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Abstract
This essay employs a coalitional perspective to revisit the Radicalesbians’ Citation1970 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.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the numerous colleagues and mentors who offered valuable feedback throughout the life of this essay, including Shawn Parry-Giles, Valeria Fabj, Joan Faber McAlister, Tiffany Lewis, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Vincent Pham, and Peter Campbell. This project developed from a chapter in the author's dissertation entitled “Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse” under the direction of Dr. Shawn J. Parry-Giles at the University of Maryland. An earlier version was awarded ORWAC Top Student Paper and presented at the Citation2012 Western States Communication Association Convention. Finally, the author extends special thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers, whose feedback and suggestions helped clarify and strengthen the final essay.
Notes
The citations here reference the version of the paper published in Notes from the Third Year (81–83). See also the archival version of the pamphlet (Radicalesbians) and a reprint listing Radicalesbians member Rita Mae Brown for the byline in The Ladder, a lesbian publication affiliated with DOB (Brown). Throughout this essay I will refer to the “woman-identified woman” in two ways: first, with lowercase letters and dashes when dealing with the concept or a person who identifies as such; secondly, with capital letters and/or an acronym WIW when referring to the published document, “The Woman Identified Woman.”
Such archives compel scholars to revisit key moments in feminist history and several are doing just that (See, for example, Poirot, Evans, Gilmore, Roth). My effort to consider a wide range of voices is undoubtedly enabled and encumbered by focusing on lesbian-feminist periodicals and speeches. On the one hand, these periodicals created a space for lesbian-feminists within a wide range of communities to share their ideas about identity and political goals. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that even the lesbian-feminist periodicals feature some voices over others. The editorial boards or collectives that produced such publications performed a critical gatekeeping function. Moreover, some voices were heard at rallies, meetings, and other gatherings of lesbian-feminists but were not written down in the pages of the periodicals. Despite the limitations, considering the range of periodicals brings such voices from the margins to the center of this analysis. It is by analyzing these voices that I aim to expand particularly on Helen Tate's previous studies (“The Ideological Effects”; Toward a Rhetorical History) and continue the work of Kristan Poirot. In part, my use of speech texts found in lesbian-feminist activist archival collections contributes to closing the gaps in representation, though again, silences remain for those voices not recorded and preserved in these archives.
Lesbian-feminists were part of a number of social movements during this time. Though these publications emerged from women's liberation– and gay liberation–affiliated groups, they published contributions from (primarily) women who also identified with labor, antiwar, Black freedom, and socialist movements, among others. The fact that their voices and multi-movement rhetorics circulated in these publications make them valuable for rhetorical scholars aiming to unpack the rich complexity of lesbian-feminist political activism in the 1970s. Though this essay focuses on contextualizing lesbian-feminist activism at the nexus of these two movements—women's liberation and gay liberation—there are points throughout that highlight the experiences and challenges articulated by women of color as they participated in those movements and beyond. For example, Betty Powell was actively involved in or a founding member of groups affiliated with Black feminism and the gay movement, including the National Black Feminist Organization, Soul Sisters, The National Gay Task Force, and the Gay Academic Union (Powell). Nonetheless, more work needs to be done to account for the experiences and voices of queers and feminists of color that worked and identified across multiple movements.
Queer historian Arlene Stein, for instance, argues that though lesbian-feminists deployed a series of identity reconstructions from the 1970s through the 1990s, they failed to sustain their social movement over time or avoid some of the challenges because activists did not offer a unified central definition of “lesbian-feminist” (136). Though she articulates a common critique of identity politics, Stein's assessment seems to foreclose the possibility of interpreting the contestation over “lesbian-feminism” as a generative process.
Susan Gal proffers recalibration as a way to negotiate dichotomies. I utilize the concept of recalibration to negotiate different binary relationships, including identity politics/coalition politics and women's liberation/gay liberation movements.
Throughout this essay I refer to the feminist movement activism that took place from 1970 through the early 1980s primarily as “women's liberation” to both recover the underused term and strategically avoid the terminology attached to the “wave” metaphor. In particular, Helen Tate argues that by 1970, the reform and revolutionary branches of the feminist movement had largely joined forces in what she calls the “radicalized mainstream feminist movement” (See Toward a Rhetorical History 91). My project seeks to contribute to histories of second-wave feminism without relying too heavily on the wave imagery (See also Evans, “Re-Viewing the Second Wave"; Baxandall and Gordon).
In addition to limitations concerning sexuality, there are several others that plague the unifying rhetoric of “sisterhood.” Primary among these, black and third-world feminist scholars have argued that sisterhood discourse masks White privilege (See Mohanty 24).
Invisibility qua privatization was not wholly negative. Just as the privatization of lesbian sexuality protected the public face of the movement from lesbian stigmatization, some women found its protection necessary for survival (Morreaux 6–7). Privatization rationales persist, particularly in legal decisions concerning queer lives and practices (Campbell).
Fear of lesbian “recruitment” within feminist circles developed from the assumption that lesbians were “demanding that every woman be a lesbian” in order to be an authentic feminist (Myron and Bunch 11). These wholesale accusations against lesbian-feminists joined charges that lesbians thought of themselves as “superior” because they did not deal with men, attacks that lesbians were chauvinists and “into oppressive sex roles,” or arguments calling them “divisive to the women's movement” (Myron and Bunch 11).
