https://socialistaction.org/2019/02/26/lesbophobia-past-and-present/
Lesbophobia Past and Present
/ 22 hours ago
Lesbian Rights = Human Rights
The Women’s Action Coalition marches in support of lesbian rights in the
1992 Gay Pride Parade in New York City. (Photo: Lisa Kahane)
By ANN MONTAGUE
Lesbians resist and rebel against institutions and belief systems that
oppress us. Starting as young girls we fight against the tyranny of
pink. Today, the situation is worse than ever for all girls, as
multi-million-dollar corporations become the enforcers of oppressive sex
stereotyping.
Over the last 10 years, Disney has marketed over 26,000 “Princess”
items. This has not only become the fastest growing brand for Disney, it
is also the largest franchise in the world for girls ages two to six.
The products are all about clothes, jewelry, makeup, and of course,
being rescued by the prince.
Disney enforces oppressive gender norms for girls by idealizing the
institution of monogamous heterosexual marriage (Cinderella, Little
Mermaid, The Princess, and the Frog). Princesses can only be imagined as
heterosexual and their greatest success can only be the fairy-tale
wedding, which renders them as property.
At the same time, the proliferation of pink sends more messages to
girls. Pink becomes more than a color, and academics have even created
the word “pinkification,” which is defined as “teaching and reinforcing
stereotypes that limit the way girls perceive themselves.”
Peggy Orenstein, the author of a recent book, “Cinderella Ate My
Daughter,” asked a sales rep, “Is all this pink really necessary? There
are other colors in the rainbow.” He laughed, “I guess girls are just
born loving pink.” There are, of course, girls who rebel, turn their
backs on imposed limitations, and shout, “Pink Stinks.”
As lesbians enter their teenage years, the struggle continues as it
becomes clear that they are not even trusted to name their own experience.
A young Arab American lesbian did a Q and A interview about her first
novel, which was a 2018 finalist in the Wishing Well Book Awards’ “Books
For Teenagers” category. She was aghast and appalled when the interview
was published. Everywhere that she had said the word “lesbian,” they had
changed the word to “queer” in their quotations.
“I was rebranded,” she said. “I became the mythological ‘if the
situation were right’ lesbian. Queer has become the ‘I am not going to
rule anything out because I am an open-minded girl.’ It doesn’t carry
the sting of ‘lesbian.’ The stigma of ‘lesbian.’ The boundaries of
‘lesbian.’ Lesbian is a solid ‘no.’”
She added that she would never have said that the androgynous lesbian
character in her book was “presenting a gender,” as her interviewer had
made up. “That unwillingness to bend is the very reason lesbians are
targeted with insidious psychological warfare.”
Why did she (Julia Diana Robertson “Beyond The Screen Door”) have this
strong reaction? It was not just that she was “misquoted,” and it was
not aimed at those who choose to identify as queer. It was because
lesbians of all ages are seeing themselves, as well as their history
erased. This, of course, is nothing new, but after past years of
struggle there is now an aggressive resurgence.
She was shocked that words she would never use to describe herself or
the characters in her novel were put into her mouth. The interviewer
admitted unapologetically what she had done; she was trying to “provide
space for all LGBTQ women.” In doing that, however, she excluded Julia
from her own story, and by extension, all lesbians.
Lesbian critical theory
These same issues are seen by Terry Castle, a literary scholar and
currently Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. As a lesbian
she started noticing that, throughout culture and specifically in 18th
century literature, lesbians were always “in the shadows, in the
margins, hidden from history.” So she decided to write a book about what
she was seeing in literature: “The Apparitional Lesbian: Female
Homosexuality and Modern Culture.”
Castle points out that throughout literature since the 18th century, as
well as in general culture, lesbians have been “ghosted,” made to seem
invisible, disembodied— unlike homosexual men. Lesbians were portrayed
as apparitions in the works of Dafoe, Diderot, Baudelaire, Balzac,
Dickens, Bronte, Colette, and Proust. This tendency continued in
20th-century writings by Mary Renault and Lillian Hellman.
In addition, lesbian heroes from the time of the poet Sappho (circa 630
B.C.) have had their biographies sanitized in the interests of order and
public safety. Radclyffe Hall’s classic fictional defense of love
between women, “The Well Of Loneliness,” was banned in England in 1928
and referred to as poison: “Poison kills the body, but moral poison
kills the soul.”
Before the late 19th century, the misogynistic medical establishment did
not write or believe that there was anything like lesbian identity and
sexuality. Well, what did women do before men established the crucial
nomenclature for women’s desire for one another? The academicians’
response was that women were involved in friendships that were merely
“platonic relationships with epistemic confusion.”
