My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory and Practice: Discuss the question "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" as if your life depended on it.
Deborah Yaffe
That depends on what we mean by "lesbians," doesn't it. (Whatever happened to the simple questions with simple answers? What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!)
If by "lesbian" we mean a 1970s version of a woman-identified-woman,* we should remember that extinction is an evolutionary consequence of failure to adapt to changing conditions, so that successful reproduction does not take place often enough to replenish the species. ("Lesbians reproduce by ear." One of my favourite Nicole Brossard quotes.)
Women are no longer having the conversations that would reproduce lesbian feminism of the sort that many of us remember with rueful fondness. We've lost out in the competition for cultural credence to the girls just want to have fun"/ "we're just like everyone else and we deserve equality" lot. Before the convergence of the Women's Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement that gave rise to lesbian feminism, lesbians were criminalized, pathologized, despised, subject without recourse to every manner of violence and degradation. During the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s and early 80s, lesbian feminists created complex and intersecting cultural formats – social, literary, political, sexual, musical, theatrical – in which the theme, "What/who is a lesbian?" always played a role. For a fleeting moment, there was even a stunning reversal in which lesbians became the emblematic normative Healthy Woman, with nonlesbians encouraged to do serious consciousness raising around their differences from lesbians. Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres set it out brilliantly. (Hmmmm. Did the lesbian feminist revolution fail because most women don't read French?)
That cultural blip having ended sometime in the later 1980s, or mid-90s, or early 2000s, depending on where you lived, lesbian feminists are again despised and pitied: with the howlingly painful twist that it's younger queer-identified women who look at us and shake their heads. But as gobsmacked and hurt and bewildered as I have often felt in the past decade or so, I have to acknowledge that part of the problem has been with my own naïve expectations, which I'll address further along. First I have to ponder a bit more the new realities.
Maybe lesbians aren't going extinct but have become ex-tinct? Drained of colour? (Perhaps as a species, we are now in the midst of some wild, unforeseen mutations?)
As a socio-political category we are no longer interesting. At least in Victoria, BC, (which is all I can talk about; if I've learned anything from the demise of the Women's Liberation Movement, it's the necessity of avoiding huge generalities about all women everywhere always) most of the time our lives are unremarkable.
As a movement, in the sense of lesbian feminist politics, we seem spent, except in small pockets here and there. That combination of radical feminist politics with lesbian passion – a total war against patriarchal language, culture, politics, economics, family – that was so thrilling in the 1970s and 1980s nowadays strikes most younger queer-identified women as quaint, or funny, or narrowly exclusive, or just sad. More lesbians today seem inspired by the possibilities of social inclusion and the social legitimacy of marriage and motherhood than by the possibilities of radical lesbian revolution. (Have we forgotten how to dream?)
It would be perverse to long for the wretched old days of constant fear; constant vulnerability to assault and incarceration; constant threat of loss of jobs, children, home, family, community esteem, and status as a normal human being. If today's urban Canadian version of lesbian life seems insipid, I'm not longing for recriminalization or remedicalization. Even with our Charter-based equality rights, there's a pool of unreconstructed and barely contained hatred that spills out wherever and whenever the social veneer stretches too thin to contain it. If I've learned anything from the 20th Century, it's not to take inclusion and equality for granted. I don't regret being able to share medical benefits with my partner or walk down the street together.
But-but-but…. How could anyone still "see lesbians as a vanguard"? When I look around my admittedly middle-class part of town, I see marriages, motherhood, and mortgages. Yet-yet-yet….I also think one can't meaningfully reject social institutions unless and until one could in fact be part of them.
The state of the radical lesbian feminist movement isn't disconnected from the state of feminism generally, and the current realities for lesbians aren't disconnected from the state of women generally. The gains of lesbians are a particular case of the gains of women in terms of our ability to earn a living, to attain social legitimacy and to nurture creativity without male patronage. And our losses are women's losses; the elusive radical possibilities have faded in the face of moderate but attainable liberal gains.
So maybe the current ascendancy of this relatively conservative moment is just something we have to live through. Maybe in another generation the lesbians will ask, "Is this all there is?" and start to create new movements with female passion somewhere near, if not at, the centre.
