It was thus neither the defense of homosexuality nor the support of its greater visibility that the feminist militants first focused on, but really the identification of a problem and the virulent critique from the heterosexual patriarchy. It is this work, and its multiple facets, that first had to be done. And this happened in many different ways, directly or indirectly, through spontaneous or theorized actions, slogans or songs, demonstrations or articles.
We know that the movement’s founding act was the segregation decision: the political break from male and mixed movements. We also know that this homosociality, decided upon for mainly strategic reasons, was interpreted from the start by the movement’s adversaries as sexual, as a result this branch of the women’s movement was immediately reviled and stigmatized as a bunch of “dykes and unloved women.” At the same time, many (heretofore heterosexual) women joined the feminist movement which opened them up to the possibility of relations between women.
To this trend were added numerous feminist texts, petitions, and campaigns against the
heterosexist
discourse, which Monique Wittig later called “the Straight Mind.” As an example, the first publication of the French journal
Partisans
(1970) contained texts on the “myth of vaginal orgasm,” the “myth of feminine frigidity,” rape, and even abortion and unwanted pregnancies. Others texts would follow, on family abuse, sexual violence against women, and later, the “coercion to heterosexuality” according to Adrienne Rich’s formula. All discourses concerning the “evident,” “natural,” and essential character of heterosexual relations thus became problematic, and were analyzed and disassembled, and in the end, made laughable and unacceptable.
It was this long and aggressive work of fighting against patriarchal institutions and myths (in particular those of “feminine sexuality”)—of shredding the patriarchy’s best claimed “evidences”—that resulted in the rhetorical and political claim of lesbian visibility being heard outside the movement and, also, inside it.
This transformation, however, was not without intense and painful controversies. Starting at the end of the 1970s, a set of lesbian critiques of the feminist movement developed, charging it with not having named and challenged heterosexuality, thus in effect denying the presence of its feminist lesbian members. This is why during the meetings of the Coordination des groups femmes (1977–78), and in one of the first gay newspapers
Quand les femmes s’aiment
(1978–80), gay women stated that they were being negated and made invisible, while at the same time exposing diverse forms of oppression within the movement; specifically, the fact that an emancipation movement can reproduce within itself the oppression of minority groups. In particular, they emphasized the constraints of silence in the name of the movement’s alleged priorities (i.e. “not to scare off the majority of women”) and the marginalization of the discussion on homosexuality (and heterosexuality) “when it should be an integral part of the struggle against the sexual norm for women’s rights to dispose of their body and their sexuality” (“Was the Women’s Movement an answer for lesbians?,”
Rouge,
April 1977).
Certainly, homosexuality is “accepted” in the context of the class struggle, but as a “special feature,” and this “
tolerance
” makes lesbians all the more self-conscious of their role as “outsiders”: “We feel negated by this pseudo-acceptance” (Stage femmes d’Orsay, “Texte des lesbiennes,” 1977). What these women were saying was that homosexuality remains scary. They particularly stressed the fact that few heterosexual women acknowledge gay women, or their questions, even though lesbians are very active in all women’s struggles, such as the right to abortion. In other areas, the issues become more complex, particularly differences between “new” and “old” gay women. Gay-identified women sometimes voluntarily held themselves outside lesbian groups, fearing the return to the “
ghetto
” from which they had already freed themselves by joining the feminist movement. Inversely, women who became gay after joining the movement could hardly understand the uneasiness and specific oppression of “old lesbians” who suffered and sometimes internalized repression.
For their part,“radical lesbians” called to fight against “heteropower” (heterosexuality as a patriarchal strategy) and also criticized feminism, or as they called it, “heterofeminism,” as a form of “collaboration” (texts from the lesbian meeting of June 1980, reported in
Nouvelles questions féministes,
no. 1). Their ambition was to build a gay political force on the basis of the analysis of lesbianism as a political choice and a privileged form of resistance to the appropriation of women by men. It must be noted that any divergences from these points, within the lesbian movement have almost always divided lesbians among themselves. They also ended in the violent and painful rupture of the collective Questions feminists
,
paralyzing all public debate on these questions for a long period.
During the 1980s and 90s, there was an increase in the number of lesbian initiatives (including archives, cafés, festivals, groups, national meetings, and publications), but the rest of the militant or academic feminist movement continued to fail to address lesbian claims. The more institutional feminist groups in particular, wanting to be recognized by public powers, be it in academia or in conventional political life, largely ignored lesbians and their claims of the most serious problems with the heterosexual system. As well, the majority of studies on women, or feminist studies, remain hetero-centered. At the National Conference for Women’s Rights in France in 1997, lesbians were once again sidestepped, as lesbianism was depicted as a peculiarity, a simple sexual choice. In fact, the problem became more general; in any movement it is difficult to construct a broad, non-fragmented vision while at the same time include different perspectives on different oppressions and resistances within that same movement.
The contestation that occurred during these conferences, and the organization of the Coordination lesbienne nationale, has changed the situation in France; lesbians have managed to achieve more representation in the national Collectif droits des femmes (Women’s Rights Collective, composed of
associations
, parties, and unions). At the international level, however, the same conflict arose during the organization of the World March of Women in the summer of 2000; the majority of women groups from countries represented refused to have the struggle for lesbian rights, or even the freedom of “sexual orientation,” included in a world-wide platform. In France, certainly, there is an agreement to include lesbophobic
discrimination
when describing the struggles of feminists, but this only happens if lesbians themselves push for it.
Fear still persists: feminist movements dread that lesbian visibility will “discredit” or endanger the movement. In fact, refusing to face
lesbophobia
, or thinking that it is a problem faced by lesbians only, means that we are leaving intact one of the major weapons of sexism; making lesbians and lesbianism invisible is one of the means for patriarchal power to deny the affirmation of independence and strength by women, by controlling and dividing them, as emphasized by Suzanne Pharr.
