Faderman, Lillian.
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present
. New York: Morrow, 1981.
Jansiti, Carlo.
Violette Leduc
. Paris: Grasset, 1999.
Leduc,Violette.
Thérèse et Isabelle. Texte intégral
. Postface and notes by Carlo Jansiti. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
Trout Hall, Colette.
Violette Leduc, la mal-aimée
. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Viollet, Catherine. “Violette Leduc. Les ravages de la censure.” In
Genèse textuelle, identités sexuelles
. Paris: Du Lérot, 1997.
—Censorship; Lesbophobia; Literature; Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite; School; Shame; Scandal.
LESBOPHOBIA
Why use the term “lesbophobia” when the term “homophobia” concerns homosexuals of both genders? If identity were a similar condition between gays and lesbians, then the distinction would be superfluous. However, this is not the conclusion reached by the French Coordination lesbienne nationale (CLN; National Lesbian Committee). Its study of accounts of homophobia aimed at lesbians, as individuals or as a social group, reveals characteristics that are specific to lesbophobia.
The first is the eclipsing of lesbians in culture and history, as attested by Marie-Jo Bonnet in her work
Les Relations amoureuses entre les femmes
(Love affairs between women). When historians make mention of lesbianism, it is often distorted, reduced to either its sexual or emotional dimension, in contrast to socially recognized pederasty of Greco-Roman society. Even today, the eclipsing of lesbianism by the media is frequent. The presentation of lesbian books or films often neglects to mention the emotional aspect of the relationship between two women. For example, the film
Go Fish
(1994) was “interpreted” by certain newspapers as the “sentimental adventures” of four young women without mentioning the lesbian content, which was quite explicit. French television and press quite readily choose to overlook lesbians, even during the Lesbian and Gay Pride celebrations, despite the banners carried by groups such as Fierté lesbienne (Lesbian Pride) and the CLN. Even without media
censorship
, public opinion nonetheless perceives homosexual culture and community as being essentially male. The little interest given to lesbian culture and organizations contrasts significantly with the abundance of articles devoted to “gay [male] power.” This constitutes a sexist manifestation of the second-class status assigned to women in patriarchal society. Thus, the eclipsing of an individual or a legal entity with the intention of denying their existence is an act of
discrimination
which leads to harmful exclusion.
Lesbophobic stigmatization is also specific: if gay men are likened to
pedophiles
, then lesbians are discredited by their representation as “
rabatteuse du porno
,” a French term to describe a woman who finds other women for her and her male partner to have sex with. (“
Rabbateur
” is a dog that leads the prey to the hunter.) When its existence is not denied, sex between women is often considered secondary, simplistic and an object of pornographic voyeurism for heterosexual men. Displayed with impunity, this
caricature
of lesbians is defamatory. Consequently, lesbian militants have discovered their names and telephone numbers in pornographic magazines, while certain magazine stands stock
Lesbia Magazine
(a lesbian, cultural, feminist magazine) in the pornography section.
Lastly, if
violence
against lesbians punishes the sexual transgression of masculine/feminine roles, as does violence against gays, the underlying meaning of the aggression differs: essentially, gay men are punished for not exercising their virile power over women, whereas lesbians are chastised for their sexual independence from men. The attacks are aimed at their female gender, their androgynous appearance and their non-submission to the heterosexual and patriarchal order. Examples of this type of violence are easy to find: family rejection, harassment from neighbors with insinuations of a supposed usurpation of the male role, and punitive rape. Further evidence can be gleaned from a sampling of
insults
: from one woman’s father, “I’d have preferred that you were a whore”; from a neighbor, “Why don’t you go and have some balls sewn on?” In each case, the lesbophobia involves an intensification of sexism.
In order to effectively resist, it is not enough to add the term “sexist” to the term “homophobic.” The former concerns all women; the latter, more often than not, brings to mind attacks against gay men only; whereas hate directed toward lesbians encompasses both phenomena, because they suffer discrimination as women in a male-dominated world and as homosexuals in a heterosexual society.