On the other hand (am I adequately conveying the strength of my ambivalences?)….We recently had a Lesbian Grandmothers' Tea – photos of the little darlings, food, and oceans of stories. There were biological grandmothers, partners of grandmothers, ex-partners of grandmothers who maintained contact with the ex and her children and grandchildren. In the midst of it, I had a little epiphany; we were probably the first generation of out lesbians to be adored as grandmothers. None of our children fretted about letting their babies stay with us and come under our influences. Au contraire, we were necessary and valued caregivers. What miraculous social changes! Who wouldn't embrace this?
The thing is, younger dykes or otherwise queer-identified people have to envision the changes they need from their own experiences. Of course, they don't want the movements we created, because they didn't grow up in our world. Their expectations arise, naturally, from their own environments. It makes no difference to younger dykes if I think texting is silly. It made no difference to me that older-style feminists thought consciousness-raising was frivolous. So there it is, the wheel turns, things change, evolution happens, species go extinct when they don't adapt to new conditions. (Or....Did we really think we were the end product of radical political evolution? Why is it so hard to accept change when change is what we wanted?)
When I think back to the glory years, I remember, as well as the thrill of it all, constant fighting, constant turmoil, floods of tears, constant reconfigurations of loyalties, issues of class, race, ethnicity, and disability, among others, constantly exploding all around us and rarely being brought to useful conclusions. I remember the never-ending discussions about S&M, lesbian porn, sex toys, gender presentation etc. in which everyone felt impelled to stake out and defend territory. I remember how hard lesbians tried to make collectivity work, to make nonmonogamy work, to live their politics flat out, all day every day, and how exhausting and dispiriting that could be.
Still, I never thought I'd see the day masses of women I think of as lesbians or dykes wouldn't be caught dead wearing the label. What for me was a lifeline to a wider, brighter, more meaningful world is for them a conservative (that is, middle-class, trans-phobic and dedicated to policing essentialist boundaries), boring, meaningless straitjacket. When I start to feel crazed, I just remember I'd never have considered wearing bloomers as a sign of freedom from constrictive clothing. We have to live in our own time.
Change is hard. Diversity is hard. We don't pay enough attention to history as part of the ongoing present. It's a darned shame we never quite pulled off the radical lesbian feminist revolution. Of course, none of the other liberatory movements of the time managed much better. Revolutions are notoriously elusive; even when they seem to be achieved, those achievements are fragile at best.
While it would be perverse to desire a return to the white-centric focus on lesbianism as a primary identity with all other social markers secondary, it seems equally perverse to me to reject the aim of solidarity that seems so lacking these days. Surely we can make community with other lesbians/dykes/queer women while still maintaining a more contemporary intersectional approach and without imposing futile criteria of who's in and who's out of the lesbian universe. The privatization of lesbian lives, which shows we are inescapably part of the larger societies in which we live, seems to me an absolute impoverishment.
It's not only that we have invented a world in which we appear as normalized female, taxpaying, solid citizens. My personal cohort has reinvented itself as home-owning middle-aged and elderly lesbians, drafters of Wills and Powers of Attorney, far more concerned about matters of personal health than overthrowing patriarchy in the near future. Not that we aren't still politically active, but we're more likely to circulate an on-line petition and send a cheque than to take to the streets, except for the annual Pride Parade, which is more of a fun celebration than a political action.
Can we keep the social inclusion but still function as radical agents of change? Can we enjoy our relatively pleasant lives and still work to end patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other social injustices? Of course we can. If simply living as out lesbians no longer signifies a challenge to patriarchy, then we can find or create other ways. We are, will be, and have always been radical not because of who we are but because of what we do.
The wheel turns. Meaning is temporary and contingent on the conditions that ground it. We can't keep saying everything was perfect for 2 months in 1974 and it's been downhill ever since. Nor can we let folks get away with that stunning canard that lesbian feminists were anti-sex. My goddess, if there was anything we were doing it was cramming in as much sex as we could. The liberation of female sexuality was one of the central features of radical feminist theory and practice. (No wonder we're so tired now.)
I do think we settled for too little. I don't buy the argument that we've somehow changed the fundamental meaning of marriage or queered heterosexuality by being incorporated into the dominant models. There must be something different between a retreat to an outmoded style of radical lesbian feminism and a capitulation to lesbian invisibility under the queer umbrella. I do expect that sooner or later, the little pockets of lesbian and queer-women's organizing going on all over the world will burst into the public consciousness in new ways that will allow us to make common cause when we in fact have common cause, or want to build common cause. And I expect the political reconfigurations will be accompanied by cultural reinvigorations that will somehow challenge and circumvent corporate control over cultural production. Certainly, the on-line universe will be part of the action. I hope the resurgent politics will come with a resurgence of personal, in-the-flesh forms of communication that can use social media without being restricted to them.
