Why Lesbian Feminism And My First Year Of University Got Along

I began writing the "Why Canada Should Have Same-Sex Marriage" paper in my first semester of university. It was for "La Vie Politique Quebecoise," a course that was taught in French by a francophone who was a senior strategist for the Quebec Liberal Party.

I subsequently wrote the same paper (with an increasingly substantial and refined understanding of jurisprudence as I went along) for "Women, Ethics & The Law in Canada," for "Human Rights and International Justice," "Introduction to Canadian Politics," "Public Policy & The Politics of Equality," "Women & Politics in Canada," and "Comparative Judicial Politics."

And by the time I'd done with political science, they'd legalised same-sex marriage, which was a good co-incidence because I would have had nothing else to write about.

Every one of those papers included the same well-written footnote about what was meant by the term "lesbian feminism." It was a term introduced to me by the book Stonewall by Martin Duberman, which follows the very early beginnings of the queer rights movement by following the stories of six people who ended up at the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, and told a little of their lives after the riots. One of the women interviewed was Karla Jay, a prominent queer academic who was an early member of the Redstockings.

She spoke in the book about the development of a separate climate for women's queer liberation, and about the phase of lesbian feminism, which is a political stance taken by feminists that maintains that it is fundamentally incompatible with feminism to be sexually involved with a man. And thus they took up with women, found that they liked it, and became lesbians. This was a "movement" (if it can even be called that) of feminist academics in the 1970's. It was the same movement that idolised female androgyny and gave us gender neutral language like "police officer" and "fire fighter."

It is interesting to me that this has recently become a topic of discussion with some friends, since it is, to my mind, a very passe idea. The primary criticism levied against this "lesbian feminism" or "political lesbianism" is that it is going against one's own currents of desire. This is not a new criticism. It is - in fact - an old criticism, and to a lot of women that I know, tied to the criticism that feminism is inherently evil because it leads to lesbianism, which, as we all know, is evil to the power of evil. It can also simply smack of an arrogant underlying assumption that these women are being beguiled away from their natural place with a man by the clutches of the feminists who de facto hate men and want to see the reversal of twenty-five hundred years of societal structure so that men can know what it feels like.

There are four flawed assumptions in this criticism. The first is the ignoring of the fact that the premise of actual "lesbian feminism" includes women enjoying being in the relationships that they founded out of their political passion. The criticism denies this, and furthermore denies that there is value in experimenting with gender and sexuality choices.

The second is that this is an issue of human sexuality. If it were a question of human sexuality, as opposed to women's sexuality, we would be asking the question of men as well. But we don't. Because this is a question the grew out of feminist discourse, not sexuality discourse (setting aside for the moment the fact that most sexuality discourse has taken place primarily among ment) and as a question of feminism, the logic of the theory supports the practice. This is illustrated by the third flawed assumption: that this doesn't happen all the time.

As people with opinions, we constantly weigh them against our own actions, and there are times when our political/society/theological/etc opinions are stronger than our interpersonal relationships, not only our romantic ones. We routinely distance ourselves from friends when differing political opinions make things too difficult, and it is all but accepted for someone to decide not to date outside of their religious or ethnic group. We let things dictate our relationships, why is it inconceivable that for a woman feminism should have the same influence?

This is not to say that there aren't legitimate criticisms of "lesbian feminism" as feminist practice. Much like identity politics still strangely holding sway in the academics of art, the idea that there could be a Platonic form of a political idea (like "lesbian feminism") is still strangely present. I see it primarily among the type of vegetarians and vegans who are militant about their food. The idea that there is a hierarchical progression to dumpster-dived raw food veganism is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It also sounds one hell of a lot like fruitarianism, of Notting Hill fame.

It is a fundamentally un-postmodern analysis, and - my "Theology & Art" prof once pointed out: "you can think that postmodernism is dumb, but you can't really argue with its existance" - that specifically progressive causes like queer rights or veg*anism should get bogged down in it puzzles me further.

The last thing I will say about "lesbian feminism," however, is that is preported to grow from the same branch of feminism that has given us women-only spaces. I would say rather that this is more fear-mongering against women-only spaces, by linking them to evil to the power of evil: lesbianism. A relationship between two women is not a women-only space, and neither do women-only spaces exist in a vacuum that prevents interaction with men in any other dimension of one's experience.

Women-only spaces exist because the rest of one's daily interaction is interaction with men. Or at least, that is how the world seems to a certain kind of feminist - the kind, much like the person of colour seeing skin tone as the great divider in society, for whom gender is the axis along which experience is drawn.