Text & the World

Friday Poem

Introduction to Poetry

 

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

 

or press an ear against its hive.

 

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

 

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

 

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

 

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

 

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Consuming Feminism (in which I express some bitterness)

I’m using this post to get some things off my chest with the regard to my old feminist group, but it might also provide context for some of the things I say about feminism here. I’ve mentioned a few times my feeling that feminism has become something that people consume and also my concern about the defending of feminist identity over an emphasis on doing actual activism. These concerns have a basis in my experience of running a feminist group over the last three years and have a lot to do with the group’s recent dissolution. 

The problems were most apparent in relation to our monthly feminist discussion nights. As soon as we had a small core group coming to meetings and a reasonably sized mailing list of people expressing interest, we decided that discussion nights would foster group development, so we came up with a list of topics and hired a room.

Over the next two years we were forced to realise that “we” (by which I mean the core group of about 10 people at its height) and the rest of the group (by which I mean 50+ people on mailing and group lists) expected radically different things from these discussion nights.  

As far as we were concerned, the discussion nights were never meant to be an end in themselves and were always supposed to result in actual action. We only started holding them because we thought that they would lead to feminist friendships and community building from which activism would develop quite organically. Once we got to know each other and discussed the issues together, we imagined that people would be inspired to actually do something.

This did happen on a small scale and we had a pretty successful period from autumn 2005 through to spring 2007.  Those of us who came to meetings consistently did manage to form enduring friendships, despite occupying very different feminist positions and identities.  I found this experience enriching and I learned a lot about working with other women and supporting each other. I think we all learned never to make assumptions about what women who call themselves feminists think. I’m still processing what I’ve learnt and there will be more positive posts on this subject in the future, but while I don’t regret running the group, there was a downside and as time went on it became an increasingly distressing experience.

In terms of our group aims, the discussion nights were a failure.  It soon became apparent that the vast majority of the group were only coming to the ones that interested them and that there was very little sense of commitment or desire to form feminist friendships.  In fact, I got rather the opposite impression that the discussion nights were popular precisely because they provided people with an opportunity to come along, get a dose of feminism, have a bitch, and go away again, without having to do any work.

Even more depressingly, we always got the most people at the more “glamorous” topics. The highest numbers we ever got were at discussions about pornography and sex.  This made me feel a little cynical. Then anything to do with the media also attracted high numbers and we got a lot of people for lads’ mags, sexist advertising and women’s magazines. While these are important topics to discuss, they are also very easy topics to discuss, the kind of thing that allows us to sit around going “Oh isn’t it awful” while at the same time having an excuse to talk about porn and celebrities.   

Meanwhile, discussions on global feminism, eco-feminism, socialist feminism, LGBT rights, eating disorders, and activism attracted between 3 and 6 people, although these topics are no less important and in some cases are a lot more important than the glamorous topics.  In the end we couldn’t help but gain the impression that people were shopping for discussion nights and picking the ones they thought would offer the most entertaining discussions. We seemed to be working incredibly hard to get people interested in stuff we thought they would be interested in as a matter of course.

Also, when we got to the end of the discussion and asked ‘what can we do?’ people lost interest and usually started getting their coats. We wondered if this question was difficult, but we also began to suspect that most people didn’t really want to do anything. When people said they did want to do something, we soon found that they meant that we should organise it and they might turn up on the day if we were lucky. We probably should have stopped when we found that no one wanted to get involved in a demonstration for the International Day to Eliminate Violence against Women. We almost went ahead with it, but pulled out at the last minute because it looked like there were going to be four of us. When we pulled out, people complained.   

As we moved into our third year, some of the original core members moved away or found themselves too busy to contribute and the problem increased for those of us left behind. The media attention we’d received (another post in itself) had inevitably conveyed the impression that we were a bigger organisation and raised people’s expectations to such a pitch that they were disappointed when they arrived.  

