Lesbianism in the queer era

In 1991, when Thelma & Louise was released, lesbian communities were, of course, well established:

The radical vision of the 1970s was never quite realized but in the 1980s strong lesbian or lesbian/gay communities were flourishing. In some areas lesbians were able to live their whole lives in a homosexual context if they wished. (Faderman, 1991: 297). However, by the middle of the 1980s, within and across these communities, the radicalism of the 1970s was breaking down into sectarian battles. In particular, it was argued that lesbian-feminist identity had been defined in such a way as to misrepresent and stifle women's diversity.

[D]espite their efforts to free themselves from imposed social roles, subcultures often created new ones, prescribing sexual styles, political ideologies, [...] This had the effect of excluding many women [...] Particularly after the mid-1970s, many lesbian-feminist communities [...] became increasingly private enclaves. (Stein, 1992: 46-7)

This sectarianism led to increasing 'boundary-anxiety' in lesbian-feminist communities.

Women felt freer to complain within the lesbian-feminist community than in the more oppressive heterosexual world, where their mistreatment was by far worse. But the word 'oppression' was then tossed around so loosely as an accusation that it came to be devalued. Criticism too often became crippling. It seemed that every move one made was sure to be found politically incorrect by a dozen others. (Faderman, 1991: 236)

On a wider stage, issues which had formed the focus of feminist activism had long been taken up by the academy and in commercial mainstream media. By the 1990s, besides having been negatively resignified in mainstream media (Arthurs, 1995: 92), radical feminism seemed largely to have lost its own sense of cohesion and direction. Radical lesbian feminism's discursive struggle to gain control of the domain of sex-gender had also produced its own contradictory objects. An alliance developed between discourses of heterosexual feminism (obliged by lesbian feminism to confront and articulate itself as heterosexual feminism) and a gay left-libertarian confrontation with radical feminist critiques of sexuality (Snitow, 1983: 24-43; Vance, 1984: 1-24; Wilton, 1995a: 90-109). The ways in which this confrontation resignified practices such as role-playing have already been covered in my chapters on cross-dressing. Its role in restructuring lesbian discourses as a whole helped shape the discursive matrix of queer.

The separatist critique of the eroticisation of power as (heterosexual) 'difference' (inequality) had been extended to gay male sexual practices, as well as to lesbians who had retained an earlier feminist model of 'sexual liberation,' or who had organised their identities on a gay model (Linden et al, 1982; Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1983; Vance, 1984; Rubin, 1984; Nestle, 1987). Radical feminists had argued that there was a tendency for the power inequality which structures heterosexuality to be reproduced in male gay sexual practice through the substitution of alternate axes of eroticised power-difference for that of gender — such as class, race, and generational inequalities.

While females as a class are always targeted for sexual abuse, boys and men are targeted according to their devalued position in an exclusively male hierarchy. Youth, poverty, and race are the special characteristics that target males as possible victims of other men. Youth functions to target a male because a youth is not yet fully dissociated from women and children. (Dworkin, 1981: 57)

Male practices of cross-dressing or transsexualism had been also been argued to reproduce the sexual subjugation of women as a gender-class (Raymond, 1980).

Male homosexual culture consistently uses the symbolic female — the male in drag, effeminacy as a style, the various accoutrements that denote female subjection — as part of its indigenous environment, as a touchstone against which masculinity can be experienced as meaningful and sublime. (Dworkin, 1981: 128)

Gay male sexuality is not different in kind from heterosexual male sexuality. All men are trained to be members of and experience the delights of being members of the ruling class. They develop a ruling-class sexuality in which power and dominance are eroticised. (Jeffreys, 1990: 208)

To male gays this often appeared as a censorious form of moral panic. To those who defined their identity mainly in terms of sexuality, the suppression of (homo)sexual imagery (pornography) amounted to suppressing gay men's primary mode of self-definition and representation. Radical feminist insistence on the homogeniety of the gender-class of men also despecified gay male identity (Weeks, 1985: 231-241), or asserted that "'male sexuality' is a perversion" (Weeks, 1985: 213).

