“Lesbians Are Not Women”: Feminine and Lesbian Sensibilities in Harmony Hammond's Late-1970s Sculpture

Abstract

SUMMARY Harmony Hammond's wrapped fabric sculptures are placed in context of the theories of gender and sexuality that circulated among lesbian and straight feminists at the time they were made, the late 1970s. Hammond has cited in particular Monique Wittig's novels, such as The Lesbian Body, and her essays including “The Straight Mind,” where Wittig concludes that the lesbian is not a woman. The critique to which Wittig's lesbian separatism has been subjected by Judith Butler in her consideration of the appeal and limitations of essentialism also applies to Hammond's art. Hammond's use of vaginal imagery was instrumental to visualizing a lesbian sensibility, but the proposition of such a sensibility established a new problematic: a new essential category. The article concludes that because Hammond's work was produced in the context of a complex set of discourses, lesbian, feminist, and aesthetic, it resisted reduction to a singular meaning. Her sculptures avoided the pitfall of substituting one essence for another, lesbian for feminine sensibility, but activated both. The sculptures effectively queered vaginal imagery: When Hammond used vaginal imagery to represent lesbian sensibility, she subverted the equation of sex and gender and the essentialist notion of feminine sensibility.