In 1993, the Lesbian Avengers marched on Washington DC, “a direct-action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility”. They were new, they were edgy, and they were sexy. The national narrative was that of a Copernican pop culture revolution, with sapphic love smack dab in the center. The Rolling Stone magazine called lesbians “The Hot Subculture”, while other publications were pumping out articles about “lesbian chic”. At first glance, one would think this marked a turning point in the American public’s acceptance of homosexuality. But some at the time were skeptical, pointing out that there was something missing from this supposed revolution: lesbians. The portrayals at the time were not centered around lesbian women, but on the concept of lesbians as an object, a fashion trend, an aesthetic. “The Message?”, Kara Swisher wrote in 1993, “America, come say hello to lesbians – they’re hot! Sexy! Out there!”. Was this truly a step forward, or were the old lesbian stereotypes of the hairy-legged, man-hating hag merely being traded out for fresh new ones?
The sexy, trendy lesbian is common in todays media. In a series of interviews with lesbians about the “lesbian” category of porn, many women pointed out that lesbian porn was not made for lesbians, but for men. One woman spoke about a time at a party where she kissed her girlfriend, and a male stranger took the opportunity to tell her how hot it was, “like it was for him, and not because we were in a relationship”. To many people today, “lesbian” is more likely to evoke a category of porn than a category of human. The cultural acceptance of lesbians we see today is not as liberatory as it is often portrayed; rather, it is an attempt to appropriate the resistance to the contradictions of patriarchal capitalism. To explore this, we can examine the historical development of homosexual identity, and produce a framework for understanding how lesbian identity is constructed today.
Lesbian, historically, has meant a number of things. In the same year as the Lesbian Avengers march, Senator Jesse Helms justified his vote against Roberta Achtenberg for assistant housing secretary with the now infamous sentence: “Because she’s a damn lesbian”. At the time, lesbian as a term for woman who got ‘too uppity’ was common and had been for a long time. But while the history of categories of sexuality is long, it is not as long as many think. In fact, the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were coined in the 1860’s. To understand what Lesbian means today – and it means a number of things – we have to understand how we got here. The answer has massive implications for not only the gay liberation movement, but for the entirety of the modern capitalist system.
There is an important distinction that must be made here between the act of sex, and sexuality. It is the distinction between sex as an act of reproduction and sex as a desirous act performed autonomously. The act of sex is ahistorical, present throughout human history. Sexuality, however, is historical. While sex as an act has been present in every species which reproduces sexually, it was only at a specific historical moment that humans began to attach societal meaning to that sexual instinct. It is a modern development.
Saying that sexuality is a modern development is not saying that we only recently developed sexual desire, but that only recently has sexual desire been constructed as a societal concept rather than and individual experience. Many modern modes of thought which attempt to apply contemporary understandings of sexuality fall flat against this. Today, the primary sexual division is that of homosexual/heterosexual, but that was not always the case. Instead, the division was between procreative and non-procreative sex. While that division is often interpreted in the context of modern concepts of sexuality, this is a mistake. It is a conflation of homosexual behavior with homosexual identity. Homosexual behavior refers to the ahistorical act of sex, while homosexual identity is the application of social meaning to that act. Homosexual activities in private occurred, but to quote John D’Emilio, “there was, quite simply, no ‘social space’ to be gay’”.
This is most prominent in an examination of legal systems approach to sex. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, points out that the ways that historical societies discussed sexuality “were all centered on matrimonial relations”. This phenomenon extends further and is especially enlightening in reframing discussions of what is often labeled as homophobia, allowing us to understand it in the context of procreation. In colonial England, the average birthrate was over seven children per woman of childbearing age. The labor of children was needed for the family unit to act as it did, a self-sufficient organization. John D’Emilio writes, “Sex was harnessed to procreation. The Puritans did not celebrate heterosexuality but rather marriage; they condemned all sexual expression outside the marriage bond and did not differentiate sharply between sodomy and heterosexual fornication”.
This is further supported by the original definitions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Up until 1934, heterosexuality was defined as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex” by the Merriam Webster dictionary before being redefined as “normal”. The cause of this transformation can be attributed most clearly to the economic changes stemming from the industrial revolution. No longer did one need a large family to reproduce a personal workforce, and so sexuality was released from reproduction. If you can work for a wage in a factory all by yourself, the economic need to create children to support you was gone. The conditions for the formation of a homosexual identity came into existence in the form of the capability of an individual to make a living outside of the heterosexual family. Capitalism’s individualistic ideology, a result of an economic structure which drastically reduced the lower classes reliance on others for their own survival, changed the social order which had made the family the primary home of socially recognized sexual activity. The formation of the concept of sexuality was not the result of the creation of sexual desire, but of the social recognition of existing desire which was brought about by the industrial revolution. In short, economic agency is a necessary preliminary for the social recognition of desire.