Libertarian lesbians also saw representation of lesbian sex as liberating rather than threatening, and the radical feminist focus on pornography as overemphasising both sexuality and representation, whilst neglecting other forms of women's oppression.

Pornography has been seen by some feminists as the single most oppressive factor in society, rather than poverty, racism or other forms of institutionalised male power. Why? [...] Many anti-pornography campaigners cannot accept that women may choose to use porn [...] This view only allows women to be victims, which we are not. (George, 1988: 110-111)

Lesbian positions in relation to sexuality and pornography became increasingly conflicted. It was perhaps the discussion of S/M and role-playing which was most divisive:

But it was the naming of lesbian sexual practices as heterosexual which stuck in the throat. (Wilton, 1995a: 101)

Finally, the lesbian-feminist critique of 'sex' erupted into what has become known as 'the sex wars' (Ferguson, 1984: 106; Jeffreys, 1990; Smyth, 1992, 36-46).

Lesbian sadomasochists [...] rejected this analysis as more of what they had spent their lives fighting. Here was yet another moralistically motivated attempt to police women's sexual behaviour [...] anti-porn feminists began to launch attacks of unparalleled ferocity against other feminists. Two important crises were the attempt in 1982 to halt 'The Scholar and the Feminist' conference at Barnard College in the USA (see Vance 1984) and the fight in 1985 to exclude SM lesbians and gay men from the London Lesbian and Gay Centre (see Ardill and O'Sullivan 1987). In both cases, the accusation of being 'anti-feminist' was used in an attempt to discredit the target of attack. (Wilton, 1995a: 101)

Libertarians accused lesbian feminism of collaboration with the reactionary tendencies of the decade:

To a woman, the libertarians describe the anti-pornography feminists as being conservative, right-wing, allied to the moral majority. (Jeffreys, 1990: 269)

Lesbian feminists saw this re-aligning of radical feminism with right-wing and homophobic movements by libertarians as a mendacious strategy to discredit the validity of lesbian-feminist arguments (269).

Another objection to the lesbian-feminist model was that it elided together categories of 'the female' with lesbianism, despecifying women's sexual orientation and foreclosing discussion of lesbian identity as distinct from heterosexual femininity. Morris (1988) argued that, in placing the figure of 'the lesbian' outside of language and culture, Daly had placed lesbianism beyond critical analysis. Any attempt to theorise lesbian (or feminine-gendered) identities foundered in a rift between a universalising construct of lesbianism and the historical contingency of lesbian practices. Wittig was also criticised either for inferring "a pre-social ontology of unified and equal persons" (Butler, 1990: 115) or "a "tendency to homogenize lesbians into a single harmonious group and to erase the real material and ideological differences between lesbians — in other words, to engage in essentialist thinking in the very act of trying to discredit it" (Fuss, 1990: 43).

It seems important to note, however, that whilst Rich's 'continuum' does seem to erase any effective boundary between heterosexual and lesbian identity, French materialist and many Anglo-American separatist feminisms strenuously rejected identification of lesbianism with heterosexual femininity or with any patriarchally defined femininity naturalised by reference to biology (Questions Féministes Editorial Collective, 1977: 214-217; Wittig, 1981; Claudie et al, 1981). Indeed, Daly's 'metaethical' reversal of the discourse of sexual difference, far from eliding femininity with lesbianism, effectively consigned femininity to the 'irreal' of a double-negation — for if male-bonding is a perverse reversal of an originary female bond then heterosexual femininity, as the negative reflection of masculinity, is rendered as a double negation of female 'nature' (Daly, 1979: 64-69).

