Feminist Theory: Radical Lesbian (A Glorious Past and an Ecological Future)

Published, 2015: The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral

Sciences, 2nd Edition, Elsevier.

Emerging from 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 insofar as a deeper analysis of marriage, family, and work

shows the extent to which these institutions continue to

privilege some men (white, middle-class, predominantly Christian,

and educated) over other men and virtually all women, reform

alone cannot achieve the equality liberal feminists envisioned.

Radical feminists promote not reform but revolutionary change in

the ways we conceive gender, sexual identity, and sexuality. The

aim is to end the oppression of women by creating first awareness

and then resistance not only to male-dominated or patriarchal

institutions, but to the conceptual frameworks that sustain them.

Radical lesbian feminism, then, represents three vital

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. Second, radical lesbian feminists seek to reclaim

women’s experiences, desires, bodies, and lives as meaningful in

themselves; third, radical lesbian feminists seek either the

subversion or the end of institutions which deny lesbian identity

or insist on defining it in terms of male desire and privilege

(such as female-on-female pornography). As perhaps the most

forceful expression of the feminist slogan “the personal is

political,” radical lesbian feminism seeks the emancipation of

both women and other oppressed peoples (for example, indigenous

peoples) through the realization of lesbian lives free from the

constraints imposed by heteropatriarchy.

Perhaps what most obviously differentiates mainstream

liberal feminism from its radicalized sister is that while the

former continues to hope that the master’s tools can be deployed

to dismantle and then rebuild a better version of the master’s

house, the latter has largely quit this project and jettisoned

its tools in favor of building not merely a house but an entire

conceptual “civilization” whose collective mission it is to

embody the experiences, values, and desires of women. That is,

while the primary focus of mainstream liberal feminist theory has

been the critical evaluation of patriarchal or male-dominated

institutions such as government, medicine, family, and religion

in the interest of retooling these institutions to affect greater

equality or inclusion for women within them, radical feminism

takes its point of departure to be the position that any

thoroughgoing critique of patriarchy must include an analysis of

the tools themselves.

How, in other words, do concepts like ‘woman,’ ‘man,’

‘body,’ and ‘mind’ inform the maintenance of these institutions?

How have we defined notions like ‘the rational,’ ‘the desirable,’

‘the good,’ ‘the moral,’ and ‘the beautiful,’ such that being

born male virtually guarantees greater access to opportunities,

affirmation, and resources? What are the conceptual and

ideological anatomies of patriarchies as we find them across

culture and history? How do patriarchal ideologies help to

maintain patriarchal institutions?

Perhaps, however, the central issue that gave birth to

contemporary radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s

was the emerging recognition that it could never be enough to

agitate for an equality of inclusion within a conceptual

framework that defines the value of women’s labor and even

existence only in reference to men’s interests and desires. The

liberal feminist project cannot fail to risk the self-defeat that

accrues to retaining a conceptual framework—the master’s tools—

that systematically inferiorizes women, and diminishes women’s

work. The merely cosmetic improvement produced in some women’s

lives (mostly Caucasian, middle-class, Christian, and educated

like their male counterparts) fails to address the very real life

and death issues—the having and rearing of children, for example—

which confronts many women locally, nationally, and globally.

Equipped with this insight, radical feminists undertook the

conceptual, social, and political quest to comprehend how the

subordination of women has become institutionalized, and how this

varies with respect to class, ethnicity, culture, ability, age,

sexual orientation, and institution. As late feminist philosopher

Audra Lorde put it, the master’s tools cannot be used to

dismantle the master’s house. The revolutionary change necessary

to produce lasting improvement in all women’s lives requires

women fashion their own tools—no easy task.