Because most people only came to the topics that interested them, they never actually became friends.  Some people never even met each other over the course of 3 years.  And because they never became friends, they had little investment in treating each other well. It is, as we all know from the blogging, much easier to be horrible to someone you don’t know.  Despite all our efforts to introduce boundaries and make the space as conducive to discussion as possible, behaviour at meetings was often pretty bad.  Some people found the meetings too intense and never came back.  Others who did stick it out complained of feeling intimidated.  We had to ask people (in writing) to respect each other’s rights to speak and express opinions without fear of mockery.  We had to ask people not to touch other people or lean over them. I’m sure those of us chairing were often seen as being a bit oppressive, but the point is we never should have had to ask.  These standards of behaviour should have been taken as read.  But if you’re only coming for the purpose having a bitch, if you’re only going to see the other people occasionally, you don’t have much investment in forming good relationships with them or in not taking out your anger on them. There was a general inability to separate the argument from the person making it and a consistent tendency to take what people were saying personally, as if every comment was intended as a direct criticism. Although almost all the meetings were by default women-only and there were no transwomen trying to break down the doors, we saw no lack of dominating, competitive and aggressive patriarchal behaviours. I actually began to wonder to what extent the “Let’s keep transwomen out at any cost and it’ll be OK” thing was having a stifling effect on any discussion about behaviour in women-only space.  

Then there was the obvious fact that we were running a racist, classist, ableist and mother-unfriendly feminist group.  By this, I do not mean that we actively discriminated against women of colour, working-class women, disabled women, or women with children.  I mean that the vast majority of our members were white, middle-class and university educated, were not disabled and were not mothers. Most of them were pretty anti-child.  This meant that the spaces we provided were not comfortable or inviting for women who were not “like us” and, as a result, they did not want to attend our events.  Why on earth would they?  But this is the subject for another post in itself so I’ll leave it here for now.

The last discussion night took place in April and was on the topic of feminism and mental health.  I wasn’t there, but when I got back I found that the chairperson, who had done a lot of preparation for the meeting and come in from another town on fucking crutches, had been confronted with three people, two of whom totally refused to adhere to code of conduct at meetings and proceeded to initiate a pretty aggressive discussion. I refused to continue and the others agreed.  Being as most of the discussions we had planned for the following 8 months were not on glamorous topics like porn, but were going to be on such frivolities as ‘war’ and ‘work’ we doubted many people would come anyway.  

By early 2008 we realised that we had somehow ended up providing a feminist service in which people turned up for a dose of feminism when they felt like it and were quick to complain if the service wasn’t deemed up to standard.  They seemed to feel no sense of collective responsibility for the group and generally acted rather as if we were getting paid for running it.  Prospective members emailed us to ask what were our events were like in a tone that implied they wouldn’t be coming unless the events came up to their standards.  By this point, those of us running things had no accountability to the group because no one wanted to join the steering group and hardly anyone would communicate with us, despite repeated requests for input. We were left wide open for criticism on that score (quite rightly) but there didn’t seem to be anything we could do about it. People might say, “Well, your events weren’t very good” but we weren’t trying to run a service and events are only as good as what people are prepared to put into them.  

Thanks to the media attention, we got increasing numbers of emails from students who, in an apparent inability to find the library, emailed us asking for help with dissertations.  What kind of research skills are they teaching them? Email some random anonymous feminists you found on the internet and ask them complicated questions on feminist theory? We could have told them anything. Then we had journalists and journalism students wanting interviews and superficial feminist sound bites, which again was always presented as an opportunity we should be grateful for.  

This isn’t feminism, I thought, this is consumerism. And not only is it consumerism it’s actually a little abusive. All our work was disappearing into a feminist black hole and all we seemed to be getting were more and more demands and less and less input. We felt like a feminism dispensing machine which people think is kind of crap and needs a bit of a kick to get it working properly and chucking out the right chocolate bars.     

Today

I submitted my first totally unsolicited essay to a journal.

I've been quite lucky so far with regard to publications. Two came about as the result of conferences and I've been invited to submit two more thanks to editors being aware that I work in the relevant field. This means I've managed to put off a terrifying experience until now.

