"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through (...) its basis in a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg. (shrink)

Is feminism compatible with psychology or therapy? This text suggests alternatives to the dangers offered by the many practitioners of psychology. The authors offer in-depth information on traditional theories alongside an encyclopaedic knowledge of therapy praxis on both sides of the Atlantic.

How has feminism failed lesbianism? What issues belong at the top of a lesbian and gay political agenda? This book answers both questions by examining what lesbian and gay subordination really amounts to. Calhoun argues that lesbians and gays aren't just socially and politically disadvantaged. The closet displaces lesbians and gays from visible citizenship, and both law and cultural norms deny lesbians and gay men a private sphere of romance, marriage, and the family.

In this article I offer a map of recent UK and US lesbian feminist literary theory which highlights the shifting and often paradoxical interpretations of lesbian sexuality as both real and as metaphorical. I focus on two key texts which offer overviews and analysis of the field from different sides of the Atlantic, which are both accessible, in the sense of being written from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ lesbians, rather than structuring lesbian feminist literary criticism around traditional (...) critical concepts, and which also, unusually, offer some (small) comment on bisexuality. These two works are Bonnie Zimmerman's Safe Sea of Women (1992), and Palmer's Contemporary Lesbian Writing (1993). I argue that lesbian/feminist literary theory offers particular constructions of sexuality which, while challenging many of the assumptions of heterosexual feminist literary theory, largely ignores the bisexual content of much lesbian fiction, and consequently glosses over some of the tricky areas of gender and sexuality difference. Through this ‘les/bi’ reading I hope to encourage the figure of the bisexual woman to question both constructions and deconstructions of lesbian sexuality. (shrink)

What happens when our digital sacred spaces become violent and incite trauma or trigger reminders of traumatic experiences? This project will delve into these questions as we begin to think about trauma in digital spaces for the Lesbian-Feminist. For example, we scroll through Facebook and see that an uncle has posted a homophobic article. The logical response to this, the response that our spiritual selves tell us to follow through on, is to delete this person from our Facebook friends. (...) Clicking the delete button is a virtual action, yet a very real and physical manifestation of losing family and friends because of their homophobia or sexism. In digital sacred spaces in particular, there is a tension between self-preservation and engaging so as to educate and bring about understanding. If we cannot even occupy the same digital spaces, how can we ever grow to occupy the same physical spaces? (shrink)

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between ‘second wave’ lesbian feminism and ‘third wave’ queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that ‘third wave’ queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that ‘third wave’ queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending (...) to hold others – lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where ‘third wave’ theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. (shrink)

: I argue for a Wittgensteinian reading of Judith Butler's performative conception of identity in light of Marilyn Frye's analysis of lesbian as nonexistent and Butler's analysis of abject. I suggest that the attempt to articulate a performative lesbian identity must take seriously the contexts within which abjection is vital to maintaining gender, exposing the intimate link between context and the formulation of intention, and shedding light on possible lesbian identities irreducible to abjection.

Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet is about placing sexual orientation politics within feminist theorizing. It is also about defining the central political issues confronting lesbians and gay men. The book brings the study of lesbians from the margins of feminist theory to the center by critiquing the analytic frameworks employed within feminist theory that renders invisible lesbians' difference from heterosexual women. This book also outlines the basic features of lesbian and gay subordination by exploring (...) the differences between heterosexual dominance and gender and race relations. Throughout, Calhoun aims to re-center lesbian and gay politics away from concerns with sexual regulations and toward concern with the displacement of gays and lesbians from the public sphere of visible citizenship and from the private sphere of romance, marriage, and family. (shrink)

This article contends that feminism is haunted by its past, and that to be haunted means that feminists need to bear witness to the possibilities, often unrealized, of that past and to actively resist the policing and defensiveness that have marked feminism's relationship to its diverse history in recent years. It engages with the work of Terry Castle and Avery Gordon in order to make this argument, and to map out a methodology for looking for the ghosts of (...) the recent feminist past. In looking for one such ghost - the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian - the article asks, how does the trope of the apparitional in lesbian cultural visibility structure cultural memories of the second wave movement? To that end the article discusses the presence of the ghost in a recent feminist/queer study of feminist historicity and in the popular press respectively. The final section looks back to the 1980s in order to trace the connections between then and now, and, therefore, something of what the ghost wants us to remember. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived (...) as a democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

Reproductive technologies, such as self-arranged donor conception, clinical donor insemination and in vitro fertilization, now have an established place in lesbian reproductive practices, providing a route to conception which separates reproduction from heterosexual intercourse. This article explores how lesbian reproduction figures within feminist studies of reproductive technologies. It critically engages with representations of reproduction and structures of sexuality in early and more recent feminist studies of reproductive technologies. Specifically, the article investigates constructions of reproduction, technology and sexuality in (...) key ethnographic studies by Sarah Franklin, Charis Thompson and Rayna Rapp. The findings suggest that heterosexuality is foundational to, and yet invisible within, this feminist research into reproductive technologies. Endorsing Chrys Ingraham's concept of a `heterosexual imaginary', I argue that this research reproduces a heterosexual imaginary of procreation, continuously representing conception as heterosexual despite the separation of conception and heterosexual sex realizable through reproductive technology. It effectively renders lesbian reproduction inconceivable. (shrink)