Some radical feminists argue that the notion “equality” is

itself tethered to a view of human nature which so privileges

attributes traditionally associated with men such as aggression,

hierarchical forms of organization, rugged individualism,

competition, and ethical systems that strongly favor impersonal

rule-following over relationality, that women are only able to be

included within such conceptual frameworks as honorary men. It is

little wonder, they argue, that examples offered to young women

by liberal feminists as role models and heroines are modeled

after male heroes; the accomplishments of women like Harriet

Tubman, or Marie Curie (or movie heroines like those found in

Terminator II, Aliens, Femme Nikita, The Hunger Games, or The Girl with the Dragon

Tattoo) are valued according to a standard that rewards domination

over domesticity, conquest over caring, and militarism over

mothering, in short masculinity over femininity. This is not to

suggest that these are not examples of very real valor, but that

what is rewarded in them goes further to reinforce a male-

centered or masculinist vision of the good than it does to foster

a vision centered around values identified as feminine such as

cooperation, compromise, collective decision-making, or

compassion. It is thus simply not enough, argue radical

feminists, for women to settle for reformist programs that aim at

equality alone. Given the conceptual constraints that determine

value, such programs will either fail or, even if they succeed,

will do so only at the cost of continuing to devalue qualities

associated with femininity, and hence with women.

As radical feminists point out, liberal feminism does not

necessarily represent the desires or interests of all women,

whether we take these desires to be culturally constructed or

endowed by nature. Here, however, we arrive at another important

juncture in radical feminist theory, one commonly referred to as

the essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate: if what

conceptual analysis shows is that the ways in which we conceive

of gender, sexual identity, and sexuality operate to privilege

men, ought we to consider these a reflection of natural

propensity, and then aim to elevate the value of feminine

characteristics like nurturing, emotional responsiveness, and the

tendency to focus on relationships over abstract autonomy? Or,

alternatively, should we eschew traditional femininity as the

construction of patriarchal culture, arguing that there are no

essential qualities that importantly distinguish men from women? If

so, at least two other possibilities present themselves: One

meaning of androgyny favors the promotion of the masculine and the

feminine in all of us, acknowledging that while gender may be

constructed, such qualities may still be salvageable

reinterpreted in a nonsexist context. Another meaning of

androgyny, however, suggests that we ought to abandon notions of

femininity and masculinity altogether as unworkable in favor some

other notion of personhood. Here the question that arises

concerns what “personhood” would look like, and whether it is

possible to envision a “human being” that can comprehend

biological differences without merely reproducing an atomistic

individual so divorced from the bodily that it becomes subject to

the same criticism radical feminists level at liberal feminism.

Can we, in other words, envision a concept of “embodied person”

which, irreducible to the determinations of either biology or

culture, is also rich enough to account for differences relevant

to and affected by both?

Whatever the answers to these questions, the primary

critique of radical feminism with respect to liberal feminism

remains unaffected, namely, that what the history of patriarchy

demonstrates is that the oppression of women is sanctioned

through the denigration of whatever qualities are identified with

femininity. Whether we seek liberation through the elevation or

the abolition of femininity what remains clear is that reformist

programs for inclusion can never by themselves be adequate. We

have not, however, exhausted other possible avenues of critique,

namely, that offered by Marxist/socialist feminists whose primary

aim it is to show how, given the marriage of patriarchy to

capitalism, it is illuminating to conceive of women not merely as a

group but as a class whose oppression is maintained first and

foremost through economic means. Combined with a radical feminist

analysis of patriarchal concepts of motherhood and domestic

labor, a Marxist/socialist account shows how divisions of labor

are themselves sexed in at least two ways: first, because women’s

labor qua procreation (the reproduction of human life itself) is

assigned to the ‘natural’ and hence is not counted as labor at

all, and second, because the domestic labor performed almost

exclusively by women, (the reproduction of the conditions of

life) has itself become naturalized in a capitalist economy that

identifies all labor as paid or wage labor; that is, if it is not

paid, it is not labor. Cast as the vehicle for the reproduction

of both life and the means to life, “woman” becomes a paradox.

‘She’ is unexploitable in the sense that her labor is not counted

as labor within a capitalist conceptual framework at all, yet

‘she’ also epitomizes the very prototype of exploitability in

that ‘her’ labors are systematically and maximally undervalues

which, in a capitalist economic system means un/undercompensated.

