Editorial
Lise Weil
TRIVIA 11, the second in our two-part series "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?", has ballooned steadily over the past weeks and months to become our longest issue yet, thus taking much longer than we expected to edit and upload. The upside of this delay is that I'm able to share some impressions of the "Lesbians in the '70s conference" which took place October 8-10 at the CUNY Graduate Center, and which materialized out of an impulse very similar to the one that gave birth to these two issues. As Andrea Freud Lowenstein from the planning committee noted in our programs: "This conference is a way to… make connections between who we were as dykes in the '70s and who we are now, when you can get a degree in queer studies, many young women find 'lesbian' a needlessly restrictive label, and those who do locate themselves on that end of Kinsey's scale sometimes seem to just wanna get married."
The conference took place over two almost unbearably intense days, followed by a concert/reading on Sunday morning. The organizers had expected 250 attendees and the event attracted over 400. The joint was packed, and not only with lesbians from the '70s; lots of young, or younger, women were there to learn about or share research they'd done on lesbian lives in those years. And there were so many workshops and panels happening concurrently over the two-day period that conversational exchanges in the halls and elevators tended to consist of "which one are you going to next?" The ones I attended were bristling with a kind of energy I haven't felt in so long I'd almost forgotten how uplifting it can be—and how badly I miss it. (Last time was the Montreal Feminist Book Fair in 1988; I had high hopes for the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta in 1992 but that one was, alas, too dominated by the oppression police to truly lift off.)
This weekend had a festival feel to it; as in addition to workshops, panels and plenaries there were performances and screenings, a poetry reading Friday night, and another one on Sunday along with music by Alix Dobkin and Linda Tillery. In Dobkin's workshop on Saturday she asked for descriptions of our first encounter with women's music. So many hands shot up I never got to tell mine (I came home from a Holly Near concert and announced to my boyfriend I was moving out), but the stories that were told were all so vivid and powerful and poignant I didn't even mind. So many stories that would otherwise not have been told. So many impassioned testimonies that would never otherwise have been heard. I would continue to be struck by this throughout those two days. Not unlike what I've felt putting together these last two issues of TRIVIA.
As for our "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" panel, featuring four contributors from TRIVIA 10 (including me) with me as moderator, so many women crowded into the narrow room that it seemed half ended up sitting on the floor. Maybe a dozen had to be turned away, and a small group kept showing up at the door as soon as the fire marshal was out of sight. Under the circumstances, the title of our workshop seemed mildly ironic and I had to open with words to the effect that rumors of our extinction had been greatly exaggerated. The panelists—Elana Dykewomon, Elliot BatTzedek and Carolyn Gage—outdid themselves with their passion and eloquence, and the discussion afterwards was so animated it would have, I'm certain, gone on for hours had we not been thrown out of the room. The same can be said for the break-out session I organized for the following day, into which even more women crowded than the first one. More on that later.
Throughout the conference, I would be struck by how much the discussions mirrored, and were illuminated by, the writings in these past two issues of TRIVIA, with their long, lingering backward glances. Often I felt myself wishing I could just insert large swatches from those articles into the conversation. At Saturday's plenary session, historian Lisa Duggan opened her talk by summing up with marvelous succinctness the two main competing narratives about '70s lesbians:
#1. They were dogmatic, dumpy sexless lesbian separatists and cultural feministswith no race or class politics, followed in the 1980s by radical, witty politically sophisticated sex radicals.
#2. They were creative, utopian lesbian visionaries withradically egalitarianpolitics followed by narrowly pragmatic assimilationistLGBT reformers and corporate selloutswho have forgotten feminism.
Any reader of TRIVIA 10 and 11 will see elements from these narratives scattered throughout these two issues: the repeated lament for the loss of those "creative, utopian visionaries," and for the assimilationist tendencies in both ourselves and the culture that have hastened that loss, alongside complaints that "lesbian" has today become a dogmatic straitjacket, narrow and constrictive.
As for lesbians of the '70s, narrative #1 was, for the most part blown right out of the water at this conference—beginning with Duggan's paper. Urvashi Vaid's talk, reprinted in this issue, made it very clear that "intersectionality" is hardly a 21st-century invention, that class and race analysis had its roots in early lesbian-feminism (as even a quick reading of Judy Grahn's "A Woman is Talking to Death" will confirm–see BatTzedek's essay in the last issue). Also, as she and many others were quick to point out, lesbians of the '70s were having sex every chance we could get (see, e.g., Stendhal's "Matteo, Prince of Paris" in this issue) and being as inventive and experimental as we possibly could about it. So much for the "dumpy sexless lesbian separatists and cultural feminists with no race or class politics."