This article is an offshoot of a research project on lesbian and gay self-organization in the UK's public sector union UNISON. The site upon which lesbians and gay men ‘work together’ is a complex and contradictory one, located at the juncture of several pathways – women's and men's movements, gendered politics and sexual politics, purist ghettos and queer rainbows. The UNISON group furnishes an ideal site for a case-study of sexual and gendered dynamics in lesbian-and-gay politics by dint (...) of institutional arrangements whereby separate spaces for lesbians and gay men respectively encourage reflexivity in working through these hyphens. While reflections from the lesbian feminist mirror have been active ingredients in the ongoing resocialization of gay men, it is argued that reflections from a gay male mirror will also be necessary if we are to nurture greater wisdom and justice in gender relations. Since the lesbian and gay group co-exists with other self-organized groups for women, black people and disabled people within a broader pro-socialist movement, the potential for working across other sets of differences is also noteworthy. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that a sustained coalition between lesbians and gay men is not sufficient in bringing about coalitions with other oppressed minorities or majorities, and may even be at loggerheads with them. (shrink)

Being a lesbian during wartime strengthens interiorized homophobic fears, and the process of coming out becomes more difficult and many fears appear on the surface. The author wrote this article in order to express the dilemmas and questions she had during the war in the former Yugoslavia, which started in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991 and went on until 1996. The article poses a number of questions asked by a feminist lesbian living in Belgrade, Serbia, during the war. (...) How was the war in the former Yugoslavia connected to the fears experienced by a lesbian? How did the war create lesbian solidarity and what did it mean for lesbians in the isolated regions? (shrink)

Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life draws explicitly from the writings of French second-wave feminist Monique Wittig. Given that Wittig’s work has fallen into obscurity in recent years, and that a number of critiques have responded to her theorization of the notion of “the lesbian,” this essay seeks to understand what Wittig has to offer to twenty-first-century intersectional feminist theory, like that of Ahmed. In this essay, I thus offer analysis and critique of Wittig’s discussion of race and slavery (...) found specifically in her philosophical writings. While emphasizing the significance of Wittig’s failure to be inclusive of women of color in these philosophical works, I propose that within Wittig’s literary writings there are potential tools and concepts—specifically multiplicity, interruption, and mutability—that can be fruitful for trans-inclusive and women of color feminist theorizing. (shrink)

: Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not merely consequent to (...) compulsory heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge. (shrink)

Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not merely consequent to compulsory (...) heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge. (shrink)

"Do You Have To Be A Lesbian To Be A Feminist?" Plenary session speech at the conference of the National Women's Studies Association, June 1990.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault's work has had a significant impact on feminist and lesbian/gay scholarship in the United States. These explorations of gender and/or sexuality in which feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars rely on Foucault's ideas carry significant implications for the organization of knowledge in our culture beyond the issues of gender and sexuality narrowly defined. Many feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars in the United States initially read Foucault primarily as a historian. Since roughly 1985, many (...) such scholars have increasingly considered and critiqued the philosophical implications of his work, elaborating an account of the assumptions about gender and sexuality that reside at the core of ostensibly universal descriptions of human subjectivity. ;Participants in debates about the "social construction" of sexuality during the 1980s observed that Foucault did not originate social constructionist work in the field, widespread assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the social constructionist position differs importantly from Foucault's analysis of sexuality as the truth of subjectivity. Historians in the United States have modified many of the substantive claims in Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. More recently, scholars have attended less to Foucault's substantive claims in favor of his approach to questions of knowledge and subjectivity. ;Feminist, lesbian, and gay scholars have long suspected that gender and sexuality play a major role in authorizing subjects to produce knowledge. Many such scholars continue within existing modes of inquiry to substitute their own, sympathetic versions of their selves for prejudicial, hegemonic versions. Scholars working off of Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers increasingly suspect that prejudicial assumptions about gender and sexuality lie embedded in the very definition of current modes of inquiry, and thus require a fundamental reconceptualization of knowledge. (shrink)

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what (...) constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme? (shrink)

I argue that Monique Wittig's view that lesbians are not women neglects the complexities involved in the composition of the category "woman." I develop an articulation of the concept "woman" in the contemporary United States, with thirteen distinct defining characteristics, none of which are necessary nor sufficient. I argue that Wittig's emphasis on the material production of "woman" through the political regime of heterosexuality, however, is enormously fruitful for feminist and queer strategizing.

Feminism is sensational -- On being directed -- Willfulness and feminist subjectivity -- Trying to transform -- Being in question -- Brick walls -- Fragile connections -- Feminist snap -- Lesbian feminism -- Conclusion 1: A killjoy survival kit -- Conclusion 2: A killjoy manifesto.

Phelan examines lesbian political theory and points out the pitfalls of a lesbian feminism that ignores the specificities of race. As she searches for a democratic identity politics, she explores the possibilities for lesbian community and for alliances with other groups, as well as the political goals of lesbian action.

