From sex deviants to gender rebels

Mitchell (1971) argued that all forms of second-wave feminism can be traced to the same radicalising context:

Although the recent chronological development ran from Blacks, Students and Hippies to women, I think that the common context just described [the US Civil Rights movement] produced them all, enabling one movement to exist in a country in which another does not. This common context has been crucial in the formation of Women's Liberation. It is this context which establishes a break with earlier feminism, and which establishes the struggle against oppression as a revolutionary one ... (Mitchell, 1971: 36)

During the 1960s, many young women became involved in lesbian lifestlyes through the hippy movement (Faderman, 1991: 203) or through European or US New Left movements (Hollibaugh, 1980: 205-208; Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 30-32; Faderman, 1991: 204). Lesbians quickly became dissatisfied with these environments, however.

Like the hippie movement, the Left was countercultural and radical on the surface, but its attitude toward women was no more liberated than that of the conservatives. The women of the Left who became interested in feminism when the movement was reborn in the mid-1960s had honed their analytical tools through New Left debate and literature . . . When they tried to raise women's issues in leftist groups such as SNCC and the National Conference for New Politics and were unsuccessful, they were convinced that they could no longer work complacently with males of the New Left. They would have to begin meeting separately if they wished to focus on those issues. (Faderman, 1991: 204)

Lesbians within established homophile groups such as DOB were also radicalising in this more militant context. Many had begun comparing themselves with other forms of New Left militancy such as the student and Black Power movements (Faderman, 1991: 193-196).

Articles slowly began to appear in The Ladder comparing lesbians to other oppressed minorities, and the rhetoric escalated as the decade progressed. By 1968, the readership was exhorted, in the language of other militant movements, to do battle against the enemies of women in general and lesbians specifically. (Faderman, 1991: 193)

In the United States, the Stonewall riot coalesced this process of radicalisation into a specifically gay militancy:

A handful of activists, made militant by the general militance of the '60s, had the foresight and imagination immediately to seize upon the riots, which had been started by more flamboyant and working-class homosexuals, and present them as an event that heralded a new gay militant movement of justified fury. (Faderman, 1991: 195)

New publications and organisations proliferated and brought more lesbians from the New Left into gay liberation (Faderman, 1991: 197). Initially, radical lesbians took a collaborative attitude towards militant forms of gay liberation:

It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behaviour possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanise women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. (Radicalesbians, 1970: 17)

Collaboration between radical lesbians and Gay Liberation came under stress very quickly, however. In the US, lesbians frequently became frustrated at liberal gay rights agendas which focused on civil inequalities of primary concern to male gays.

They complained that gay reformists pursued solutions that made no basic changes in the system that oppressed lesbians as women and their reforms would keep power in the hands of the oppressors. (Faderman, 1991: 211)

The British GLF articulated a more revolutionary approach (Watney, 1980), but the British New Left saw feminism as 'divisive:'

We have both independently been accused by men on the left of having betrayed our socialism and of living in a lesbian feminist ghetto. We have been urged to set aside such bourgeois individualism and to get back to the 'real thing' which is fighting the class struggle ...

... Even gay men are inscribed within it. Not only are many of them misogynists, but their bonding together as men does little to challenge patriarchal consciousness, and some of them appear to share with all males a resistance to understanding feminist consciousness. (Jackson and Mahony, 1980: 137-138)

Many lesbians moved away from this 'political dead-end in terms of women's liberation' and 'in the direction of revolutionary feminism' (Jackson and Mahony, 1980: 139).

In France, the 'new feminisms' were also "steeped in Marxist culture" (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: xi). Radical feminists redeployed the tools of their dialectical training in "an attempt to formulate a theory that would combat women's absence from the patriarchal discourses of Marxism and account for women's specificity" (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: xii). 

Within the American WLM, heterosexual feminists pressured lesbians to remain silent about their sexuality for fear of reinforcing the stigmatisation of feminism as the bitter and twisted ranting of penis-envious lesbians. The advent of gay liberation increased these lesbians' consciousness of their oppression as lesbians. Consciousness-raising groups provided an ongoing forum for militant lesbians in the US to explore the specificities of lesbian women's oppression.

Many 1970s feminists were encouraged in their exploration of lesbianism through consciousness-raising (CR) groups ... women often came to believe that men were kept in power as a group because of women's nurturing, subordinate personal relations with them. It was heterosexuality that supported male supremacy. (Faderman, 1991: 208)

A meeting was called in 1970 between GLF lesbians and lesbians in the feminist movement to discuss the discriminatory narrowness of the liberal agenda of the broader women's movement.