Some thoughts on Gender and Personhood

“I never would have thought you were a lesbian.”

Every now and then someone says something like this to me. 

I am hurt and angry. I recognise the statement, usually made with a coy smile, as an act of violence against me as a person. I am forced to remember that I am always subject to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the heterosexual ‘privilege of unknowing.’ I am made aware of the unequal power relationship that exists between myself and heterosexual people, and which empowers them to ignore and question my hard won identity when it suits them.   

Identity categories are tricky things. They pre-exist us and some we are slotted into from birth.  As soon as the doctor says, “It’s a girl” or “It’s a boy” much of our future life experience is decided entirely without our consent and in the service of a naturalized heterosexual order.  As transgender activist Susan Stryker observes, ‘A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity’ (‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein,’ 250).

Other identity categories are not handed to us on a plate, or forced down our throats; others we have to fight to occupy.  The identity category ‘lesbian’ was not made easily available to me. It was withheld.  When I was 9 and my parents told me about sex, they did not say, “Of course you might be a lesbian, so here’s a book about lesbianism in case you need it.” They gave me a book which presented a very limited kind of heterosexuality as natural and inevitable.  I had to find out about lesbianism on my own and in secret.  Coming out and occupying a lesbian identity as an adult comes with a price which I’ll be paying for the rest of my life, but which I’m prepared to pay because my life would not be worth living otherwise.

When I read writing by transfolk about their experiences of being slotted, non-consensually, into gender categories that don’t fit their sense of themselves as they really are, and about their battles to be who they feel themselves to be, despite enormous personal cost which sometimes includes death itself, I empathise.  I don’t know what it feels like be transgendered, or even genderqueer,partly because I’m just not a particularly “gendery” person, but I can see certain resonances between trans experience and my own experience as a lesbian. I can imagine that if you’ve spent years fighting to be who you feel you are in terms of your gender, being denied that gender is likely to be experienced as a kind of violence to you as a person.

There is very good reason for challenging the naturalized heterosexual order in the hope of loosening up the strictly binary gender system into which are slotted, but as Stryker implies in her comment above, we also have to deal with the fact that under current conditions gender identity is still a founding condition of human subjectivity, socially constructed or not and whether we like it or not.

The social constructionist anti-trans feminist argument proposes that transfolk reify oppressive socially constructed gender norms by actively choosing to buy into the binary gender system and taking on fictional gender categories as if they are essential or inevitable.  If the feminist aim is to get rid of ‘class woman’ altogether, transitioning is by implication a counter-feminist activity. Of course the argument is more complex than this, but I just want to look at with this strand here and use it as a starting point for some thoughts on gender and personhood.* 

In the first instance, it seems to me that the majority of transfolk do not see themselves as actively choosing gender categories, or even as choosing at all. As far as I can tell, transitioning is about getting one’s body and external self-presentation to match up with the way one has always felt inside.  It is not about choosing; it is about being. There are choices to be made in terms of how a person acts on their feelings, but when I have had discussions about the feminist anti-trans position with transfolk, they find this argument particularly difficult to grasp because it just doesn’t resonate with the ways in which they experience their bodies and genders.  

Then there is the argument that since gender is socially constructed, it is not real, so how can you choose to occupy a fictional category? What, indeed, is the point of going to all this effort to occupy a fictional category? I happen to agree that gender is socially constructed, by which I mean it has a history and it always mediated through language and discourse, but I do not think that makes it phantasmatic. It shapes our lived experience in very real ways.  Just because something is socially constructed does not make it any less profound, deeply felt, or easy to change than something that is viewed as “natural.”  I consider “lesbian” to be a modern socially constructed category, but it is extremely important and real to me because it gives my life shape and meaning and enables me to find a community.

I am not arguing that we shouldn’t try and change the current binary heterosexualized gender order. It is incredibly oppressive and I believe that it can change, should change and is in the process of changing.  I think we should be working towards a world in which gender attributes are no longer bound to biological sex, in which there are more than two options in terms of gender categories and in which no gender categories are ever policed with threats of violence and death.