This, however, poses a fairly perplexing question. “How is it”, D’Emilio asks, “that capitalism, whose structure made possible the emergence of a gay identity and the creation of urban communities, appears unable to accept gay men and lesbians into its midst?”. Despite the individualism it perpetuates, capitalism cannot be seen as antagonistic to the heterosexual family – in fact, it is the opposite. Capitalism is reliant on the family. For the property-owning class, the family created a system for passing on property, while the proletarian family is needed to reproduce the workforce. Any economic system must be able to reproduce its means of production, and an aspect of that is labour power. If the system uses more than it can create, it will not last, and so for that system to maintain itself it must contain the means of its own reproduction. When it comes to labour power, the means of reproduction is the family unit. The family creates children and sets them up to become laborers themselves.
As Friedrich Engels explained in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, modern marriage in capitalism turns the family into a primarily economic institution. “[The monogamous family] was not in any way the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience. It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property”. As he points out, literature in the past which referred to love, and romance invariably did so in the context of infidelity. “This first form of individual sexual love, the chivalrous love of the middle ages, was by no means conjugal. Quite the contrary. In its classic form among the Provençals, it heads straight for adultery, and the poets of love celebrated adultery”. Marriage was economic, and love played no part in it.
But, again, while capitalism does rely on the family, it is ideologically antithetical to it. The family is collectivist, while capitalism is individualistic. It is a contradiction at the heart of our economic system, an ouroboric crisis at the core of our systems of production, one which systematically degrades the entire concept of the family. The destruction of the family has been a common talking point in western politics for at least the last two hundred years. In the 19th century, proletarian women entering the workforce resulted in a scandalized middle class concerned by the perceived threat to family life. Anti-suffrage propaganda often made use of similar language, portraying suffragettes as unwed bitter spinsters. And today, homosexuality has been similarly blamed for this timeless war on the family. The family is a central institution of modern society. It is the institution through which our society, and more importantly, our workforce, is reproduced. There is a reason its destruction is such a subject of fear – its collapse would pose a massive existential threat to our society.
This is the framework by which we can understand the historicity of heterosexism within capitalism – not as ex nihilo, it does not come from nothing, but as a natural consequence of a contradiction within capitalism. Capitalist individualism, which created the conditions for the formation of homosexual identity, is a threat to itself and to its reproduction, making obsolete the very structures by which it perpetuates itself. While bourgeois marriages serve the function of retaining wealth in the upper class through inheritance, inheritance has no meaning to the class which owns nothing. This contradiction is deadly to capitalism, and so capitalist ideology reinforces the idea of the family in abstract terms, no longer a source of economic utility, but a place to find personal emotional value and to satisfy our need for intimate relationships. This façade has turned love and the family into euphemisms, categories used to protect capitalist reproduction.
The entire process of reproduction is made up of similar contradictions. As D’Emilio points out, society continues to view childrearing as a private process, of parents as the owners of their children and as responsible for their lives, yet childrearing is largely socialized in education, media, and other industries which reproduce children not in terms of their physical birth but as vessels for capitalist ideology. And it is in this contradiction that the need for homophobia forms as a natural consequence – capitalism is internally unstable as a result of the contradiction between its individualism and its need for reproduction, and so it passes on the blame. When homophobes talk about the destruction of family values, they are not wrong. The family as we know it is being destroyed, but it is not feminists, lesbians, or gay men who are responsible, it is capitalist individualism.
And this is not the first time for capitalism. Nancy Fraser, in “Contradictions of Capitalism and Care”, explores the history of women’s rights under capitalism in the United States. She identifies three points in which the inherent contradictions of capitalism and growing sentiments of women’s emancipation came to a head. Fraser lays out three distinct historical periods defined by the ways in which women related to the economy: “first ‘separate spheres’, then ‘the family wage’, now the ‘two-earner family’”. Each of these came about after the previous social order was in contradiction with some other aspect of society to the extent that it had to be resolved, lest the entire structure collapse.
And through all of these, the institution of the family remains at the core of the contradiction, unable to justify itself against capitalist individualism. Heterosexism and homophobia are the consequences of this contradiction, forces which arose to protect and justify an institution which cannot justify itself. We are seeing an institution which still has important economic value, in that the family is needed to reproduce the workforce, but has lost its ideological justifications and is in conflict with the ideals which were formed by the very economic system which depends on it.