In fact, race and class did not seem to be polarizing issues at this conference as they have been in the past, and age was inherently a non-issue as so many of the speakers, poets and presenters were in their sixties and seventies (OLOC—Old Lesbians Organizing for Change—was a strong presence). Organizers seemed to have learned their lessons well. From what I could see, events were all wheelchair-accessible and women of color were well represented on panels, in plenaries and on stage at readings. One of the highlights of the conference was Friday night's poetry reading where Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, Audre Lorde's daughter, read her mother's "A Litany for Survival" with a voice and delivery so identical to Audre's that the women sitting beside me said claimed she was being channeled into the auditorium.
If there was a divisive issue at this conference, at least from my perspective, it was the question of gender identity. After all, the question that hovered over the weekend—who are we as lesbians, now, in the 21st century?—could not be answered without addressing, among other things, the ways in which our changing understandings of gender have unsettled the whole category of "lesbian." Our TRIVIA panel, and the break-out session the next day, were as far as I could tell the only places where this question was raised explicitly. The issue surfaced several times during our panel presentations, most explosively in Carolyn Gage's paper on Teena Brandon, who is remembered today as the female-to-male, transgender victim of a brutal murder motivated by transphobia. Gage pointed to Brandon's identity as a self-identified survivor of incest, and the inconvenient truth that "gender dysphoria" can be a dissociative syndrome associated with father-daughter incest (you can read the full version in TRIVIA 10). In the heated discussion that followed, some women asserted that butches in their communities were under pressure to transition and that "butch flight" was a real phenomenon, while other women challenged these claims. The discussion was cut off when organizers broke in saying we had to clear the room.
Both in that workshop and in the one on Saturday, which attracted an overflow crowd despite being scheduled at the end of a full day of workshops, women spoke, with open hearts, about not wanting to identify as "lesbian" because they did not want to feel they were excluding their trans brothers and sisters—some saying that for this reason they prefer to call themselves "queer." These seemed to be primarily young women, but I heard an almost identical statement in another workshop from a one-time radical lesbian filmmaker in her sixties. ("Am I still a lesbian?" asks Lauren Crux in this issue. "Is our post-modern understanding of the fluidity of gender and sexuality and identity making my identity irrelevant? Is the word Queer truly inclusive, or does it serve to erase me? Or, am I already erased? Am I soon to be a relic—(Oh look, an old lesbian, how quaint)?") There was an undeniable clash of perspectives at the conference between those of us—mostly, but not only, lesbians who came out in the '70s and '80s—who were disturbed by the collapsing of lesbians into the LBGT movement, along with an apparently accelerating drift towards "queer" or "boi" identification, and the mostly younger voices lobbying for inclusiveness.
I heard the word "inclusive" a lot at the conference. "Inclusiveness" has a really good sound to it. It evokes open arms, embraces. Not wanting to include, or be included, makes one seem narrow, churlish, mean even. Yet inclusiveness generally comes with a price, and too often that price is loss of vision. In the case of lesbians disappearing into the LBGT movement, that price, from what I can see, has been the loss of feminist vision. And it was feminist analysis that allowed us to cut through such an incredible amount of crap in the '70s. Consider this: in one year, 1978, we saw in the U.S. alone the publication of Rich'sDream of a Common language, Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Mary Daly'sGyn/Ecology: a Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature. Yes we had an analysis of heterosexism and of gender oppression, but alongside that we had a highly developed, extremely wide-ranging critique of "white male supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (to use bell hooks' phrase) which reckoned with its profound spiritual implications as well as its effects on the non-human world. And we did not stop with critique; we were all about generating new models—for power, for eroticism, for love, for "be-ing" itself. Our analyses may have been flawed and partial, our visions may have been often unrealizable, but I don't think anyone can claim that a comparable body of theory has been generated by the trans, bi and gay movements combined.
One young woman who'd had her hand up at the end of our break-out session approached me when it was over to say she had very much wanted to speak, to say that she identified as a radical lesbian and was completely mystified by her lesbian peers, their queer identification, the transitioning. She said she thought the difference between her and them was that they had all learned feminism in women's studies or gender studies programs, all of which, she said, "have been co-opted by the gay/bi/trans movement." She, on the other hand, as she put it, "went directly to the writers of the second wave, where it's all clear as day." What she'd wanted to say to other dykes in her generation, she said, was "Go do your homework. Read second-wave feminist theory."
I had an "ah-ha" moment not long after that, a moment similar to the epiphany Cynthia Rich describes in her letter to me in the last issue. No wonder!! No wonder lesbian-identification is so tenuous among young people today. In the almost total absence (except in pockets, like TRIVIA, or the conference) of the remarkably rich, vibrant global lesbian-feminist culture we created in the 70s and 80s, as documented both in this issue and the last one, "lesbian" has shrunk to an almost exclusively sexual identity. Coming out at that time meant stepping into a world. Now that that world has largely vanished, how can the word mean what it meant to us? Maybe—this was an entirely new thought for me—maybe it's time we older lesbians stop insisting that it should. As long as the historical record of who we were and of all that we built is preserved—and judging from this conference, there seems to be no danger of it being forgotten—why shouldn't lesbians call themselves "queer," or anything else they damn well please?