This kind of manoeuvre considerably annoyed many heterosexual feminists who launched a discursive counter-attack by the mid-1980s — often asserting what amounted to a counter-ontology of heterosexual desire as a naturalised 'irrational force' set beyond analysis or criticism. Jeffreys' (1984) responded with exasperation to the re-naturalising tendency of re-assertions of heterosexual feminine identity by various socialist feminists, including members of the Feminist Review collective and, in particular, Rowbotham's (1984) article romancing (heterosexual) desire beyond politics as "our peep at the extraordinary [...] the chink beyond the material world" (21). In effect, besides exhorting heterosexuals to cease "collaborating with the enemy" (Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981) lesbian feminism had confronted heterosexual feminism as heterosexual (displacing it as the universally feminine), thus provoking a socialist-feminist counter-discourse. Socialist (heterosexual) feminism either attempted to reposition the lesbian-feminist critique, to assimilate it, or to ignore it. Wilton cited a number of heterosexual feminists' "extraordinary" claims between 1980 and 1994 to the effect that:

Although non-lesbian-feminists critiqued the power relations of heterosexuality in the early days of the WLM, a radical politics of heterosexuality has not yet been developed. (Wilton, 1995a: 88)

Lesbian feminists, on the contrary, saw the socialist-feminist psychoanalytic model of sex as under-theorised and/or essentialist:

They do not know that they are being insulting by discounting more than twenty years of struggle by lesbian feminists [...] What is now called essentialism is the belief that a lesbian can eschew gender, or the belief that it is possible to practice a sexuality not organised around the penis or power imbalance. (Jeffreys, 1990: 101)

The language of the psychoanalytic criticism fails when it comes to some forms of political engagement. It is also underdeveloped with regard to women's sexuality and, partly as a consequence, close to silence and structural incapacity with regard to lesbians. (Florence, 1993: 126)

As the 1980s progressed, breaches between heterosexual and lesbian feminisms, together with the strong profile and relative access to power beginning to be achieved by queer politics in the US, led to a greater intimacy between lesbian and gay or queer perspectives. In Britain, the Clause 28 campaigns and the AIDS crisis increased the public visibility of homosexuality and also drew many lesbians to organise in mixed groups which offered greater access to power and resources (Smyth, 1992: 15-16). The net effect was a tendency for representation of lesbian identity to become increasingly undifferentiated from male homosexual identity. Although many lesbians perceived these shifts positively as an opening out of lesbian discourses of sexuality, many others perceived the tendency as an effect of a generally reactionary ambience which characterised the Thatcher/Reagan epoch. Lesbian alliances with gay male politics and the nascent politics of queer were seen as a betrayal of radical feminist vision:

As [Raymond, 1989] and others explained it, the 1980s and 1990s brought a retrenchment from the radical visions of the previous decade. A triumphant conservatism had shattered previously cohesive lesbian communities. (Stein, 1992: 34)

For Stein, however, it was the very proliferation of lesbian communities themselves which had caused this perception of disintegration. A larger lesbian community inevitably multiplied perspectives and projects.

What is new, I suggest, is the lack of any fundamental hegemonic logic or center to [...] [lesbian] projects. (Stein, 1992: 35)

Whatever the cause or context, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s there had been a shift, which was partly generational, towards 'co-ed' activism and queer perspective and strategies.

An incipient movement seems to be gathering momentum. In its angry militance this new movement promises to have something in common with lesbian-feminism of the 1970s. It is different, however, in that gay men were its first organizers and it is presently dependent on coalitions with gay men. (Faderman, 1991: 300)

Radical feminists in Britain and the US interpreted queer, along with the libertarian politics of the 1980s, largely as a reaction to a lesbian sexual revolution and its practical critique of techniques of male-dominance.

The result of this dramatic onslaught designed to reconstruct lesbian sexuality has been the partial incorporation of lesbians into the political structures of control of the heteropatriarchy. (Jeffreys, 1994: 21).