An inconclusive conclusion, then, will have to do me for now. To go from criminality, stigma and incarceration to unremarkable social normality in one generation isn't nothing. It's a huge achievement that we should be proud of, that wasn't handed to us, that we worked hard for. At the same time, inclusion isn't everything. It's not evenly distributed and it's not permanent, and we forget at our peril that it could be taken away even from the most privileged of us at any time. And all it does, even when it's fully effective, is to put us roughly on the same level as other women of our class, ethnicity, and circumstances. Given the level of climate change, economic breakdown, and gross injustice that characterizes our times, the lesbian who doesn't reinvent the world is likely to find herself hanging on by her nails to a pretty grim terrain.
Afterword
This has been the single hardest piece I've ever written. I've had a debilitating struggle to reconcile my wildly different feelings about the current lesbian scene and my own place in it. No matter how I frame the issues, part of me agrees and part of me disagrees. Maybe a state of radical confusion actually makes the most sense.
I don't think we can understand our own (or any) historical moment if we only focus in tightly on that moment. A longer and wider view gives a fuller, richer picture. After the revolutionary promise of the 1930s, the world witnessed ghastly slaughters and soul-destroying conformity before the revolutionary movements of the 1960s. Maybe most cultural epochs are simultaneously the best and the worst of times. I do feel a crazy, unfounded optimism about the future. If I live long enough, who knows what amazing liberatory mutations the dykes may unleash on an unsuspecting world?
* I've never been able to wean myself off the traditional spelling of the word "woman." Womban, wommon, and other versions have always made me laugh, not in a good way. So I use the standard version throughout.
That depends on what we mean by "lesbians," doesn't it. (Whatever happened to the simple questions with simple answers? What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!)
If by "lesbian" we mean a 1970s version of a woman-identified-woman,* we should remember that extinction is an evolutionary consequence of failure to adapt to changing conditions, so that successful reproduction does not take place often enough to replenish the species. ("Lesbians reproduce by ear." One of my favourite Nicole Brossard quotes.)
Women are no longer having the conversations that would reproduce lesbian feminism of the sort that many of us remember with rueful fondness. We've lost out in the competition for cultural credence to the girls just want to have fun"/ "we're just like everyone else and we deserve equality" lot. Before the convergence of the Women's Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement that gave rise to lesbian feminism, lesbians were criminalized, pathologized, despised, subject without recourse to every manner of violence and degradation. During the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s and early 80s, lesbian feminists created complex and intersecting cultural formats – social, literary, political, sexual, musical, theatrical – in which the theme, "What/who is a lesbian?" always played a role. For a fleeting moment, there was even a stunning reversal in which lesbians became the emblematic normative Healthy Woman, with nonlesbians encouraged to do serious consciousness raising around their differences from lesbians. Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres set it out brilliantly. (Hmmmm. Did the lesbian feminist revolution fail because most women don't read French?)
That cultural blip having ended sometime in the later 1980s, or mid-90s, or early 2000s, depending on where you lived, lesbian feminists are again despised and pitied: with the howlingly painful twist that it's younger queer-identified women who look at us and shake their heads. But as gobsmacked and hurt and bewildered as I have often felt in the past decade or so, I have to acknowledge that part of the problem has been with my own naïve expectations, which I'll address further along. First I have to ponder a bit more the new realities.
Maybe lesbians aren't going extinct but have become ex-tinct? Drained of colour? (Perhaps as a species, we are now in the midst of some wild, unforeseen mutations?)
As a socio-political category we are no longer interesting. At least in Victoria, BC, (which is all I can talk about; if I've learned anything from the demise of the Women's Liberation Movement, it's the necessity of avoiding huge generalities about all women everywhere always) most of the time our lives are unremarkable.
As a movement, in the sense of lesbian feminist politics, we seem spent, except in small pockets here and there. That combination of radical feminist politics with lesbian passion – a total war against patriarchal language, culture, politics, economics, family – that was so thrilling in the 1970s and 1980s nowadays strikes most younger queer-identified women as quaint, or funny, or narrowly exclusive, or just sad. More lesbians today seem inspired by the possibilities of social inclusion and the social legitimacy of marriage and motherhood than by the possibilities of radical lesbian revolution. (Have we forgotten how to dream?)