But back to the question of gender identity. It needs to be said that there is a resistance on the part of some lesbians—including a few featured in these two issues—to acknowledging what psychology and transgendered people have been telling us for some time now: that women-identified women (some of them lesbian-feminists!) are indeed born in male bodies, and vice versa, and that for these individuals, transitioning is the only way to begin to feel whole and sane—and is very often a matter of life and death. There is no excuse for our continued ignorance about this, and for our not embracing transgendered peoples' struggle for civil rights and non-discrimination in the same way as we have that of every other stigmatized and marginalized group since the '70s. To lesbians who persist in calling mtf transexuals "men" I say: go do your homework!
Having said that, I also believe we need to be allowed to ask questions like the following without being called transphobic:
1)Is it possible that woman-hatred is a factor in the current trend of butches becoming bois or transmen?
2)Are sex-change operations being used by some as a medical escape route from the pain of being a woman and thus a victim?
3)Might there be valid reasons for wanting to exclude transgendered people from biological-women's space?
Two out of the four speakers in Saturday's plenary spoke critically of the women-born women policies of the Michigan women's music festival, as if it were somehow regressive to still be insisting that such spaces are necessary. But if, as Vaid pointed out in her talk, citing statistics from Faludi's recent essay inHarper's, male domination and male violence are as rampant as ever in the U.S., then can't an argument be made for the importance of gathering in a space where no penises are allowed? In the aftermath of the conference, one radical feminist, who asked not to be identified, responded to those plenary remarks as follows: "If Michigan had a trans-open policy, the Festival would have no way to require men to leave the land. All the men would need to do is say that they were pre-op transwomen… Men have always 'crashed' women's beaches, vandalized women's lands (including Michfest, which has to bury powerlines, etc. because of that), and they have always exhibited voyeurism whenever women are nude or partially nude, and especially in nature. If persons with penises were allowed on the land, it would be open season for frat boys and perpetrators…It would be the end of something incredibly precious to thousands of women."
Though it seemed to me that by and large at this conference, both speaking and listening were done in a spirit of genuine respect, I did hear from one woman that she was afraid to speak for fear of being called transphobic, and since the conference I've seen evidence of just how potent and pervasive this fear is (e.g. the unidentified source above). I think it's worth noting that a butch lesbian who had promised to do an interview with me about the disappearing of butches withdrew at the last minute because, as she wrote to me: "I don't want anything I say to be misconstrued, as there are certain forces that are exploiting pre-existing schisms in our community to the injury of all of us." I can't say I entirely understand what those forces are, though perhaps I will once this editorial is online, but what I do know is that there is self-censorship operating among those who have questions about the popularity of transitioning among butch lesbians. The only other piece that was withdrawn from this issue strongly denounced both the "continuing hatred and denial of butches" and the "fad" of "women becoming men." The author of that piece pulled out for other reasons, but she made it clear she knew that what she was saying would "start a shit storm."
Despite the rifts over gender identity, the overriding feeling at this conference seemed to be, after an initial bout of disorientation, sheer amazement: that we had found ourselves together again, after all these years, that we were able to pick up threads we had let fall long ago, that we were again having these vital conversations—that we actually had a venue for these conversations! U.S. writer Maureen Brady spoke of "the comfort of being among like-minded women, a feeling that grew in me as the time went on…It has often seemed that life nearly stopped after the movement stopped being a central force." Swiss writer Verena Stefan, who has a piece in this issue, was impressed by the quality of inter-generational dialogue, the way young women—in particular at the Jewish and African-American workshops she attended—approached their elders, with tremendous curiosity and admiration. Québecoise filmmaker Myriam Fougère seemed euphoric every time I ran into her, and said it was exciting to her to "see so many 'old' lesbians who keep creating as well as the time and their circumstances allows them. Each of us in her own way fidèle à elle même, creating a life that makes some sense…"
To return to the question I asked above: why shouldn't young lesbians choose to call themselves "queer" instead of "lesbian," given the lack of meaningful context for that word today? I suppose one reason would be the hope that such a context might regenerate, that a healthy lesbian-feminist culture might actually rise up again on the ruins of the one we began building some forty years ago. I have to admit it was the last thing I expected—but this conference gave me, as I suspect it did many others, a mighty dose of such hope.
#
A final note on the word "extinction." Sometime in August, as Betsy and I were beginning to pull this issue together, one of the contributors wrote to me to ask why, given the horrific ongoing losses of species, tribes and entire ecosystems, we would use this word for people who aren't actually extinct? It seemed to me an excellent question, and I found myself gnawing on it for quite awhile. In the face of so much actual extinction, was it disrespectful of us to be using that word in a mostly metaphorical sense?