[It was] historic in that it was the first meeting of radical young Lesbians without gay men, the first time Gay Liberation Front women had met with Lesbians from the women's movement, and the first time Lesbians from the women's movement had met each other as Lesbians. (Love and Abbot, 1985: 113)

The first resolution of the Lavender Menace Manifesto (produced by lesbians involved in the 1970 meeting) was:

Be it resolved that Women's Liberation is a Lesbian plot. (Love and Abbot, 1985: 115)

In the context of a militant black separatism, the lesbian separatist movement was formed (Tallen, 1983; Hess et al, 1980):

As for the women's movement, almost from the beginning there was radical and separatist opposition to the reformist and male-female integrationist National Organisation for Women ... Radical feminists learned from the example of racial separatists ... [T]he militant understanding that racism/sexism were supported by the real interests of a certain element of society went hand in hand with the separatist tactic of not working politically with that element. For racial separatists that element was whites. For feminist separatists it was men. (Hess et al, 1980: 126)

Similarly, tensions within the French Women's Liberation Movement (MLF) led to a separatist movement modelled on the US, for which Monique Wittig was temporarily the spokeswoman:

The "Féministes révolutionnaires," was formed in 1970 ... [and] were devoted to the total destruction of the patriarchal order. They adopted the American model of consciousness-raising groups ... to allow each woman to speak, to eliminate the possibility of the most skilled speaker taking over (which was what was happening at the general assemblies of the MLF) ... (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 33)

Lesbian feminists now "emphatically rejected the notion that they were part of a homosexual minority" (Faderman, 1991: 207). Rather than advocating assimilation, the radicalised lesbian-feminist movement launched a fundamental critique of the institution of heterosexuality itself.

Their decision to become lesbian-feminists stemmed from their disillusionment with the male-created world and their hope of curing its ills ... (Faderman, 1991: 216)

Rejecting biologistic accounts, separatists began to recast lesbianism as an elective, counter-identificatory, mode of resistance to patriarchy. This expanded the field of lesbianism considerably.

There were probably more lesbians in America during the 1970s than any other time in history, because radical feminism had helped redefine lesbianism to make it almost a categorical imperative for all women truly interested in the welfare and progress of other women. (Faderman, 1991: 207)

A second generation of lesbian feminists came to lesbianism through this radical feminist movement (Faderman, 1991: 216). This expansion engendered a wave of new feminist publications, projects, and activism (Faderman, 1991: 219). But the rejection of previous forms of lesbianism by a second generation of radical lesbian-feminists, together with their radical critique of heterosexuality, generated conflict between generations of lesbians, as well as between lesbians and heterosexual feminisms, and between lesbians and gays (Faderman, 210-214). As the decade progressed, the diversity of lesbian discourses would reassert itself — both from within and without. Lesbians would polarise over issues of race and community, heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, role-playing, and sado-masochism. Until the codification of queer discourse at the very end of the 1980s, however, all of these dissenting fields within lesbianism and feminism would continue to refer their dissent to the discourse of radical feminism.

Faultlines in the second wave

Many would regard (lesbian) radical feminism as absolutely distinct from Marxist- or Socialist-feminist perspectives. Of course, the aims and strategies of diverse feminisms are not merely distinctive but often conflict. An 'orthodox' Marxist-feminist discourse was articulated "without challenging the primacy of production implied by the orthodox model ..." (Benhabib and Cornell, 1987: 2). The influential French radical feminists, on the other hand, articulated their critiques not through an orthodox (linear-determinist and empiricist) Marxist framework but in terms of a post-structuralist discourse already engaged in a project of deconstructing ideology, language and subjectivity (see Weedon's overview, 1987: 19-73; Wittig, 1980: 21-24). This is, of course, the same discursive field which produced French and British film theory (Easthope, 1991: 16-43; Stam et al, 1992: 18-27). 

With its more diffuse origins in a culture with strongly empiricist traditions, US radical feminist discourse refers itself to a far more generalised framework of women's 'experience:'

For feminist thinkers of the present era the first and most fundamental act of our own emancipation was granting ourselves authority as perceivers, and we accomplished this act by discovering agreement in the experiences and perceptions of women. (Frye, 1990: 176)

Nevertheless, US radical feminism directly inspired the avowedly lesbian forms of French Feminism (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 33-36). 

British feminists tend to distinguish between a (largely lesbian) radical/revolutionary feminism which attempts a radical break with patriarchal models and a (largely heterosexual) socialist feminism with its belief that the discursive tools of post-structuralist Marxism can be used to provide feminist analyses (Mitchell, 1971). A similar divide can be observed in French feminism. Anglo-American radical feminism is, of course, the form of feminism most commonly associated with lesbianism:

Historically, radical feminists have been those who are members of or who identify with a lesbian-feminist community that rejects male-dominated heterosexual sex. (Ferguson et al, 1984: 106)

Within French Feminism, it was the revolutionary strand which was associated specifically with lesbianism:

The lesbians among the members of the "Féministes révolutionnaires" were convinced that only a lesbian position could withstand appropriation by a patriarchal, capitalist society. (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 33)

Feminist critiques of patriarchal culture, seen as articulating a communality of female experience and a specifically female cultural perspective, are often bundled together as 'cultural feminism' (for example, Showalter, 1986: 263), particularly in the USA. On the other hand, an 'essentialist' cultural feminism may also be regarded as distinct from 'constructionist' radical feminism (Kimball, 1981: 3; Dyer, 1990: 179; Code, 1991: 80-81). 