I support Cheshire Calhoun's argument that there is a distinctive type of sexuality injustice addressed to lesbians and gays, but challenge her definitional strategy regarding the concepts of "lesbian" and "gay" and the "universalistic essentialist" distinction that she draws between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Finally, I take issue with the political implications of her claim that lesbians' and gays' special oppression stems from our exclusion from the legal prerogatives of marriage and parenthood.

"Allen’s work is virtually unique among American writers. It illustrates a deep knowledge of the issues raised by the postmodernists, yet she does not succumb to the playing field, constructing instead her own philosophical direction and aesthetic." —Sarah Hoagland Jeffner Allen shapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. The surprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbian lives—a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women—informs these reflections.

Lesbian ethics is an ethics of resistance and creation. It is not a set of rules of right behavior or injunctions of duty and obligation or delineations of good character that one may find in utilitarian, deontologic, and virtue treatises. It is a liberatory conceptual journey which emerges from recognized contexts of oppression, and as such challenges some unstated assumptions of traditional Anglo‐European ethics. Lesbian ethics is an envisioning and discussion of possibilities, given lesbian lives, for a (...) transformation of values. As such it is not a matter of moral reform, a matter of preservation of and better adherence to existing values. It is a call for another type of moral change, moral revolution. (shrink)

Can one theorize the lesbian within a feminist frame? I argue that a difference sensitive feminist frame closets lesbians because (1) heterosexist oppression has been under-theorized and thus gender analyses fail to intersect with sexual orientation analyses, (2) feminist values and goals have worked against representing lesbian difference from heterosexual women, and (3) difference sensitive feminism requires that lesbians be representable as women with a different sexuality and not as a “third sex”, not-women, not-men, i.e., not through (...) the very image through which lesbians historically were made conceivable. (shrink)

Claudette Kulkarni explores lesbian experience from a Jungian and feminist perspective, through interviews with women who see themselves as lesbians or who are in a lesbian relationship. Although a feminist treatment of the subject challenges the heterosexism of Jungian theory, the author presents a link between theory and experience that is consistent with both approaches. She concludes that when a woman finds herself loving another woman she is often responding to a profound psychological instinct to act, in spite (...) of internal conflict or external opposition, and that this is a significant move in the service of personal and collective individuation and a movement toward achieving self-understanding. (shrink)

Recent writing by Jewish lesbians is characterized by challenging and evocative reflection on themes of home and identity, family and choice, tradition and transformation. This essay is a personal journey through some of this writing. An exploration of the obvious and troubling tensions between lesbian or feminist and Jewish identities leads to the paradoxical but ultimately unsurprising suggestion that lesbian identity and eroticism can provide a route of return to and affirmation of Jewish identity.

This chapter contains section titled: Relation to Philosophy Lesbian Philosophies of Liberation Heterosexuality and Lesbianism. Ethics and Politics Essentialisms and Anti—Essentialisms The Future of Lesbian Philosophy Bibliography.

For years, mainstream feminist ethics focused criticism on male supremacy. Feminist philosophers in this volume adopt a less male-focused stance to look closely at oppression's impact on women's agency and on women's relations with women. Examining legal, social, and physical relationships, these philosophers confront moral ambiguity, moral compromise, and complicity in perpetuating oppression. Combining personal experience with philosophical inquiry, they vividly portray their daily engagement with oppression as both victims and perpetrators. They explore such issues as how pornography silences women (...) and radical feminist politics' complicity in racism. Among these insightful essays, Sandra Bartky argues that women share guilt for racism when they benefit from it without protest; Susan Brison reflects on uses of narrative in trauma recovery from such experiences as being targeted for rape or murder; Joan Callahan examines fallout of derogatory speech directed at lesbians; Virginia Held proposes carrying care into marketplaces and governments; and, in her introduction, Claudia Card draws on Primo Levi's conception of "gray zones" in exploring dangers of character damage to victims of misogyny. A fitting companion to Card's highly regarded Feminist Ethics, this volume interweaves observations on character, political ethics, violence, and love into an accessible sourcebook for students. It tackles some of feminism's most pressing issues and helps readers to identify and then overcome the real damage caused by oppression. (shrink)

From the historical roots of second-wave feminism to current debates about feminist theory and politics. This introduction to Anglo-American feminist thought provides a critical and panoramic survey of dominant trends in feminism since 1968. Feminism is too often considered a monolithic movement, consisting of an enormous range of women and ideologies, with both similar and different perspectives and approaches. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which takes a close look at the most influential (...) strands of feminism: liberal feminism, Marxist/socialist feminism, radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and black feminism. In later chapters, Whelehan ties these complexities of, and conflicts within, feminism. The role and relationship of men to feminism, and feminism's often thorny relationship to postmodernism, are also the subject of chapter length treatment. Concluding with a provocative discussion of the much-heralded advent of post-feminism and the rise of the new feminist superstars such as Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, and Katie Roiphe, Modern Feminist thought is an ideal text for students and a book no feminist teacher or activist should be without. (shrink)