Lesbian feminisms: Historical and present possibilities

Abstract

Lesbian feminism was a dominant ideology of politicized (white, middle class, North American, Western European, and Australasian) lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to the rise of lesbian feminism, lesbianism was commonly theorized and talked about as illness and deviance, and subsequently as a personal sexual preference. Lesbian feminism offered women a new political language for thinking about sexuality. According to a key lesbian feminist writer, Sheila Jeffreys (2003: 22) ‘lesbian feminism is distinguished from other varieties of lesbian politics by its emphasis on the need for some degree of separation from the politics, institutions and culture of men’. Drawing on the principles of radical feminism, lesbian feminism centred on the notion that ‘the personal is political’ and, therefore, that lesbianism was fundamentally about woman-loving, separatism, eroticizing equality, choice, and resistance. In particular, lesbian feminists argued that because lesbianism was invisible, invalidated, and punished as a way of controlling women under patriarchy, accepting the label ‘lesbian’ was ‘an assertion of refusal of the heteropatriarchal order, and a commitment to women and other lesbians’ (Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1994: 313). Therefore, lesbianism was conceived as a political act. To this end, the introduction by Adrienne Rich (1997) of the construct of a lesbian continuum (i.e. women’s connection with other women socially, spiritually, and/or sexually) introduced the notion that any woman could be a lesbian. (Political) lesbianism therefore became a way of living out feminist politics. Although there was broad agreement among lesbian feminists about the principles that united them, they sometimes differed in their views on certain issues (Douglas, 1990; Kitzinger and Perkins, 1993). Perhaps the greatest source of debate was about the extent to which separatism was important to the project of dismantling