‘The task of all these movements seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself’ (Butler, Undoing Gender 8).**

Trouble is, that might be a little different for different people, depending on where they’re standing.

We have a problem with a clash between theory and lived reality here, because at the moment gender is powerfully linked to concepts of personhood. This goes for all of us – trans and non-trans.  As the gender theorist Judith Butler notes, ‘Gender ... figures as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity’ (Undoing 11). Occupying a coherent, relatively stable, recognisable gender identity can be a matter of life and death, because being intelligible in terms of your gender is tied to your worth as a human being.  This is one reason why transfolk are killed simply for being identified as trans.  If you slip into the category of the subhuman, your life is no longer considered valuable, or worth loving, or worth grieving when someone beats you to death in an alleyway.  Off the radar, in terms of gender, is a very dangerous place to be when ‘the viability of our individual personhood is fundamentally dependent on these social norms’ (Butler, Undoing 2). It must be painful for transfolk to hear that their embodiments reify the gender binary when it seems that the rest of society would strongly disagree with that idea, and when working to make your gender presentation intelligible in terms of norms is not done from some nefarious desire to support gender oppression, but to gain as viable and as bearable a life as possible.  Being loved, being recognised as human, being able to be part of a community, these things are vital to our sense of self worth as well as our personal safety

It is sometimes suggested that while transfolk should not be abused or denied the ability to transition, neither should they expect to be accepted into the recognisable gender categories because they are, in effect, a kind of third gender.  Aside from the fact that most transpeople do not appear to feel that they occupy a third gender, no such category is currently available to people in western culture. Attempting to occupy such a liminal space would not be likely to result in a bearable life, unless the person concerned was immensely privileged and could do whatever they like, or managed to live mainly within the confines of a very alternative community (which some people do by choice of course). But in general, telling people they are not allowed to be the gender they feel themselves to be, and that they should live in some kind of liminal state is a terrible thing to say because no such option for a viable, loveable life currently exists in our society.

‘To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not, to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in your favor’ (Butler, Undoing 30).  

It is also suggested that transfolk should not go through with surgeries because doing so mutilates the body in the aim of supporting the binary gender system. Again, there is conflict here between life and theory. Living in an in-between state is incredibly difficult for all sorts of reasons. In my last job, I went to an older LGBT peoples’ network where the case of an older transwoman who needed full-time care was discussed. She had not had genital surgery but had lived as a woman for over 30 years and now she lay blocking a hospital bed.  Every care home in the area had refused to take her in because they “couldn’t cope with it.”  “It” the problem? Or “it” the individual?

There is certainly a severe critique to be levelled at the medical and psychiatric pressures put on transfolk in terms of gender performance (being bullied to be more masculine or feminine than they feel in order to get treatment) and in their being pushed to go through with surgeries when that might not be the best option for them, but transfolk have already been making these critiques themselves and should be supported in doing so. And, at the end of the day, we come back to what counts as a viable existence for a person in the here and now, which is ultimately all we have. 

*This post has not been conceived as a contribution to internet “trans wars,” by the way, although it is obviously informed by them. Some of the arguments I’ve seen lately have just made me think a lot about gender and personhood, particularly two posts by feminist Avatar here and here.

**My thinking in this post has been influenced by Judith Butler in her chapter ‘Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy’ in her book Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). I have kept quoting to a minimum because I didn’t think many people would thank me for huge chunks of Butler, but for anyone who does like that sort of thing, you can go and read it yourselves.  

Friday Poem

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on

W. H Auden

Part 2

I suddenly woke up last night with the thought, “I am NEVER going to get an academic job.” There followed a panic attack of the “Oh my god, I’ve wasted the last 5 years of my life; it doesn’t matter how many publications I get, how many conferences I attend, how many years I slog away at my teaching, I will never get a job because I am just one of those people who never gets a job no matter how hard they work” variety. This was exacerbated by remembering that I applied for 14 jobs last year.  Sure, I didn’t get an interview for any of them, but at least I was sustained by an awareness that jobs do exist.  This year I have applied for only THREE jobs, which means that I am competing with literally hundreds of people.  Then I decide that they probably won’t renew the contract for my not very high status teaching job anyway. I’ve been there so damn long they’re probably sick of the sight of me, and I think I was being quite annoying in that meeting the other day.

