoted in Fletcher, 1989:93). (Freud’s choice of language would not be my own but the image forcefully describes the difficulties at the heart of the heterosexual ‘norm’.) The reluctance to question the status of heterosexuality has led to a frustrating unevenness in feminist psychoanalytic discourse, in which the status quo has been problematized and yet the already existing alternatives to a heterosexual norm are still largely untheorized. In the absence of any sort of feminist intervention, lesbianism as one ‘deviation’ from this norm is still generally regarded within psychoanalytic accounts as a pathology. This anomalous situation informs Parveen Adams’s recent contribution to

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feminist psychoanalytic debates (Adams, 1989) in which she makes an argument for the radically transgressive sexuality of lesbian sado-masochism but only at the expense of all other lesbians, whose sexuality she still regards as pathological. Her intervention is nevertheless important because it is one of the few places lesbianism has been taken up at all in recent feminist psychoanalysis and I will return to her argument later.

Psychoanalytic theories of female homosexuality While reticence about problematizing heterosexuality has temporarily deflected the possibility of a radical reassessment of the status of lesbianism in our culture, theories about female homosexuality abound in the less progressive literature. Here, lesbianism has appeared in highly contestable ways. Freud’s rather truncated ideas about female homosexuality, based predominantly on one case, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, have been taken up since it was written in 1920 in order to pathologize lesbianism as a ‘deviant’ condition, a product of arrested development. I want to briefly spell out how Freud understood ‘female homosexuality’ and indicate some of the ways this understanding has been deployed in order to shore up conventional notions of normality. From there, I want to ask whether there is anything we can salvage from the Freudian account, in the light of feminist reworkings of other parts of his theory. The Freudian account of female homosexuality begins with the girl’s recognition of castration which heralds her entry into the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, for the girl there are three courses possible on this recognition; only one of these, the acceptance of her castrated status, guarantees that she reach ‘the final normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object’ (Freud, 1931:376). This outcome has already been problematized above. The second course available to her is ‘a general revulsion from sexuality’ when faced with the ‘fact’ of her castration, and in the third:

she clings with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity…and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods. This ‘masculinity complex’ in women can also result in manifest homosexual choice of object’ (Freud, 1931:376, my emphasis). So, homosexuality is one of the courses available to the girl in her transition from preOedipal sexuality and is an effect of the refusal of castration. This refusal is designated as a ‘masculinity complex’, and signified for Freud the girl’s desire to be a man. Freud makes this very clear in his case study; his patient, who developed a homosexual object choice at sixteen, had ‘brought along with her from childhood a strongly marked ‘masculinity complex’, she took pleasure in ‘romping and fighting’ and, on inspection of her brother’s genitals ‘developed a pronounced envy for the penis’. She also, Freud states, was a feminist, and felt it unjust that boys had more freedom than girls. (Freud, 1920:197). This account of homosexuality as a result of a ‘masculinity complex’—the disavowal of the ‘fact’ of castration in the little girl’s belief that she can indeed be a little man—is a recurrent theme in psychoanalytic literature on female homosexuality. Mandy Merck

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has pointed this out in her critique of Freud’s case study (Merck, 1986) and identifies two other themes which are concurrent with this first. The second is the heterosexual origins of a homosexual object choice; the girl initially takes her father as love object as she ought, but ‘regresses into her early masculinity complex’ ‘as a result of her inevitable disappointments from her father’ (Freud, 1933:130). For Freud’s homosexual patient these disappointments were manifest by her mother’s pregnancy while she herself was in her teens, thus serving as proof of her mother’s victory over the girl in their rivalry for the father. And here we have the third theme; homosexuality as a ‘stepping down’ from feminine competition. Jackie Stacey has pointed out the inevitable problems of an account in which the only trajectory to lesbian desire is through a masculine identification (Stacey, 1987). I agree with her criticisms, particularly in her argument that such an account maps lesbian relationships onto a heterosexual blueprint, thereby denying the specificity of a woman’s desire for another woman. These are points I will come back to in the final section. But first, I want to address the equation of lesbianism and masculinity posed within psychoanalysis in its implications for us as lesbians. I feel a certain reluctance about doing this, and I am very conscious as I do so that the reductionism inherent in collapsing lesbianism into masculinity has historically been one of the sources of our oppression. It is an equation, though, that has come up time and time again in my own therapy, and I recognize it too, in conversations with friends, as well as in other public representations of lesbian identity. To name two of those here; at a recent ‘Lesbian Sexuality’ discussion series at the Women’s Media Resource Centre in London in the summer of 1989, the question of ‘butch’ lesbians’ bid for masculinity was a strong theme of the ‘Butch and Femme’ discussion. Secondly, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it is a recurrent theme in lesbian popular fiction (Hamer, 1990); from Ann Bannon’s lesbian romances in the 1950s, to contemporary lesbian crime fiction, there is a fascination with women who usurp the sexual and social privileges associated with masculinity.

Rethinking lesbianism within psychoanalysis Shortly before writing this article I read a clinical case study of ‘Homosexuality in Women’. Written by Joyce McDougall, a practising analyst who has returned to this theme repeatedly over the past two decades, it takes up Freud’s theme of female homosexuality as masculinity. Despite the fact that the book in which McDougall’s article appeared has been published by Virago (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981), and is frequently cited on women’s studies book lists, her interpretations of her patients’ ‘condition’ are given according to a highly normative model of development, in which femininity is upheld as the privileged route out of the Oedipus complex, the benchmark of ‘normality’ against which a ‘homosexual’ route is pathologized. And yet, as I read her series of ‘case studies’, I found myself immersed in an identificatory process of recognition; despite my anger at her descriptions, I felt I was reading about me. I want to think about the implications of how I read myself into her ‘case studies’. The common feature of homosexual women in her account is the ways they regard themselves as separate from all other women, a characteristic she explains psychically as

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Woman Through the Mirror. Sculpture in steel by Sarah Reilly

homosexual women’s repudiation of ‘any identification with the genital [as opposed to the pre Oedipal] mother, particularly in her role as sexual partner to the man’ (McDougall, 1988:177); she says, for these women believed

they were different from all other women. In their deeper fantasy they were castrated men. To be a women meant to be nothing, to have nothing, to create nothing. Activity was the privilege of the male…(McDougall, 1988:179–80). I understand the ‘genital mother’ here as mother-as—‘woman’, the mother who the child knows to be having penetrative sex with the father, a mother different from the powerful ‘phallic’ mother of the pre-Oedipal phase who was not yet known to be ‘castrated’. Accepting identification with the genital mother means, for the girl, accepting her own fate as ‘sexual partner to the man’ in a relationship in which both partners acknowledge the man’s possession of the phallus over and above the woman. But the girl won’t identify, because, she thinks ‘to be a woman means to be nothing, to have nothing, to create nothing. Activity is the privilege of the male…’ and she intends to make her claim to that privilege, even it it means refusing to accept the ‘fact’ of her castration.

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In the absence of a feminist critique of patriarchy McDougall’s case study is highly problematic, and renders women’s identifications and disavowals as symptoms of individual pathology. Yet I feel that what is being gestured towards (perhaps despite authorial intentions) and what I identify with in these accounts, is the internalized experience of patriarchy; how we as individual women ‘take in’ patriarchal laws. This ‘taking in’ can occur in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways; consciousness of patriarchal conditions leading to politicization on one level can coexist with a repudiation on another of the category ‘woman’ as it applies to oneself. I wonder whether lesbianism, sometimes, for some women is a psychic repudiation of the category ‘woman’. I think about my own history, my denial of the signs of womanhood as they imposed themselves on my body at puberty—my resistance to the facts of menstruation (for years I couldn’t bring myself to change my tampon or sanitary towel more than about once a day, which resulted in me regularly bleeding over myself. I used to pray to god that I’d do anything if he would make the blood go away); my inability to even think about contraception when I had heterosexual sex (and even after I got pregnant and had to have an abortion, I still never confronted the fact of my own reproductive capacity). For a long time I was able to sustain the belief that I was like a boy in all significant respects. Of course this belief is not without its contradictions. The details of how it was possible at all relate to a particular family history; the first child in the family who was treated like a son by her parents (especially her father), whose tomboyishness was found endearing and who was encouraged in her academic pursuits. This is one version of the story. Here is the other: the only child in the family enjoys the privileges of being like a son, and thinks she’s a boy, until the birth of a real boy usurps her position. His presence points to her fraudulence. What option is left open to her, the daughter, except that of the (inferior) girl? Life’s narrative is one of ‘stepping down’ in favour of another’s more privileged claim. Neither story is more ‘true’; they are two versions of the same family biography. Both are present and active in my psychic life and as competing narratives they pose a question which I re-enact at every moment and every point of my lived experience: just like the hysteric, described by Fletcher, ‘the question is, Am I a woman or a man?, when either position is impossible, an impasse of meanings’ (Fletcher, 1989:104). Retaining my earliest position of privilege in that family triangle, in fantasy if not in actuality, necessitated a repudiation of femininity as I understood it, of girlhood. The version of womanhood that I repudiated was not, however, a category based on any biological reality or necessity. The category ‘woman’ is a cultural fiction, a social construction based on what, at any given historical moment, dominant culture thinks ‘woman’ ought to be. Above all, within this construction, it is an imperative that ‘woman’ be what ‘man’ is not. This is the contradiction which all women must live out: that the limited versions of womanhood on offer within dominant culture can only be attained at a cost to women’s early psychic lives in which, as we we have seen, there is no inherent, natural or biologically determined difference between women and men. Because the ‘active aims’ of women’s early psychic life are not done away with, but continue to inform, challenge and disrupt any conscious or fixed sense of self, women’s psychology is governed not only by

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feminine ‘acquiescence’ but also by ‘masculine’ resistance and defences against femininity (Sayers, 1986:40). The contradictions for women inherent in having to sustain a feminine identity in order to be socially acceptable, despite the pulls of opposite and often unconscious identifications, can often result in the setting up of anxiety states for women. Janet Sayers has argued that the social experience of womanhood is that women are both psychically capable of and socially encouraged to be independent and active, and yet offered fewer possibilities than men of doing so. This contradiction often results in the repression of women’s resistance to cultural forms of femininity, which then reappear as ‘symptoms’. She says that to the extent

that actual gratification by women of [their active] aim is opposed by consciousness, it may then be repressed into the unconscious as occurs in neurosis, turned against the self as occurs in depression, or only recognised in others, as occurs in paranoia (Sayers, 1986:119). As an instance of this contradictory positioning, Valerie Walkerdine has illustrated how in primary education in post-war England girls are incited to be ‘children’ in a context where the category ‘child’ is continually transposed into ‘boy’—thus ‘treating girls “as if” they were boys’ (Walkerdine, 1985:224). This occurs simultaneously with girls’ positioning in other practices in which it is their femininity which is validated. The act of splitting which results ‘produces effects likely to result in anxiety states’. In the illustrations above, women’s ‘masculine’ resistance to femininity remains unconscious, hence the translation of this resistance into symptoms such as states of anxiety, depression, paranoia, neurosis and so on. While wishing to avoid the charge of voluntarism, I do think there may be grounds for arguing that psychically lesbianism is the one identity which brings closest to consciousness a recognition of the contradictions women are forced to live out. As such it may well be an extremely healthy response to the contradictory positioning of women in our culture. This is not to suggest that lesbianism is without psychic costs however, and one of these must be the production of anxiety states in individual women attendant upon the challenge a lesbian identification offers to patriarchal authority. That is, we both challenge the authority that goes with the possession of the phallus, and are fearful of the consequences of that challenge. John Fletcher has described lesbianism as ‘an intelligible response’ to the dilemma of the girl; who ‘was once a man, phallic, active and with Mother as primary love-object’ but who ‘in a cultural moment…is called upon to renounce her phallic position’. He goes on to argue that lesbianism:

should be seen not as a blind refusal of an object, the penis, or a person, the father, nor as a disavowal of genital difference, but as an attempt to contest or displace the meanings they carry, i.e. castration, its fantasies of mastery, loss, possession, subjugation and an avoidance of the destructive feelings they unleash, hostility, envy, shame, etc […] lesbianism can be seen as a restorative strategy which seeks to repair the losses, denigrations, thwartings that a