An essential point can thus be made without entering the

essentialism/anti-essentialism debate: regardless what qualities

we assign to nature or nurture, that women’s oppression is

intimately linked to the relationship between her economic status

and her status as provider of hearth, home, and progeny for men

well supports the radical feminist claim that there exist no

social institutions in which men do not have a controlling

interest, including economy and family. What recommends this

approach over liberal feminism, then, is the emphasis on the role

of economic class. Whereas the best that liberal feminists can

hope for is an equality of competition between men and women

within capitalism, the radical Marxist/socialist feminists are

free to imagine a world within which neither sex nor class

oppression are operative—much less determinative—of social

status. Radical feminist theory is thus utopian in a way that

liberal feminism cannot be since, in its Marxist/sicialist guise,

it demands not reform but revolution.

While a radicalized Marxist/socialist feminism goes further

than liberal feminism or than radical feminism alone to both

evaluate capitalist patriarchy and offer an alternative, even it

ultimately fails the project of genuine emancipation. For while

such a critique of capitalism shows something important about the

specifically sexed parameters of economic oppression, there

remains considerable work to be done to show the relationship

between economic and other forms of oppression such as sex,

sexual orientation, race, age, ability, and so on.

Given the need for this work, many radical feminists

distinguish themselves from both mainstream liberal feminism and

Marxist/socialist feminism by taking a more skeptical, self-

reflective approach to theorizing, arguing that it is at least an

open question whether any patriarchal institution is salvageable

in any form. There is little more revolutionary a declaration

than that capitalism must be overthrown, but if this is not

accompanied by the overthrow of other patriarchal institutions,

the status of women could remain unchanged or worsened as men’s

conditions improve. What revolutionary changes would institutions

like the family need to undergo to achieve equality not only with

respect to gender, but with respect to any number of other axes

of oppression, including race, ability, economic class,

indigenous culture status, age, sexual identity, and sexuality?

Some radical feminists such as the late Mary Daly argue that

patriarchy must be overthrown or abandoned in favor of separatist

or women-only cultures and societies. In her “radical elemental

feminist manifesto,” Quintessence, Daly describes the fundamental

ideology of patriarchal institutions as rapist, ‘characterized by

invasion, violation, degradation, objectification, and

destruction of women and nature; the fundamental paradigm of

sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, and all other oppressive-

isms (1998, p. 8). Not unlike the radical Marxist/socialist

feminist’s view that the sexed division of labor lies at the root

of economic exploitation, Daly argues that at the root of all

forms of oppression lies that sexual domination—the male

prerogative to rape—on the basis of which degradation and

objectification, in short, enslavement, becomes the naturalized

condition of virtually all nonmale, nonwhite, nonheterosexual,

non-Western, nonhuman, nonaffluent, persons.

If Daly is correct, (a) all forms of oppression and

exploitation take sex as their essential archetype. Hence, (b)

feminism’s emancipatory objectives cannot be achieved without

serious attention paid to the ways in which sexism informs the

other ‘isms’ which sustain a patriarchy that (c) is oppressive as

well as violent in all of its past and present forms, and in

which its primarily male beneficiaries continue to have a stake.

Finally, (d) to whatever extent sex oppression is archetypal of

all oppression so too must heterosexuality become compulsory, that

is, a characteristic of the heteropatriarchal way we define sex and

hence sexuality such that other sexualities are either completely

occluded or, when acknowledged at all, identified with the

perverse and unnatural.

Within compulsory heterosexuality, an action only counts as

sex if (a) it involves a penis-penetrating-a-vagina, (b) it is

compulsory in the sense that no other option counts as an

acceptable choice, and (c) it negatively associates abstinence

with frigidity, mental illness, or homosexuality. On this view,

then, the domination of sex cannot be accomplished without the

domination of sexual identity and sexuality. Given the combined

compulsion of (a)–(c), moreover, it is little wonder that Daly

characterizes heteropatriarchy as rapist urging the view that

resistance to patriarchy must be accompanied by resistance to

heterosexuality. Radical feminism thus becomes radical lesbian

feminism as both the rejection of male sexual access and as the

radical embrace of the value, lives, and bodies of women. Such

is the meaning of dismantling the master’s house with new tools.