It would be perverse to long for the wretched old days of constant fear; constant vulnerability to assault and incarceration; constant threat of loss of jobs, children, home, family, community esteem, and status as a normal human being. If today's urban Canadian version of lesbian life seems insipid, I'm not longing for recriminalization or remedicalization. Even with our Charter-based equality rights, there's a pool of unreconstructed and barely contained hatred that spills out wherever and whenever the social veneer stretches too thin to contain it. If I've learned anything from the 20th Century, it's not to take inclusion and equality for granted. I don't regret being able to share medical benefits with my partner or walk down the street together.
But-but-but…. How could anyone still "see lesbians as a vanguard"? When I look around my admittedly middle-class part of town, I see marriages, motherhood, and mortgages. Yet-yet-yet….I also think one can't meaningfully reject social institutions unless and until one could in fact be part of them.
The state of the radical lesbian feminist movement isn't disconnected from the state of feminism generally, and the current realities for lesbians aren't disconnected from the state of women generally. The gains of lesbians are a particular case of the gains of women in terms of our ability to earn a living, to attain social legitimacy and to nurture creativity without male patronage. And our losses are women's losses; the elusive radical possibilities have faded in the face of moderate but attainable liberal gains.
So maybe the current ascendancy of this relatively conservative moment is just something we have to live through. Maybe in another generation the lesbians will ask, "Is this all there is?" and start to create new movements with female passion somewhere near, if not at, the centre.
On the other hand (am I adequately conveying the strength of my ambivalences?)….We recently had a Lesbian Grandmothers' Tea – photos of the little darlings, food, and oceans of stories. There were biological grandmothers, partners of grandmothers, ex-partners of grandmothers who maintained contact with the ex and her children and grandchildren. In the midst of it, I had a little epiphany; we were probably the first generation of out lesbians to be adored as grandmothers. None of our children fretted about letting their babies stay with us and come under our influences. Au contraire, we were necessary and valued caregivers. What miraculous social changes! Who wouldn't embrace this?
The thing is, younger dykes or otherwise queer-identified people have to envision the changes they need from their own experiences. Of course, they don't want the movements we created, because they didn't grow up in our world. Their expectations arise, naturally, from their own environments. It makes no difference to younger dykes if I think texting is silly. It made no difference to me that older-style feminists thought consciousness-raising was frivolous. So there it is, the wheel turns, things change, evolution happens, species go extinct when they don't adapt to new conditions. (Or....Did we really think we were the end product of radical political evolution? Why is it so hard to accept change when change is what we wanted?)
When I think back to the glory years, I remember, as well as the thrill of it all, constant fighting, constant turmoil, floods of tears, constant reconfigurations of loyalties, issues of class, race, ethnicity, and disability, among others, constantly exploding all around us and rarely being brought to useful conclusions. I remember the never-ending discussions about S&M, lesbian porn, sex toys, gender presentation etc. in which everyone felt impelled to stake out and defend territory. I remember how hard lesbians tried to make collectivity work, to make nonmonogamy work, to live their politics flat out, all day every day, and how exhausting and dispiriting that could be.
Still, I never thought I'd see the day masses of women I think of as lesbians or dykes wouldn't be caught dead wearing the label. What for me was a lifeline to a wider, brighter, more meaningful world is for them a conservative (that is, middle-class, trans-phobic and dedicated to policing essentialist boundaries), boring, meaningless straitjacket. When I start to feel crazed, I just remember I'd never have considered wearing bloomers as a sign of freedom from constrictive clothing. We have to live in our own time.
Change is hard. Diversity is hard. We don't pay enough attention to history as part of the ongoing present. It's a darned shame we never quite pulled off the radical lesbian feminist revolution. Of course, none of the other liberatory movements of the time managed much better. Revolutions are notoriously elusive; even when they seem to be achieved, those achievements are fragile at best.
While it would be perverse to desire a return to the white-centric focus on lesbianism as a primary identity with all other social markers secondary, it seems equally perverse to me to reject the aim of solidarity that seems so lacking these days. Surely we can make community with other lesbians/dykes/queer women while still maintaining a more contemporary intersectional approach and without imposing futile criteria of who's in and who's out of the lesbian universe. The privatization of lesbian lives, which shows we are inescapably part of the larger societies in which we live, seems to me an absolute impoverishment.