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patriarchal culture inflicts on the girl in her primary relation to the mother (Fletcher, 1989:105). This reading of lesbianism points to a correspondence between lesbianism as a psychic position and feminism as a political one. (Though I do not mean by this that every woman could be a lesbian or that every feminist should be.) Feminism is a political movement based on a refusal to accept the social ‘truth’ of men’s superiority over women. This superiority of men over women is a ‘truth’, but only to the extent that it enjoys a material and ideological existence within social relations. Feminism’s resistance to it is in the form of a denial of this ‘truth’ and an assertion that things could be otherwise. For this reason, feminists have sometimes suffered social condemnation as perverse, jealous, twisted and disappointed women; women who ‘act like men’. Similarly, lesbianism can be seen as a psychic refusal of the ‘truth’ of women’s castration (acceptance of which would guarantee them a place within the dominant social order). Both then, are refusals, though of a different order from each other; feminism on the terrain of social relations, lesbianism within psychic life. The points of overlap between the two are numerous, and could well form the content of another article. On this point it is interesting to note that Freud referred to both his homosexual women patients as ‘feminists’.

The limits of a psychoanalytic account: the diversity of lesbian identities The idea of lesbian identifications as a form of resistance to patriarchal culture’s demand for femininity marks a departure from the usual pathologization of lesbians within psychoanalysis and shifts the terms of the debate to a critique of patriarchal social relations instead. However, while I think that this account has some purchase in the psychic construction of our sexual identities, its explanatory power is limited. The diversity of contemporary lesbian identities foregrounds the limitations of a model which appears to ascribe to all lesbians a singular and unified psychic identity (and of course lesbianism is not only a psychic identity but is also currently a highly social one). In response to an earlier version of this paper Mary McIntosh has commented that, contrary to the assumptions that lesbians share a psychic history, we may in fact all be psychically diverse individuals, thrown together socially by what is now defined as ‘lesbian desire’. I want to hold onto the idea that we do share elements of a psychic history, at least within historically and culturally specific circumstances, but that these common features do not take preponderance over the difference between us. Rather they are imbricated alongside each other in the formation of our identities. All sorts of social differences impact upon psychic reality. As an example, in the Women’s Media Resources Centre discussions on lesbian sexuality mentioned above, it was suggested that in the context of bi-cultural lesbian relationships, racial difference is one problematic yet productive form of difference between lesbians. So that when I refer to our diversity I mean that which exists in terms of these social differences between us according to race and class, as well as the specifics of our different individual histories. I am not clear precisely how our different social positionings are implicated in our different psychic identifications. An exploration of their relationship could be a very

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fruitful direction for further work. What does seem likely is that the relationship is not a direct nor straightforward one but is complex and subject to contradiction, reversal, and change over time. What is clear is that the differences between us make it impossible to posit a singular or uniform trajectory to lesbianism, and points to the fallibility of a model which attempts to do this.

Difference and desire between lesbians What I want to consider is how lesbians’ different psychic identifications are constitutive of desire between us, and how the fact of lesbians’ desire defies and transgresses the understanding of ‘desire’ within contemporary psychoanalysis. As we shall see, if the current psychoanalytic account of desire is exhaustive, desire between women ought not to exist. This is firstly because psychoanalysis understands lesbianism primarily in terms of gender identity—as a disaffiliation from the cultural imposition of femininity—and only secondarily as an object choice, thus lining up all lesbians unproblematically on the side of masculinity. Secondly, it is only in terms of the binary opposition of masculine and feminine identities that desire is seen to exist in psychoanalytic theory. The explanation of this latter point is quite complex but goes something like this: in the Oedipus complex, there is recognition of the difference between the sexes and a realization of the inequities of phallic possession. Desire is brought into being with this realization and is always retrospective and recuperative; that is, it is the desire to get back that which one thought one possessed but which one now realizes is the possession of another. Masculine and feminine identities are allocated around this apparent opposition between possession and nonpossession of the phallus. Classically, lesbians are thought to pretend possession of the phallus, (they make a ‘virile identification’ with it; Adams, 1989:263) and are thus aligned, albeit fraudulently, on the side of masculinity. In this rather simplistic account lesbian desire becomes near impossible; desire cannot exist between lesbians, since they are both on the same side of desire, or, if a lesbian does experience desire, it is bound to be towards a feminine subject who could only desire her back as though she were a man. However, as I have suggested, lesbianism is less a claim to phallic possession (although it may be this too) than it is a refusal of the meanings attached to castration. As such it is a refusal of any easy or straightforward allocation of masculine and feminine positions around the phallus. Instead it suggests a much more fluid and flexible relationship to the positions around which desire is organized. In order to illustrate how desire might be organized amongst lesbians, I want to make reference to a form of sexuality which has figured large in recent attempts to formulate an ongoing lesbian sexual politics. The question of butch/femme sexuality is a highly contested area of debate amongst lesbians for reasons I have examined elsewhere (Hamer, 1990). Raising the issue of butch and femme here may seem somewhat of a digression. However, it seems to me that butch and femme sexuality represents a fulcrum between psychoanalytic accounts of lesbianism and a lesbian discourse on desire. On the surface it seems to confirm the most conventional version of female homosexuality within

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psychoanalysis, yet simultaneously it is acknowledged by many lesbians as an authentic and productive form of lesbian sexual expression. Without making too great a claim for its transgressive qualities (and indeed, if taken too literally, ‘butch and femme’ becomes a very static form of sexual expression) I want to suggest how butch and femme relationships might bring into focus certain questions about lesbian sexuality more generally; questions which are unthinkable within conventional psychoanalysis. It seems to me that above all, what butch and femme sexuality represents is difference between lesbians. It is both one way of giving a name to difference as well as a social and psychic manifestation of a particular difference (the details of which are explored elsewhere in this issue, Ardill and O’Sullivan). I do not advocate that it is the only difference between lesbians or that all lesbians can be slotted into one or other of its terms. But as a representation of difference between lesbians it serves as an antidote to the monolithic account of lesbianism within psychoanalysis (as well as to the rather sexless emphasis on sameness between lesbians supported by a certain current of lesbian feminism dominant in the late 1970s and early 1980s. See Rich, 1980). Overwhelmingly, the difference that butch and femme sexuality gives name to is a difference in relation to desire. It gestures towards the way we, as lesbians, take up different positions in relation to the desire of another woman. Joan Nestle has described butch and femme in terms of this relationship between two desiring positions, as an ‘erotic partnership’ between two women (Nestle, 1988:101). What is significant for my purpose in Nestle’s descriptions of butch and femme relationships is less the content of either of its terms but the fact that they exist in relation to each other. I suggest that this description might be extended to describe forms of desire between lesbians in general, in which desire ‘involves a relation between two positions’ (Fletcher, 1989:110), a negotiation between two desiring partners. Butch and femme as a form of sexuality is at its most static and therefore limiting when either term is taken on in the absence of the desire of another. What all this suggests is that lesbian desire still turns on a relationship to difference, where it is the relationship which becomes significant over and above the actual terms of the difference. Different positions are taken up in relation to another’s desire and while the positions may be fixed (as in butch/femme), the individuals who occupy them are not necessarily fixed. A passage taken from one of the novels of pulp fiction writer, Ann Bannon, illustrates figuratively this play with identities and positions permitted in a lesbian context;

Jack grinned at her. ‘You’re a boy,’ he said. ‘With Marcie, anyway […]’. Laura put her glass down. ‘I’m a girl,’ she said […]. Jack put his head back and laughed. ‘Correction,’ he said. ‘You’re a girl. Why don’t you move down here [into the lesbian ghetto] where you don’t have to be either?’ ‘Everybody has to be one or the other.’ ‘You’re too literal, Laura. Cut off your hair. Wear those pants you look so nice in. Get some desert boots, a car coat and some men’s shirts and you’re in business.’ (Bannon, 1986:67)

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The difference around which lesbian desire turns may, in the first instance, be organized around the positions of masculinity and femininity. However, lesbian desire transgresses the masculine/feminine binarism around which phallic sexuality is organized, not because we stand entirely outside it, but because oscillation, fluidity, movement is much more possible within it. This argument is not dissimilar to the one Parveen Adams recently made in ‘Of Female Bondage’, an essay on lesbian sado-masochism also reviewed elsewhere in this issue (O’Connor). There, she makes out a special case for the ‘mobility of desire’ between lesbian sado-masochists, on the grounds that for them, desire is not anchored to the paternal phallus of the Oedipal law. Given how few affirmative accounts of lesbianism exist within psychoanalytic discourse, it is disquieting that Adams makes her case for the transgressive qualities of lesbian sado-masochism only at the expense of all other lesbians (‘traditional homosexual women’ in her phraseology). She ascribes this mobility by tracing a route through clinical heterosexual fetishism, rather than, say, through other forms of lesbian identification. This choice has quite a distinct effect on her argument since it serves to discount the central similarities between lesbian sadomasochism and other forms of lesbianism. This is ironic, not only because lesbian sadomasochists have continually emphasized how their sexual practices exist on a continuum with other forms of lesbian sexuality but also because Adams’s argument for mobility rests substantially on the fact that the lesbian sado-masochist’s desire is not heterosexual and is about ‘the construction of sexuality between women’. These are qualities which, it could well be argued, are common to all lesbians. Because of the similarities between the desire of the lesbian sado-masochist and of other lesbians, I therefore think it is possible to import Adams’s notion of the ‘mobility of desire’—‘there is choice and mobility […] an erotic plasticity and movement […] a play with identity and a play with genitality (Adams, 1989:262)—to all, not merely some forms of lesbian sexuality. Desire here is mobile because lesbians can be both masculine and feminine—simultaneously or at different moments—in relation to the desire of another. This fluidity and oscillation around the positions of masculinity and femininity signifies the splitting off of categories of gender from any biological determination.