During the panic attack I realise why I’m so resistant to actually finishing and submitting my book proposal, making excuses about the difficulties presented by the questionnaire.   I am very scared at the thought of getting a book contract without any hope of an academic job and having to spend the next year (or two) writing a book with minimal institutional support, trying to keep the wolf from the door with part-time teaching gigs and admin jobs to pay the rent.  Of course, everyone’s telling me getting a book contact will increase my chances of getting a job ...  so it’s a gamble.

Weirdly, I think I had to go through the panic because after all that I got up this morning went to the library and got on with writing the proposal.

Too much academia probably isn't good for you

I need to read an essay by Helene Cixous.  She’s very famous so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find.  The essay is in a journal. I check if my library stocks it and it does. I go to the shelves and discover that the essay is in the first part of the 1976 volume and my library only has the second half of 1976. Why on earth would you only stock the journal for half a year -- the second half?  “Never mind,” I think, “I shall probably find it in the electronic databases.”  I spend the rest of the afternoon in an abusive relationship with JSTOR.  I login and search for the article.  JSTOR denies all knowledge.  Trusted Archives for Scholarship my arse.  So I look in Literature Online (LION.)  LION tells me that JSTOR does have the article.  JSTOR says it’s never heard of it.  Just on the off chance, I try the Google Scholar search.  “Ooh the liar” says Google and shows me the page in JSTOR with the article. But I can’t read it from there; I have to log back into JSTOR again, which responds, “Google said what? No way? Who’s Helene Cixous? Ok, we might have a couple of essays by her, but not that one.”  I try every possible search.  I do the article search, typing in the exact publication details.  Nope.  I try author and keyword searches.  I even search under the names of the translators.  Nothing.  I log out and try Google again in case I was hallucinating the first time.  Google shows me the front page of the article in JSTOR.  It looks so beautiful.  I’m sure my article will be a total disaster if I don’t read it. I begin to feel like the wife in some old film like Gaslight with JSTOR as the husband trying to convince me that I’m insane, possibly in cahoots with Google.  I decide to think laterally and take another approach.  Maybe the essay has been reprinted in another book.  After some more research I find that it has.  Hurrah. “Take that JSTOR” I say, only to find that my library doesn’t have the book.  I come to the conclusion that my library is just a bit crap. I still don’t have the article.

Damning inequalities revealed in first major lesbian health study

I've been awaiting the results of the first major UK lesbian health study with interest. I wasn't expecting good news, but it's more depressing than I expected.

The first major survey ever conducted into lesbian and bisexual women's health in Britain reveals deeply disturbing levels of self-harm, substance abuse and exclusion from routine testing for cervical cancer. Prescription for Change, a survey of 6,000 lesbian and bisexual respondents across the UK, suggests that health services are failing to identify specific healthcare needs among Britain's 1.8 million lesbian population. They are also failing to address specific mental health needs that many women still experience as a result of discrimination. 

The survey, the biggest of its kind ever conducted outside America, provides unique new statistics on the mental health, drinking and drug use of lesbian and bisexual women in Britain in 2008:

1. More than one in five lesbian and bisexual women in Wales have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year, compared to 0.4 per cent of the general UK population.
2. Over thirty five per cent drink three times a week or more compared to a quarter of women in general.
3. More than 1 in 4 lesbian and bisexual women in Wales say that they have or have been told that they have an eating problem, compared to 1 in 20 of the general UK population

I know that levels of self-harm and drinking are very high among lesbian and bisexual women and I've hardly met any lesbians who don't have body image and eating problems, but it's still disturbing to have the exent of the problem confirmed. 