Despite their differences, French feminism and the forms of British feminism which it influenced share with Anglo-American radical feminism a primary focus in gender-difference, as opposed to an 'orthodox' Marxist focus on productivity/reproductivity. I am not concerned here with the minutiae of feminist disputes but with the common constructs to which conflicting second-wave feminisms refer their differences. I shall therefore follow some influential feminist literary theorists (for example, Moi, 1985; Sedgwick, 1985; Showalter, 1986) in acknowledging their differences and conflicts and yet treating Anglo-American radical feminisms, French feminisms and socialist-feminisms as mutually productive rhetorical strategies within the discursive formation of second-wave feminism:

At the core of this feminist project lies the claim of solidarity or common cause among women as a group across lines of religion, class, race, and other historically significant divisions ... It bears emphasis that this was from the beginning a call for solidarity, not a description of reality. (Offen, 1990: 13)

[I]f the notion of class distinction is correctly, i.e., dialectically posited - that is based on the reality of oppressive dynamics instead of on a static content analysis - it can be said that all women belong to the same social class - [this] along with the breaking away from naturalist ideology - is the primary condition for any feminist struggle ... (Questions Féministes Editorial Collective, 1977; reprinted in Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 216)

Although ... consciousness-raising groups on the American model are virtually non-existent in France ... the concern with blatant acts of oppression against women and with the institutionalization of sexism is the same among feminists of both countries. (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 10)

'French' and 'radical' feminism differ on very many very important issues ... they are alike in seeing all human culture, language, and life as structured in the first place ... by a drama of gender difference. (Sedgwick, 1985: 11)

In many ways, the direct experience that led to the formation of the first French women's groups in the summer of 1968 was strikingly similar to that of the American women's movement ... Predictably enough, they took their cue from American women and started to form their own women-only groups ... Once the Anglo-American reader has overcome the effects of ... culture-shock, however, it doesn't take long to discover that French theory has contributed powerfully to the feminist debate about the nature of women's oppression, the construction of sexual difference and the specificity of women's relations to language and writing. (Moi, 1985: 95-6)

To date, most commentary on French feminist critical discourse has stressed its fundamental dissimilarity from the empirical American orientation, its unfamiliar intellectual grounding in linguistics, Marxism, neo-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derridean deconstruction. Despite these differences, however, the new French feminisms have much in common with radical American feminist theories in terms of intellectual affiliations and rhetorical energies. (Showalter, 1986: 248)

I am, of course, aware that radical feminist discourse represents a very specific strand of 1970s/1980s lesbianism which was, in social-historical terms, far more diverse. Although it clearly did not by any means represent all lesbians, lesbian-feminist discourse and its separatist communities dominated lesbian life (whether lived as conformity or dissent) during the 1970s and into the 1980s.

While their community encompassed only a fraction of American women who loved women, it was their image of lesbianism that dominated the 1970s, since they felt freer than the other women to present themselves through the media. (Faderman, 1991: 218)

Gyn/Ecology is probably the most important and influential single work to come out of the American women's movement since Kate Millet's Sexual Politics ... It is influential because has been read by an enormous number of women, because it elicits positive responses from feminists who might not otherwise agree on anything else, and because it has helped to shape at least some of the broad debates in the women's movement for quite some time. (Morris, 1988: 28)

In any event, second-wave feminist theory as a whole has, by now, been repositioned by postmodernist theorists as effectively falling back into an essentialising discourse of gender, whatever its original intention (Morris, 1988: 28-50; Fuss, 1990; Butler, 1990; Jeffreys, 1994, 97-120). 

The fragmentation of identities [which postmodernism] proposes, specifically the dissolution of the category women, threatens the historical feminist project ... The category women is essential in relation to the equally essential category men. This dualism persists in our sexed bodies and in our cultural constructions of their meaning. (Offen, 1990: 15)

The [postmodernist] version of gender the lesbianandgay theorists are presenting is a far cry from the understanding of gender which other feminist theorists might have. (Jeffreys, 1993: 98)

As such, these postmodern forms of feminism represent a fundamental break with the underlying continuities of second-wave feminist discourse.

Female bonding in the feminist field of vision

The radical feminist trope of 'female bonding' was crucial to lesbian-feminism. This trope becomes most intelligible when seen as effecting a resignification of conceptualisations of male bonding as fundamental to the organisation of patriarchal language, culture and economy which originated in structural-anthropology and psychoanalysis. These posited an originary symbolic exchange of women between men which founds transpersonal (social) male relationships and by which 'the woman' becomes merely the symbolic object of an exclusively male cultural exchange:

[The gift] is an ubiquitous means of social commerce ... marriages are a most basic form of gift exchange, in which it is women who are the most precious of gifts ... [T]he incest taboo should best be understood as a mechanism to insure that such exchanges take place between families and between groups. (Rubin, 1975: 173)

All forms of cultural exchange are thus said to be founded in this primary relationship between men which is secured by the exchange of women. In the radical-feminist view, this was the origin of the de-subjectivisation of women as they became the objects of that exchange which constituted men as linguistic subjects. Thus, male subjectivity is structurally dependent upon the objectification of women.