Endthoughts If lesbianism is based on a mobility of desire, an oscillation of identifications, then it follows that lesbianism also opens up a space for feminine identifications which are not heterosexual. To illustrate, a ‘femme’ friend of mine recently commented that for her, positively embracing this term was her claim to the status of ‘woman’ simultaneous with her desire for a woman—a position disallowed within any conventional Oedipal trajectory. Here, then, lesbianism is not merely a refusal of the category ‘woman’ but a reworking of it, an insistence upon new meanings of ‘woman’, new possibilities of gender. That lesbian desire exceeds the forms of sexuality laid out within conventional psychoanalytic accounts may also be about historical change. Lesbianism is now conceived as a collective and increasingly public identity and the new social forms it takes creates new psychic realities. The diversity I mentioned earlier, of an increasingly visible

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collective lesbian identity, makes possible new forms of identification, the expansion of new sexual possibilities, new relationships to gender and new relationships to desire.

Notes Diane Hamer is an Australian feminist currently living in London, and working on a PhD on contemporary lesbian identity at the Department for Cultural Studies in Birmingham. She also teaches women’s studies in adult education and along with two other women is producing an item for Channel 4’s Out On Tuesday. Thanks to all the friends who are never exhausted by conversations about psychoanalysis or therapy, especially Susan Ardill, Susan Black, Sue Bradley, Alison Oram and ‘Harriet’. Thanks also to the Feminist Review editors for their support and encouragement. 1 The patriarchal nuclear family is the dominant form in which familial relations are organized in British culture, ideologically if not in actuality. Therefore a relation to the Oedipal law derived from that family form, I would suggest, governs the internal psychic structure of all individual subjects within this culture. But the nature of our relation to it will be different according to the particularities of our history and experience.

References ADAMS, Parveen (1989) ‘Of Female Bondage’, in BRENNAN (1989). BANNON, Ann (1986) I Am A Woman, Florida: Naiad. BRENNAN, Teresa (1989) editor, Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, Jannine (1988) editor, Female Sexuality: New Psycho analytic Views, London: Karnac; originally published London: Virago (1981). EARDLEY, Tony (1985) ‘Violence and Sexuality’, in METCALF and HUMPHRIES . FLETCHER, John (1989) ‘Freud and his Uses: Psychoanalysis and Gay Theory’, in SHEPHERD and WALLIS (1989). FREUD, Sigmund (1908) ‘“Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, in The Pelican Freud Library (PFL), Vol. 12 (1985) , Harmonds-worth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1920) ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in Case Histories II, PFL Vol. 9 (1979) , Harmondsworth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1931) ‘Female Sexuality’, in On Sexuality, PFL Vol. 7 (1979) Harmondsworth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1933) ‘Femininity’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho analysis, PFL Vol. 2 (1973) , Harmondsworth: Penguin. HAMER, Diane (1990) ‘“I Am A Woman”: Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s’, in LILLY (1990). LILLY, Mark (1990) editor, Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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McDOUGALL, Joyce (1988) ‘Homosexuality in Women’, in CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL (1988). MERCK, Mandy (1986) ‘The Train of Thought in Freud’s “Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”’, in m/f no . 11/12. METCALF, Andy and HUMPHRIES, Martin (1985) editors, The Sexuality of Men, London: Pluto. MITCHELL, Juliet and ROSE, Jacqueline (1982) editors, Feminine Sexuality, London: Macmillan. MITCHELL, Juliet (1986) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London: Penguin. NESTLE, Joan (1988) ‘Butch and Fem Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s’, in NESTLE (1988). NESTLE, Joan ( 1988 ) A Restricted Country, London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. RICH, Adrienne (1980) ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in Signs Vol. 5 no. 4. RONDOT, Jane (1989) ‘Hysteria or Resistance? The Great Freudian Cover-Up Part II’, Trouble and Strife, no. 15. ROSE, Jacqueline (1983) ‘Femininity and Its Discontents’, Feminist Review no. 14. RYAN, Tom (1985) ‘Roots of Masculinity’, in METCALF and HUMPHRIES (1985). SAYERS, Janet (1986) Sexual Contradictions, London: Tavistock. SHEPHERD, Simon and WALLIS, Mick (1989) editors, Coming On Strong, London: Unwin & Hyman. STACEY, Jackie (1987) ‘The Invisible Difference: Lesbianism and Sexual Difference Theory’, in collection of papers for the ‘Homosexuality: Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Amsterdam (1987). STEEDMAN, Caroline, URWIN, Cathy and WALKERDINE, Valerie (1985) editors, Language, Gender and Childhood, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. WALKERDINE, Valerie (1985) ‘On the Regulation of Speaking and Silence; Subjectivity, Class and Gender in Contemporary Schooling’, in STEEDMAN, URWIN and WALKERDINE (1985).

THE PLEASURE THRESHOLD: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film Cherry Smyth

The body of the women is written over and across with a whole theory of cinema and a whole romance of the woman, typed cards fixed to her body, phrases traced directly on her skin (Jacqueline Rose, 1986:212). Pornography as an area of study Porn can be both progressive and reactionary, oppressive and liberating and it is naive simply to welcome or denounce its representations. Debates in Britain have tended to pivot on the oppressive nature of power without often recognizing the possibility of women’s pleasure. Heterosexual analyses of porn have rarely applied their theories, often rooted in a binary male-female, subject-object discourse, to same-sex erotic representations. Socialist-feminist men have seen other men’s need to watch porn as a social lack: ‘A narcissistic substitute for really effective and socially interactive powersharing’ (Bloom, in Day and Bloom, 1988:21). Many radical feminists have strived to protect us from its corrupting force: ‘It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our oppression that it can be from images and fantasies of that very oppression that we draw what we have been encouraged to see as empowering and liberating, i.e., sexual pleasure’ (Jeffreys in Chester and Dickey, 1988:139). Just as it has been taboo for women to express an interest in sex and sexual satisfaction, so feminism has prescribed further taboos declaring ‘politically correct’ ways of having sex and seeking arousal. To watch, never mind admit to enjoying porn, is equal to treacherous collusion with the most sinister component of hetero-patriarchy. As porn is visible and explicit it could be seen as an easier target to focus the fight against sexism and male violence. However, antiporn campaigners have often conflated sexually explicit images with violence against women, rather than see porn as a socially constructed part of a much larger whole, for example, the family, language and educational systems, legal and religious traditions, which perpetuate the oppression of all women, both in terms of sexism and racism. Some feminists have argued that recording or studying representations of our sexual acts and fantasies deflects from ‘real’ political work. Richard Dyer suggests that studies of porn


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have been devalued in a similar way to those of weepies, thrillers and low comedy, because they all hold a culturally inferior position (Dyer, 1985). I would like to go beyond the argument of whether porn should exist, to examine how it gives or withholds pleasure within a lesbian context. Rather than enter labyrinthine distinctions between porn (masturbatory) and erotica (celebratory), art (pure) and smut (dirty), I will use the word porn to describe work which seeks to arouse, or represent arousal.

The lesbian gaze Heterosexual porn has often failed to portray women’s pleasure, having represented it as a male construct with satisfaction only possible through penetrative sex. Scenes showing masturbation often act as precursors to the ‘real’ sexual act involving the penis. It seeks to promote the male viewer’s erection and masturbation, and constantly tries to disguise (thus revealing) the instability of phallic power. How often do you see the limp, wrinkled penis exposed? In addressing the male consumer, cinema in general, and porn in particular, have objectified and often degraded the female body. Many feminist critiques of cinema have focused on the structure of the male gaze, within which the male is subject and the sexualized female body is object, replicating the structure of unequal power relations between men and women. ‘If she is desired at all, it can only be across a masculine identification, the only place within cinema for desiring a woman being a form of control through the look’ (Rose, 1986:211). A feminist counter-cinema would have to construct woman as subject and spectator without perpetuating the repressive identifications of mainstream cinema, and also satisfy our desire for pleasure, while theories have almost denied the possibility of retrieving pleasure at all. This had led in some cases to a reactionary ‘feminist’ politics which has desexed the female body, robbed her of her pleasure, and created a suspicion of all pleasure promoted by cinema. Within the ‘lesbian community’ it has created a false polarity between the pro-sex, sexpositive gang, and the anti-sex, sex-negative lobby. The reactionary, divisive dichotomy of good girl/bad girl has silenced doubt and confusion, pressurizing women to join a particular ‘camp’. Studies of both the gaze and the object have often been determined by heterosexuality and whiteness, assuming that both the gaze and the object are fixed in gender, sexuality and race. It has been convenient and simpler to see the binary male-female opposition, uncomplicated by the vagaries of ‘difference’ (Mulvey 1975:6–18). Kaplan has suggested that ‘the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the “masculine” position’ (Kaplan, 1983:29). What becomes of the female object and the male gaze when we examine lesbian porn? Is the voyeur assumed to be white? Is there a location of a Black lesbian gaze in lesbian porn? Is it possible to create a female hero-subject who is not a victim? Does lesbian porn succeed in scrutinizing female pleasure where heterosexual porn largely fails? Can it extend definitions of male and female beyond the active/passive, voyeur/exhibitionist stereotypes?

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Lesbian sexuality has been repressed, rendered invisible and impotent by society. By watching porn, we can on some level recognize ourselves, defend our right to express our sexuality and assert our desire. It includes us in a subcultural system of coded sexual styles, gestures and icons which affirms our sense of belonging. If we are white women however, we have a more privileged sense of inclusion as the actors are almost always white, and so the gaze operates through this perspective, primarily addressing the dominant voyeur in western culture who is white. As well as provoking the internal disapproving homophobic judge, watching porn has more recently come to represent rebellion from some kinds of prescriptive feminist sex which must be equal, nurturing, non-penetrative and romantic. To thrill, porn needs to be illicit. By watching lesbian porn we are transgressing a feminist taboo, as well as the wider socio-political taboo, which invests the act with the thrill of the forbidden.

Another’s intimacy ‘One of the paradoxes of porn lies in a simultaneous compulsion to fetishize (to fragment the body) and a compulsion to “reveal all”.’ (Stern, 1982:39) Another paradox is that we try to find ourselves in the heart of another’s intimacy. Porn may leave us with frustrated misrecognition for it usually consolidates oppressive codes of race, body size, age, attractiveness and ability, which only seduce by tapping into the fixed womanobject men have constructed and fetishized to secure their dominance. In the videos I watched there was only one woman who was not white. Was this because a group of white lesbians got together to make lesbian porn videos on very low budgets, which they simply crewed and casted themselves? Did they purposefully avoid casting Black lesbians for fear of reproducing racist stereotypes, or did they just ‘not know any’? It perhaps signifies an unwillingness among white lesbians to engage with the issue of difference around race, through fear of including Black lesbian images, as Blackness represents more potent sexuality which threatens their control. These representations therefore perpetuate the hegemony of the perfect, white female body in western cultures, its seamlessness disguising any problem or disruption of identity. They also uphold the apparently all-powerful constancy of the white gaze.