It's not only that we have invented a world in which we appear as normalized female, taxpaying, solid citizens. My personal cohort has reinvented itself as home-owning middle-aged and elderly lesbians, drafters of Wills and Powers of Attorney, far more concerned about matters of personal health than overthrowing patriarchy in the near future. Not that we aren't still politically active, but we're more likely to circulate an on-line petition and send a cheque than to take to the streets, except for the annual Pride Parade, which is more of a fun celebration than a political action.
Can we keep the social inclusion but still function as radical agents of change? Can we enjoy our relatively pleasant lives and still work to end patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other social injustices? Of course we can. If simply living as out lesbians no longer signifies a challenge to patriarchy, then we can find or create other ways. We are, will be, and have always been radical not because of who we are but because of what we do.
The wheel turns. Meaning is temporary and contingent on the conditions that ground it. We can't keep saying everything was perfect for 2 months in 1974 and it's been downhill ever since. Nor can we let folks get away with that stunning canard that lesbian feminists were anti-sex. My goddess, if there was anything we were doing it was cramming in as much sex as we could. The liberation of female sexuality was one of the central features of radical feminist theory and practice. (No wonder we're so tired now.)
I do think we settled for too little. I don't buy the argument that we've somehow changed the fundamental meaning of marriage or queered heterosexuality by being incorporated into the dominant models. There must be something different between a retreat to an outmoded style of radical lesbian feminism and a capitulation to lesbian invisibility under the queer umbrella. I do expect that sooner or later, the little pockets of lesbian and queer-women's organizing going on all over the world will burst into the public consciousness in new ways that will allow us to make common cause when we in fact have common cause, or want to build common cause. And I expect the political reconfigurations will be accompanied by cultural reinvigorations that will somehow challenge and circumvent corporate control over cultural production. Certainly, the on-line universe will be part of the action. I hope the resurgent politics will come with a resurgence of personal, in-the-flesh forms of communication that can use social media without being restricted to them.
An inconclusive conclusion, then, will have to do me for now. To go from criminality, stigma and incarceration to unremarkable social normality in one generation isn't nothing. It's a huge achievement that we should be proud of, that wasn't handed to us, that we worked hard for. At the same time, inclusion isn't everything. It's not evenly distributed and it's not permanent, and we forget at our peril that it could be taken away even from the most privileged of us at any time. And all it does, even when it's fully effective, is to put us roughly on the same level as other women of our class, ethnicity, and circumstances. Given the level of climate change, economic breakdown, and gross injustice that characterizes our times, the lesbian who doesn't reinvent the world is likely to find herself hanging on by her nails to a pretty grim terrain.
Afterword
This has been the single hardest piece I've ever written. I've had a debilitating struggle to reconcile my wildly different feelings about the current lesbian scene and my own place in it. No matter how I frame the issues, part of me agrees and part of me disagrees. Maybe a state of radical confusion actually makes the most sense.
I don't think we can understand our own (or any) historical moment if we only focus in tightly on that moment. A longer and wider view gives a fuller, richer picture. After the revolutionary promise of the 1930s, the world witnessed ghastly slaughters and soul-destroying conformity before the revolutionary movements of the 1960s. Maybe most cultural epochs are simultaneously the best and the worst of times. I do feel a crazy, unfounded optimism about the future. If I live long enough, who knows what amazing liberatory mutations the dykes may unleash on an unsuspecting world?
* I've never been able to wean myself off the traditional spelling of the word "woman." Womban, wommon, and other versions have always made me laugh, not in a good way. So I use the standard version throughout.
About the Author
I did the classic Women's Liberation Movement arc from unexamined hetero to thoughtful bi to, upon falling madly in love 27 years ago with my current partner, considering myself a lesbian because I live a "lesbian life," which used to be a meaningful concept. I left the US in 1967. I've been involved in radical feminist politics since 1971 or thereabouts, originally in England, and in Victoria since I moved here in 1981. I was involved with the Everywomans Books collective from 1982 until its closure in 1997. I was the staffperson for the Victoria Status of Women Action Group 1986-1989. I taught Women's Studies1990-2004 at UVic, where I co-taught the first Lesbian Studies course with my now-deceased colleague and friend, Michele Pujol.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.