In psychoanalytic accounts of male subjectivity, the alienation of the boy child's primary (incestuous) bond in identification with the mother, and its re-alignment with patriarchal culture, is crucial:

The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It binds not only a person's narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow-men. (Freud, 1914: 32-3)

In Lacanian terms, the phallus is not a physical penis but merely a trope which stands in for the homosocial bond between men — a homosocial bond which never entirely succeeds in eradicating a trace of homoeroticism. 

The function of what Lacan called "the third term" is to institute a gendered exchange as it repositions the pre-gendered subject of the mother-centred diad to a gendered identification in a patriarchal culture which is instituted in relations of exchange (of signs). The symbol objectifies the signified and mediates a relation between subject and signified and separating man from the world because the relation of signifiers is to other signifiers and not directly to the material world. A metaphor replaces a signifier with another signifier but ultimately all signs are metaphors or metonyms because of the mediating effect of language. 

Lemaire (1977) explicates the origin of Lacan's symbolic order as an autonomous domain of discourse produced in this intra-male exchange:

Symbolism is, then, an order of values which is different from all reality: the order of the signifiers ... [is] the effect of a pact, an alliance or a convention as a token of mutual recognition between subjects (Lemaire, 1977: 55).

Relations between men will be mediated by discourse or, to be more precise, by the concepts it engenders. In the domain of social symbolism, the third term which mediates between the living will be the Ancestor, the Dead, God, the Sacred Cause, the Institution, Ideology, etc. (Lemaire, 1977: 60)

Man can only become a gendered social subject by inserting himself into language. But it is the nature of signification that it is different from that which is signified. That is, it signifies the absence of the signified, and estrangement from the 'real.' As he finds himself only in the symbolic, the third or mediating term. man is always a being by and for other men. 

The father (that is, the law of the father) first appears as the agent of the prohibition of incest. This is the foundation of the symbolic in instituting exchange, because without defining human relations through this prohibition there would be no exchange (of women) and thus no ordering of kinship relationships — that is, no social or economic order at all. At the resolution of the Oedipal conflict, the boy-child re-aligns himself with the phallus, participating in its power to order discourse.

The resolution of the Oedipus liberates the subject by giving him, with his Name, a place in the family constellation, an original signifier of self and subjectivity. It promotes him in his realisation of self through participation in the world of culture, language and civilisation. (Lemaire, 1977: 83)

The feminine figures in this patriarchal language system merely as that which is different from the male (that which 'lacks' the phallus) — that is, as the structural negation of masculine subjectivity. The binary terms of presence/absence structure the order of representation in patriarchal culture.

Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. (Mulvey, 1975: 64)

Freud's own texts, particularly "The Uncanny", theorize the gaze as a phallic activity linked to the anal desire for sadistic mastery of the object. The specularizing philosopher is the potent master of his insight; as the example of Oedipus demonstrates, the fear of blindness is the fear of castration. As long as the master's scopophilia (i.e. "love of looking" remains satisfied, his domination is secure ... If our theorist were to think the feminine, he might find himself tumbling from his phallic lighthouse into the obscurity of the dark continent. (Moi, 1985: 134 – emphasis hers.)

Radical feminism thus confronted a fundamental problem of representation. The male-to-male bond, sealed by the exchange of women (as commodities), negates the feminine and vitiates positive representation of women (as strong or active). For lesbians, the conceptual problem seems still more acute, as Irigaray ironically points up:

The trade that organizes patriarchal societies takes place exclusively among men. Women, signs, goods, currency, all pass from one man to another or - so it is said - suffer the penalty of relapsing into the incestuous and exclusively endogamous ties that would paralyze all commerce. The work force, products, even those of mother-earth, would thus be the object of transactions among men only. This signifies that the very possibility of the socio-cultural order would necessitate homosexuality. Homosexuality is the law that regulates the socio-cultural order. Heterosexuality amounts to the assignment of roles in the economy: some are given the role of producing and exchanging subjects, while others are assigned the role of productive earth and goods ...

Female homosexuality exists, nevertheless. But it is admitted only in as far as it is prostituted to the fantasies of men ... It would be out of the question for them to go to the 'market' alone, to profit from their own value, to talk to each other, to desire each other, without the control of the selling-buying-consuming subjects ... But what if the 'goods' refused to go to 'market'? What if they maintained among themselves 'another' kind of trade? (Irigaray, 1977: 107-110)

Homosexuality (desire for an object of the same-sex) may be opposed to homosociality (Sedgwick, 1985: 1); although this is a distinction which is lost in translation of Irigaray's pun (hom(m)osexualité = homo/same and homme/man). Although male-same-sex relations order patriarchal society, male-same-sex eroticism is forbidden because it is disruptive of this exchange (of women) between men.