Then I began to think more specifically about the writers in these two issues. It can't be denied that the words "extinct" and "extinction" have hit a nerve with them. To many of us it does feel that something precious and vital—a culture, a vision, a way of life—has been, is being, run out of existence. And it's not as if that precious thing has been around forever. ("Back when I came out," Lauren Crux writes, "we didn't exist then either. We have not had a long run. I'd like to linger just a bit longer.")
Add to this the terrifying fact, which I seem to bump up against more and more often, that our most radical voices are going—literally—silent. In just the last ten years: Monique Wittig (who makes a cameo appearance in this issue in fictional form in Stendhal's piece). Andrea Dworkin. Gloria Anzaldua. Jane Rule. Paula Gunn Allen. Mary Daly, to whom the last issue was dedicated. And, just this past summer, Michèle Causse (see my tribute in this issue). Even as I was beginning to write this editorial I received news that Jill Johnston (see Chocolate Waters' tribute in this issue) had died. The loss of these bold, inventive, visionary voices would perhaps not be so distressing if there were other fierce bright lights coming along to replace them. Though I'm sure there must be a number of them out there, I can't say I know of more than a very few myself.
This leads me to a final announcement, one that I have put off making because it grieves me to say it, knowing that it throws TRIVIA's future into uncertainty. With this issue, my involvement as editor ofTRIVIA: Voices of Feminism comes to an end. If the journal is to continue, others will need to step up to fill the role of editor, and to take over all the other tasks involved in getting these issues onto the web (please see the box at the end of this page). So if you're out there—you bold, visionary, energetic women!—now would be the time to make yourselves known.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
Betsy Warland
Within these two issues, several texts evoke the lesbian feminist volcano (ex(s)tinctus, to extinguish a fire or volcano) that fuelled a hotbed of politics, culture and art in the 1960s into the early 1990s. Alongside of us, many other marginalized peoples' politics, culture and art also erupted. This was a radical and euphoric time. After decades and centuries of suffocating containment, it was remarkable to feel that anything was possible. Yet, in these early years, our lesbian feminist movement in Canada was essentially a white volcano.
As women of color took their place, these eruptions multiplied within the feminist and lesbian feminist movements around issues of race and class. Looking back, it is apparent to me that we were a new culture, and like any young culture, we were too idealistic, even naïve. We did not possess the maturity or wisdom that we needed to navigate these multiple eruptions. Despite this, much was gained, realized, but much was not. And we stalled. And, in my opinion, we are still stalled.
Unlike gay men, who before they came out had previously occupied and controlled the public world – and continue to after they come out – we had not. And we still do not. We occupy the far smaller sphere of our domestic and intimate lives. As important and meaningful as this private sphere is, it puts too many expectations on our intimate relationships: expectations that arise from our larger visions of world. This pressure and frustration quickly turns into judging each other, rejecting and erasing one another. So quickly, that we rarely catch a glimpse of how we repeatedly undermine one another. With this issue, two writers decided against including their pieces in it because of concerns around judgment. And it is our loss. I believe it to be all of our loss.
Throughout TRIVIA 10 and 11, there is the relishing and honoring of our past as well as the tracking of quests for defining oneself in the present. A central question is: how do we create a sense of belonging now? For me, this belonging requires far deeper mutual respect for our differences and far more willingness to incorporate something men excel at: team work. Until we understand just how pivotal teamwork is in making things happen in the public world, the patriarchy has nothing to worry about. Teamwork tolerates differences, dislikes, even the occasional betrayal, for these are inevitable; what matters is a shared goal.
In Susan Faludi's recent Harper's essay, "American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide,"she tracks how feminists have not "figured out how to pass power down from woman to woman" historically. Nor, I would add, have we learned how to show respect to one another mutually. In Canada, lesbian feminist writers frequently acknowledge the influence of male writers and thinkers but rarely mention women writer or thinkers' names that I know to have also been crucial influences. Since the mid-90s, most Canadian lesbian feminists have quietly backed away from this identity as something that informs or inspires their work. It simply wasn't viable if you wanted to be even a moderately successful writer in Canada. Our lesbian feminist readership is small, pretty conventional; our grassroots feminist literary community withered away some time ago. The only solid ground was/is for the few lesbian feminist authors who are considered suitable for scholarly study within the academy. If not canonized nor tenured, the sheer tenacity and devotion required by lesbian feminist publishers and writers like TRIVIA founder and publisher Lise Weil is formidable.*
Quebec author Nicole Brossard has been and continues to be an inspiration for feminist lesbians in Quebec, Canada, North America and abroad. Simply said, I cannot imagine my writing life without Nicole's body of work. In her 2005 collection of essays, Nicole writes, "…it is my lesbian body which gave me the best ideas." In its fullness of being, the lesbian body is boundless. Boundless.
