Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud
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battered women’s shelters, feminist health clinics, and self-defense classes with a feminist bent. The period from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s could be called the age of progressive institution-building: it saw the founding of long-lived, influential infrastructure, such as a movement-oriented advertising agency (the Public Media Center, 1974–2009), a radical philanthropic network (the Funding Exchange, operating between 1979–2013), a training institute for activists of color (the Center for Third World Organizing, founded in 1980), and an annual gathering of left intellectuals (the Socialist Scholars Conference, founded in 1983, renamed the Left Forum in 2005).12
A whole wave of activists, particularly from the identity-based movements, focused on the production and distribution of alternative media during this period. “There was this passion for getting information out,” recalled Carol Seajay, one of the founders of the Feminist Bookstore Network and the longtime publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, which remained in operation until 2000. Most of the underground papers of the sixties had died by the mid seventies, but new publications took their place—along with new publishing houses, and new bookstores to disseminate it all. A certain number of these media institutions were left or broadly radical: Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco and Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica (both founded in 1971; Midnight Special closed in 2004); Mother Jones magazine and the socialist weekly In These Times (both founded in 1976); the Center for Investigative Reporting (founded in 1977); the book publishers South End Press (1977–2014) and New Society Publishers (founded in 1982). But the biggest areas of growth were within the identity-based subcultures, most notably the feminist and gay movements. By 1976, there were enough gay newspapers to hold a gay press convention: staff members from nine East Coast papers, with a combined circulation of over 100,000, gathered at the offices of Gay Community News (1973–1992) in Boston to discuss common concerns. Later that year, more than 125 women—representing eighty feminist bookstores, periodicals, and publishing houses—gathered at a Camp Fire Girls Camp in Omaha, Nebraska for the first Women in Print Conference; by that point, there were an estimated 150 feminist presses and periodicals in existence.13
These institutions prided themselves on their independence, and saw their mission as explicitly political. “Control of our own voices and words is just as important as control of our bodies,” explained June Arnold, co-founder of the feminist publishing house Daughters, Inc., in 1976. Ed Hermance, the manager of Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, which opened in 1973 as one of the country’s first gay bookstores, offered a similar rationale. “When the store first opened, there were fewer than 100 titles that anybody could identify that might possibly be of interest to gays and lesbians,” he recalled. “The store was just about the only public space that people could go to. That’s what it did, was be a public space for lesbians and gay men.”14
Much about the radical/progressive political landscape in the United States was slowly but decisively shifting in this period of activist introspection. Movements might be smaller and weaker than they had been a decade earlier, but there were more of them, speaking in a greater array of voices. The idea of a single, unitary “left” was always more myth than reality, but that myth was becoming increasingly out of line with reality on the ground. First and foremost, the radical identity-based movements were here to stay; with the late sixties’ flush of street militancy behind them, some were turned inward, focused on self-exploration and cultural work, but they would remain fiercely committed to autonomy and self-representation. Issue-based movements and activist projects multiplied alongside them. “We’ve had a tremendous increase in both the number of demonstrations and the spectrum of issues,” the director of Washington, DC’s Mayoral Command Center noted in 1978. Where a handful of large mobilizations might have taken place in the nation’s capital in any given year a decade or so before, now there was a constant stream of protests, by groups that, in the Washington Post’s lively tally, included “farmers, American Indians, religious fundamentalists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, anti-abortionists, pro-abortionists, women’s libbers, anti–women’s libbers, gays, senior citizens, marijuana advocates [and] ban-the-bombers.”15
Not everyone on the left celebrated this growing diversity of causes and voices, feeling that some sense of shared political purpose had been lost amid the new radical cacophony. Journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote with sadness of “the sense of isolation that pervades the American left since the disappearance of a cohesive movement sensibility,” in a 1978 essay entitled, “What to Do Till the Movement Arrives.” He continued, “Some important social movements built around specific issues—minority rights, nuclear power, and sexual liberation—have deepened in recent years, but by and large they exclude those who deviate from the narrow genetic, preferential, or topical definitions of the movements, and provide little day-to-day work for … activists of a leftist or socialist cast.” This characterization of the new movements as “narrow,” and the related claim that they were fragmenting rather than augmenting the larger radical project, would be a recurring refrain for the next forty years. “The left”—the broad more-or-less socialist political tendency that saw economic relations as fundamental—might now be only one radical subculture among many, and one whose appeal was dwindling rather than expanding, but it would too often continue to view itself as broader and more universal than all the rest. (“When many people think of leftists,” quipped Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza in a 2014 interview with journalist Julia Wong, “they think of white men selling newspapers who are going to tell you what you should think and how you should make revolution happen now.”)16
There were interesting efforts to bridge the traditional left and what some were now calling the “new social movements,” including the journal Socialist Revolution (founded in 1970, renamed Socialist Review in 1978, folded in 2006) and the multi-issue New American Movement (founded in 1971), which merged with another left formation in 1982 to create Democratic Socialists of America, but none of these had wide impact or electrified a large following. That part of the left that called itself “the left” too often preferred to stay stubbornly unreconstructed, particularly in regard to gender. Well into the new millennium, many institutions of the socialist left, from conferences to publishing houses, remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, lagging far behind mainstream society. This dramatic underrepresentation of women—over decades in which women organizers, and the theory and practice of identity politics, were steadily reshaping much of the radical activist landscape—only served to give an anachronistic feel to certain segments of the socialist left and limit their relevance to movements on the ground. There was a nice irony in the fact that the biggest revival for socialist ideas after the sixties came through the Occupy movement of 2011, whose organizing practices were profoundly shaped by feminism and anarchism: political traditions are, after all, often renewed from the outside.17
And indeed, the closer one looks at the more radical of the “single-issue” movements of the early 1970s onward, the less single-minded or narrow they appear. Some or even many of the people who attended a given movement’s mass rallies or marches might be interested only in the issue at hand, but the core organizers invariably had a broader vision and critique. Anti-nuclear activists, for instance, weren’t simply concerned with the health and safety risks posed by nuclear power plants; they viewed the push toward nuclear power as an outgrowth of a toxic ideology of “progress” and “growth”—one which the traditional left too often shared. The committed organizers who most shaped the new wave of movements tended, moreover, to migrate from one movement to the next, creating deep political, tactical, and strategic continuities between what superficially appeared as disconnected issue-oriented campaigns.
The charges of narrowness and fragmentation were lodged most frequently against the identity-based movements. But during this same period, some were laying the foundation for a new critical approach to structures of power, one that focused heavily on the relations between different systems of domination and in the process fundamentally challenged older views of what was “universal” and what was “particular.” The group most often credited with coining the phrase “identity politics,” the Boston-based black lesbian and feminist Combahee River Collective (founded in 1974) paved the way. The collective was anchored by the writer and activist Barbara Smith, whose work throughout the 1980s as publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press would be enormously influential,