As recently as 1985 this concept that lesbians are asexual was
continuing to be propagated with the claim that lesbians were simply
another form of female “homosocial” bonding: “The bond of sister and
sister, women’s friendship, ‘networking’ and the active struggles of
feminism” (“Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire,” by
queer theorist Eve Sedgwick).
Castle explains that she has avoided in her book, when talking about
lesbianism, using “pseudo umbrella terms,” such as “queer.” Although the
term “queer” has become popular in activist and progressive academic
circles, it has a tendency “to disembody the lesbian once again.” While
Castle recognizes the contribution of Eve Sedgwick in both explicating
queer theory in the academic world and in bringing the subject of
homosexuality into the academic mainstream, Castle points out that
Sedgwick excludes lesbians. In “Epistemology of the Closet,” Sedgwick
defends her exclusion of lesbians and admits her addressing
homosexuality is “indicatively male.”
Among some queer theorists it has become popular to contest the very
meaningfulness of terms such as “lesbian” or “gay” or “homosexual” or
“coming out.” They claim that no one knows what those terms mean; they
lack “linguistic transparency.” But lesbophobia appears because everyone
knows exactly what is meant by the word lesbian. It is clear as a bell.
The sexual boundaries of lesbians are fiercely policed because of
misogyny and homophobia on the right and on the left. Throughout history
men have imprisoned, killed, and institutionalized lesbians. Corrective
rape of lesbians is still used around the world to enforce heterosexuality.
The Anne Lister controversy
The erasing of lesbians past and present converge in last year’s
protests around Anne Lister’s memorial plaque.
Recently, a large number of diaries were discovered in an obscure
archive in Yorkshire, England. In them Anne Lister (1791-1840) details
her sexual affairs with women throughout her entire life. The eroticism
of her letters was explicit and in some she developed a code to
communicate secretly with her lovers. She often wrote of her disinterest
in men: “I love, and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them
in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.”
The York Memorial Trust planned a plaque memorializing Lister in the
English community where she had lived and worked. The original plaque
referred to her as “gender non-conforming” but omitted the obvious fact
that she was a lesbian. Thousands of Lesbians were outraged that here
was a lesbian who had to write love letters in code in the 1800s, and
once again in 2018 her identity was erased.
Julie Furlong started a petition protesting the wording on the plaque:
“Gender non-conforming can mean anything, it simply means you do not
conform to societal expectations. It has nothing to do with sexuality.
Don’t let them erase this iconic woman from our history. She was a
lesbian.” Thousands of lesbians signed the petition demanding that the
plaque be changed.
This month, a reworded plaque will be unveiled. The York Civic Trust
consulted with Lister’s biographers and responded to the outcry over the
erasing of Ann Lister’s obvious lesbian identity.
The plaque commemorates what Anne Lister described as her marriage to
Ann Walker at Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate in 1834. This was 200
years before same-sex marriage was legalized in England. The plaque now
reads, “Anne Lister 1791-1840 of Shibden Hall, Halifax. Lesbian and
Diarist took sacrament here to seal her union with Ann Walker, Easter 1834.”
Black feminist Claire Heuchan, who blogs under the name Sister Outrider,
encouraged lesbians to sign the petition protesting the original plaque.
“The discrimination she faced, and the challenges that came with being
open about her sexuality, were a specifically lesbian experience. She
wrote specifically about lesbian life, love and sexuality. It is
important to acknowledge the specifics of lesbian reality, especially
because countless lesbian lives have been hidden from the record. When
Lister’s diaries were first discovered by a descendant in the 1930s,
friends encouraged them to burn them and purge Lister’s voice from
history. It’s incredibly fortunate he didn’t. It is difficult to
celebrate how Lister blazed a trail for future lesbians when the word
lesbian is, apparently, unspeakable.”
These diaries illustrate that lesbians have been a part of communal life
far longer than many have assumed. They make clear what lesbians have
always known, that despite all the hostility past and present, we inject
ourselves, visibly or invisibly, into the larger world. The numerous
lesbians in Castle’s treatise on literature and culture illustrate that
the sense of sexual alienation or marginalization could never stand in
their way. Somehow being obliterated and erased by one’s society
promoted them to assert themselves even more aggressively. We will
surely see this happening again. Castle shows that lesbians are
everywhere, and always have been.
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February 26, 2019 in LGBT rights.
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Carl Sagan
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind
and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says
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fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
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