* I imagine I speak for many of us in thanking Lise (thunderous applause!) for creating a vigorous cultural site in which we can think, imagine and converse.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
TRIVIA 11, the second in our two-part series "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?", has ballooned steadily over the past weeks and months to become our longest issue yet, thus taking much longer than we expected to edit and upload. The upside of this delay is that I'm able to share some impressions of the "Lesbians in the '70s conference" which took place October 8-10 at the CUNY Graduate Center, and which materialized out of an impulse very similar to the one that gave birth to these two issues. As Andrea Freud Lowenstein from the planning committee noted in our programs: "This conference is a way to… make connections between who we were as dykes in the '70s and who we are now, when you can get a degree in queer studies, many young women find 'lesbian' a needlessly restrictive label, and those who do locate themselves on that end of Kinsey's scale sometimes seem to just wanna get married."
The conference took place over two almost unbearably intense days, followed by a concert/reading on Sunday morning. The organizers had expected 250 attendees and the event attracted over 400. The joint was packed, and not only with lesbians from the '70s; lots of young, or younger, women were there to learn about or share research they'd done on lesbian lives in those years. And there were so many workshops and panels happening concurrently over the two-day period that conversational exchanges in the halls and elevators tended to consist of "which one are you going to next?" The ones I attended were bristling with a kind of energy I haven't felt in so long I'd almost forgotten how uplifting it can be—and how badly I miss it. (Last time was the Montreal Feminist Book Fair in 1988; I had high hopes for the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta in 1992 but that one was, alas, too dominated by the oppression police to truly lift off.)
This weekend had a festival feel to it; as in addition to workshops, panels and plenaries there were performances and screenings, a poetry reading Friday night, and another one on Sunday along with music by Alix Dobkin and Linda Tillery. In Dobkin's workshop on Saturday she asked for descriptions of our first encounter with women's music. So many hands shot up I never got to tell mine (I came home from a Holly Near concert and announced to my boyfriend I was moving out), but the stories that were told were all so vivid and powerful and poignant I didn't even mind. So many stories that would otherwise not have been told. So many impassioned testimonies that would never otherwise have been heard. I would continue to be struck by this throughout those two days. Not unlike what I've felt putting together these last two issues of TRIVIA.
As for our "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" panel, featuring four contributors from TRIVIA 10 (including me) with me as moderator, so many women crowded into the narrow room that it seemed half ended up sitting on the floor. Maybe a dozen had to be turned away, and a small group kept showing up at the door as soon as the fire marshal was out of sight. Under the circumstances, the title of our workshop seemed mildly ironic and I had to open with words to the effect that rumors of our extinction had been greatly exaggerated. The panelists—Elana Dykewomon, Elliot BatTzedek and Carolyn Gage—outdid themselves with their passion and eloquence, and the discussion afterwards was so animated it would have, I'm certain, gone on for hours had we not been thrown out of the room. The same can be said for the break-out session I organized for the following day, into which even more women crowded than the first one. More on that later.
Throughout the conference, I would be struck by how much the discussions mirrored, and were illuminated by, the writings in these past two issues of TRIVIA, with their long, lingering backward glances. Often I felt myself wishing I could just insert large swatches from those articles into the conversation. At Saturday's plenary session, historian Lisa Duggan opened her talk by summing up with marvelous succinctness the two main competing narratives about '70s lesbians:
#1. They were dogmatic, dumpy sexless lesbian separatists and cultural feministswith no race or class politics, followed in the 1980s by radical, witty politically sophisticated sex radicals.
#2. They were creative, utopian lesbian visionaries withradically egalitarianpolitics followed by narrowly pragmatic assimilationistLGBT reformers and corporate selloutswho have forgotten feminism.
Any reader of TRIVIA 10 and 11 will see elements from these narratives scattered throughout these two issues: the repeated lament for the loss of those "creative, utopian visionaries," and for the assimilationist tendencies in both ourselves and the culture that have hastened that loss, alongside complaints that "lesbian" has today become a dogmatic straitjacket, narrow and constrictive.
As for lesbians of the '70s, narrative #1 was, for the most part blown right out of the water at this conference—beginning with Duggan's paper. Urvashi Vaid's talk, reprinted in this issue, made it very clear that "intersectionality" is hardly a 21st-century invention, that class and race analysis had its roots in early lesbian-feminism (as even a quick reading of Judy Grahn's "A Woman is Talking to Death" will confirm–see BatTzedek's essay in the last issue). Also, as she and many others were quick to point out, lesbians of the '70s were having sex every chance we could get (see, e.g., Stendhal's "Matteo, Prince of Paris" in this issue) and being as inventive and experimental as we possibly could about it. So much for the "dumpy sexless lesbian separatists and cultural feminists with no race or class politics."