Why then consider masculine homosexuality as an exception, while in fact it is the very basis of the general economy? Why exclude homosexuals, when society postulates homosexuality? ... By interpreting openly the law of social functioning, they risk indeed the displacement of its horizon. Moreover, they bring into question the nature, the status, the "exogamic" necessity of proceeds from trade. By short-circuiting the commercial transactions, would they also expose what is really at stake in such dealings? ... When the penis itself becomes simply a means for pleasure, and indeed a means of pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Pleasure, so it is said, should be left to women, those creatures so unfit for the seriousness of symbolic rules. (Irigaray, 1977: 108 - emphasis hers)

The degree to which homosexuality may participate in or disrupt patriarchal homosociality is a matter for feminist dispute (Jeffreys, 1993: 148-149; Frye, 1983: 143; Sedgwick, 1985: 6-7). But what was most important for lesbian feminism was that, in these psychoanalytic terms, lesbianism could be seen only as a doubly 'inverted' mimesis of male homosexuality. Jeffreys saw the "the rejection of the sexological construction of lesbianism" as "fundamental" to 1970s lesbian feminism (1994: viii). Radical feminism was concerned to address the ways in which the inversionary model had been deployed to reinforce the exclusion of persons designated feminine from the proactive or authoritative use of language by virilising all forms of lesbian and feminist resistance (Rich, 1980; Faderman, 1981; Frye, 1983).

To separate those women stigmatized as 'homosexual' or 'gay' from the complex continuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history. (Rich, 1980: 21)

Despite a degree of economic and political enfranchisement achieved by first-wave feminism, proactivity in women could still only be received as a mimicry of masculinity. A woman whose behaviour is proactive within a male institution (such as academia) may gain a credible authority through aligning herself with the master term but becomes commensurately problematic to the patriarchal category of femininity. Authoritative speech cannot proceed from the place of the woman. She can speak authoritatively only from a position of male (professionalised) authority:

Confronted with the dissonant appearance of a female person in a situation where [the phallicist] is unable to block out the fact that she is a person, he blocks out the fact that she is female. (Frye, 1983: 48)

This problematic informed socialist-feminist negotiations in film-studies such as that of masquerade theory (Doane, 1982). The anxieties revealed through the discussion of 'power dressing' which accompanied an influx of women into lower management positions of the 1980s cited the same fundamental problem of how to be active and feminine at the same time (Garber, 1992: 41-66). 

The stereotypical butch fielded a confrontational style of negotiation. Lesbian feminisms, on the contrary, sought a complete break with negotiations which reproduced the exclusion of women per se from meaningful discourse by virilising proactive women — whether such virilisation is masked by a compensatory display of overheated heterosexual femininity (masquerade) or willingly adopted as a stigmatised (butch) identification. From a lesbian point of view, it was also of primary importance that the objectifying mode of the male exchange not only prevented women from representing themselves in the dominant culture, but also from signifying to one another.

[T]here is ... a mortal dread of being outside the field of vision of the arrogant eye. That eye gives all things meaning by connecting all things to each other by way of their references to one point - Man. We fear that if we are not in that web of meaning there will be no meaning: our work will be meaningless, our lives of no value, our accomplishments empty, our identities illusory ... for most of us ... a woman existing outside the field of vision of man's arrogant eye is really inconceivable. (Frye, 1983: 80)

Heterosexual femininity began to be perceived as collusion with the production of femininity as 'to be looked-at-ness' which played a role in maintaining the patriarchal significatory system because it referred itself to masculinity as its negation. Lesbian feminists took the view that the phallic gaze might be most effectively challenged by somehow re-orienting, or re-referring, practices of female identification to other women.

For those who are ... threatened, the presence of women to each other is experienced as an absence. Such women are no longer empty receptacles to be used as "the Other," and are no longer internalizing the projections that cut off the flow of being. Men who need such projection screens experience the power of absence of such "objects" and are thrown into the situation of perceiving nothingness. (Daly, 1973: 41-42)

Woman-identified lesbianism was thus seen as the fundamental praxis of radical-feminist theory. Heterosexuality began to appear not as nature, nor even as the precondition of constructing a social identity, but as nothing more than the systematic exercise of techniques of male power over women. If the woman could not be disentangled from the nets of patriarchal language, however, a female focus on the feminine could only achieve a fall into nothingness. In order to move the world, the lesbian-feminist project had to create a — discursive — place to stand.