Lesbians in particular become the victims of this contradiction. While the presumed revolution of lesbians sparked in part by the Lesbian Avengers did change societal constructions of lesbian identity, that transformation was not liberatory. Out of the hateful frying pan, into the objectifying fire.
A Taxonomy of Lesbians
Having developed a historical roadmap of the development of lesbian identity, we can now create a taxonomy of lesbian identity to allow for a categorization of cultural representations of presumed sapphic love. This taxonomy will reveal that at the core, female desire is at best incidental to patriarchal constructions of lesbian identity, and that the true basis for these constructions is as extensions of male heterosexual desire.
There are four forms of lesbian identity which are permissible within heterosexual modes of thought and patriarchal society. These describe not the individual experiences of lesbians, but the cultural narratives which presuppose heterosexual male supremacy and struggle to justify that supremacy within a quickly changing society. If lesbian desire can be defined as genuine female sexual desire towards women, these forms each represent ways in which it is constructed against that definition.
The first form is lesbian desire appropriated into heterosexual identity. This takes the definition and removes the “towards women” aspect and reformulates lesbian relationships as heterosexual. This is best exemplified by the heteronormative question of ‘which one of you is the man in your relationship?’ often directed at lesbians. It is an attempt to apply heterosexual gender roles upon a relationship which, by its very existence challenges those roles.
The second is lesbian desire as denied in the absence of male desire. This takes the definition and removes the “sexual” aspect, on the assumption that without male desire, lesbian relationships cannot be sexual. Where the first form solves this problem by turning female desire into male desire, this simply removes desire. The ironic concept of “Sappho and her friend” in LGBTQ circles describes a person who, upon observing explicit female homosexual desire, ascribes to it platonic meaning.
The third form is lesbian desire as an object of male desire, objectification. This takes the definition and removes the “female” aspect, turning lesbian desire as a whole into a tool for external male desire. An obvious example of this is the fact that lesbian pornography and portrayals of lesbian sexuality in general is created with male consumption in mind. This can be confirmed easily by asking a lesbian how well they think lesbian sexuality is portrayed in media. This form removes the entire dynamic of lesbian relationships, transforming them from the relationship between two individuals into a single object for the male gaze.
The fourth form is lesbian desire as an obstacle to male desire. This takes the definition and removes the “genuine” aspect, reframing lesbian desire as an illusion in the face of the “true” form of sexual desire, which is male desire. The male chauvinist idea of “flipping a lesbian”, or that lesbians just have not met the right man yet, are not only examples of this concept in action, but testaments to how dangerous they are. Sexual assault of lesbians by men are a serious problem today and cannot be distanced from these portrayals. These perspectives on lesbian desire not only deny women autonomy over their own identities but justify violence in the name of that denial.
We could continue to provide examples of ways in which lesbians are reframed to allow them to fit into the definition of women as defined by men. The concept of “inversion”, which eventually faded into obscurity in favor of the concepts of transgenderism and homosexuality, was used to explain men or women who would show same sex sexual desire, explaining that through the idea that they must be a woman carrying male desires, or vice versa. While this concept is not in use much today, it is hardly rare to hear someone describe lesbians as being “manly”. However, the important point here is how absolutely absurd this is. The structures which contribute to the male centered definition of woman are not simple, they are not natural, and they are not easily maintained. There is a purpose for these structures that justifies them.
A very obvious parallel here is in the historical development of female identity. The first question that must be asked is, what are women? This is not as easy to answer as it might seem, as the historical context of women is difficult to unpack. How “woman” as a category is defined is a complex set of issues, issues which will be important to our point. To quote Anita Sarkeesian, “In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team. They are the ball”. It is for this reason that it is even up for debate whether or not women even exist in the historical sense, if women’s existence within patriarchal societies is as an object rather than a subject.
This is the frame for our investigation into the ontology of women. We must accept that women’s existence is in some sense contingent, socially defined in relation to male power structures. Sarkeesian was referring to the example of stories where women’s victimhood acted as a plot device for the male protagonist, where the stories “[trade] the disempowerment of female characters for the power of male characters”. We can see similar tropes emphasized by the existence of metrics such as the Bechdel test, a measure of female representation which points out the dearth of stories where two women talk to each other about something other than a man. Saying women’s existence is contingent does not mean that the physical existence of people who identify as women is contingent, but that social recognition of women is based upon their relation to men. Male is the default, female requires justification.
