Pivoting Between Identity Politics and Coalitional Relationships: Lesbian-Feminist Resistance to the Woman-Identified Woman

Abstract

This essay employs a coalitional perspective to revisit the Radicalesbians’ 1970 manifesto, “The Woman Identified Woman,” and to examine the circulation of its constitutive rhetoric of woman-identification within lesbian-feminist activist communities during the 1970s. I argue that lesbian-feminists utilized a pivoting strategy, a horizontal mode of working the space between identities, to leverage coalitional relationships and the woman identified woman as resources to craft alternative identity constructions that resisted woman-identification, challenged interlocking oppressions, and increased lesbian visibility within those respective communities. This analysis centralizes dynamic movement relationships and loyalties to approach the established narrative about lesbian-feminists in women's liberation from a new perspective and reexamine the constitutive rhetoric of woman-identification. Revisiting lesbian-feminist rhetoric brings the voices from an important archive to bear on feminist and queer history while centralizing coalitional relationships, offering a fruitful perspective from which to analyze social movement rhetoric and reexamine an important artifact in the feminist rhetorical canon.