Although Irigaray's ironical opening out of psychoanalytical models of gender was clearly influential, the agendas of French revolutionary (lesbian) feminism were much closer to US radical feminism (Questions Féministes, #1, editorial reprinted in Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 216; Rosenfeld, 1986) and their mutual influence was considerable. This was partly because Wittig and the revolutionary feminists shared the Anglo-American feminists' antipathy towards Freudianism (Mitchell, 1974: xv; Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 33), and partly because they also shared an emphasis on the materiality of ideology and on historical agency (Fuss, 1990: 41). It was this emphasis on agency, as much as an epistemological reliance on the category of 'the woman' which provoked dismissal as a bourgeois-humanist tendency by heterosexual feminists on the left, notably Kristeva (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 31-33).

Wittig's lesbian may, on the contrary, be argued to occupy the most radically constructionist position offered in lesbian-feminist theory. Wittig argued that if 'the woman' is to be defined by her dependence on the master category of men then lesbians, who are neither economically nor sexually dependent upon men are by definition not women — or at least represent a rather significant lacuna in patriarchal reality.

Lesbian is the only concept I know which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man ... a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. (Wittig, 1981: 20)

Lesbianism might thus be resignified as the 'third term' of feminism. (Fuss, 1990: 42)

Lesbianism, then, offered a discursive space outside of patriarchal language in which 'the woman' could be radically reconstructed.

It has been argued that Wittig nevertheless effected a essentialising and thus universalising construct of the lesbian (Butler, 1990; Fuss, 1990). It is important to note, howver, that Wittig's lesbian is not actually sexed. That is, Wittig's model of the lesbian is not the kind of feminine-essentialising construct which other French feminist uses of the sign of 'the feminine' have often been criticised for reproducing (Questions Féministes Editorial Collective, 1977: 218-219; Moi, 1985: 134-149; Fuss, 1990: 56-7). Instead, this lesbian space outside of gendered reality (niether a really female nor really male) is seen as offering the potential to deconstruct the false binary of gender.

US radical feminism posited lesbianism not as gender-inversionary nor as mimicry of male homosexuality but as a radical reversal of homosociality. The crucial trope of 'woman-identification' or female-bonding offered a ground for a radical restructuring not merely of lesbian identity, but of patriarchal reality itself. Daly (1979: 19, 327) referred to Wittig's (1975) model of the discursive production of sex in setting out to figure not merely a putative outside from patriarchal language, but to construct an alternative, feminist, 'metalanguage' with 'the lesbian' as its transcendental signifier. She attempted this through a discursive process of rendering the oppressive and exclusionary homosociality of the "planetary Men's Association" (326) more transparent to women:

For she must not only know the works of The Masters; she must go much further. She must see through them and make them transparent to other Voyagers as well. (Daly, 1979: xiv)

Morris (1988) argued that Daly, unlike Wittig, "pursues a politics of subverting isolated signs, not discourses" (29, 31) but this seems to represent a distortion of Daly's method arising from Morris' use of a specifically Derridean model of deconstruction. Daly constructs her transcendental lesbian not from a resignification of "isolated signs" but in a space imagined as a (discursive) reversal of the homosocial order of patriarchy. Homosociality (epitomised for Daly in the 'parthenogenetic' construct of the all-male Christian trinity) is characterised as the fundamental form of patriarchy and guarantor of male meaning. [It is difficult to select quotes to re-present Daly's arguments since she deliberately deploys an "anti-academic" form and language (xiii-xiv). Nevertheless, I will attempt to illustrate my reading with citations of Daly's own work]:

The 'products' [of male academics] are more often than not a set of distorted mirrors, made to seem plausible through the mechanisms of male bonding. (Daly, 1979: 23)

It is 'sublime' (and therefore disguised) erotic male homosexual mythos, the perfect all-male marriage, the ideal all-male family ... The mundane processions of sons have as their basic but unacknowledged and unattainable aim an attempted 'consubstantiality' with the father ... The junior scholar dreams of becoming the Professor. The acolyte fantasizes about becoming The Priest. Spirated by all these relations is the asphyxiating atmosphere of male bonding. (Daly, 1979: 38-9)

Patriarchal male identify is based, however, in a perversion of an originary, or organic, female identity structured by an organic, intra-female, bond:

Radical feminist metaethics ... also means dis-covering the parthenogenetic Daughter, the original Athena, whose loyalty is to her own kind ... (Daly, 1979: 13)

In the US, Liberal-humanist-feminist psychoanalytic thought (see Dinnerstein, 1976; Chodorow, 1977) placed great emphasis on the mother-daughter bond. Daly imagined a female identity in terms of this primary bond. Daly thought this naturalised unity of the infant with the maternal body might mature organically into an experience of a female symbolic figured as an exchange (of signs) between women (a female cultural order). 

The girl-child thus would not need to barred from the experience of plenitude in the mother's body through a series of 'splittings' or negations (as in Freud and Lacan's accounts of male identity formation) in order to morph an individual female identity and insert herself into a symbolic order. She would become the mother's body through an organic progression, expressing a symbolic continuity, or relay, of consciousness which effects a female community (but which by no means necessarily involves becoming a biological mother).