The universalist argument for the mixing of gays and lesbians that opposes the non-mixing argument is, therefore, an illusion. The mixing of men and women only in terms of “men” or “homosexuals,” denies the social hierarchy of the sexes, the cultural, political, and economic supremacy of men, and the resultant sexist and lesbophobic discrimination. It disqualifies feminist and lesbian demands. Thus, neutralized in the male universe, lesbians have no way to escape invisibility and defend their dignity and rights other than by revealing the specifics of lesbophobia and demanding it be countered with preventative and strict antidiscrimination legislation.
This analysis is supported by numerous European and North American studies, as well as by foundational texts from lesbian-feminist and/or radical culture. Numerous examples of chastisement and ostracism for refusing to submit to male rule can be found in
The Proceeding of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women
. As noted in this report, a Norwegian lesbian is hospitalized and submitted to “re-education,” in which coitus with her ex-husband is imposed daily, despite her vomiting; in Germany, judges and journalists take advantage of the trial of two lesbians who murdered a husband to attribute to lesbians a frequent penchant “for all types of murders, suicides, and assassinations,” which leads the report’s narrator to conclude:
Discrimination against lesbians represents the extreme sexual oppression practiced against women. In this instance, men’s fear that women be sexually independent illustrates itself the most clearly. By their lifestyle, lesbians represent a threat to those very foundations of patriarchal society:
marriage
and
family
. Since women are not supposed to develop their own sexuality, sexual needs in which men are not concerned are forbidden.
In her book
Homosexuality: Power and Politics
, Susan Hemmings writes of the lesbophobic campaign that preceded the decline in gay rights and the increased scarcity of salaried jobs for women in England from 1979 onward: after a female Labour Party candidate who was suspected of being a lesbian and was forced to come out publicly, a newspaper published the following comment: “The Lord gave us two sexes with a mutual attraction in order to perpetuate the race and those men and women who seek to pervert this plan go against God’s will”;
The Evening News
denounced the idea of artificial insemination for lesbian couples, expressing the horror of imagining a child raised without a father. In an article titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” a journalist for the
Daily Express
attacked a school teacher because she taught “ten ways to fight sexism at school,” thus compromising her career. In this campaign, anti-feminism becomes linked to anti-lesbianism. In an essay entitled “Des droits à reconnaître” (Rights to be recognized), Quebecois lesbians underline the role institutions play in such waves of reaction: the hospital where a medical team attributed a woman’s problems to her lesbianism; the court that revoked a lesbian mother’s custody of her child by associating lesbianism with sexual
perversion
, etc.
Irene Demcsuk and Linda Peers remind us that medical and psychoanalytical language are implicated in the pathologization of lesbianism. Even if this supposed sickness no longer appears in the nosography, the stigma is still conveyed socially and remains present in people’s minds. In order to explain this discrimination, the authors call into question “the constraint of heterosexuality,” “a constraint whose function is to ensure the patriarchal control of women’s bodies.” They borrow this concept from Adrienne Rich, for whom “heterosexuality is neither a fact of nature, nor an innate characteristic, but a social construction affected by the relations of the sexes and by the domination of women by men.” This “constraint to heterosexuality” is, according to them, ideological: “
Heterosexism
” is the “patriarchal ideology founded on the presumption that all individuals must be heterosexual under threat of being presumed immoral, perverse, deviant, sick, deficient and, therefore, inferior.”