Fanny Liquidates Kenni’s Stocks In Fatale Video’s 1988 selection of Clips, Part III is one of the more successfully ironic and humorous sex tapes available In Which Fanny Liquidates Kenni’s Stocks. The three Clips could perhaps be likened to short hardcore films known as loops which have been made since the turn of the century usually for domestic and private venues. Six women were invited to my front room for an afternoon of viewing and comment. The plot is sacrificed to give ‘value for money’ which is ultimately signalled by the ‘come shot’. The plot may be minimal but the narrative codes are so strong that there is no doubt that sex will occur. No matter at which point you join a loop, you always know what is about to happen. As in classic porn narratives, in Clips, Part III, one character, the femme in this case, enters the scene wanting sex, while the other, the butch, remains uninterested. Reading the business news, the butch is suitably attired in striped shirt, braces and

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trousers. The television voice-over recites the stocks and shares while the femme, exaggeratedly underdressed in floating pale pink négligée, stockings and suspender belt, begins to masturbate, tempting the butch. Intercutting looks between the characters are well-timed and build up tension. The femme fingers a large clear dildo and switches the television channel to images of ultra-feminine women dancing, flirting with the camera. This third look within the scene intensifies sexual anticipation and highlights the parodied roles each character has adopted. Close-ups of the butch undoing her shirt, and the femme’s heaving chest draw the viewer into the promise of eventual fucking. However, the femme comes singlehanded, exhibiting an incredible G-spot ejaculation, the butch still watching, then fucks herself with the dildo, discreetly closing her legs to the camera and the viewer. A close-up of her face, beaded with sweat, reveals her pleasure and also her apparently ‘real’ exhaustion. As she moves her hair off her forehead in a seemingly spontaneous gesture, the woman is revealed beneath the character, both tender and vulnerable.

The lesbian come shot The symbolic power of the male cum shot rests not in its accuracy, however, but in its very dissonance with the primary social model of fucking (i.e., intercourse)…pilled juices, copiously photographed, serve as proof of pleasure/orgasm and of reproductive potency. (Cindy Patton, 1988) While the male actor exposes his ‘real’ arousal by erection and visible orgasm, the female actor can only signify her pleasure by sound and gesture. Heterosexual porn attempts, but never succeeds, to reveal the mystery of female pleasure which remains hidden. Heterosexual men, therefore, are constantly anxious about their inability to satisfy women, and are drawn back again and again to pornographic attempts to signify her pleasure, to make it visible. This anxiety around female pleasure and satisfaction transfers to women, who know the mystery of their pleasure, and also know how many women fake it in order to please men and convince themselves. Heterosexual women’s desire to watch porn therefore works with a different dynamic. Do they want a visible sign of orgasm which rivals or indeed betters the male come shot, in order to gain its power and potency? Porn produced by heterosexual men will never concede this explicit power to women, and so they are constantly disappointed and disempowered by much of what porn fails to expose. The only convincing female orgasm I have seen in mainstream representations of heterosexual sex is in The Big Easy (Jim McBride, 1987) in which a man and a woman have sex, almost fully clothed, and the woman has a manually stimulated clitoral orgasm. Ironically, the fact that their bodies and genitals are kept hidden gives the scene an intense eroticism. The woman’s pleasure comes first, independent of the potency or even visibility of the penis. By replicating the come shot so essential to heterosexual and much gay male porn, Clips has bought into a wide range of signifiers which do not necessarily enhance the ability of the shot to arouse. Like hetero-sexual porn, it makes the mistake of assuming that the more explicit the sex is, the more it will excite the voyeur. Here the ultra-visible


female come shot acts as a visual joke which releases tension and evokes the actor’s pleasure. For lesbians who are embarrassed about coming very wetly, apparently wetting the bed, or who enjoy external ejaculation, this may validate their experience. However, for many of us who experience orgasm as internal, therefore hidden, this shot, rather than inducing ultimate satisfaction, perpetuates anxiety. If this foot-long trajectory from the femme’s vagina is real, as the actor claimed, then does it present a visual goal which we must strive for, thereby creating inadequacy in the lesbian viewer who has never achieved such an awe-inspiring feat? Perhaps what we desire from porn must remain an unfulfilled fantasy, as the orgasm made visible is rendered problematic and paradoxical. For me, the sustained looking without touching and then the laughter and seemingly involuntary interaction is much more erotic. However, the visible ejaculation from the femme’s vagina undercuts the scene in a powerfully dramatic and subversive way. Later we see the butch fucking the femme with the dildo which never ejaculates. The video ends unexpectedly with no closure as they continue to fuck. Coming, unlike in much heterosexual and gay male porn, does not immediately signal the end of the sexual act and thus the video. This openness challenges the values of dominant cinematic structures which insist on narrative resolution, just as the sexual sufficiency of the femme fails to act out the submissivedominant roles of heterosexual porn. Her auto-erotic autonomy mirrors our own as viewers and challenges the stereotype of the passive femme. Here we are presented with a female hero-subject who is not a victim.

Dildo as fetish Lesbians looked to gay men’s porn for material taboo in their own circles—sex sans romance in its endless variations. With their elaboration on technique, especially the pleasures of penetration, gay men have ironically contributed to the renaissance of vaginal sex amongst lesbians. (Byron, 1985) Real lesbians, according to some feminists, apparently do not use dildos, yet they appear with remarkable regularity in American lesbian porn. While some argue that the dildo takes on central signification in the absence of a penis, therefore replicating static and predictable malefemale interaction, this is clearly not always the case. It is the ‘butch/ top’s’ aim in lesbian sex to give the ‘femme/bottom’ complete satisfaction, while the penis is often the only satisfied genital in heterosexual porn, made explicit by the come shot. In lesbian porn the presence of the dildo can subvert the potency of the penis by reasserting women’s sexual sufficiency and proving that the woman lover is more powerful than any male rival. It is also a potent fetish which reintroduces an illusory difference between the lovers. The dildo signifies the lack of fixity of gender, emphasizing that there is always a potential split between the sexual object and the sexual aim, between subject and object of desire. The femme/bottom enjoys being filled up and the butch/top has her hands free. Both have the added stimulus of pelvic thrusting and pubic bones rubbing. Women control the phallus as never before. By

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possessing a mock penis she is given all the freedom of the outside world, the chance to identify as erotic, and give the erotic back to another woman.

False realism Do we want cinéma-vérité without stylized shots and reverse camera angles, such as in Fatale Video’s Shadows (1985)? Here shots are held for an excruciatingly long time as if the production team were afraid to disturb or delay the action by setting up different camera positions. Voices are inaudible and crucial close-ups absent. Attempts to show lesbian sex as it is, as opposed to how it has been constructed by men, often fall into the trap of trying to make it ‘realistic’, simply resulting in badly constructed work. The line between fantasy and reality is dissolved by the artless photography and the selfconsciousness of the actors, which break the secure vision of the voyeur, who constantly seeks a seamless ‘other’ reality. These slippages cause discomfort and an inability to suspend disbelief in the viewer, who experiences undesire and nonpleasure. In Shadows, the butch-bottom giggles, embarrassed and inappropriate, collapsing any sexual tension between her and the top-femme betraying our desire for a construction of uncomplicated sexuality, the ‘perfect’ representation of our sexual act, which is often riddled with inhibition, conflicting desires, fear or timidity. We yearn to recognize ourselves in a world which is ‘other’, somehow unobtainable, but none the less transcending our complex, awkward fucking—pins and needles; dirty sheets; contact lens falling out; itches and spots; frigidity and dryness; the phone ringing. Or the nights spent alone wondering if we will ever be touched again. For Shadows, fast forward is the best viewing method. ‘They could be doing the hoovering’, commented a friend, bored by the endless strapping and unstrapping, the passionless whipping. This could be a how-to-do-SM video. While the SM paraphernalia promises ‘really hot’ sex, the scene is cold and lifeless. This is porn with two subjects looking for an object. Emptiness resounds in the viewer as absence and lack. The butch-bottom attempts to present the ultimately eroticized body—availability without response, total receptivity. What we are left with is commoditized fetishism, dispassionate, desperate and banal. Shadows represents lesbian porn taking on myths constructed by heterosexual patterns of submission and dominance, and failing to recreate them in a way that comprehends and integrates lesbian passion. Regrettably it does not engender an exploratory look at issues of trust, lust and power. Poor direction, acting and cinematography limit what it can ultimately achieve.

Future promises What will future representations of lesbian desire bring? Will they advocate safer sex such as Fatale’s Clip Part II, ‘ In Which Cocojo and Houlihan are Bound for a Safe Journey ’ with silk scarves, plastic gloves and dental dams? Or will the images appear beyond sex as in Mano Destra, (Cleo Ubelmann, Switzerland, 1985), in which one woman is seen tied up while another stands above her, or marches around her in an elaborate game of anticipation in which neither speaks or touches? Beautifully lit and shot in black and white in a large, sparse setting, the top, dressed in black leather constantly watches the


bottom who is curled up, her knees bound to her torso with white rope, her head turned away from the camera, blindfolded. Different tableaux of the bound woman in changing positions are presented, as anticipation moves into an intense study of patience, of contained passion, sustained trust, until supreme alienation, which is almost calm, reigns. Like being offered an ice-cold, luscious fruit drink on a hot day, which you are forbidden to taste, this film encapsulates desire as death, as nothingness, and yet utter completeness. The one moment of touch is uncomplicated as the released bottom sits smoking while the top simply massages her shoulders. The voyeur’s desperate need for something to happen forces an examination of identification with sadistic and masochistic desire, invoking the enduring selflessness of each. Mano Destra dissects desire rather than attempting to arouse it. However much some lesbian porn replicates weary stereotypes of oppression, and fails to transcend embarrassed self-consciousness, other representations have successfully explored the dynamics of erotic exchange. In some, butch-femme, active-passive interaction is subverted, and in others power differences are exaggerated and fetishized. While at times the come shot as closure is challenged, at others, there is no orgasm represented at all. I hope to see a filmic practice which explores the gap between identity and fantasy, which brings erotic ambiguity into porn, tests our pleasure threshold and manages to parody and break dominant patterns of filming sex, rather than hopelessly imitate them.

Notes Cherry Smyth lectures on lesbians in film and writes film reviews. She is currently contributing to and coediting a book on the representation of women in cinema, to be published by Virago. She contributed to Serious Pleasure (London: Sheba, 1988) and the forthcoming Feminist Companion Guide to Cinema (Virago). She lives in London. She would like to thank Rosalind, Elsie, Maria and Marijke for their viewing stamina; Sally Munt for lending the videos; and Sara Dunn for advice and support.

References BYRON, Peg (1985) ‘What we talk about when we talk about dildos’, The Voice, March 5 , New York. CHESTER, Gail and DICKEY, Julienne (1988) editors, Feminism and Censorship, Bridport: Prism. DAY, Gary and BLOOM, Clive (1988) editors, Perspectives on Pornography, London: Macmillan. DYER, Richard (1985) ‘Coming to Terms’, Jumpcut, no. 30, pp. 27–9. KAPLAN, E. Ann (1983) Women and Film, London: Methuen. MULVEY, Laura (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative’, Screen, Vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn, pp. 6–18. PATTON, Cindy (1988) ‘Cindy Incidentally’, Square Peg, issue 23, pp. 20–2. ROSE, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. STERN, Lesley (1982) ‘The Body as Evidence’, Screen, Vol. 23, no. 5.