That is, radical lesbian feminists (or radical feminist lesbians)

argue for two distinct but intimately related claims: first that

compulsory heterosexuality must be repudiated, and second, that lesbianism must itself

be theorized as a positive, life-affirming, morally responsible choice, (itself a

rejection of essentialism).

One potentially compelling objection to this view is that it

is surely possible to embrace the political goals of lesbian

feminism without jettisoning sexual relationships with

sympathetic men. However, because even the best of men are still

disproportionately empowered in heterosexual relationships such

intercourse cannot fail to remain compulsory, argues Daly (among

others), and hence self-defeating. This is not to say that

heterosexual sex either is or is not inherently harmful to women,

but rather that because male sexual access can be identified as

one of the primary sources of women’s oppression, cauterizing

this source of harm is instrumental to ending heteropatriarchal

power. Indeed, whether heterosexual sex is inherently harmful or

not is largely beside the point given that from a radical lesbian

feminist point of view it is hard to imagine conditions under

which the potential for harm could be sufficiently ameliorated,

and thus the risk of a heterosexual relationship worth taking.

Nothing, moreover, requires us to theorize men’s “essential”

natures as aggressive or women’s as passive; it is enough to

simply recognize that history and culture are so saturated with

the glorification of male sexual conquest and violence, that the

prospects for change and the likelihood of that change being

initiated by men is less than compelling. Not unlike Marx’s

conception of the permanent revolution of the working class,

radical lesbian sexual separatism constitutes much more than a political

strategy; it constitutes part of the bedrock of a growing lesbian

culture in the sense that what propels this revolution is a positive

choice to live one’s life among women, not to live among women until men

learn to behave better. Indeed, to opt merely for the latter is

tantamount to abandoning in advance the worth of having chosen

the former.

Feminists such as Sarah Hoagland argue that a constitutive

feature of a coherent lesbian ethic includes the repudiation of

all forms of domination and subordination. To the extent, then,

that heterosexuality is entrenched in and defined by these

values, it can find few comfortable bedfellows—literally or

figuratively—among radical lesbian feminists. Is a nonoppressive,

nondominating heterosexuality possible? In theory, no doubt it

is. But, as feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye points out, the

practical likelihood of this given the stakes men have and are

likely to continue to have in heteropatriarchy seems illusive at

best. Lesbians, she argues, are simply impossible within the

heteropatriarchal conceptual framework; indeed, they are like

‘arm wrestling ducks.’ That is, no arms, no wrestling, no penis,

no sex. Hence while gay men can be condemned for having perverse

sex, lesbians cannot have sex at all, and without the possibility

of sex, there can be no lesbians.

As a clever male college student was once heard to put the

point: ‘There can be no arm-wrestling ducks, but a good arm-

wrestling fuck, now that’s sex.’ Frye goes on to argue that given

the biological facts of reproduction as well as the social and

political expectations attached to child-rearing, it is hardly a

wonder that exercising control over the conditions under which

pregnancy, birth, and lactation take place becomes imperative for

men who are likely to experience the termination of privilege as

the unjust withdrawal of something owed. As Frederick Engels had

shown more than a century earlier, men’s investment in sexual

domination is rooted first and foremost in men’s investment in

the products of their own (hetero)sexuality, namely, the

offspring who represent a paradigmatic form of property, a

reflection of self-interest, and the potential for future

inheritance. To deny men sexual access, then, is effectively to

deny them the opportunity to control the conditions of women’s

reproductive lives, and hence of women’s lives in general,

particularly in nations or regions where access to contraceptives

and abortion is heavily regulated or banned by heteropatriarchal

laws, mores, and religion. Note that here too, an element of

Marxist/socialist critique helps to forge the tools of radical

feminist critique, especially, concepts like “property,”

“product,” and “inheritance.”