If this definition applies to gays as well as lesbians, it seems to apply more to the latter in that it reveals the sexist component of homophobia. The foundational texts of lesbian-feminist culture illustrate the systemic functioning that produces this ideology, though neither terms “heterosexist” nor “lesbophobia” are to be found anywhere in them. In the tradition of Kate Millett, Nicole-Claude Matthieu, and Christine Delphy, Collette Guillaumin’s materialist feminism denounces the multiple ways that the class of men oppresses the class of women by way of “sexing,” that is, the private appropriation of each woman by a husband or father and the collective appropriation of all women. Monique Wittig’s materialist lesbianism calls into question the categories of “man” and “woman” themselves: “The categories in question function as primitive concepts in a conglomerate of various disciplines, theories, trends, and ideas that I would call ‘straight thought.’ … It’s a question of woman, man, difference, and the whole series of concepts that are affected by this marking, including concepts such as history, culture, and reality.” Wittig emphasizes the political finality of this conceptual structure: “Heterosexuality is the political system in which we live, based upon the enslavement of women.” Consequently, the woman who loves another woman and who does not belong to a man must “consider herself a fugitive, an escaped slave, a lesbian.” This leads Wittig to state: “It would be wrong to say that lesbians live, associate, and make love to women as the term woman exists solely in heterosexual systems of thought and economic systems. Lesbians are not women.”
These analyses allow us to better understand, whether we want to or not, why lesbianism is intolerable for patriarchal society and in what ways it is subversive. They offer an adoptive strategy in order to combat lesbophobia. Monique Wittig’s strategy seeks “a total conceptual re-evaluation of social fabric”: “The transformation of economic relationships is not enough. We must implement a political transformation of key concepts, that is to say, those concepts which are strategic for us.” Wittig’s lesbian consciousness is not aimed at transgression, but rather the abolition of the gender and sex upon which the notion of universality itself is based. Her strategy also consists of reinventing language and literary genres that subvert heterocultural heritage, in order to offer women (and men?) examples of what writing, fiction, and a lesbian-specific utopia could be.
As stakeholders in this revolutionary current, radical lesbians pursue the deconstruction of the heterosexual system with the objective of abolishing it. For them, “the constitution of a lesbian community represents the basis of a political force, and not a simple expression of identity.” It is for these reasons that, since the 1978 split, some radical lesbians keep their distance from the “hetero-feminists” who do not call into question the supremacy of heterosexuality as the foundation of patriarchy and the oppression of all women. If the imprint of materialist lesbianism and radical lesbianism is real in European and North American society, lesbian activism has diversified and, some would say, compromised itself in homosexual reformism in order to obtain social recognition and equal rights.
In France, because of the plurality of groups and a non-monolithic political conscience, the CLN has pragmatically decided to promote lesbian visibility and the defense of their rights as citizens. This translates, notably, into the active presence of CLN representatives in the offices of the Collectif national pour les droits de la femme (National Collective for Women’s Rights), in the coordination of the European Women’s Lobby, and by its participation in the World March of Women. Their work organizes around understanding lesbophobia as the ultimate expression of sexism and in revealing the need for mutual support between heterosexual women and lesbians. The positive results of this approach attest to the fact that only patient explanation of our common oppression can reverse the systemic heterosexism instilled within each and every one of us.
The struggle against lesbophobic attacks also progresses through solidarity with gay men, who, if they benefit from the privileges of the dominant class because they are men, are still oppressed because they too suffer from heterosexual constraint. If collective action aims to integrate sexual orientation into anti-discriminatory legislation, it is imperative that political prevention and laws take into account the sexist dimension of lesbophobia. This explains why the CLN wishes to bring, beyond the collective goal, its own amendments to the law where necessary. As legal expert Anne Le Gall states, “You can have neither discipline, nor way of expression, nor mystique even, nor transcendence, nor a relationship with another if you are not an autonomous individual, including on the legal, social and political level as brought about by
law
; and a law which applies to men as it does to women.”
—
Raymonde Gérard
Coordination lesbienne nationale. “La Lesbophobie en France” report (March 2001).
Bonnet, Marie-Jo.
Les Relations amoureuses entre les femmes
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995.
Delphy, Christine.
L’Ennemi principal
. Paris: Syllepse, 1976. [Published in the UK as
The Main Enemy
. London: Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications, 1977.]