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VOYAGES OF THE VALKYRIES: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing Sara Dunn

One of the paradoxical effects of the feminist antipornography movement is that it has elicited vigorous, polemical and assertive calls for sexually explicit material by and for women. Feminist pornographic writers, lesbians in particular, have achieved a higher profile than they could ever have hoped for in the days when pornography was not one of the few really burning sites of feminist feeling.1 Vilification has proved to be good publicity, though hardly a pleasant experience for most (see Joan Nestle’s ‘My History with Censorship’ (Nestle, 1988:144), or Dorothy Allison’s ‘Public Silence, Private Terror’ (Allison, 1984:103)). It has also created an atmosphere of acute defensiveness and anxiety, so that reasoned debate becomes a nearimpossibility. This, of course, is always the fault of the ‘other side’. Gayle Rubin, for example, says:

The fights between Women Against Pornography (WAP) and lesbian sadomasochists have resembled gang warfare. But the responsibility for this lies primarily with the anti-porn movement, and its refusal to engage in principled discussion (Rubin, 1984:303). She goes on:

Trying to find a middle-course between WAP and Samois [a lesbian SM group] is a bit like saying that the truth about homosexuality lies somewhere between the position of the Moral Majority and the gay movement (Rubin, 1984:303). This rhetoric is typical—to lay the blame for the lack of ‘principled discussion’ on the other side, and simultaneously foreclose on the possibility of discussion by claiming a monopoly on virtue, (in this case by saying that to have any disagreements with Samois is de facto to be antigay). Attempting to escape these ‘parallel monologues’ as Adrienne Rich describes them (Rich, 1983:64) proves a nerve-wracking business. (I didn’t realize how nerve-wracking until I came to write this article.) But it is possible to be firmly pro-pornography and Feminist Review No 34, Spring 1990

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still be able to question some of the assumptions made by writers of women’s pornography about what that writing is, and what its function is.

Form and function of lesbian porn Radical form

It used to be that lesbian pornography was sexually explicit material containing images of lesbians designed for the arousal of heterosexual men. As lesbians have gained access (albeit miniscule) to the production of print, a different strand has emerged:

Erotic writing is as much documentary as any biographical display. Fantasies, the markings of the erotic imagination, fill in the earth beneath the movement of great social forces; they tell deep tales of endurance and reclamation (Nestle, 1988:10). Was the aim of a ‘good’ erotic story to explore a crucial dimension of lesbian identity…or was the aim to titillate…? We decided the two aims could coexist (Sheba, 1989:8). Lesbian sex writers are trying to provide their sisters with high quality, salacious entertainment…[also] lesbian literature has survival value. Its stimulation can give us hope that our true love is out there somewhere, and the strength to keep paying the bills and looking for her…it makes our lives easier (Lady Winston, 1987: v). These quotations are taken from the introductions to three very different books: Serious Pleasure, ‘a collection of lesbian erotic stories and poetry, the possible, impossible, fantastic and realistic’; A Re stricted Country, by Joan Nestle, a mixture of autobiography, polemic, sexual memoir and fantasy; and The Leading Edge, edited by Lady Winston, with an introduction by Pat Califia who describes the collection as ‘an anthology of lesbian sexual fiction designed to arouse and excite and be read with a friend’. Different styles but a common theme, namely the assumption that sex writing is in itself radical; that to write of sex and sexual identities is always a subversive act. This is not a new theme—liberals have long equated pornography with the progressive and the good (Diamond, 1980:129)—but it is a contradictory one. For why, when proclaiming a history, an identity to the world, choose a vehicle that by its very nature relies on being illicit? Why choose pornographic writing, the success of which depends on a sense of sex as forbidden and secretive, isolated from its emotional and social context? Reading porn is mostly a solitary activity, which goes on, one-handed or not, behind closed doors, and one of its contradictory pleasures is the tension between its explicit content and illicit context. Lesbian writers very often have a dishonest relationship with this illicitness, as they simultaneously decry their hiddenness, their marginality, and glory in it. By styling themselves (and being styled) the illicit ones, the bad girls (as opposed to the good girls who don’t like any sexual explicitness at all), these writers rely on the same sexual

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double-standards, the same sex-associated shame and guilt which they claim it is their mission to remove. The bad girls need the good girls to make them feel good (i.e., bad). As Pat Califia says in her introduction to Macho Sluts, ‘Reading this won’t make you an outlaw—it’s not that easy sweetheart’ (Califia, 1988:21). Radical content

A corollary to this assumption of the inherently radical in the act of sexual revelation is the assumption that content can inform. This is a confusion of pornography with sex education and propaganda; an easy conflation, used to great effect by the right. But once again, material whose appeal is predicated on taboo cannot readily be appropriated for soothing sexual or psychic anxiety, or for political propaganda. The notion that porn can have some educative function, either political or sexual, is in danger of sounding like a reworking of the stimulus-response model, decried as simplistic when it is put forward by antiporn campaigners seeking to connect the reading of porn to the committing of rape. It is not immediately clear why those who think porn can’t teach men anything imagine it can teach lesbians something. Pornographic politics?

Porn relies on the seeming absence of an authorial presence. But whether out of evangelical enthusiasm or political defensiveness the lesbian porn writer interjects all too often. For example, C. Bailey’s ‘Ride My Bitch II’ concerns two women (Liz and Carol) who drive round the US ‘looking for women to fuck’. They pick up a hitchhiker, Iris, who then invites them in for supper. Soon their intentions towards her become clear:

Here again was the roughness that Iris longed for yet feared. She made as if to protest, but Carol was quick, pinning her face down across the table-top. Iris struggled, but Carol twisted her arm behind her back, effectively taking command. Iris could feel Carol enjoying taking command. Iris could feel Carol enjoying the roughness, and whimpered, more grateful than afraid. Liz stripped away her pants, then there was a long pause in which Iris felt not at all degraded as the two women coveted her greedily (Bailey, 1987:71). There is a constant loss of nerve in this paragraph, not in terms of the action itself, but in the reiterated psychology. The repetition of what Iris could feel in Carol, (enjoying the roughness, enjoying the command) the repetition of ‘command’, the reiteration ‘longed for yet feared’ and ‘more grateful than afraid’, reveal not just stylistic shortcomings but lack of confidence in allowing the action to speak for itself, the reader to interpret as she wants. The final sentence is perhaps the most transparent, with the reassurance, clearly addressed to the reader that Iris is not ‘degraded’, utterly destroying our privileged position as voyeur. We are suddenly and irritatingly aware of the author’s political worries (as distinct from the character’s, the exploration of which can generate powerful eroticism—see Califia’s The Surprise Party’ described later in this article) as she assumes (a) that we imagine Iris is feeling degraded (which may be wrong anyway) and (b) that we don’t want her to feel degraded, which may also be wrong. Authorial concern over Iris’s degradation or lack of it is a point for discussion outside the narrative framework of this

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story; the power of lesbian porn writing can be pitifully circumscribed by political anxiety. This problem is interestingly ironized in Barbara Smith’s The Art of Poise’:

I watch your face watching my cunt. You lick your lips—appetite? Or are you reflecting the movement, the moving of me? Is your face my cunt? (Later we will discuss the politics of looking.) (Smith, 1989:64; emphasis in original) Later, but not right now. Acute political understanding of the workings of power in terms of sexuality, class and race can be the driving force behind lesbian pornography. Cherry Smyth’s ‘Crazy About Mary Kelly’ (Smyth, 1989:103) exploits the contradictory emotional and sexual charges generated by an encounter between a second generation Irish Protestant and an Irish Catholic recently moved to London. The ambivalence of desire fuelled partly by an anger which has its roots in political oppression, and the confusion it evokes, produce a richer texture to the story than mere explicitness could do:

She hadn’t seen me before, but I’d seen her. Cocky bitch. I bet she thought she’d slum it with me. ‘Janine Robertson, academic, with a special interest in the Irish question.’ She was moving her hands over my arse. I wanted to make her beg to touch me, I made her say please; say my name; say please again…She knelt down and licked the crack between my cheeks, her hands pushing the top of my buttocks, holding me firm and sure, making me safe. I didn’t want to be safe. She was so sure of herself. I wasn’t going to trust her. Yet I was wet. How was I so wet? (Smyth, 1989:105) Some porn, whilst acknowledging the issues, seems to gloss over the realities of power, rather than exploit them. Ann Allen Shockley tackles the sexuality between mistress and slave, something no white writer in any of the collections I read was brave enough to do. The Mistress and the Slave Girl’ is set in the early nineteenth-century American South and is the story of white mistress Heather and her Black slave Delia. In this extract, Delia is feeling a little miserable:

A shadow crossed the girl’s face. With downcast eyes, her slender fingers pulled at the grass…she seemed on the verge of tears. Heather automatically took her hand to comfort her. The hand fit like a small bird in the palm of her own. ‘What’s troubling you?’ she asked gently. Besides being a slave, she thought to herself. (Emphasis in original) Later, the two women end up in bed:

‘Delia, say my name,’ Heather urged, nibbling on an earlobe. ‘Mistress—’


‘No! I’m not your mistress!’ Heather retorted half angrily. ‘I am your lover!’ ‘Lo-ver. Heather.’ (Shockley, 1987:31) This seems so embarrassingly far from any real attempt to explore the sexual charge between a white woman and her Black slave that it comes across as a kind of alternative Mills & Boon. Sex at arm’s length

A common feature of much lesbian porn writing is the use of distancing mechanisms in the narrative, which somehow diffuse the immediacy of the sexual content. Often, stories will be in the form of a character imagining—a fantasy inside the fantasy of the text—or reconstructing past experience. In ‘Crazy about Mary Kelly’, the sex all takes place in retrospect, through the eyes of each character; Ann Allen Shockley’s historical setting similarly distances the reader—the sex took place hundreds of years ago. In Cuntessa De Mons Veneris’s ‘A Visit to the Hairdresser’ (Cuntessa De Mons Veneris, 1989:130)—one of the most explicit pieces in an otherwise overly restrained collection— the author frames the sex in the context of a fantasy imagined by the narrator as she is having her hair washed. In this instance a sense of immediacy for the reader is cleverly maintained as the transition from fantasy to reality is seamless:

I close my eyes and listen to the music. She wets my hair then applies the shampoo, running her fingers through my scalp… As she rinses my hair it makes little squeaky noises when she squeezes the water out. I lick a nipple through her blouse. I nibble a nipple. She squeezes the water out of my locks. Her nipple hardens. I undo her blouse one button at a time. The end of the story sees the protagonist opening her eyes, as the hairdresser, clothes intact, takes the towels away. The fantasy mechanism is skilfully handled here, and a certain amount of erotic charge is generated because the hairdresser does not know anything about the scene she has just taken part in. However, fantasy sequences often veer dangerously close to the ‘then I woke up and discovered it was all a dream’ schoolessay genre. It seems to be the author’s desire to diminish her own intimacy with the acts she is describing which necessitates these often clumsy reminders that we are in the realm of fiction. Explicit sex can rarely be written about without some kind of boundary—as if we are afraid it might somehow dribble off the page unless kept under tight control. A woman’s banquet?