Moreover, the available feminist identity lacked inclusivity as it was primarily White and middle-class. As Katie King notes, the centralizing of lesbianism and lesbian identity within radical feminism was not universally positive, as it made lesbianism a “magical sign” (135).
Additionally, the emphasis on shared gender identity among radical lesbian-feminists contributed to a strained relationship with gay men because it did not provide a space for alternative versions of masculinity (Penner 235).
Homophile leader Frank Kameny proffered the phrase “Gay is Good” as a turn on the well-known phrase “Black is Beautiful.” It soon became a mantra among homophile activists. In later years, Kameny continued to argue that “gay” was the best term for all homosexuals, while lesbian-feminists like Del Martin, Joan Biren (JEB), and Charlotte Bunch, among others challenged the ways in which “gay” rendered lesbian women invisible (Johnson 214).
Capitalization of identity markers in this essay is limited to quotations of primary source materials.
In other research I also seek to extend Poirot's work analyzing the internal containment that occurred within lesbian-feminist communities by attending to the plethora of disciplinary discourses in which lesbian-feminists of all stripes engaged throughout the 1970s.
Perhaps the more familiar story of woman-identification is how it worked for lesbian-feminists. True, many lesbian-feminists held on to the promise contained within the construct of the woman-identified woman. Many adopted the identity of woman-identified woman to successfully navigate internal feminist politics, ameliorate the painful experiences with sisters in women's liberation, and craft lesbian-feminist politics. Following the distribution and circulation of the WIW manifesto, lesbian-feminist activist and Furies Collective member Charlotte Bunch positioned the woman-identified woman at the heart of lesbian-feminist politics (8). For some lesbian-feminists—including Bunch—the woman-identified woman was simply synonymous with the “lesbian [who] commits herself to other women for political, emotional, physical, and economic support,” representing “one part of challenging male supremacy” and a prong of the lesbian-feminist agenda (8). Eleanor Cooper, a lesbian-feminist writing in The Lesbian Feminist in 1979, looked back on the WIW as a critical “analysis of Lesbian oppression and Lesbian pride,” which made it “the most basic statement of Lesbian feminism” (3). Finally, Phyllis Lyon, a lesbian-feminist activist based in San Francisco pointed out to an audience at the University of Missouri in 1975, “The lesbian, a woman-identified woman, is truly the key to helping other women find their true identity as women. And this is a great deal of what Women's Liberation is all about” (9). For these activists and others, woman-identification was a powerful mode of communicating lesbian and lesbian-feminist identity. By and large, these lesbian-feminists felt that women's liberation was crucial to their identity formation. They sought to extend the feminist critique of patriarchy by connecting it to heterosexual ideology, a perspective largely captured by the WIW.
The term “third-world woman” has been discussed and critiqued extensively by feminist scholars (including Chandra Mohanty). I use the term in this essay when referring to or quoting the women who self-identified as such during the 1970s. It is also important to note that developing a coalitional relationship with women's liberation or gay liberation by third-world women was a critical way for third-world gay women to circumvent the racist, classist, and even ageist experiences within those activist communities (“Third World” 10).
The process of revisiting feminism's second wave continues apace. Stephanie Gilmore and other scholars in the collection Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, for example, reconsider this history with an eye toward coalitional politics.
I hope that reconsidering these histories can offer tools for activists today. LGBT and queer activists and many others continue to navigate the exhilarating and frustrating aspects of identity politics. Using letters to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer suggests each identity is separate and unique, and some people utilize those labels for self-identification and activism. At the same time, there is pressure to give up the work of identity politics, because, echoing Todd Gitlin and others, they are limited, divisive, and detrimental to movement success (35). More than an identity, queer is proffered as a new, improved umbrella term, part reclaimed slur, part theoretical perspective that shatters and undermines dichotomies of sex, gender, and sexuality. This is a powerful term that has animated many activist efforts. And yet, I am hesitant to simply throw the other identities out with the bathwater and replace them with queer. Just like “gay” before it, queer does not necessarily shatter all of the boundaries and privileges associated with sexism, racism, classism, and more. Despite the possibilities of umbrella terms, they are as limiting and covering as the imagery suggests. For example, even as “queer” rises within LGBT politics, the limiting hetero/homonormative rhetoric of love and commitment that took over in the effort to secure marriage equality, leaving observers to ask, “What else is there for LGBTQ people to fight for?” Such a narrowed public policy agenda ignores many intersections of oppression, including income inequality, incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, hate crimes, workplace discrimination, homelessness, housing inequalities, and many more. Thus, while queer may offer radical and transgressive possibilities as it challenges the identities associated with the letters LGBT, oppressive structures and practices remain that queer (as an umbrella term) actually protects and insulates. I am concerned about the erasures that take place, particularly the erasures of identity possibility. Thus, looking back at the complexities generated by women avowing one of those identity categories, lesbian—more specifically lesbian-feminist—can provide insight into the possible complexities that are missed, ignored, or simply erased by the move toward queer as a blanket term. This should be a point of concern for those invested in queer politics today. Moreover, this concern for erasure need not rehearse the dichotomy of identity politics versus coalition politics.