Companion to Feminist Studies. Группа авторов
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(Deevey 1975, p. 24). Deevey's position is one of several drivers of political lesbianism: radical feminist women who choose to devote their energies away from men and toward women; something articulated in 1981 by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists:
We do think all feminists can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman‐identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women … Attached to all forms of sexual behaviour are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation … [It] is specifically through sexuality that the fundamental oppression, that of men over women, is maintained.
(Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 1981, p. 5)
The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists argued that “Penetration is an act of great symbolic significance by which the oppressor enters the body of the oppressed” (p. 6) and that “Every woman who lives with or fucks a man helps to maintain the oppression of her sisters and hinders our struggle” (p. 7).
Separating physically, sexually, and emotionally from men became a way for radical feminists to free up resources and energies for the movement while also helping to dismantle a patriarchal institution.
Radical Feminism: Criticisms
Before discussing legacy and continued relevance, it is worth pausing to examine the enduring criticisms of radical feminism, some of which form the basis for why the movement's apex was reached over half a century ago and has not replicated since. While historically, all feminism has endured some battering in the media (Faludi 1991), radical feminism has endured a disproportionate share of negative coverage. Mackay for example, observes that “the image of the feminist as a man‐hating, hairy‐legged lesbian has achieved almost universal currency…” (Mackay 2015, p. 439). The most obvious explanation for this lies in the perception of extremism:
Radical feminism often seems to serve as the vessel or totem which signifies a feminism gone too far, an extreme example of feminism and a destination at which no sane person would presumably wish to arrive.
(Mackay 2015b, p. 334)
Radical feminism disrupts the status quo and demands that each institution that helps to maintain patriarchy is dismantled: such a revolution was, of course, widely viewed as unpopular, if not treasonous. Another criticism lay in the goals being viewed as simply untenable. Bryson for example, notes that “men cannot be simply ‘killed off’ in the same way as a class enemy might conceivably be; quite apart from humanitarian considerations, this would be a biological impossibility” (Bryson 2003, p. 173). While few radical feminists were actually advocating killing men,5 even the objective of dismantling patriarchy seems, for many, “naïve and simplistic” (Whisnant 2016, p. 68). Similarly, the personal is political catch‐cry has been criticized as narrow, self‐indulgent, individualist, and excessively focused on victimhood. In Sheila Rowbotham's Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action, she raises two further criticisms including the folly of sisterhood and the movement as insufficiently intersectional:
The idea of “women” as a unified group has been brought into question in a series of challenges to perspectives that ignored and denied the experience of groups such as lesbians, black women, working class women, aboriginal women, Jewish women, older women, disabled women, and many others.
(Rowbotham 1992, pp. 79–80)
Rowbotham argues that clustering all woman under one banner – overlooks that factors other than sex may be more important than sex in identity formation. Some scholars have even spotlighted that sex might in fact thwart or inhibit bonding, contending that sisterhood is, in fact, at odds with women's lived experiences and that womanhood is an “invented” rather than natural category (Weisser and Fleischner 1994, p. 2). Several scholars also argue that women can and do oppress each other (Fouche 1994; Bryson 2003). These ideas also link to the broader criticism of radical feminism as insufficiently intersectional, and as artificially deeming sex as the central source of oppression over other factors. Walby for example, spotlights radical feminism's “false universalism which cannot understand historical change or take sufficient account of divisions between women based on ethnicity and class” (Walby 1986, p. 3). Rebecca Whishnant also addresses this:
According to its critics, radical feminism does not engage sufficiently with women's diversity (along racial and other lines), nor does it acknowledge and analyze multiple intersecting systems of oppression.
(Whisnant 2016, p. 68)
While Whisnant counters this assertion – contending that some radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin were, in fact, writing about intersectionality – nonetheless the perceived whiteness of radical feminism has persisted as a critique.
Since the 1980s, with the rise of postmodernism and the mainstreaming of scholarship like queer theory, the stranglehold of biological understandings of sex has waned. Bryson for example, notes that “postmodernism does not only stress the differences amongst women and the consequential dangers of generalising about their situation, it also questions the underlying assumption (common to all ‘modernist’ feminists) that it is meaningful to talk about ‘women’ and ‘men’ at all” (Bryson 2003, p. 173–174). Postmodernism's critique of the usefulness of biology and gender has become a key component of much modern theory and contemporary critiques of radical feminism. Debates around transgenderism illustrate this particularly well.
The Transgender Challenge
In 2014, Time magazine ran a cover story titled “The Transgender Tipping Point,” accompanied by a photo of transgender actress Laverne Cox (Steinmetz 2014). This article signified a watershed moment in not only transgender activism but visibility. That same year, transgender activist Janet Mock's memoir Redefining Realness became a bestseller. It was also in 2014 that Jeffreys's book Gender Hurts was published. Jeffreys's position is that transgenderism – in practice and ideology – is harmful:
[T]ransgenderism is but one way in which “gender” hurts people and societies. Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an “essence” of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities. This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination.
(Jeffreys 2014, p. 1)
Among transgender activists, Jeffreys's book remains heavily criticized. Goldberg discusses this clash between radical feminism and the rise of transgenderism in the New Yorker:
Ordinarily, Jeffreys told me, she would launch the publication of a new book with an event at the university, but this time campus security warned against it. She has also taken her name off her office door. She gave a talk in London this month, but it was invitation‐only.
(Goldberg 2014, n.p.)
Criticism of transgenderism of course, did not start with Gender Hurts. Jeffreys credits the publication of Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire (1980) as being an early inspiration. Even earlier than Raymond, Morgan positioned herself as an early TERF (Trans‐Exclusionary Radical Feminist) in 1973 in a speech given at a lesbian conference following a performance by a transgender musician:
I will not call a male “she”; thirty‐two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers' names and in our own, we must not call him sister
(in Goldberg 2014, n.p.).
With radical feminism already seeming “passé in feminist circles” (Whisnant 2016, p. 68), compounded with the rise of identity politics6