An almost universal assumption made by women pornographers is that putting the woman at the centre of the story will make porn more appealing to women consumers. In her introduction to Herotica, (a collection of pornography aimed at both heterosexual women and lesbians), Susie Bright maintains:

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The most obvious feature of women’s erotic writing is the nature of the woman’s arousal. Her path to orgasm, her anticipation, are front and centre in each story…it is her sexual banquet that is being served (Bright, 1988:4). But do women always identify with the woman in a story? Do lesbians always identify with lesbians? I would suggest not. The consumer of porn is able to derive pleasure precisely because the boundaries between subject and object are fluid and subject to the consumer’s will. Women reading porn will not always picture themselves as being the woman in a story, whether it is told from her perspective or not; lesbians will not always picture themselves as lesbians—precisely because they do not have to. It must be remembered that porn does not offer us the bodies it describes in reality; it frees us to imagine what we will—it opens up fantastic possibilities, the possibilities of fantasy. It is precisely the fantastic nature of porn, its otherness from daily experience that is so vital. It is often assumed that it is the explicitness of porn that titilates, whereas in fact it is the possibilities evoked that arouse—with a perverse coyness, porn constantly heightens expectations whilst never being able to offer the goods. Separatist masturbations

What constitutes this otherness for a particular reader will depend on a whole matrix of past experience (sexual and otherwise), sexual identity, race, religion, upbringing, politics and physical ability. For some the portrayal of any kind of lesbian encounter will be ‘other’ enough; for others, it will be interracial lesbian encounters, or SM lesbian encounters, or heterosexual ones, or gay male ones which generate that intense feeling of voyeurism. Of course, for lesbians, to be aroused by anything outside ‘vanilla’ lesbian sex may be politically troubling; this may suppress arousal, (or perversely increase it, as we play into the ‘bad girl syndrome’ I mentioned earlier.) We may have uneasy feelings because we are not supposed to be turned on by pricks, we may feel this threatens our very identity as lesbians—but it is time to get away from the idea that we can all be ‘lesbian separatist masturbators’, as Pat Califia says (Califia, 1988:16). It is vital to recognize the complexity of our sexual identity, its contradictory and recalcitrant nature, to write of what ‘really gets us wet, not what we think ought to get us wet’ (Califia, 1988:13). In practice this is a difficult and slow process. The beginnings of an experiment in this direction are made by Cathy Dobbs in ‘Read Me a Story’, where two lesbians use ‘conventional’ (heterosexual) porn as a part of their own lovemaking. Still there is an apologetic preamble:

These books [heterosexual porn books] were written by men, whose views of sex, and of women’s sexuality in particular, never cease to amaze me. My opinion of their ideas might have been biased because I am a lesbian; but I had slept with men, and had found it ridiculous how many of the important details of lovemaking these writers left out (Dobbs, 1988:59). Suddenly, with no explanation, the lack of ‘important details’ is forgotten and our reader starts to get turned on:


He reached around her breasts, taking them in his hands, his stiff penis pushing against her ass cheeks…She moaned deeply. I could feel it. I could feel the stabs of pleasure running through her body. Waves of sweet honey ran through her, through me (Dobbs, 1988:60; emphasis in original). So it goes on, and the woman’s lover notices her arousal, makes her read out loud and fucks her as she is reading. Moving beyond the need to apologize, and consequently achieving a more skilfully sustained sexual charge, Pat Califia’s The Surprise Party’ (Califia, 1988:211) tells of a self-possessed butch who gets arrested and repeatedly and ritually fucked by three policemen. The otherness of sex (i.e., heterosexual and gay male) generates the erotic charge, coupled, of course with the butch’s realization of the perversity of her own desires:

He put his hand on his crotch, fondled it and squeezed it. ‘You don’t like this either, do you?’ he demanded. ‘No!’ Liar, her sex-conscience jeered. You love getting fucked. You fantasise about cock and talk dirty about it all the time. But I’m a lesbian, her public persona objected. This doesn’t have anything to do with that, the wiser voice replied (Califia, 1988:215). The disparity between private pleasures and public faces is exploited here, not coyly forgiven. Califia’s own voice does not inhibit the character, the fiction is sustained and the piece maintains erotic momentum.

More orgies, fewer meetings? If we have the courage to describe ourselves without shame, whatever our enemies have to say about us will subside to the status of a footnote (Bright, 1988: x). The antiporn lobby is consistently criticized for its transhistorical view of sex, for seeing sex as sexism, sex per se as the root of women’s oppression. Many lesbians justify ‘their’ porn from a disturbingly similar position. In their formulation, sex per se is radical, an agency for change. It is as if, through sex, we can reclaim our lives, become more honest people; throw off repression and oppression will follow, homophobia will become a footnote.

When women have enough sex…we will feel better about ourselves, have more energy and be less inclined to take shit or be talked down to. The sexually satisfied woman is not a vegetable, she is a Valkyrie (Califia, 1987: vii).

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Over and over women porn writers justify themselves in language as essentialist as those they most vehemently oppose:

Sex is play and joy and power and gifts we give each other. In short, talking about sex is a way of reclaiming our lives (Nestle, 1989:6). Sex is also work, grief and tension. It can be disempowering. Not having sex can be strengthening and consolidating. If you have no desire, or no sex, are you then, according to lesbian porn writers, not free? Are you always a vegetable, never a Valkyrie? Merely to transpose the language of sexual liberation to a lesbian context is not enough: for this is the language that assumes sex is natural, an essence that needs some particular expression out of its own nature. It is also the language that assumes ‘repression’ of sexuality stunts the personality; some of the more puerile utterances of the lesbian porn movement imply that if you don’t like what you read (i.e., the ‘real’ face of lesbianism) then you can’t be a lesbian:

If you don’t like to read about pussy maybe you don’t like pussy and you should be lickin’ something else (Califia, 1988: x). Furthermore:

The sexually autonomous woman is probably not going to be a docile follower. She will probably have something better to do than go to five meetings a week to argue about the language of a resolution. So, if we are all having good sex then we won’t go to meetings any more—that may well be true, but unfortunately the need for the meetings isn’t going to disappear in the roar of lesbian orgasm—they’ll simply go on without us. It seems we are assailed from all sides: if we like porn we are male-identified and if we don’t we aren’t real lesbians. Real lesbians want ‘selfish [this word crops up a lot], individual, direct, genital pleasure’ (Califia, 1988:26); real lesbians believe in market forces (competition, according to Califia will improve the quality of porn); real lesbians ‘don’t want to save the world but they know it’s essential to be able to save your own ass’ (Califia, 1988:10); real lesbians will like ‘Macho Sluts’. (A nifty oxymoron I admit, but macho lesbians are usually the ones who don’t do the washing-up and think butch is all about the way you walk.) Lesbian sex is neither reactionary nor subversive—it can be either, just like all other sex. At the end of a piece of lesbian porn you will either have enjoyed it or you won’t, you will have come or you won’t. Porn depends on not delivering the goods. The world will not have changed:

We know that even if our coming out has changed our experience of the world, it has done nothing to change the world. After the moments of harsh intimacy with ourselves or others we let the world fall back into place again. We acknowledge, with extraordinary calmness, given how much all this costs


us, that there is no radical impulse beneath our radical acts. After Saturday night, another Saturday night, that’s all. Morning comes (Bartlett, 1988:216). The privileging of sex and sexual representation as the site of women’s oppression is misguided at best. But the privileging of sex and sexual representation as the site for radical impulses, for voyages of the Valkyries, comes perilously close to the same thing.

Notes Sara Dunn is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in London. 1 I have deliberately made no distinction between pornographic writing, erotic writing and sexual writing, but used all these terms interchangeably. Where particular writers make a distinction I have quoted them directly.

References ALLISON, Dorothy (1984) ‘Public Silence, Private Terror’, in VANCE (1984). BAILEY, c. (1987) ‘Ride My Bitch II’, in LADY WINSTON (1987). BARTLETT, Neil (1988) Who Was That Man? A Present to Mr Oscar Wilde, London: Serpent’s Tail. BRIGHT, Susie (1988) editor, Herotica, California: Down There Press. CALIFIA, Pat (1987) Introduction to LADY WINSTON (1987). CALIFIA, Pat (1988) Macho Sluts, Boston: Alyson. CUNTESSADE MONS VENERIS (1989) ‘A Visit to the Hairdresser’, in SHEBA (1989). DIAMOND, Irene (1980) ‘Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration’, in STIMSON and PERSON (1980). DOBBS, Cathy (1988) ‘Read Me a Story’, in BRIGHT (1988). LADY WINSTON (1987) editor, The Leading Edge: An Anthology of Lesbian Sexual Fiction, Denver, Colorado: Lace. NESTLE, Joan (1988) A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories, London: Sheba. NESTLE, Joan (1989) Quim, Summer, no. 1 , p. 6. RICH, Adrienne (1983) ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in STIMSON and PERSON (1980). RUBIN, Gayle (1984) ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in VANCE (1984). SHEBA (1989) editors, Serious Pleasure: Lesbian Erotic Stories and Poetry, London: Sheba. SHOCKLEY, Ann Allen (1987) ‘The Mistress and the Slave Girl’, in LADYWINSTON (1987). SMITH, Barbara (1989) ‘The Art of Poise’, in SHEBA (1989) SMYTH, Cherry (1989) ‘Crazy About Mary Kelly’, in SHEBA (1989). STIMSON, Catharine and PERSON, Ethel (1980) editors, Women, Sex and Sexuality, London: University of Chicago Press. VANCE, Carole (1984) editor, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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REVIEWS

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis Edited by Teresa Brennan Routledge:

London 1989

£30.00 Hbk ISBN 0 415 01489 1 £9.95 Pbk ISBN 0 415 01490 5 ‘No femininity please, we’re British.’ This, suggests Rachel Bowlby in her contribution to this collection, is perhaps a particularly English line of development in discussions of psychoanalysis and feminism. Bowlby considers the affair between psychoanalysis and feminism since their coincidental appearance in a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1906, and pays particular attention to the status of the feminine in both discourses. The urgent question, ‘your place or mine?’, remains endlessly undecideable in their relations because the predicament both face is identifying each other’s sex, because the place where neither wants to be is the place of the feminine. Both are caught in the dynamics of repudiation: psychoanalysis arguing that she must repudiate femininity in


order to accede to womanhood, she repudiating his repudiation of her. If Bowlby is right, then the irony of this ‘affair’ is that the ‘place’ of endless undecideability is the ‘place’ of the feminine (and a horizon towards which much contemporary European theory has been heading). Through a series of intricate unravellings, Bowlby unconceals three different words which Stratchey has translated as ‘repudiate’: verfen—to discard; ablehnen—to decline, refuse, remove; and weisen—to exile, expel or banish. Bowlby asks whether now, many fraught repudiations later, we might not find a way out of this impasse of femininity —die Verwerfung also means a geological fault. Substitute this for the ‘bedrock of femininity’ and we get, not repudiation, but the faulting of femininity, the leaving open, the slide between the strata. It is perhaps from this fault, this slide, that many of the texts in this collection emerge. Teresa Brennan argues in her introduction that between psychoanalysis and feminism lies an open space without anachronistic boundaries where basic premises are being rethought. Jane Gallop in the opening paper wonders whether we are moving backwards or forwards in that

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space. She reads Juliet Mitchell as allying herself with the Lacanian attack on the biologism of much psychoanalytic theory. For Mitchell and Lacan, the human becomes human at the moment of castration, a severance, or cut, from biology. This split is emblematic of the division between the human and the natural sciences—a border Mitchell wants psychoanalysis to patrol. This suggests that perhaps we are still at work on those anachronistic boundaries. Gallop now rejects her own alliance with this adversarial position and seriously questions the insistence on the ‘split’ or division in models of the human subject. Feminism, she argues, can still reject humanism without jettisoning biology. Many of the papers which follow Gallop engage with what have seemed like entrenched debates about the body, essentialism and sexual difference. It seems symptomatic of what Bowlby has described as the British neurosis about femininity that Luce Irigaray is the focal point for the section in the book about essentialism. Both Rosi Braidotti and Margaret Whitford are charged with the task of refuting the British reception of Irigaray’s work. Whitford argues that what is problematic for readers of Irigaray is not some biological essentialism (she does not propose a fixed female essence) but rather, her vast erudition. Irigaray is a practising psychoanalyst, a philosopher and a poet. She has been engaged in linguistic research into gender and schizophrenic discourse. That she is lesbian may have something to do with the extraordinary reception which one of the first of her theoretical papers to have been translated received: ‘When our lips speak together’ seems to have been read as a rather aberrant lesbian love poem; likewise, The Mechanics of Fluids’ from her book Speculum of the Other Woman.

