![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay examines 1970s lesbian-feminist identity rhetorics to interrogate the exclusionary logics of visibility and gender normativity. Lesbian-feminists used such logics to exclude women living “in the closet,” performing gender in nonnormative ways, or avowing a transgender identity. Those struggles form a dynamic context to situate and critically analyze Robin Morgan's keynote address at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” Though Morgan's address exemplifies rhetorical violence of identity politics and transphobia within lesbian-feminist communities, I explore its radically queer possibilities to shed fresh light on persistent struggles that shape contemporary queer politics.
Acknowledgments
This essay is derived from a chapter of the author's dissertation entitled “Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse,” directed by Dr. Shawn J. Parry-Giles. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2012 meeting of the National Communication Association in Orlando, Florida. The author extends her deepest appreciation to Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Vincent Pham, Peter Campbell, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Shelby Bell, Joan Faber McAlister, Tiffany Lewis, Theresa Donofrio, Erin Rand, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and support of this project.
Notes
1. “Betcha Didn't Know,” The Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10 /11 (May/June 1973): 7.
2. Joan E. Nixon, “Documenting the Dyke Conference,” Lavender Woman 2, no. 5 (August 1973): 14.
3. Connie Mayer, “1200 Sisters Gather!,” Lavender Woman 2, no. 3 (May 1973): 1.
4. Jeanne Cordova, “Radical Feminism? Dyke Separatism?,” Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10/11 (May/June 1973): 27.
5. Cordova, “Radical Feminism?,” 27.
6. Nixon, “Documenting,” 14.
7. Nixon, “Documenting,” 14.
8. Alyssa A. Samek, “Pivoting Between Identity Politics and Coalitional Relationships: Lesbian-Feminist Resistance to the Woman-Identified Woman,” Women's Studies in Communication 38, no. 4 (2015): 393–420; Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.
9. Helen Tate, “The Ideological Effects of a Failed Constitutive Rhetoric: The Co-Option of the Rhetoric of White Lesbian Feminism,” Women's Studies in Communication 28, no. 1 (2005): 1–31; Kristan Poirot, “Domesticating the Liberated Woman: Containment Rhetorics of Second Wave Radical/Lesbian Feminism,” Women's Studies in Communication 32, no. 3 (2009): 263–92.
10. I consulted articles, editorials, speeches, and forums published between 1970 and 1979 in periodicals including The Lesbian Tide (Los Angeles), Lavender Woman (Chicago), Leaping Lesbian (Ann Arbor), The Lesbian Feminist (New York), The Furies (Washington, DC), Focus: A Journal for Gay Women (Boston), and Sisters (San Francisco) and materials from various archival collections.
11. Erin J. Rand, “Review Essay,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (2009): 475.
12. I use the term rhetorical violence to refer, in part, to a “vehemence or intensity of language” that results in what Judith Butler calls “injurious speech.” Violence itself is not limited to the “deliberate exercise of physical force against a person” (OED), or what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “naked force,” but works through the use of symbols. Bourdieu argues, “Domination, even when based on naked force, that of arms or money, always has a symbolic dimension . . .” (172). See Violence, n4, Oxford English Dictionary; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 1997): 2; Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
13. Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?,” Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10/11 (May/June 1973): 30–34. Reprinted versions of the keynote address differ with regard to Morgan's edited content. See Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Vintage, 1978), 170–88; and Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?,” in We are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 424–34. The version cited here from the Lesbian Tide includes the edited material.
14. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Identity Politics,” in Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, ed. Lorraine Code (London: Routledge, 2000), 263–64.
15. Linda Martín Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty, “Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 2; Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2, 14.
16. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 2.
17. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995), 35; Jill M. Bystydzienski and Steven P. Schacht, Forging Radical Alliances Across Difference: Coalition Politics for the New Millennium (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 7.
18. Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 3; Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalition Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 4.
19. See Alcoff and Mohanty, “Reconsidering,” 3.
20. Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams, 127; and Bystydzienski and Schacht, Forging Radical Alliances, 4.
21. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Feminism and Politics, ed. Anne Phillips (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 243.
22. Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 240–43.
23. Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983): 127–42; Richard B. Gregg, “The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 4, no. 1 (1971): 71–91; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (1973), 74–86; McGee, “In Search of ‘The People,’” 235–49; Karma Chávez, “Counter-public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building,” Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011): 1–18; Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22.
24. See Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133; Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 2 (1952): 184–88; Franklyn S. Haiman, “The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53, no. 2 (1967): 99–114; Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs 18, no. 4 (1993): 793.
25. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 12.
26. Gregg, “The Ego-Function,” 82.
27. Ibid., 74, 82.
28. Nathaniel I. Cordova, “The Constitutive Force of the Catecismo Del Pueblo in Puerto Rico's Popular Democratic Party Campaign of 1938–1940,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 212–33; Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 133–50.
29. Butler, Excitable Speech, 2.
30. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Braziller, 1955), 25.
31. See Stewart, Charles J., “The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 4 (1997): 429–46.
32. Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
33. Zizek, Violence, 1.
34. Christina Foust, “‘Social Movement Rhetoric:’ A Critical Genealogy, Post-1980,” in Social Movements and Counterpublics: Connections, Contradictions, and Possibilities for Social Change, ed. Foust, Amy Pason, and Kate Zittlow Rogness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming), 3.
35. Rand, “Review Essay,” 476.
36. Erin J. Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist & Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014); Alcoff, “Identity Politics,” 264; Alberto Melucci, “The Process of Collective Identity,” in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 46.