In fact, race and class did not seem to be polarizing issues at this conference as they have been in the past, and age was inherently a non-issue as so many of the speakers, poets and presenters were in their sixties and seventies (OLOC—Old Lesbians Organizing for Change—was a strong presence). Organizers seemed to have learned their lessons well. From what I could see, events were all wheelchair-accessible and women of color were well represented on panels, in plenaries and on stage at readings. One of the highlights of the conference was Friday night's poetry reading where Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, Audre Lorde's daughter, read her mother's "A Litany for Survival" with a voice and delivery so identical to Audre's that the women sitting beside me said claimed she was being channeled into the auditorium.
If there was a divisive issue at this conference, at least from my perspective, it was the question of gender identity. After all, the question that hovered over the weekend—who are we as lesbians, now, in the 21st century?—could not be answered without addressing, among other things, the ways in which our changing understandings of gender have unsettled the whole category of "lesbian." Our TRIVIA panel, and the break-out session the next day, were as far as I could tell the only places where this question was raised explicitly. The issue surfaced several times during our panel presentations, most explosively in Carolyn Gage's paper on Teena Brandon, who is remembered today as the female-to-male, transgender victim of a brutal murder motivated by transphobia. Gage pointed to Brandon's identity as a self-identified survivor of incest, and the inconvenient truth that "gender dysphoria" can be a dissociative syndrome associated with father-daughter incest (you can read the full version in TRIVIA 10). In the heated discussion that followed, some women asserted that butches in their communities were under pressure to transition and that "butch flight" was a real phenomenon, while other women challenged these claims. The discussion was cut off when organizers broke in saying we had to clear the room.
Both in that workshop and in the one on Saturday, which attracted an overflow crowd despite being scheduled at the end of a full day of workshops, women spoke, with open hearts, about not wanting to identify as "lesbian" because they did not want to feel they were excluding their trans brothers and sisters—some saying that for this reason they prefer to call themselves "queer." These seemed to be primarily young women, but I heard an almost identical statement in another workshop from a one-time radical lesbian filmmaker in her sixties. ("Am I still a lesbian?" asks Lauren Crux in this issue. "Is our post-modern understanding of the fluidity of gender and sexuality and identity making my identity irrelevant? Is the word Queer truly inclusive, or does it serve to erase me? Or, am I already erased? Am I soon to be a relic—(Oh look, an old lesbian, how quaint)?") There was an undeniable clash of perspectives at the conference between those of us—mostly, but not only, lesbians who came out in the '70s and '80s—who were disturbed by the collapsing of lesbians into the LBGT movement, along with an apparently accelerating drift towards "queer" or "boi" identification, and the mostly younger voices lobbying for inclusiveness.
I heard the word "inclusive" a lot at the conference. "Inclusiveness" has a really good sound to it. It evokes open arms, embraces. Not wanting to include, or be included, makes one seem narrow, churlish, mean even. Yet inclusiveness generally comes with a price, and too often that price is loss of vision. In the case of lesbians disappearing into the LBGT movement, that price, from what I can see, has been the loss of feminist vision. And it was feminist analysis that allowed us to cut through such an incredible amount of crap in the '70s. Consider this: in one year, 1978, we saw in the U.S. alone the publication of Rich'sDream of a Common language, Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Mary Daly'sGyn/Ecology: a Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature. Yes we had an analysis of heterosexism and of gender oppression, but alongside that we had a highly developed, extremely wide-ranging critique of "white male supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (to use bell hooks' phrase) which reckoned with its profound spiritual implications as well as its effects on the non-human world. And we did not stop with critique; we were all about generating new models—for power, for eroticism, for love, for "be-ing" itself. Our analyses may have been flawed and partial, our visions may have been often unrealizable, but I don't think anyone can claim that a comparable body of theory has been generated by the trans, bi and gay movements combined.
One young woman who'd had her hand up at the end of our break-out session approached me when it was over to say she had very much wanted to speak, to say that she identified as a radical lesbian and was completely mystified by her lesbian peers, their queer identification, the transitioning. She said she thought the difference between her and them was that they had all learned feminism in women's studies or gender studies programs, all of which, she said, "have been co-opted by the gay/bi/trans movement." She, on the other hand, as she put it, "went directly to the writers of the second wave, where it's all clear as day." What she'd wanted to say to other dykes in her generation, she said, was "Go do your homework. Read second-wave feminist theory."
I had an "ah-ha" moment not long after that, a moment similar to the epiphany Cynthia Rich describes in her letter to me in the last issue. No wonder!! No wonder lesbian-identification is so tenuous among young people today. In the almost total absence (except in pockets, like TRIVIA, or the conference) of the remarkably rich, vibrant global lesbian-feminist culture we created in the 70s and 80s, as documented both in this issue and the last one, "lesbian" has shrunk to an almost exclusively sexual identity. Coming out at that time meant stepping into a world. Now that that world has largely vanished, how can the word mean what it meant to us? Maybe—this was an entirely new thought for me—maybe it's time we older lesbians stop insisting that it should. As long as the historical record of who we were and of all that we built is preserved—and judging from this conference, there seems to be no danger of it being forgotten—why shouldn't lesbians call themselves "queer," or anything else they damn well please?