Lesbians, feminism, race, and class

The painful strife and fragmentation which constituted the political terrain of the 1980s was not only attributable to the well-publicised 'sex wars,' but also articulated wider conflicts within and across multiple, but dialectically imagined and mutually exclusive, identificatory boundaries. By the 1970s, the universalising tendency of articulations of femaleness or lesbianism had already been argued to have extended the categories of gender to absorb those of class and race. These manoeuvres were unacceptable to many lesbians who felt that the universalising effects of radical feminist theory despecified other master discourses to which women are subject, such as race and class in particular (Combahee River Collective, 1977; Lorde, 1979; Hooks, 1982: 139-158; Moi, 1985: 95; Faderman, 1991: 235-245). Many black feminists objected that re-appropriations of colonial histories and subaltern discourses was inappropriate. These effectively re-framed diverse histories of women's struggles as ubiquitously passive victimisation; taking no account of racism and failing to hold themselves accountable to black women; as well as reinforcing the racist attribution of a propensity to violence and rape in black men (Lorde, 1979; Davis, 1981; hooks, 1982).

In relation to the 'sex wars,' many black lesbians also complained that issues such as SM were largely irrelevant to black lesbian communities (Sims et al, 1982), or saw radical feminist activism relating to pornography as reinforcing the regulation of sexual practice by a racist and capitalist state (Parmar, 1988; Davis, 1981; hooks, 1982). Although black lesbians did also align themselves with lesbian-feminist separatism (Lee, 1981); and black lesbian feminism itself developed a separatist tendency as a result of conflicts over signifying race within feminism (Mason-John, 1993: 26; Mason-John and Khambatta, 1993: 27-28), radical feminism was nevertheless increasingly seen as denying diversities of history and culture.

Feminism in a Foucauldian frame

Queer theory attempted to supersede conflicting models of identity by deploying a Foucauldian discursive account of the production of subjectivity. In Foucault's (1976) account of The History of Sexuality, the discursive formation of 'alliance' (gender) has, in the 20th Century, been superseded by the discursive formation of 'sexuality' as the universal referent of questions of identity. "Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic [of sexuality] that henceforth serves as our master key" (Foucault, 1976: 78). Queer theory, accordingly, attempted to "separate questions of sexuality from those of gender" (Stein, 1992: 50). Foucault delineated a genealogy of 'sexuality' as a discursive formation by "historicising the present" — if we can understand history as a discontinuous and non-linear process whose illusionary coherence is itself a discursive product of a modernity, which is now fragmented by discourses of post-modernity.

Marxism had narrated a disjuncture between bourgeois ideological language and the objects which it purported to represent — though these must always appear in logical conformity with it. Foucauldian 'discourse' is, on the contrary, inseparable from, because productive of, its own objects. Indeed, a discursive formation is rendered intelligible only through the effects of this productive capacity. Further, power is not dialectical but multiple and incoherent in its exercise and thus produces contradictory objects. Because the discursive formation is also productive of the subjectivity of its protagonists there is no originary consciousness or 'outside' from which to view it. Its operation must be inferred through observation of its clashing objects. It is this struggle between the contradictory objects of a discursive formation which signals its presence — dis-covers its power to contain all knowledge in reference to itself. Power is not the property of a (bourgeois, aristocratic — or even male) class imposed on a subordinated class, as represented by Marxist or radical feminist analysis, but productive of all parties to discursive conflict through the overdetermination of all fields of intelligibility.

Radical feminism in the 1970s had articulated an ideological model of power and agency. It proposed that patriarchal power was the property of the gender-class of males. Heterosexuality could be seen as its representational order, functioning to cover the real conditions of women's exploitation and oppression. The ideological system of heterosexual gender enforced women's subordination to masculine interests. 'Butch' lesbians appropriated male power through mimesis of its techniques. Heterosexual-feminine subjects 'misrecognised' themselves in the phantasms of a patriarchal representational order and thus 'femininity' was a state of false-consciousness articulated in conformity with masculine interests. The 'real,' to be uncovered or reconstructed, was a (re)integrated lesbian consciousness beyond the representational domain of heterosexual gender.