The affirmation of women’s lives, bodies, values, and

choices forms the second critical axis of any radical lesbian

feminist theory. Yet, while this affirmation has often been

theorized as necessitating some variety of separation from men—

separatism—it unclear what exactly this might mean, for whom it is

realistically practicable, and to what extent it requires

physical and material independence from both men and patriarchal

institutions. This much, however, seems clear: the choice to no

longer engage with men sexually constitutes a minimal criterion

of separatism whereas the choice to embrace a life composed

primarily or even exclusively of “women-loving-women” goes much

further—and is also far more difficult to realize in practice.

There are several reasons why this is the case: first, because we

live in a capitalist economy, regionally, nationally, and

globally, wherewithal is economic wherewithal. Hence, the

creation of any women-only space, permanently (a communal farm,

for instance) or temporarily (such as women’s music festivals) is

an economic undertaking which, in virtue of this, is always at

risk of excluding some in favor of those who can afford the price

of separatism. As some lesbian feminist women-of-color point out,

separatism continues to be a luxury of whiteness to whatever

extent economic affluence does. Second, because every

institution, economic, social, cultural, medical, to which we

have access is imbued with heteropatriarchal values, it remains

somewhat obscure what separatism could mean short of wholesale

abandonment. Third, short of the invention of parthenogenesis, a

contribution of male-produced sperm is still a requisite of human

reproduction.

Such a characterization of separatism may, however, be

guilty of a straw fallacy: maybe it appears impracticable only

because its parameters have been defined too narrowly or too

simplistically. Whether this is so, however, depends precisely on

what kind of conceptual work such a notion is supposed to be able

to do, for whom, and for what duration. The range of other

potentially separatist choices is very wide and includes at least

the following: the formation of one’s primary affective

relationships, sexual or otherwise, with women and girls only,

choosing a woman-centered spirituality, adopting and rearing

girls within a lesbian culture, creating woman-centered works of

art, dance, music, poetry, comedy, film, philosophy, and

literature, rejecting other male-centered practices such as

nonhuman animal flesh consumption, hunting, or other hierarchical

forms of organization, choosing political affiliations and

activities that are consistent with a woman-centered life. The

difficulty here, of course, is twofold: first, how ought what

counts as woman-centered or lesbian (and do these mean the same

thing?) be defined? How ought the reproduction of the same forms

of oppression which so disable us within heteropatriarchy be

avoided within lesbian culture? (Should preoperative transsexual

men-to-women be allowed into women-only spaces? Can a woman-

centered life include rearing sons? Should radical lesbian

feminists form political alliances with gay men? If so, should we

sign on to their political causes such as the promotion of

legalized marriage for gays and lesbians?).

Second, if ‘separatist’ is itself subject to evolving

cultural, ethnic, and historical interpretation, surely it is as

dangerous to treat it ahistorically as it is to treat “woman,”

“man,” and so on. What, then, does separatism require beyond the

refusal of sexual access to men? Does anyone’s refusal matter

more than others? Can lifelong lesbians who do not identify as

feminists be separatists? Can women who have left long-standing

heterosexual relationships and now identify as lesbian qualify as

separatists in mid-life? How separate is separate? The point, of

course, is that many questions attend the endeavor to create new

tools, and much more attention needs to be paid to the ways in

which oppressions related not only to sex, but to race, ability,

age, gender expression, and class intersect with compulsory

heterosexuality. I’d also argue that, like the feminist movement

more broadly, radical lesbian feminism needs to provide far more

critical analyses to the ways in which women are identified with

nonhuman animals, especially with respect to sexuality, and that

radical lesbian feminists need to think more about the practical

consequences of meat-eating, the use of plastics, and their own

global footprints as human actors in a world of limited and

inequitably accessible resources. There is much to worry and much

to celebrate. Nonetheless, if the radical lesbian feminist

critique of what has grown well-beyond capitalist

heteropatriarchy, AKA, corporatist and globalist

heteropatriarchy, is correct, this endeavor is more than just

important; it is necessary to the emancipation of women.

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