But back to the question of gender identity. It needs to be said that there is a resistance on the part of some lesbians—including a few featured in these two issues—to acknowledging what psychology and transgendered people have been telling us for some time now: that women-identified women (some of them lesbian-feminists!) are indeed born in male bodies, and vice versa, and that for these individuals, transitioning is the only way to begin to feel whole and sane—and is very often a matter of life and death. There is no excuse for our continued ignorance about this, and for our not embracing transgendered peoples' struggle for civil rights and non-discrimination in the same way as we have that of every other stigmatized and marginalized group since the '70s. To lesbians who persist in calling mtf transexuals "men" I say: go do your homework!
Having said that, I also believe we need to be allowed to ask questions like the following without being called transphobic:
1)Is it possible that woman-hatred is a factor in the current trend of butches becoming bois or transmen?
2)Are sex-change operations being used by some as a medical escape route from the pain of being a woman and thus a victim?
3)Might there be valid reasons for wanting to exclude transgendered people from biological-women's space?
Two out of the four speakers in Saturday's plenary spoke critically of the women-born women policies of the Michigan women's music festival, as if it were somehow regressive to still be insisting that such spaces are necessary. But if, as Vaid pointed out in her talk, citing statistics from Faludi's recent essay inHarper's, male domination and male violence are as rampant as ever in the U.S., then can't an argument be made for the importance of gathering in a space where no penises are allowed? In the aftermath of the conference, one radical feminist, who asked not to be identified, responded to those plenary remarks as follows: "If Michigan had a trans-open policy, the Festival would have no way to require men to leave the land. All the men would need to do is say that they were pre-op transwomen… Men have always 'crashed' women's beaches, vandalized women's lands (including Michfest, which has to bury powerlines, etc. because of that), and they have always exhibited voyeurism whenever women are nude or partially nude, and especially in nature. If persons with penises were allowed on the land, it would be open season for frat boys and perpetrators…It would be the end of something incredibly precious to thousands of women."
Though it seemed to me that by and large at this conference, both speaking and listening were done in a spirit of genuine respect, I did hear from one woman that she was afraid to speak for fear of being called transphobic, and since the conference I've seen evidence of just how potent and pervasive this fear is (e.g. the unidentified source above). I think it's worth noting that a butch lesbian who had promised to do an interview with me about the disappearing of butches withdrew at the last minute because, as she wrote to me: "I don't want anything I say to be misconstrued, as there are certain forces that are exploiting pre-existing schisms in our community to the injury of all of us." I can't say I entirely understand what those forces are, though perhaps I will once this editorial is online, but what I do know is that there is self-censorship operating among those who have questions about the popularity of transitioning among butch lesbians. The only other piece that was withdrawn from this issue strongly denounced both the "continuing hatred and denial of butches" and the "fad" of "women becoming men." The author of that piece pulled out for other reasons, but she made it clear she knew that what she was saying would "start a shit storm."
Despite the rifts over gender identity, the overriding feeling at this conference seemed to be, after an initial bout of disorientation, sheer amazement: that we had found ourselves together again, after all these years, that we were able to pick up threads we had let fall long ago, that we were again having these vital conversations—that we actually had a venue for these conversations! U.S. writer Maureen Brady spoke of "the comfort of being among like-minded women, a feeling that grew in me as the time went on…It has often seemed that life nearly stopped after the movement stopped being a central force." Swiss writer Verena Stefan, who has a piece in this issue, was impressed by the quality of inter-generational dialogue, the way young women—in particular at the Jewish and African-American workshops she attended—approached their elders, with tremendous curiosity and admiration. Québecoise filmmaker Myriam Fougère seemed euphoric every time I ran into her, and said it was exciting to her to "see so many 'old' lesbians who keep creating as well as the time and their circumstances allows them. Each of us in her own way fidèle à elle même, creating a life that makes some sense…"
To return to the question I asked above: why shouldn't young lesbians choose to call themselves "queer" instead of "lesbian," given the lack of meaningful context for that word today? I suppose one reason would be the hope that such a context might regenerate, that a healthy lesbian-feminist culture might actually rise up again on the ruins of the one we began building some forty years ago. I have to admit it was the last thing I expected—but this conference gave me, as I suspect it did many others, a mighty dose of such hope.
#
A final note on the word "extinction." Sometime in August, as Betsy and I were beginning to pull this issue together, one of the contributors wrote to me to ask why, given the horrific ongoing losses of species, tribes and entire ecosystems, we would use this word for people who aren't actually extinct? It seemed to me an excellent question, and I found myself gnawing on it for quite awhile. In the face of so much actual extinction, was it disrespectful of us to be using that word in a mostly metaphorical sense?