In Foucault's discursive account, on the contrary, there can be no consciousness before or after discourse. 'Sexuality,' as a discursive formation, is not separable from the subjects which it produces. Subjectivity itself is illusionary, incoherent, and contradictory. Foucault, however, has not entirely done away with the Marxist concept of ideology as masking the exercise of power. The success of power "is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms." (Foucault, 1976: 86)

Would power be accepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter [...] 'Law,' for example, represented itself as a socially necessary limit on personal freedom rather than as the exercise of power. (Foucault, 1976: 86-87)

Sexuality deploys more complex techniques, and is productive in its functions rather than regulatory, as had been assumed by the psychoanalytic 'repression thesis.' Discourse does not work to conceal a prior reality, but produces reality in accordance with its own articulations.

Critics argued that 'power' had thus been idealised and subjectivised by Foucault (arguments summarised in Bristow, 1997: 189-199; Best and Kellner, 1991: 68-75). In academic discussion of sex-gender, Foucauldian 'power' certainly seems to have displaced the Lacanian phallus as 'transcendental signifier.' 'Power' acts as the master-trope, veiling itself, enigmatically demarcating itself from discussion of its effects, immanent only in its effects. Power clearly did need to be understood as more diverse and contradictory in its operations than was proposed by the Marxist dialectic or in the equally dichotomous radical feminist model of agency. 'Power,' in Foucauldian queer discourse, however, tends to evince similar characteristics to those which accrued to 'the phallus' — or to God — as origin of all, immanent in all things, located simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, overdetermining all articulation and experience and yet in itself inarticulable.

Queer theory actually seems unique in perceiving itself purely as resistance to an abstraction of 'power' or 'dominance' rather than in terms of resistance to historically referenced exploitative processes such as the capitalist mode of production, sexism, or colonialism. 'Queer' reflects an ontological shift begun in critiques of mechanistic Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s away from perceiving 'culture' or 'ideology' as a 'superstructural' effect of material processes of expropriation and oppression and towards perceiving material conditions as discursive effects. However, Foucault's use of language in his account of the deployment of 'sexuality' is revealing, giving a clue to a gender-positional significance of this paradigm shift which reverberates through queer discourse:

In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as signification and discourse. We have placed ourselves under the sign of sex [...] (Foucault, 1976: 79 – emphasis mine)

One of the radical breaks achieved by Foucault (and poststructuralist critiques) was the implication of the historian (as himself a discursive product) in the production of history as an object of discourse. In these terms, then, who is this authoritatively speaking 'we' cited by Foucault which has subordinated 'us' in the domain of sexuality? The denomination 'we' bears an uncanny grammatical resemblance to (western) mankind (through the use of those good, old-fashioned, 'false generics'). This passage is not really intelligible otherwise. Moreover, historically, 'sexuality' has been articulated in terms of (white, middle-class, heterosexual) masculinity and its 'others,' by male persons; and deployed through the white, bourgeois, male-exclusive or male-dominated institutions of religious, medical, academic, and latterly media, authorities.

This (phantasmagoric) universalising of this 'we' (mankind) who have placed 'us' (all) under the sign of sex provokes a question: is it merely some abstract or ontological 'will' to resist which sets some of 'us' against this dominant discourse and its effects? For how or why, otherwise, would some of 'us' rebel against a 'we' by whose articulations we are ourselves produced and contained? It would seem that Foucault (1982) resorts to a rhetorical logic because this phenomenon of resistance to/by the 'we/us' who both speak and are spoken by power, is really quite unfathomable otherwise. That is, since the question 'cui bono?' is rendered unaskable, it is only by troping on the form of an analytic proposition that resistance seems explicable at all: that is, the semantic relation of force to resistance necessarily links the subject and predicate of its articulation, being common to both terms (see Foucault, 1982: 225).