The basic pattern was, according to some, Maiden, Nymph, and Crone, and according to others, Maiden, Mother and Moon. Jane Harrison points out that figures interpreted to be "mother and daughter" are, in fact, often older and younger forms of the same person. (Daly, 1979: 76, quoting Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, (1966) Cleveland and NY, World Publishing, p.274)

Daly argued that this female symbolic, as well as its "perversion" by what she calls the "male mothers," can still be glimpsed through mythic patriarchal resignifications of the symbolism of the female trinities of ancient religions. 

The lost female symbolic also remains latent in lesbian identification which offers women the possibility of reclaiming a symbolic order guaranteed by female homosociality. Intra-female identification can thus be figured as an experience of continuity in plenitude, rather than the tenable disguise of an alienating and unfulfillable 'lack' which structures the Lacanian account of subjectivity. Lesbian erotic expression is also thus placed beyond the heterosexualising domain of desire instituted by 'lack' and refigured as an immediate experience of intra-female plenitude.

Daly thus questioned any necessity for the intervention of patriarchal law (or indeed any dis-embodied linguistic order) in the formation of identity. Female identity is not figured as founded in sexual difference but in the unmediated presence of the female body to itself originating in the primary female bond. That is, identity can be figured in the presence to itself of 'the female' and not merely as compensation and cover for a structurally absent phallus.

Correctly named, his [God-the-father's] 'omnipresence' is omni-absence. His absence everywhere is named as 'presence' everywhere, and the 'presence' consists precisely in this false Absence which is the essence of the patriarchal god. (Daly, 1979: 79)

In terms of this lesbian-feminist reversal, it is masculinity rather than femininity which becomes the negated and problematic term. It is not the girl child who really needs to cope with difference, it is the male child who is different, morphologically, from the primary form of the mother. 

Daly went on to argue that the dialectical rhetoric of western metaphysics is a product of an alienated male identity based in a sense of sexual difference from the female body. Man alienates his consciousness when he sets himself over-against the organic unity of the primary bond in the violent act of attempting to possess the female. The violent redirection of the primary bond with the mother's body in order to establish an identity based in sexual difference is necessary only to inaugurate and maintain a structure of male dominance materialised in the form of heterosexual gender. For Daly, male culture is thus entirely based on the aggressive appropriation of an imago of female creativity which can be read in the abundance of metaphors in masculine cultural production of creativity as "giving birth." This is even typical of the archetypally phallic discourses of science (51-57). 

If masculinity is a distorted re-appropriation of an originary female identity, a secondary identity split off from the universality of female "Be-ing," then (heterosexual) feminine gender is a double reversal — a negating projection by an already inverted "male mother." By choosing to be present to other women, as a political act, the lesbian can begin to reconstruct a primary female identity and to deconstruct the symbolic regime of the "male mothers."

Daly's account thus naturalised a lesbian-eroticism seen as intrinsic to the organic origins of the intra-female bond, differentiating it from the homoeroticism of male homosociality, which patriarchy anxiously conceals (Ibid: 51-52). In Freudian terms, it is the sublimation (as a condition of adult masculinity) of infantile narcissistic homoeroticism which both eroticises the homosocial bond and disavows its eroticism. Thus the representation of homosociality in contemporary western culture is always unstable, and often borders on hysteria in its denials (Modleski, 1991: 135-144).

According to Freud, males effect the necessary sublimation by investing homo-erotic energy into (homo)social goals. 

Feminist and left-male critics of the 1980s male-buddy movie took a less sanguine view. It would appear that, in terms of the representational regime of the 1970s and 1980s at least, the threat of re-absorption to the feminine (posed by feminism) was more characteristically dealt with by reiteration of a fantasy negation, and violent suppression, of an externalised enemy. The violence of this fantasy simultaneously obliterates the externally projected threat and, in its activity, restores and re-naturalises masculinity as that which acts (Neale, 1983; Lewis, 1983; Theweleit, 1989). 

By the 1980s, radical feminism saw this process as exceeding the terrain of fantasy:

Terror issues forth from the male, illuminates his essential nature and his basic purpose ... an essential element in the modern legend of terror that man spews forth celebrating himself: he is biologically ordained (where before he was God's warrior) to terrorize women and other creatures into submission and conformity. Failing that, terror will fulfil its promise; the male will wipe out whatever terror does not control. (Dworkin, 1981: 16)

Daly noted that the exclusion and discursive "killing" of the "internal woman" appears as a central, and apparently vital, practice in military training. Concerned to avoid these aspects of male comradeship in her model of female bonding, she argued that woman-identification maintains a dynamic tension between 'friendship' and 'sisterhood' (that is, between a female-symbolic order and a quotidian female comradeship). This tension expresses the dual function of female bonding: of prioritising, affirming, and nurturing personal relationships but also of providing a transpersonal referent for a lesbian-feminist use of language.