The former challenges the structuralist theory of the universality of language and Lacan’s insistence on woman’s negative entry into the symbolic order. For Lacan, woman does not exist in language. His theory of female sexuality is predicated on this negative entry into the symbolic. Irigaray is quite clear that female sexuality cannot articulate itself within an Aristotelian type of logic. Her specificity is repressed within this framework. But it is not immutable; why can one not speak otherwise? It is perhaps, learning from Bowlby, more extraordinary that she has been heard at all than it is that she has been repudiated in this country—No Irigaray please, we’re British! In her own paper, Irigaray discusses the significance of gesture in psychoanalysis. She discusses the therapeutic significance of lying on the couch’ (to be removed from the scene of representation, to be deprived in the present of the power to produce meaningful discourse) and suggests that it has different implications for men and women. In a satisfying corollary to the Freud/ Lacan/Derrida appropriations of baby Ernst’s fort/da game of symbolizing his mother’s absence, Irigaray insists that this pre-verbal gesture is already sexual difference in play. She argues that the little girl could never objectify her mother in this way (a spool of thread which the boy throws forwards and backwards is seen as mother coming and going). The mother’s sex is the same as hers and therefore cannot have the status of a reel. She describes a range of reactions which the girl might have. She might play. Or she might be overcome by distress and neither speak nor eat. When she plays, with a doll, or in a dance, she constructs a vital subjective space for herself in relation to her mother. The girl has the mother, in some sense, in her skin, in the humidity of her mucous

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membranes, in the intimacy of her most intimate parts, in the mystery of her relation to gestation, birth…she does not want to master the mother, but to create herself (pp. 134–5). It is difficult, for women in this culture, to re-member mother in this way but the implications of being unable to symbolize this relation are dire, e.g., an inability to mourn (her loss), or to perform certain operations of sublimation. According to Margaret Whitford in her paper in this collection, Irigaray argues that the need for the phallus which is imputed to the little girl is an a posteriori justification of the obligation which is placed on her to be legal mother and wife. She goes on to argue that there are two reasons for Freud’s insistence that the little girl’s relation to her mother is phallic rather than feminine: firstly, that Freud’s imaginary (which is also the imaginary of western representation) is anal, that is, it does not recognize sexual difference: for Freud the little girl is a little man, as in the sexual theories or fantasies of children; secondly, that on a more global level it is based on a metaphysics of presence: ‘what you see (presence) is privileged over what you cannot see (absence) and seeing guarantees being, thus the penis is elevated to the position of phallus: nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing, no being, no truth’. Penis envy, or penis as access to the mother, or baby as substitute for penis is essentialist. To argue that the little girl can have a feminine, rather than a phallic, relation to her mother is not. I believe that we must unravel the fear and understandable mistrust of essentialist theories from structures of resistance and denial. For Irigaray and many of the other contributors to this collection, a central theoretical problem is the inability to

separate ‘mother’ and the ‘woman’. In clinical theory, as in metaphysics, there is only the place of the mother, of the maternal. Within the Oedipal scenario then there is the imbalance masculinity/ phallus/Law of the Father and an unsexed Maternal. The status of the daughter is vital here. In psychoanalytic discourses, the daughter’s desire is characterized as inevitably phallic, rather than feminine. She thus occupies the site of a struggle for a place for ‘woman’ (which Bowlby reminds us necessitates a repudiation of femininity). Whitford argues on behalf of Irigaray that if mother is not also woman, then there is no real other—presumably because if she is unique (unsexed maternal) she can be incorporated, eaten whole, as it were, her otherness, ‘the difference within’, camouflaged by the maternal function, guaranteed only by the ‘threat’ of castration. Lesbianism, a woman taking an other woman as lover, can be read as the site of a resistance to the symbolic repression of what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘the name of the mother’ (Spivak 1983). Many of these papers stress the necessity for an articulation of the heterogenous mother/ woman daughter/woman relations within the symbolic. Alice Jardine takes up the mother/ daughter paradigm in a different but none the less equally pertinent way in her discussion of the different generations of women caught in the web of different historical transferences (an earlier generation in transference to psychoanalysis, then later, another to femininism and this present generation in transference to both discourses and both previous generations). In a marvellous unravelling, threads of which include discussions of women who have written of their analysis, she argues for a radically

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different understanding of these transferences through a thinking in the time of future anterior: ‘moving from an individual to a collective analytic perspective, the future anterior incorporates the possibility of understanding the history/story we are, through and from the perspective of the generation before us, in so far as that perspective becomes or is now our own and is realised in the future’—or, in Lacan’s words, ‘what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming’. This mode changes our linear conception of time and does away with the concept of ‘generation’ altogether. The difficulties and dangers inherent in the possibility of inscribing woman in the symbolic are not underestimated—but none of them develop ideas on the basis of a self evident female nature, or essence. If there is a consensus, then it is that we could never possibly reach the definitive ‘woman’. But as Rosi Braidotti argues, ‘I do not have to define the signifier woman in order to assert it as the speaking subject of my discourse’. Gayatri Spivak in her paper outlines some of the difficulties of the feminist/ psychoanalytic epistemological project through which men and women understand their ontology in terms of sexual difference, male and female subjects construing themselves as knowable objects. She identifies a crucial distinction between ontology (which is about essence, what am I?) and axiology (which is about value, who am I?). For the philosopher, there is an irreducible difference between the subject (woman) of the psychoanalytic epistemology and the subject (feminist) of axiology. She retraces the relation between the concept ‘woman’ (a catachresis, a metaphor without literal referent), deconstruction and the post-colonial

disenfranchized woman. Ultimately, she repositions herself in relation to deconstructive theory and argues for the (philosophical) integrity of naming that disenfranchized woman ‘whom we strictly, historically, geopolitically cannot imagine’ as literal referent. We must, as an élite complicit with the culture of imperialism, acknowledge that we participated in obliterating the trace of her production, we must stage the scene of effacing her biography, in the hope that the possibility for that name will finally be erased. For Spivak, if we must think the relationship between the subject of ontology and the subject of axiology, then the name woman will refer to the ‘gendered subaltern’ of decolonized space. It is ironic, if not a little frightening, that Braidotti should read this as Spivak reproducing an ‘essential woman’. Lisa Jardine, Toril Moi, Elizabeth Wright, Naomi Segal and Joan Copec also contribute to this anthology with ideas about epistemophilia, ‘the real’ and the death drive and so on but within the context of this special issue, I would like to bring attention to last paper in the collection: ‘Of female bondage’ by Parveen Adams. Teresa Brennan, in her introduction, argues that this ‘pathbreaking’ paper contributes to our understanding of the ‘relations between the psychical and the social’ by ‘studying a new sexuality’: lesbian sado-masochism. Adams herself informs us that she hopes to contribute to the debate on sexual politics by ‘showing that psychoanalysis can theorize new phenomena without transforming itself into sociology or psychology’. Her main thesis is that, psychoanalytically speaking, while lesbian sado-masochism remains a perversion, it is not pathological and that ‘entities which are perverse but not

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pathological demonstrate that psychical processes do not of themselves determine sexualities and their “normal” or pathological status’. One might well welcome such a reading into debates on sexual politics were it not for the fact that in constructing this thesis, Adams finds herself obliged, firstly, to establish an equivalence between female heterosexuality and nonsado-masochistic lesbian sexuality and, secondly, to situate them both as pathological (‘within the forms of womanly pathology organized within the phallic field’). What this ultimately presents is a twofold theory of female sexuality: the heterosexual woman and the non SM lesbian on one side, not perverse but ‘normally’ and inevitably pathological and the SM lesbian on the other side, perverse but not pathological. In Adam’s narrative, the dividing line or ‘cut’ is the (Lacanian) phallus. Adams is enabled to decide who signifies whose desire for whom by assessing positions taken up in relation to the paternal phallus: ‘in the feminine heterosexual position the woman finds the signifier of her desire in the body of a man; within the masculinity complex the heterosexual woman who has made a virile identification with the father wants the man to recognize her virility and the homosexual woman is in the same way enabled to offer that which she does not have’ (p. 263). Adams’s explanation for this exciting and radical new found freedom which only SM lesbians have acquired is complex, if not a little tortuous, and very little of it has to do with a distinction between SM lesbian praxis ‘non’ SM lesbian praxis. Briefly, it hinges on two points. Firstly, on a distinction between the SM lesbian and the clinical male heterosexual masochist and secondly, on ‘aspects of reality which

press forward [on the SM lesbian] and make possible a change in the balance of unconscious life which produce a possible but unpredictable materialisation of unconscious life’ (p. 261). The clinical male masochist, while disavowing the sexual difference of the parents (or more precisely the absence of a maternal phallus), necessarily remains within a heterosexual framework, his practice is compulsive and genitality is ‘disturbed’ whereas the lesbian sadomasochist, although also disavowing the absence of the maternal phallus, constructs a sexuality among women, experiences choice and mobility and genital satisfaction is one among many pleasures: ‘she constructs fetishes and substitutes them, one for another, she multiplies fantasies and tries them on like costumes…a proliferation of bodily pleasures, a transgressive excitement, a play with identity, a play with genitality’ (pp. 262–3). What ‘aspects of reality’ ‘press forward’ on the SM lesbian and not on other women, whether lesbian or otherwise, are not at all discussed and this seems to me a tantalising omission. I wonder who exactly Adams is appealing to in this debate? Are not the real protagonists in the story of female bondage which unfolds in this paper the ‘virile’ heterosexual women (intellectuals) and vanilla lesbians who remain forever tied up in phallic knots? Furthermore, this curious assimilation of ‘straight’ lesbianism into a general theory of female heterosexuality is not generally reflected in psychoanalytic discourse or in its institutional practices (in principle, heterosexual women can train with the Institute of Psychoanalysis in this country while women who are lesbian cannot, so she could not be expecting to contribute to change there—unless, of course she

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believes that the ‘new’ status (i.e. non pathological) she affords her ‘new’ sexuality (lesbian sadomasochism) is likely to see the doors of the Institute flung open to SM dykes…). Much work needs to be done (if not undone) on these questions and I believe that what this paper clearly identifies is the frustration of thinking through issues of female sexuality outside of a critique of the metaphysics of presence on which Lacanian theory is predicated. Denise O’Connor

Reference SPIVAK, G. (1983) Displacement and the Discourse of Women in KRUPNICK (editor) Displacement Derrida and After, Indiana University Press.

Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories Edited by Hall Carpenter Archives/ Lesbian Oral History Group Routledge: London 1989

£20.00 Hbk ISBN 0 415 02958 9 £8.95 Pbk ISBN 0 415 02959 7 Not one of the women telling her story in Inventing Ourselves is a white, middleclass, able-bodied, young, southern English woman with a Christian background. Some may have a few of those characteristics, but never all of them. The Hall Carpenter Archive/Oral History Group has clearly read a message from the tortuous battles over the years in women’s collectives and groups across the country,

producing something very readable in the process. pIt is also noticeable that whole women appear in the book, describing whole lives, rather than some fraction of their existence. During the late seventies and early eighties, lesbian life history collections winged their way across the Atlantic, containing the category lesbian. Whether this category was seen as unfortunate or wonderful depended on the story-collector’s motives. Either the lesbian was a pitiable wretch doomed to a life of misery, or she was in the vanguard of womenidentification, having discovered the female utopia, or nirvana, or both, despite all the odds. Either way, lesbians were not depicted as whole people; the stories would read as carefully edited descriptions which defined a unified category. In Inventing Ourselves, the editing has been equally careful to show the breadth and diversity of each individual’s experience and participation in the world in general, to such an extent that in some of the interviews, lesbianism received relatively little attention. In case the reader misses the point, it is repeated in the various introductions and the postscript to the book: ‘this book explores how lesbians have created their lives and contributed to the changes of their times’ (p. vii); ‘As lesbians we have to take on the responsibility to make sure that we are part of social, political and cultural history’ (p. x). Presumably, the reason for the latter comment is that if lesbians will not, nobody will. But is this a responsibility to society, or to other lesbians, or to further the fount of human knowledge, or what? We are not told. These contrasts with previous oral history collections are significant, and make the book a product of its time. In

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the past, those concerned with social life, including feminists and sociologists, were searching for unity in experience, however tenuous. More recently, the emphasis has been on difference (an ‘in’ word in academic and some political circles at the moment). In that respect, the trend is towards the antiracist movement’s attitude, which switched from the old we’re-all-thesame-really argument some time ago. In Inventing Ourselves, the concept of difference is fully explored, starting with an older Jewish lesbian (now dead) who lost most of her family at the hands of the Nazis, and finishing with a mixed-race woman who was shunted around like passthe-parcel by a social service that appeared to be ignorant of the problems of race in Britain. What comes across is that these women all had fundamentally different experiences and made fundamentally different choices. It is not surprising, then, to find the editors emphasizing the individual in her role as creator of her own life, from the very title of the book to the editorial comment. It is not the externally imposed category but the woman that makes her life, the book argues, in both the material sense and in terms of her right to perceive and interpret the past as she chooses. The interviewees themselves, however, occasionally show that their choices were severely limited by the powers that be, so although it could be argued they created their lives in one sense, they most certainly did not have a free reign. It is not surprising either to discover an absence of any statement which suggests that all lesbians are united in some great struggle, or share some great truth. On the contrary, the implication is that previous attempts to paper over the cracks, as it were, only succeeded in pushing out those who did not, and would never, fit this

conjured-up unity. And as for truth, the editors remind the reader that truth is in the eye of the beholder and changes constantly anyway. Instead, there is an insistence that lesbians not be erased from the history books, that they not be seen as white, middle-class, etc., women, and that they will not take legislation such as Section 28 of the Local Government Act lying down. These are the messages to the nonlesbian world. The message to lesbians is that difference and change should be recognized and appreciated for what they are: part of their history, which should be looked at and considered, warts and all. The interviews tell of women’s disasters as well as their successes, about happy heterosexual marriages and other positive relationships with men as well as awful ones, about the more dubious sides of the lesbian community as well as the positive ones. So it would seem the category ‘lesbian’ is crumbling, just as the category ‘woman’ has been crumbling under the weight of the evidence in feminist circles for some time. Things are just not that simple anymore. Change and difference is further emphasized by the selection of photographs of the interviewees, which form an essential part of the book. Again, in case the significance of the photographs and how they have been chosen is missed, Nicky West (who shot most of the portraits), tells the reader: The sense of personal development and change conveyed by the close positioning of past and present representations of the subject undermines the fallacy of fixed identity.’ (pp. ix-x) Inventing Ourselves is also peppered with snippets of history, told from the perspective of women who were often creating a chunk of it themselves, even if

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(or perhaps be cause) they found themselves marginalized in society. The book can almost make a reader dizzy with the energy and determination many of these women show politically, and from a very young age. It is not made clear whether the interviewees have been carefully selected for political activism or not, but there is certainly a lot of it going on in these pages. It is hard to believe that this political energy is representative of lesbians in general, though it does make for absorbing reading. This is perhaps unfair criticism, since ‘representative’ is a relative concept. The editors overtly intended to represent those groups which are rarely given any space at all in this society, in lesbian books or anywhere else, and this they have done. Excluding white, middle-class ablebodied, southern English young lesbians with a Christian background is fair enough, as they are covered copiously elsewhere, but the editors should not have spoiled this valid point by slipping into the old implication that the stories cover lesbian experience as a whole. The book stands perfectly well on its own merits; it was not necessary to try and add to them. Sarah Green

LETTER

Dear Feminist Review, While Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan are waiting for responses from ‘individual heterosexual socialist-feminists’, from ‘heterosexual feminists’ or from ‘strong, assertive (feminist?) heterosexual women’, whom they invite to ‘come out of the closet and discuss and reveal the intricacies of their sexuality and sexual practice’ (come to think of it, why not from heterosexual men, they too might have exciting things to say about ‘domination and subordination’, ‘thoughts on S/M’, and are only too keen to ‘discuss and reveal’)—may we, as a mixture of lesbians, feminists and ‘women, whoever they are’, nevertheless reply to their article ‘Sex in the Summer of ’88’ (Feminist Review 31, Spring 1989). As feminists mostly active in the ‘smelly but possibly fertile muck’ of the provinces, we are mystified by Sue and Susan’s construction of a universal history of ‘Sex in the Summer of ’88’: ‘After a couple of years, events took place in London…which indicate new shifts and struggles around lesbian sexuality.’ No events prior to ’88? (The last noteworthy event appears to have been Sue and Susan’s article about the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in ’86.) And no events outside of London? Arguably, more attention and struggle focused on Clause 28 than on Joan Nestle (and pace Sue and Susan, for many it meant engaging not only with pragmatic, but with theoretical and political issues). Yet to them, it is a couple of hundred ‘mostly young white lesbians’ recycling themselves around a number of London events which amounts to a ‘groundswell’, ‘a strong tide’, an historic shift ‘in the struggles around lesbian sexuality’, with ‘considerable impact at grass-roots level’. And ‘a handful of women’ or ‘a small minority of women’ among these are taken to stand for or ‘crystallize’ ‘the main strands of current lesbian feminist discourse’. Some 200 lesbians may have been spending the summer of ‘88 ‘talking about sex’ and learning to say naughty words ‘such as dildo, sex-toy, S/M, butch/femme’ and, horror of horrors (or thrill of thrills) ‘fucking’ (even if they ‘still don’t know the relationship of those words to what we actually tend to do sexually’). Proud not to be (like revolutionary feminists) ‘stuck somewhere back in the 1970s’, they leapt ahead into the revival of Joan Nestle’s ground-breaking nostalgia for the ‘butch/femme bar culture of the 1950s’. While they were thus engaged at the very pulse of the new wave, millions of lesbians elsewhere were not only actively


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engaging in sexual relationships (with or without naughty words), but also in sexual politics. Still, the historic saga continues: overwhelmed by ‘the sense that talking about sex was the only thing to do as the summer of ’88 drew to a close’, ‘large numbers of women and men’ got together for a ‘significant event at which nothing particularly significant was said’. (Despite the fact that ‘two women on the panel’ apparently ‘addressed the state of the world’.) ‘It seemed as if many women and men were holding back.’ From saying significant words like ‘dildo’ and sex-toy’? Or ‘from talking about those problems which’, according to the authors, ‘really dominate our lives, like frustration, loneliness, jealousy and obsessive dependencies’? No wonder then that ‘perhaps what we are is stupefied’. In sisterhood, Susanne Kappeler Liz Kelly Joan Scanlon

NOTICEBOARD

The Gillian Skirrow Appeal for Cancer Research Gillian died on 30 December 1987, aged forty-eight, after a long fight against cancer. She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde; she pioneered the teaching of Film and TV Studies at Strathclyde, and was very active in setting up and teaching the Women’s Studies course there. Gillian was also a founder member of the Steering Board of Opportunities for Women. She was, and still is, a source of inspiration for women who are concerned with feminism. In all her work she gave total dedication and commitment, and she always had great enthusiasm and energy. Donations to Gillian Skirrow Appeal, c/o Sara Mills, English Studies Department, University of Strathclyde, Richmond Street, Glasgow G1 1XH.

Call for Papers ‘Out of the Margins: Women’s Studies in the Nineties’ A conference to be held at Coventry Polytechnic on 7 and 8 July 1990. The third Women’s Studies Network (UK) conference will focus on the development of Women’s Studies out from the margins of higher education, and explore its current impact upon mainstream teaching, research and publication, and its prospects in the 90s. It will also be concerned with previously marginalized areas within Women’s Studies itself, such as Black Women’s Studies and Lesbian Studies, and consider their developing significance for the subject as a whole. Plenary addresses, papers and workshops will be divided into four strands, to run throughout the two-day conference. Papers, or proposals for leading a workshop, are invited from those working in the field: please contact Jane Aaron at the Department of English, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH. Tel. 0533 522630 or 0533 701443.


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Feminist Review: Issue 34: Perverse Politics

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Feminist Review: Issue 34: Perverse Politics

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Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 46 (Feminist Review)

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Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 47 (Feminist Review)

Feminist Review: Issue 37 (Feminist Review Journal)

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

Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 44

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Feminist Review Issue 56: Debating Discourses, Practising Feminism (Feminist Review)

Feminist Review: Journal, Issue 41 (Feminist Review Journal)

Feminist Review: Issue 53: Speaking Out: Researching and Representing Women

Issue Politics in Congress

Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics (Gender and Politics)

Capital & Class. - 1988. - Issue 34

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

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