37. See Martha Solomon, ed., A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840–1910 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991).
38. See, for example, George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
39. C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed To Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13.
40. See Carlos Ulises Decena, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire Among Dominican Immigrant Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Rand, Reclaiming Queer.
41. See David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, ed., Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
42. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Book, 2002), 52.
43. Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know, 18; Marlon B. Ross, “Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 161–89.
44. Halperin and Traub, Gay Shame, 3.
45. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 52.
46. Betty Peters, “Notes on Coming Out; They Mean to Kill Us All,” Lavender Woman 1, no. 3 (May 1972): 3.
47. Ibid., 3.
48. Linda Shear, “Politicalesbians,” Lavender Woman 1, no. 1 (1971): 6.
49. “Letter to Leaping Lesbian Regarding ‘In the Closet,’” Leaping Lesbian 3, no. 2 (1979): 5.
50. Ibid., 5.
51. Ibid., 5.
52. Ibid., 5.
53. Ibid., 5.
54. Peters, “Notes,” 3.
55. Morreaux, “And About those Closets,” Focus 2, no. 5 (1971): 6–7.
56. Ibid., 7.
57. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). A number of scholars have addressed this line of attack within lesbian communities. See Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (New York: Cleis Press, 2003).
58. See Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers; Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; Nestle, A Restricted Country. Ahmed re-reads the lesbian-feminist critique of butch/femme and argues that desire, not bodies, should have been a central concern. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 98.
59. Del Martin, “Lesbians and Gay Liberation,” Speech delivered in Bellingham, WA, April 6, 1973. Box 40, Folder 16, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers 93–13, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society.
60. Ibid.
61. Phyllis Lyon, “Speech to The Third Annual Florida Gay Conference, Tallahassee, FL,” 26–29 May 1978, Box 40, Folder 6, Lyon and Martin MSS.
62. Some lesbian-feminists reframed attacks on role-playing by turning to “sex power,” critiquing adherence to sex roles, and calling for alternative roles to equalize relational power structures. Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch, Lesbianism and the Women's Movement (Baltimore, MD: Diana Press, 1975), 12.
63. Patricia Fullerton, “Dilemma of the Modern Lesbian” Lavender Woman 1, no. 3 (May 1972): 5.
64. Anita Cornwell, “Black Lesbian Woman,” Lesbian Tide 3, no. 2 (Sept. 1973): 11.
65. Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), 1–35.
66. Sandy Stone was the target of Janice Raymond's transphobic attack in the late 1970s. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 221–35.
67. See Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983); Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Feminism,” Ms. (April 1976): 49–51, 92–98.
68. I use the term “transgender” in this essay instead of the term used during the 1970s, transsexual. When referencing Elliott, I use feminine-gendered pronouns to recognize her self-identification as a woman. In quotes from primary sources, however, readers may notice contradictory nomenclature because those opposed her presence at WCLC focused on her preoperative status and thus often referred to Elliott, incorrectly, as a transsexual man with masculine pronouns. Others referred to Elliott as a transvestite, similarly denying her affirmed gender identity.
69. Beth Elliott, “Of Infidels and Inquisitions,” Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10/11 (May/June 1973): 15, 26.
70. Ann Forfreedom, “Lesbos Arise!,” Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10/11 (May/June 1973): 4; Barbara McLean, “Diary of a Mad Organizer,” Lesbian Tide 2, no. 10/11 (May/June 1973): 37.
71. See Carolyn D'Cruz and Mark Pendelton, ed., After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia, 2014), 133–40.
72. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 30; Robin Morgan, Monster (New York: Vintage, 1972).
73. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 30.
74. Ibid., 30.
75. Ibid., 30.
76. Ibid., 30.
77. Ibid., 31.
78. Ibid., 31.
79. Ibid., 32. James Penner notes with surprise Morgan's “insistence that male culture and all men are inimical to feminism” and argues she “veered” into homophobic territory. James Penner, Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of American Masculinity in Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 235.
80. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 31.
81. Ibid., 32. See David Lionel Smith, “Booker T. Washington's Rhetoric: Commanding Performance,” Prospects 17 (1992): 191–208.
82. Morgan, Lesbianism,” 32.
83. Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede, “The Rhetoric of Black Power: Order and Disorder in the Future,” in The Rhetoric of Black Power, ed. Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 195; Fisher, Rhetoric and American Democracy, 87.
84. Morgan, Going Too Far, 171; Stryker, Transgender History, 103–4.
85. McLean, “Diary,” 36.
86. Ibid., 36; Morgan, Going Too Far, 171.
87. McLean, Diary,” 36.
88. Morgan, Going Too Far, 171.
89. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 32.
90. Stryker, Transgender History, 162.
91. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 32.
92. Ibid., 32.
93. Ibid., 32.
94. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1994): 239.
95. Morgan, “Lesbianism,” 32.
96. See Stryker, Transgender History, 162.
97. Samek, “Pivoting.”
98. Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).
99. In the 1990s, Susan Stryker reclaimed the attacks on transgender people as dangerous monsters and embraced the monster as a titular transgender figure that crossed binaries and boundaries to highlight a radical, affective potentiality. See Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 237–54.
100. See Michelle Goldberg, “What is a Woman?” The New Yorker, August 4, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2.
101. In May 2015, the Michigan festival founders announced that the 2015 gathering marking the 40th anniversary would be the last.
102. Arlene Stein, “The Incredible Shrinking Lesbian World and other Queer Conundra,” Sexualities 13, no. 1 (2010): 21–32.