In terms of mental health, the implications of being a lesbian or bisexual woman are massive.

A Friday Poem

"The Waking"

I strolled across
An open field;
The sun was out;
Heat was happy.

This way! This way!
The wren's throat shimmered,
Either to other,
The blossoms sang.

The stones sang,
The little ones did,
And the flowers jumped
Like small goats.

A ragged fringe
Of daisys waved;
I wasn't alone
In a grove of apples.

Far in the wood
A nestling sighed;
The dew loosened
Its morning smells.

I came where the river
Ran over stones:
My ears knew
An early joy.

And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.

Theodore Roethke

Progress

One article submitted for consideration in journal.

Halfway through the marking.

Back

I have returned.

Comments are no longer on moderation.

There will now be a further hiatus while I attempt to meet a deadline for an article this week and do my summer marking.

Blog down

I'm going away for a week and I don't know how much access I'll have to the internet during that time, so I'm putting comments on moderation until I get back.

Friday Poems

Baffled for just a day or two

17 Baffled for just a day or two— Embarrassed—not afraid— Encounter in my garden An unexpected Maid. She beckons, and the woods start— She nods, and all begin— Surely, such a country I was never in!

Her breast is fit for pearls

84 Her breast is fit for pearls, But I was not a "Diver"— Her brow is fit for thrones But I have not a crest. Her heart is fit for home— I—a Sparrow—build there Sweet of twigs and twine My perennial nest. Emily Dickinson

It isn't always easy being a lesbian and a feminist

My lesbian identity inevitably intersects with my feminist identity and this raises a lot more problems for me than the equation of lesbianism with feminism in the popular imagination might suggest likely.

Despite the ostensible idealisation of lesbianism and the prominence given to lesbian-feminism in some feminist circles, the impression I have gained from hanging out with a lot of lesbians over the last 10 years is that the majority either have a problematic relationship with feminism, or reject it out of hand. And my overall feeling is that, on the whole, ‘feminism’ still doesn’t really know what to do with lesbians, remains shot through with heterosexism and sometimes with outright lesbophobia.

In the first instance, I think feminism needs to pay a lot more attention to the way heterosexual women support and perpetuate lesbophobia and try and understand how this impacts on the alliances lesbians often form with other oppressed groups. Moreover, the endless focus on the way men oppress women leaves lesbians with little space to talk about the ways we are oppressed by heterosexual women.

One of the worst experiences of bullying in my life was a case of lesbophobic bullying at the hands of other girls. When I started secondary school it soon became apparent that my gender and sexuality were judged complete failures in relation to the rigidly heteronormative standards of the school environment. I was one of those awkward unfeminine girls. I wore my hair short and my clothes baggy; I refused to wear makeup or shave, and would have nothing to do with the boys. At the time, having been denied, as a matter of course, any access to information about lesbianism, I did not connect these factors to my sexuality, which was very much nascent. Some people did make connections, though, and the other girls ostracised me completely for several months. After that, they would speak to me, but took pleasure in ostracising me whenever they felt like it. This was a very traumatic experience and only ended when I made friends with the other nascent sexual dissidents who no one wanted; namely, the ‘school slut’ and the ‘gay boy.’ So, yes, I will ally myself with sexual dissidents and ‘queers’ because I consider them my people, the friends who supported me against the ‘good’ heterosexual girls who seemed to want to kill me. I have since found, from reading the Stonewall School Report, that ostracism by other girls is a common experience for young lesbians.

When I went out into the world of work, I found that heterosexual women were often extremely lesbophobic and I’ve been uncomfortable in every female-dominated work environment. I have felt unable to speak freely about my life or to be myself. I have felt guarded and defensive. I have had to put up with rude comments about my clothes and appearance, or been left out and ignored. Last year, I worked in an office staffed almost entirely by gay men and I was much more comfortable. This surprised me because, yes, there was some sexism (which I did challenge), but overall I realised that being able to be myself with regard to my sexuality was more important to me. And just being able to talk to other people openly about homophobia was wonderful, not to mention the joy of having normal conversations about my partner without getting an icy “how nice” followed by silence, or (worse) a series of inappropriate questions. I would be very nervous about working in a female-dominated space again, unless I knew for sure that the organisation contained a good number of lesbians and gay men.

