Living a Feminist Life, Chapter 9: “Lesbian Feminism”
“I write this chapter out of a conviction: in order to survive what we come up against, in order to build worlds from the shattered pieces, we need a revival of lesbian feminism. This chapter is an explanation of my conviction.” (213)
“Lesbian feminism might seem to be passé precisely because lesbian feminism posed feminism as a life question. Many of the critiques of lesbian feminism, often as a form of cultural feminism, were precisely because of this attachment to life.” (213)
“Lesbian feminism can bring feminism back to life.” (214)
“[L]iving as a lesbian is how I live a feminist life.” (214)
“If living a lesbian life gives us data, lesbian feminism gives us the tools to interpret that data.” (215)
“In chapter 2, I offered a rethinking of heterogender as a traffic system, a way of directing human traffic. When a flow is directed, it becomes a momentum. In chapter 6, I began to rethink the materiality of power in terms of walls, the hardening of history. We can rethink heterogender as another brick wall, one that is encountered by those who are not going in the right direction. When you are not going the right way, a flow is an obstruction. Lesbians know a lot about obstruction.” (215)
“Feminist philosophers have taught us for over a century how man becomes universal; women particular. Women become relatives, only registered as existing when existing in relation to men. We can now deepen the formulation I offered in chapter 6: women as female relatives. To become woman is to become relative: not only in the sense of kin (connected by blood or marriage) but also in the fundamental sense of considered (only) in relation or proportion to something else.” (215)
“Living a Lesbian Life,” Sara Ahmed, Lesbian Lives conference, February 20, 2015, University of Brighton
“I speak today from a conviction: in order to survive what we come up against, in order to build worlds from the shattered pieces, we need a revival of lesbian feminism. This lecture is an explanation of my conviction.
Right now might seem an odd time to ask for such a revival. It might seem we are offered more by the happiness of the queer umbrella. I think the erasure of lesbians as well as lesbian feminism (often via the assumption that lesbian feminism is a naïve form of “identity politics”) would deprive us of some of the resources we need because of what is not over, what is not behind us. In some recent queer writing, lesbian feminism appears as a miserable scene that we had to get through, or pass through, before we could embrace the happier possibility of becoming queer. For instance, Paul Preciado (2012) in a lecture on queer bulldogs refers to lesbians as ugly with specific reference to styles, fashions and haircuts. The lesbian appears here as elsewhere as an abject figure we were all surely glad to have left behind. I suspect this referencing to the ugliness of lesbians is intended as ironic, even playful. But of course much contemporary sexism and homophobia is ironic and playful. I don’t find it particularly amusing.
We need to refuse this passing by holding onto the figure of the lesbian feminist as a source of political potential. Lesbian feminism can bring feminism back to life. Many of the critiques of lesbian feminism, often as a form of “cultural feminism,” were precisely because of how lesbian feminists posed feminism as a life question, as a question of how to live. Alice Echols in her book Daring to be Bad, which gives a history of radical feminism in the United States, describes: “With the rise of lesbian-feminism, the conflation of the personal with the political, long in the making was complete and unassailable. More than ever, how one lived one’s life, not commitment to political struggle, became the salient factor” (1989: 240) Note this not: the question of how we live our lives is separated from a commitment to political struggle; more than that, it is implied that focusing on living our lives would be a withdrawal of energy from political struggle. We can hear a similar implication in Juliet Mitchell and Rosalind Delmar’s argument: “the effects of liberation do not become the manifestations of liberation by changing values or for the matter by changing oneself, but only by challenging the social structure that gives rise to the values in the first place” (cited in Echols 1989: 244). The suggestion is not only that life change is not structural change but that focusing on how one lives one’s life might be how structures are not transformed.”
…
“Arms can be beaten; they can be straightened. Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinity notes with some surprise how Havelock Ellis uses the arm as a gender test in the case of Miss M : ‘Miss M. he thinks, tries to cover over her masculinity but gives herself away to Ellis when he uses a rather idiosyncratic test of gender identification: “with arms, palmed up, extended in front of her with inner sides touching, she cannot bring the inner sides of the forearms together as nearly every woman can, showing that the feminine angle of the arm is lost”’ (1998: 80). If the muscular female arm is measured by a straightening rod, the arm is not straightened. An arm becomes a wayward gift.
So maybe I am thinking too of your arms, your strong butch arms and what they can do, who they can hold. I think of being held by your arms. Yes, I do.
Judith Butler includes the arm in a list of limbs that can symbolise the phallus. Although I always have had sympathy for Judith Butler’s ‘The Lesbian Phallus’ (1993: 88), and by this I mean her argument, I wonder if we make arms into phallic symbols, that we might miss lesbian arms in all their fleshy potential.”
Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998)
“[T]hinking of postmodernism as produced within institutional limits is precisely to understand the contested nature of its knowledges and boundaries.” (7)
Arguing against philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of storytelling in The Postmodern Condition:
”But while the naming process [in Cashinahua cultural narratives] is intrinsic to the narrative and organises the positions of the subjects of the narrative, this passage opens up points of excess and contextualisation. The assignment of the patronym (naming from the father) brings into play the narrative's constitution within a broader social structure organised around the authority of the father. In this sense, the positions of the narrator and the hero are not ̄uid, open or determined `simply' by the pragmatics of the narrative's transmission, but are over-determined by the social divisions of power which assign the proper name (as transcendental signifer) to the male. This closure or delimitation simultaneously takes place in narrative (the assignment of the patronymic name) and beyond narrative (in the gendering of subject positions within institutions). The transmission of the narrative takes place then within a social context which becomes intrinsic to its effect. This blurs the distinction between the intrinsic and extrinsic which Lyotard uses to exclude an analysis of social structures (age, sex, family, professional group). Such contradictions enable us to expose the text's reliance on a separation of linguistic exchange from broader structures of social differentiation in his model of narrative pragmatics. The authority of the storyteller becomes inseparable from (even if it remains irreducible to) the authority of the father and the passing of the father's name.” (11)
“The method of analysis employed by The Postmodern Condition hence involves the construction of the values of difference and fluidity (narrative pragmatics) against structure and regulation (institutions). What is clear through my reading of Lyotard's postmodernism as having a method, is that such texts invest postmodernism with particular meanings and values in the event of describing it. So while certain concepts and values are normally taken as reference points for postmodernism (postmodernism is difference, fluidity, indeterminacy), we can now read them as in construction, as being organised into particular narratives and methods…[P]ostmodernism involves particular ways of organising or ordering such concepts and values in the process of constructing itself as an object.” (12)