A feminist thinks of her close friends as sisters, but she knows that she has many sisters ... whom she has never met. She senses gynaesthetically that there is a convergence of personal histories, of wave-lengths. She knows that there is a network of communication present, and that on some level, at least potentially, it exists among women who have never met or heard of each other (Daly, 1979: 371).

Rich also developed the lesbian implications of liberal-feminist psychoanalytic models, which see mothering-by-women as producing a much stronger bond between mother and female child than boy child. This 'natural' bond between women needs to be forcibly redirected towards men in order for heterosexuality to be instituted.

[W]e are confronting not a simple maintenance of inequality and property possession, but a pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness ... (Rich, 1980: 234)

Daly's primary project was to gain discursive control of the (re)production of women's reality by re-focusing women's gaze away from their reflection in the 'phallic gaze' and, instead, onto other women.

Each woman sees her own knowledge of reality confirmed in her sister. The possessors' spell is broken. (Daly, 1978: 384)

Rich, on the other hand, saw "conscious woman-identification" as offering a means to dismantle male power which obscures women's "collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives" (246). This leaves the reader to infer that there is some kind of female 'nature' but that we currently have no access to it because it is occluded by the processes of compulsory heterosexuality.

Irigaray, Wittig, Daly and Rich have all been accused of positing a kind of noumenal femaleness behind the phenomenon of heterosexual femininity. Daly, however, specifically problematised the concept of another reality behind patriarchal culture, seeing woman-identification as offering a potential to move forward towards new formations:

So also do women elicit insights by seeing through such obvious myths as the second birth of Athena from the head of Zeus ... We do this by reversing their reversals - a complex process which involves much more than swinging to a simplistic conclusion that "opposites" of male myths are the "depths" we seek. (Daly, 1979: 46)

Although, unlike Wittig, she did sex an originary "Be-ing" as female, Daly (1979: 69) attempted to avoid the collapse of her lesbian figure back into the heterosexual category of femininity by making a distinction between 'feminine' (a male-defined construct) and 'female' (a pre-linguistic, morphological conceptualisation). Wittig, Daly and Rich have also all been argued to universalise 'the lesbian' but Rich's model tends to universalise 'the woman' as a general category, effectively denying any specificity to a lesbian identification (as well as diversities among women more generally):

If we consider the possibility that all women - from the infant suckling her mother's breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother's milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women - exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. (Rich, 1980: 240)

Clearly, this poses considerably less of a threat either to heterosexual men, or to a heterosexual femininity, which is unproblematically resituated within this 'continuum' of woman-identification. This may explain why Rich's formulation has found so much greater acceptance in the academy.

The radical feminist project of refocusing female identification could be seen as vital to the development of second-wave feminism:

If the first feminist emphasis on sexual difference as gender (woman's difference from man) has rightly come under attack for obscuring the effects of other differences in women's psychosocial oppression, nevertheless that emphasis on sexual difference did open up a critical space — a conceptual, representational, and erotic space — in which women could address themselves to women. And in the very act of assuming and speaking from the position of subject, a woman could concurrently recognize women as subjects and objects of female desire. (De Lauretis, 1988: 141-2)

Rather than positioning lesbians as subject and objects of desire, however, Daly's model of woman-identification clearly rules out any kind of mimesis of heterosexual subject-object relations between women. 

Radical and revolutionary feminist models went beyond French radical-feminist efforts to decentre the phallus as transcendental signifier by drawing it into critical discourse. 'Desire' itself was denaturalised in Daly's model as a product of a heterosexual order based on a hierarchised binary of sexual difference figured as possession/ lack. Any lesbian mode of subject-object orientation of desire (such as roleplaying) appeared as mimesis of a heterosexual structure of desire. Heterosexual femininity was thus effectively re-cast either as a form of pure victimisation or as a political betrayal of feminism.

As a reverse discourse, however, the lesbian-feminist construct did successfully open out a discursive space from which the naturalisation of heterosexuality — and even of desire itself — could be radically questioned.

The fundamental intuition that directs the policies and passions of the radical feminist groups is that the order of the universe is not a natural order; it is an order imposed by men. (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981: 31)

Lesbian-feminist models, from Wittig's to Daly's, discursively constructed a discursive space outside patriarchal signifying systems seeking to replace, rather than displace, the phallus as transcendental signifier. Whilst the mode of its critiques often placed radical feminism outside of academic credibility, lesbian separatist discourse nevertheless found a widespread intuitive acceptance among lesbians. 

Lesbian feminism saw female bonding as a primary tool against the male-homosocial exclusion of women precisely because it effected a realignment of female focus from the circulation of authorised male meanings to the circulation of the unauthorised, hidden, discourse of women. That is, from the (heterosexual) relationship of women-to-men to the (lesbian) relationship of women-to-women. 'The woman' moved from negation to substance and lesbianism moved centre-stage as the only 'true' reality.