Then I began to think more specifically about the writers in these two issues. It can't be denied that the words "extinct" and "extinction" have hit a nerve with them. To many of us it does feel that something precious and vital—a culture, a vision, a way of life—has been, is being, run out of existence. And it's not as if that precious thing has been around forever. ("Back when I came out," Lauren Crux writes, "we didn't exist then either. We have not had a long run. I'd like to linger just a bit longer.")
Add to this the terrifying fact, which I seem to bump up against more and more often, that our most radical voices are going—literally—silent. In just the last ten years: Monique Wittig (who makes a cameo appearance in this issue in fictional form in Stendhal's piece). Andrea Dworkin. Gloria Anzaldua. Jane Rule. Paula Gunn Allen. Mary Daly, to whom the last issue was dedicated. And, just this past summer, Michèle Causse (see my tribute in this issue). Even as I was beginning to write this editorial I received news that Jill Johnston (see Chocolate Waters' tribute in this issue) had died. The loss of these bold, inventive, visionary voices would perhaps not be so distressing if there were other fierce bright lights coming along to replace them. Though I'm sure there must be a number of them out there, I can't say I know of more than a very few myself.
This leads me to a final announcement, one that I have put off making because it grieves me to say it, knowing that it throws TRIVIA's future into uncertainty. With this issue, my involvement as editor ofTRIVIA: Voices of Feminism comes to an end. If the journal is to continue, others will need to step up to fill the role of editor, and to take over all the other tasks involved in getting these issues onto the web (please see the box at the end of this page). So if you're out there—you bold, visionary, energetic women!—now would be the time to make yourselves known.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
Betsy Warland
Within these two issues, several texts evoke the lesbian feminist volcano (ex(s)tinctus, to extinguish a fire or volcano) that fuelled a hotbed of politics, culture and art in the 1960s into the early 1990s. Alongside of us, many other marginalized peoples' politics, culture and art also erupted. This was a radical and euphoric time. After decades and centuries of suffocating containment, it was remarkable to feel that anything was possible. Yet, in these early years, our lesbian feminist movement in Canada was essentially a white volcano.
As women of color took their place, these eruptions multiplied within the feminist and lesbian feminist movements around issues of race and class. Looking back, it is apparent to me that we were a new culture, and like any young culture, we were too idealistic, even naïve. We did not possess the maturity or wisdom that we needed to navigate these multiple eruptions. Despite this, much was gained, realized, but much was not. And we stalled. And, in my opinion, we are still stalled.
Unlike gay men, who before they came out had previously occupied and controlled the public world – and continue to after they come out – we had not. And we still do not. We occupy the far smaller sphere of our domestic and intimate lives. As important and meaningful as this private sphere is, it puts too many expectations on our intimate relationships: expectations that arise from our larger visions of world. This pressure and frustration quickly turns into judging each other, rejecting and erasing one another. So quickly, that we rarely catch a glimpse of how we repeatedly undermine one another. With this issue, two writers decided against including their pieces in it because of concerns around judgment. And it is our loss. I believe it to be all of our loss.
Throughout TRIVIA 10 and 11, there is the relishing and honoring of our past as well as the tracking of quests for defining oneself in the present. A central question is: how do we create a sense of belonging now? For me, this belonging requires far deeper mutual respect for our differences and far more willingness to incorporate something men excel at: team work. Until we understand just how pivotal teamwork is in making things happen in the public world, the patriarchy has nothing to worry about. Teamwork tolerates differences, dislikes, even the occasional betrayal, for these are inevitable; what matters is a shared goal.
In Susan Faludi's recent Harper's essay, "American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide,"she tracks how feminists have not "figured out how to pass power down from woman to woman" historically. Nor, I would add, have we learned how to show respect to one another mutually. In Canada, lesbian feminist writers frequently acknowledge the influence of male writers and thinkers but rarely mention women writer or thinkers' names that I know to have also been crucial influences. Since the mid-90s, most Canadian lesbian feminists have quietly backed away from this identity as something that informs or inspires their work. It simply wasn't viable if you wanted to be even a moderately successful writer in Canada. Our lesbian feminist readership is small, pretty conventional; our grassroots feminist literary community withered away some time ago. The only solid ground was/is for the few lesbian feminist authors who are considered suitable for scholarly study within the academy. If not canonized nor tenured, the sheer tenacity and devotion required by lesbian feminist publishers and writers like TRIVIA founder and publisher Lise Weil is formidable.*
Quebec author Nicole Brossard has been and continues to be an inspiration for feminist lesbians in Quebec, Canada, North America and abroad. Simply said, I cannot imagine my writing life without Nicole's body of work. In her 2005 collection of essays, Nicole writes, "…it is my lesbian body which gave me the best ideas." In its fullness of being, the lesbian body is boundless. Boundless.
* I imagine I speak for many of us in thanking Lise (thunderous applause!) for creating a vigorous cultural site in which we can think, imagine and converse.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.