To put it another way, if 'group A' takes all or part of 'group B's' land, resources, or personal freedom then it is very clear why 'group B' would vociferously object and why 'group A' would make up some self-serving (and self-reassuring) tale of inevitability. But in Foucault's micropolitical model, the universalisation of subjectivity under 'power' renders the processes of expropriation and oppression immanent to a universal but rather abstract 'force' designated as 'power.' Under the sign of 'power', we are all pitted against each other. This not only makes it rather difficult to account for the 'will' to resist. It also has interesting implications for a decade in which neo-libertarian constructs of socially atomised individuality defined by consumption were coming to the fore.

Foucault clearly did not mean to specify sexuality, much less homosexuality, as the sole field of global resistance by this solution to the problem of the exclusionary effects of dialectical models. The deployment of 'sexuality' itself was argued to be discontinuous and differentiating by Foucault. In shifting from an account of 'discipline' (modes of dominance) to a focus on 'resistances,' Foucauldian theory attempts to recognise the multiplicity of formations through which power can be effected and the multiplicity of communities produced as resistance in the exercise of power (Best and Kellner 1991, 48-53; Bristow, 1997: 168-188). As an effect of Foucault's discursive manoeuvres, however, the phallic subject of patriarchal law is 'accidentally' translated to the object of a discursive formation of sexuality through a syntactically effected shift from male subject who speaks authoritatively to a gender-non-specific object spoken by discourse.

'Man,' nevertheless, generically remains in the position of speaker of 'sexuality' by which he is also spoken (of) as 'normal' or 'abnormal.' The woman is also spoken (of) as 'normal' or 'abnormal' and her relation to 'man' is either 'normal' or 'abnormal.' That her 'normal' relation to 'man' is that of subordinate has become difficult to articulate — in fact, appears to have been superseded in the order of "sexuality" and thus its reiteration in a history of the (gendered) present appears merely as the persistent effect of an obsolete formation. 'Power' is not thus represented as the property of a singular class or category. There is only contradiction and 'difference' in the fragmentary multiplicity of confrontations which constitute the processes of discourse. The discourse of 'sexuality' effects power by excluding from the boundaries of intelligibility those whose 'performance' of its constructs of subjectivity is inconsistent or dissonant. The excluded remain, nevertheless, articulations of the normalising process itself — that is they are not 'outside' of (or alternative to) the dominant discourse but the contradictory objects of it.

Queer discourse, based in a Foucauldian construct of sexuality as the key signifier of identity, thus places (white, male, middle-class) homosexuality at the defining centre of the terrain of resistance — effectively underwriting the all-inclusive claims of queer. This manoeuvre dislocated the counter-discourses of the subjects of feminism(s) and of class and race difference(s): reassigning 'us' (all) willy nilly as objects of a discourse of sexuality. In short it lent itself to the setting up of another falsely inclusory 'we,' and the 'others' it thereby resignified were obliged to scramble to realign their resistances to a new discursive formation if they wanted their articulations to continue to reference authoritative (white, male) meanings (issues summarised in Ramazanoglu, 1993).

At the same time as this manoeuvre can be seen as appropriative, feminists have also seen Foucauldian approaches as offering, however problematically, new possibilities to feminism (Diamond and Quinby, 1988; Ramazanoglu, 1993). It was also genuinely radicalising of male homosexuality in the sense that it produced 'queerness' as resistance to the production of heterosexuality as power, rather than as a contradictory content of 'desire.' The extent to which homosexuality is articulated as the product of an involuntary desire is the extent to which it can become naturalised. The extent to which it has been naturalised is the extent to which it is amenable to regulation and thus incorporation to a pluralistic or 'civil rights' model — of 'equality before the law.' The effective radicalisation of queer made participation in queer politics seem more accessible to many lesbians than the civil rights agendas of gay politics. By discursively vitiating the categories of gender, furthermore, queer claimed to offer lesbians a radical departure from a feminist discourse overdetermined by heterosexuality (gendered sexual identity). Queer does not, in the end, however, seem to have radicalised lesbianism which had already radicalised (that is, if radicalism is not to be defined in terms of adherence to a queer creed of 'sexuality,' but in terms of a systemic rather than juridical articulation of opposition to gender oppression). The lesbian-feminist analysis of heterosexuality had already effected a systemic critique — albeit in a dualistic, ideological, paradigm. Foucauldian approaches might seem to offer a way out the conflicts produced by the universalising tendencies of dialectical models, but it had also occluded lesbian discourses of gender.