Certain young lesbian militants today believe that they have no link to the feminist movement, and some consider feminism, by not giving a real place to lesbian claims, to be truly “homophobic.” However, the issue is infinitely more complex. The question of the place of the lesbian questioning within feminist theorization is always present. But—and this independently of life choices made by lesbians and heterosexual women—there was a real divergence between the two main theoretical options present from the beginning of the movement.
On one hand, revolutionary and radical feminists maintained that said notions of “woman” and “man” had been completely constructed historically, socially, and politically, and that they only made sense within a specific discourse, such as patriarchal domination. As early as 1970, Christine Delphy described this relationship as one of class. For her, as for Colette Guillaumin or Monique Wittig, just as the disappearance of capitalist exploitation would mean the end to antagonist categories of “worker” and “boss,” the disappearance of “patriarchal” would automatically result in the disappearance of the two categories “man” and “woman”: women would thus lose all at once their necessity in the social game, as well as their pertinence in sexual relations. These positions, similar in principle to Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis in her 1949 book
Le Deuxième Sexe
(
The Second Sex
), were clearly anti-naturalist, anti-essentialist, and pro-equality and
universalism
. Inversely, for other militants and theorists, the “
gender
difference
” is an inevitable component of the human species (“there are two genders”), and the feminine, as an objective of the movement, up until then oppressed and repressed by male power, was to be exposed, developed, and even glorified. A real mysticism of the “gender difference,” and often of motherhood, was created at the same time in the movement, particularly by the Psychanalyse et politique group led by Antoinette Fouque, and in numerous circles of female thinkers and artists, including Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Annie Leclerc, and Chantal Chawaf. One must stress that the idea of valorization, which could lead to the essential rending of “differences,” was common to many movements of this period (particularly anti-racist movements), the differential MLF were the only ones to justify them through arguments that were openly or implicitly naturalistic and biological (“The shop belongs to the worker, the uterus belongs to women, production of living things belongs to us,” wrote Psy and Po). It should be noted that it is this line of thinking that is, curiously, read and thought of in the US as being solely representative of French feminism.
That said, these themes have since been taken up by intellectual women and a few men—such as Sylviane Agacinski, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Legendre—as part of the debate on gender parity. In numerous countries, this feminism of maternity, often linked to the defense of
family
, has more than once been highlighted with homophobic pronouncements. In the same way, feminist movements in India, the first country in the world to vote for man/woman parity in Parliament, bitterly criticized Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film
Fire
. This film, which was the first in India to depict a lesbian relationship, was accused of presenting a poor image of women. In so doing, these Indian feminists were in tacit agreement with right-wing Hindu religious groups which vandalized movie theaters where the film was shown. Incidentally, this overriding value granted to gender difference is also found in numerous associations of women, feminists, or more often anti-feminists, particularly in the US, where they are generally aligned with pro-family, pro-life religious groups. This is exemplified by Wilma Leftwich’s declaration in 1998 at the annual convention of the Concerned Women for America association that suggested the existence of a world conspiracy aiming at “reducing the American population by generalizing abortion, sterilizing mothers of large families, and promoting homosexuality.”
Was this emphasis placed on “gender difference,” or even the cult of this “difference,” compatible with the idea of equality of gay and lesbian sexualities and struggles? The question was posed right at the beginning of the movement by radical feminists, for whom “gender difference” was only another ruse of the patriarchy in order to resign women to the boundaries of their gender and their oppression. This was clearly set forth beginning at the end of the 1970s, particularly by Wittig, who maintained that “lesbians are not women” because “lesbianism is above gender categories.”
It was not until the end of the 1990s, and the debates that accompanied homosexual union, that “gender difference” became the ultimate weapon brandished by the adversaries of
PaCS
, gay
marriage
, and gay
parenting
. Supporters were thus accused of attacking “
symbolic order
” (a notion inappropriately borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss), as demonstrated by enthologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, and thereby undermining the entire basis of Western civilization, or worse, the possibility of all rational thinking. For anthropologist Françoise Héritier, gender difference is the essential condition of all thought, its “ultimate doorstop.” Legendre also uses this “hard core of reason that is gender difference” and the “universal principle of non-contradiction: a man is not a woman, a woman is not a man,” to conclude that in the PaCS episode, “the State is divesting itself of its functions of guarantor of reason [to] leave the space to a hedonist logic inherited from Nazism.”
Curiously, speakers on behalf of the feminist movement—those who had fought differential and identity discourses of “feminineness”—as well as their advocates have been dramatically absent from the debate. However, the reservations expressed by some women toward the institution of family and the legitimization of the couple (even gay couples), was probably not absent, nor was the fear that these happen to weaken fundamental feminist claims for the acknowledgment of everyone—“man” or “woman,” “homo” or “hetero,” “trans” or “bisexual” (even “asexual”)—as persons in their own right.
—Liliane Kandel and Claudie Lesselier
Anne. “La Difficile frontière entre homosexualité et hétérosexualité.” In
Les Femmes s’entêtent, 1973
. CLEF (Centre lyonnais d’études féministes).
Chronique d’une passion. Le mouvement de libération des femmes à Lyon
. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
Delphy, Christine. “L’Ennemi principal,”
Partisans,
no. 54–55 (1970).
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. “La Pensée-Lévi-Strauss,”
Prochoix,
no. 13 (2000).
———. “Les Femmes s’entêtent,”
Les Temps modernes,
no. 333–34 (1974). New edition: Gallimard, “Idées,” 1975.
Fourest, Caroline.
Foi contre Choix, la droite religieuse et le mouvement “prolife” aux Etats-Unis
. Lyon: Golias, 2001.