Opengender

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'.