Queer and feminism

Heterosexual feminisms were also re-forming in an inevitable alliance with queer discourse ushered in through conceptualisations such as 'gender-bending' (Garber, 1992; McClintock, 1993; Gamman and Makinen, 1994), and on analyses of masculinities (Sedgwick, 1985; Penley and Willis, 1988; Tasker, 1993; Cohan and Hark, 1993; Kirkham and Thumim, 1993). In her treatment of male homosexuality, Sedgwick (1990) did also attempt a queer rehabilitation of the radical feminist model of woman-identification as a 'stunningly efficacious coup' (56) in that it "reassimilate[d] to one another identification and desire, where inversion models, by contrast, depend on their distinctness. Gender-separatist models thus place the woman-loving woman and the man-loving man each at the 'natural' defining center of their own gender, again in contrast to inversion models that locate gay people - whether biologically or culturally — at the threshold between genders" (58). As a reading of the lesbian-feminist project, however, this hardly seems accurate. Lesbian feminism clearly did not place man-loving man at the "natural defining centre of anything at all. On the contrary, as I have previously demonstrated, it repositioned masculinity as an inversion of a primary female symbolic order and heterosexual femininity as the negation of this prior inversion. In radical feminist terms, masculine subjectivity, whether hetero- or homo-sexual, represented merely the parasitic agency of oppression.

Lesbians were frequently critical not only of the way in which queer feminism articulated a focus on (queer) masculinity but also of the extent to which 'the woman' articulated as heterosexual in queer discourse. Many of its most prominent female voices are not identified with lesbian practice. It seems quite typical, for example, that a 'queer slot' documentary discussing the issue of minority gay TV programming ('Queerspotting,' in the Queer Street season, Tx: C4 1997) should refer to lesbians only in passing and feature only one female 'talking head' — that of Suzanne Moore, who does not identify as lesbian but who, without a trace of irony, articulated herself as a gay man through the unproblematised use of the pronoun 'we' in this male-gay context. It is interesting to note that a discourse which was mobilised by reclaiming the abjected tag 'queer' in opposition to the normalising construct of heterosexuality, should so evidently prioritise alliances with heterosexual women over working (it out) with lesbians.

A celebratory construct of 'postmodern femininity' also developed both in representations of heterosexual femininity and of 'lesbian chic.'

Since the Victorian age, major shifts in sexual positions have occurred, partly as a result of sexology, sexual liberation, and the feminist and gay movements [...] our female sexual responses and desires are now seen as powerful. No longer feared, female sexuality is envied. (Straayer, 1990: 265)

The same mainstream media which had lambasted radical lesbian feminism were sympathetic to the point of romance towards this new alliance between heterosexual feminism and queer — which Madonna apotheosised at the start of the 1990s (issues overviewed by Jeffreys, 1994: 97-120; and Lamos, 1994: 93). Although many lesbians found such representations attractive, lesbian attitudes were often sceptical and suspicious of moves which appeared to put masculinity (and heterosexual femininity) back at the cynosure of enquiry. Feminists adopted various strategies in an effort to retain or retrieve the specificity of lesbian agendas in this queer discursive context including outright refusal of any re-alignment of lesbian feminism, discursive rearticulations of gender processes, the desubjectivisation of psychoanalytic models of desire, and a 'strategic essentialism.' The next chapter looks at feminist efforts to evade the dissolution of the 'subject of feminism'.