So then, if women are truly contingent upon men, what are women without men? In The Straight Mind, Monique Wittig makes the claim that women are fundamentally others, that men are not different, but women are. The relationship between the sexes is not that of “sex one/sex two”, it is “normal/other”. “Woman” is compared to a slur, as it is a signifier which indicates oppression and has no meaning outside the context of the “heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems” which formed them. The heterosexual relationship, which Wittig defined as “the obligatory social relationship between ‘man’ and ‘woman’”, is the only source of meaning for the category of woman. It is for this reason that she ends her essay with the infamous phrase, “Lesbians are not women”.
Skeptically accepting this conclusion for the moment, we can apply this mode of thought to history as a means of testing it. If women have historically been defined in relation to men, and if this definition was supported by and in support of the structures of society, Wittig’s argument will be supported.
Before the expansion of our understanding of sexuality, there were two forms of built social relationships that were socially recognized. Monogamous marriage in the heterosexual form defined by Engels, and friendship. As mentioned before, on the societal level, sexual relationships outside of the economic procreative marriages were largely left alone by social structures. In those marriages, the woman was subjugated by the man, made entirely contingent to him, objectified. So, we turn to the realm of friendship to answer our question of whether or not women have been allowed a sovereign existence in any sense.
Sharon Marcus’ Between Women explores female friendship in Victorian England, making a number of claims about its nature. It begins by identifying the roles of women as defined in the 1839 book The Women of England, a female conduct book. These were “daughters, wives, and mothers”, each examples of ways women were positioned in relation to men via the familial sphere, but there was a fourth role women were allowed: friend. Between Women as a whole makes the case that the role of friendship was not just a potential aspect of Victorian society for women, but a socially recognized role.
This places the claim that “woman” is a category only in relation to “man” in jeopardy, or at least requires it to be qualified. While Marcus explicitly rejects the idea that female friendships were “an attempt to press women’s bonds into patriarchal service”, she does acknowledge that Victorian acceptance of female friendship was “because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates”. So, while women did have lives that were not defined by men, this is nothing new to our argument. The argument is not that the individuals categorized as women never exist outside of their interactions with men, but that the category as a whole is recognized by society in its relation to men.
What Marcus shows us is not that women were socially treated as independent of men, but the opposite in fact. Those genuine friendships between women were revolutionary, they marked a shift in society. They exposed the growing contradiction between the societally accepted definition of women as being an “other” to men with the cultural move towards individualism. This is the ontology of “woman” today. Women are a contradiction, individuals within a category that does not reflect the truth of their lives.
The sapphic non-women demonstrate this ontology. Lesbians are the ultimate opposition to the definition of women as being contingent to men, and as such pose a threat to the patriarchal construction of women as such. Like female friendship, cultural acceptance of lesbians is not a sign that the patriarchal construction of women has been thrown aside, but a sign of the contradiction. Today, the appearance of socially accepted lesbian relationships in spite of the very category of “woman” being meaningless outside its relationship to “man” represents an inherent contradiction within our social and economic institutions that is coming to light, and exposes the ways in which those structures must cover for themselves.
What then, is the future of this contradiction? If we are to follow Nancy Fraser’s argument, as well as the point of Sharon Marcus, the contradiction female sexuality poses can be resolved only through a dramatic shift in the structure of things, as a crisis arises, a shift which is by no means inevitable. In The Perverts Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek examines the turbulent history of capitalism. “Capitalism is all the time in crisis. This is precisely why it appears almost indestructible. Crisis is not its obstacle. It is what pushes it forwards towards self-revolutionizing permanent, extended self-reproduction – always new products”. Crisis and contradiction alone are not necessarily threats to capitalism.
The situation of female sexuality is not a result of independent societal attitudes, rather it is societal attitudes which are a result of material economic conditions. The family is the result of a mode of production which necessitates constant reproduction and expansion of its workforce, and of the societal reverence given to private property and inheritance. Heterosexism and homophobia are themselves birthed out of the contradiction between the family and the individualism of the economic system it supports. Even the idea of “women’s liberation” is itself arguably contradictory. The category of “woman” is defined in relation to oppression, and so long as gender categories hold societal weight will continue to do so. It is a term that is meaningless outside of oppression. The systems which crafted the chains cannot break them, they can only dress the chains up and promise that they are gone.
This is because the only freedom an established system can offer to those it oppresses is freedom to participate in that oppression. Chizuko Ueno, in Nationalism and Gender, described neoliberal’s offerings of equality to women as the choice of ghettoization or integration. Women are given the choice to either segregate themselves from men, to accept different treatment by society, or to integrate, and be allowed to participate in male society. But participation could never be equal, and while women could be doctors, lawyers, soldiers, they would always be second-class doctors, second-class lawyers, and second-class soldiers. As capitalist individualism sows the seeds of the annihilation of the family, the institution it relies on, neoliberal notions of equality call into question the very basis of its structure.