Feminist Theory: Radical Lesbian

Abstract

Emerging from the mainstream liberal feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical feminists challenge the prevailing view that liberating women consists in reforming social institutions such as marriage, family, or the organization of work. They argued that because a deeper conceptual analysis of marriage, family, and work shows that these institutions were and are defined qua values that privilege some men (white, middle-class, educated), they cannot achieve the equality that liberal feminists envision. Radical feminists promote not reform but revolution whose aim it is to end the oppression of women by creating awareness of and resistance not only to male-dominated or patriarchal institutions, but to the conceptual frameworks that sustain them. Radical lesbian feminism, then, represents two signal features of this revolutionary approach. First, the critical evaluation and rejection of compulsory heterosexuality, that is, of a sexuality defined solely in terms of male sexual access to women's bodies, and second, the reclamation of women's experiences, desires, bodies, and lives as meaningful in themselves. As perhaps the most forceful expression of the personal is political, radical lesbian feminism seeks the emancipation of both women and other oppressed peoples through instantiating lesbian lives free from the constraints imposed by heteropatriarchy.