None of this is feminism’s fault, but nor am I seeing much discussion on this subject within feminism. I’m not seeing that much discussion about how to show solidarity with lesbian women and challenge lesbophobia either.

Despite the lip service given to lesbians and (in my view unhealthy) idealisation of lesbianism in some feminist circles, my impression is that feminism in general remains very heterocentric and only welcoming to certain kinds of lesbians who say the right things and don’t make too much of big deal about their lesbianism. So many times I have considered commenting on a feminist blog post which simply does not acknowledge the existence of lesbians to say ‘but, lesbians might see this differently because’ only to give up because I just can’t be bothered to play the troublesome lesbian anymore.

And then we have lesbian-feminism and its discontents

1970s lesbian-feminism was powerful and influential and I’ve found radical lesbian-feminists such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown inspirational. I also think a lot of the ideas expressed by radical lesbian-feminists remain very important (yes, including separatism actually). But as lesbian-feminism became increasingly tied up with political lesbianism, cultural feminism, the anti-pornography movement, and started producing a discourse which identified ‘properly’ feminist lesbian genders and sexual practices, this ‘lesbian-feminism’ became extremely problematic for a lot of lesbians because it idealised a certain kind of lesbian, while rejecting most of lesbian history and culture. Lesbians who dissent are not welcome within this kind of lesbian-feminism.*

The result seems to be a refusal on the part of feminism in general to listen to what a lot of lesbians are saying about the complexities of lesbian identity and sexuality, including: the importance of treasuring our lesbian herstory (in all its gory details); the real meaning of butch-femme relationships and identities; the need to ally with gay men and transfolk against homophobia and gender terrorism; the fact that lesbians, especially working-class lesbians, have historical alliances with prostitutes and sex workers; the fact that sexual practices which look oppressive in one context can be experienced as resistance and liberation in other contexts; and the need for lesbians to produce sexually explicit materials for our communities, which means that a lot of lesbians just can’t get behind the strict anti-pornography position (I tried to write about this last issue here.)

I was talking to a radical lesbian-feminist who lived through the lesbian sex wars and she openly admitted that lesbians left feminism in droves as a consequence of this trend, perceiving feminism as just another means to oppress them, and appalled to find hard won and treasured forms of sexual resistance designated ‘patriarchal.’ As another lesbian said to me once, “Feminists were telling us we weren’t allowed to have sex!” The consequence is that lesbian-feminism has come to mean a certain kind of lesbian, while lesbians who consider themselves feminists remain very divided (hence, we have one magazine called Off Our Backs and one called On Our Backs). While I don’t identify as a sex positive feminist for quite a few reasons, I can definitely understand why a lot of younger lesbians find this position more attractive than what seems to be offered by feminism on the whole. So, my own position as a lesbian and a feminist remains complex and difficult.

I find my experiences of lesbophobia at the hands of women barely acknowledged by heterosexual feminists. I am faced with having to constantly challenge heterosexism within feminism. And I am confronted with a quite vicious division among feminists who are lesbians, with one side making demands of me which I cannot possibly accept without massively compromising myself and betraying lesbian history and culture, and the other promoting a sex positive feminism which, while I understand where its coming from, I don’t personally find helpful or welcoming.

* If you want to know more about why lesbians were unhappy about this trend in lesbian-feminism, check out Joan Nestle's collection of essays and fiction, A Restricted Country (Ithaca; New York: Firebrand Books, 1987).

EDIT: By the way, I'm not going to let lesbians off the hook here. I have another post in the pipeline addressing the incredible levels of bad behaviour I've seen demonstrated by lesbians in feminist groups and spaces over the years, behaviour which is hurtful to heterosexual feminists and often very oppressive towards bisexual feminists.

IDAHO

Saturday is the International Day Against Homophobia