Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Feminist Review Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

CONTENTS

Editorial 1 ‘The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious 3 in Modern Feminist Theory Rosalind Minsky Feminism and Pornography 11 Kate Ellis Barbara O’Dair and Abby Tallmer Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship 15 Gillian Rodgerson and Linda Semple Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say 25 Lynne Segal The Woman in My Life: Photography of Women 35 Selected by Mica Nava Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project 45 Clara Connolly Woman, Native, Other 55 Pratibha Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing 63 Jayne Egerton Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Poems 75 Gloria Evans DaviesÉva TóthBatya Weinbaum

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Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now? 85 Lorraine Gamman and Gilda O’Neill The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: the Danish 91 Redstocking Movement Lynn Walter Reviews Angela McRobbie on New Times 111 Ann Rossiter on Woman-Nation-State 115 Letters 119

Noticeboard 125 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Alison Light, Alison Read, Annie Whitehead, Avtar Brah, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Erica Carter, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Inge Blackman, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Loretta Loach, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Mica Nava, Naila Kabeer, Sue O’Sullivan. Correspondence and advertising For contributions and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For subscriptions and advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Inland Book Company Inc., 22 Hemingway Avenue, East Haven, CT 06512, USA. Copyright © 1990 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review. Copyright © 1990 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. PHOTOCOPYING AND REPRINT PERMISSIONS Single and multiple photocopies of extracts from this journal may be made without charge

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 in all public and educational institutions or as part of any non-profit educational activity provided that full acknowledgement is made of the source. Requests to reprint in any publication for public sale should be addressed to the Feminist Review at the address above. ISSN number 0141–7789 ISBN 0-203-98582-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-05274-2 Print Edition vi Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Editorial

Recent political developments nationally and internationally are generating discussion and re-evaluation within the editorial collective of Feminist Review, as elsewhere, and we are now in the process of considering how these might change the journal. A longer editorial statement, the result of our thinking about these questions, will be published in the next issue. In the meantime, we would like to signal to our readers our plan for a special issue to be published in the autumn of 1991. Provisionally entitled ‘Shifting Territories’, it will anticipate the emergence of a new European identity and the quincentenary of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1992. ‘Territory’ is more than a geographical metaphor, and we hope that contributions to this special issue of Feminist Review will explore changes in the political, theoretical and imaginative mapping of feminism, socialism and anticolonialism throughout the world. Territory’ also encompasses our physical world and the deterioration of the environment. How should we respond to these major transformations? How should they be understood? What new intellectual and creative possibilities do they offer? How have these changes been represented? What are their political implications? Feminism has long been a critic of the old order. Can it regain the political and intellectual initiative? We would welcome submissions for this special issue on ‘Shifting Territories’ and would like to remind readers that we are always on the lookout for contributions to the journal. Feminist Review is often seen as an academic journal despite the fact that we publish a wide range of pieces: some of these are by established authors, others by newcomers; they vary also in terms of length, style, medium and approach. We hope in future to increase the proportion of nonacademic writing in the journal and would like to point out that we consider for publication all work (and this includes visual work) on themes that are interesting and pertinent for feminists. Contributors should bear in mind in their treatment, the contested nature of feminism and socialism as concepts, as well as the pervasiveness of Anglocentrism and racism. This issue of Feminist Review is not a ‘special’ or ‘theme’ issue in that its contents cover a range of subjects. We have, however, included three articles on pornography and censorship since, with the growing public visibility of the antipornography campaign, this has again become a contentious and topical question. Several of the articles in Perverse Politics: Feminist Review No. 34 and in Feminist Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Review No. 35 also addressed this matter. We have decided to reprint in this issue, No. 36, part of the introduction to the US publication Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship (Ellis et. al., 1988) because it seemed both highly relevant and an indication of the similarity between recent developments in this country and in the United States. We also include in this issue an article by Clara Connolly which sets out and explores some of the contradictions that can occur in antiracist practice, in this instance in the context of youth work with 2 FEMINIST REVIEW

young women. The politics of antiracism, which are rendered increasingly complex as we take on board the implications of fundamentalism, will also be addressed by some of the contributors to the next issue of Feminist Review, No. 37. Another special feature of the current issue is the reproduction of visual images from an exhibition of photographic and mixed-media work by and about women. We hope to see more of such work in future issues. Rosalind Minsky, in a challenging piece, examines theories of the unconscious and their implications for feminist theory and practice. Jayne Egerton, in her article, draws attention to the specific housing need of lesbians. Two of the other pieces that we publish here reflect on the feminism of the late sixties and early seventies. One is about the twentieth anniversary of the first Women’s Liberation conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, the other about Redstockings, the Danish Women’s Liberation group whose members engaged with many of the same ideas and forms of political practice as other Women’s Liberation groups of that moment. We also publish in this issue an interview with Trinh T.Minh-ha, Vietnamese American feminist, in which she talks with Pratibha Parmar about her work as film-maker and author. Yet another feature of this issue are the letters. We would like to emphasize how important we feel it is for Feminist Review to receive feedback, to be a forum, the site for an exchange of ideas, and we hope that the flow of correspondence will continue; likewise with recommendations for reviews. Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to inform our readers that we are pleased to be able to welcome to the Feminist Review editorial collective Alison Read, Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Inge Blackman as new members.

Reference

ELLIS, Kate, JAKER, Beth, HUNTER, Nan, O’DAIR, Barbara and TALLMER, Abby (1988) editors Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship, Seattle: Real Comet Press. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 ‘THE TROUBLE IS IT’S AHISTORICAL’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory

Rosalind Minsky

Many people have a problem with psychoanalytical theory because it is grounded in the concept of the unconscious. They find this concept distasteful and justify their distaste on the basis of two fundamental criticisms: that they can find no empirical evidence for it and that it is ahistorical. In this paper I want to begin by looking briefly at what I think constitutes evidence for the unconscious and then move on to consider the charge of it being ahistorical and examine what this charge really means. I shall then argue that rejection of the unconscious on these grounds is part of a more serious problem for the production of feminist knowledge of the personal—the problem of anxiety often experienced as distaste. A feminist knowledge which can theorize the link between sociology and psychoanalytic theory—integrate social and psychical reality—may only be possible if we can find a way of moving beyond anxiety to an integration of our own personal social and psychical dimensions in the form of insight. Most of us are familiar with the following kind of behaviour. We feel anxious—guilty—or vulnerable, so we hit out at the people closest to us and act as if they were attacking us. This mechanism is known in psychoanalytic theory as ‘projection’. We find a part of ourselves unacceptable (the thing we feel guilty about—our anxiety or insecurity, our vulnerability) and instead of allowing ourself to consciously feel and acknowledge the feelings we don’t like, we project them onto other people and then feel under attack from these people. These same people then represent to us the alienated part of ourself we’ve thrown out. Feeling under attack we attack them (usually much to their surprise!). At it’s simplest it’s the ‘kicking the cat’ reaction (much as I dislike that expression). The point about projection is that it is one of the many defensive behaviours by which we protect ourselves from knowing about the contents of our inner world—our psyche— which I shall henceforth call the ‘unconscious’. So feelings which are unacceptable and therefore potentially very painful, if we allow ourselves to feel them consciously, are projected out into the world onto other people where we mistakenly imagine we’ve got rid of them. Unfortunately, we haven’t and we experience paranoia to a greater or lesser extent. We feel under attack from these alienated parts of ourself over which we no longer have any control. Sometimes whole relationships are based on what is known in psychoanalytic theory as ‘projective identification’. People often marry each other or live together within an essentially Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 symbiotic type of relationship, with one person expressing all the anger for both partners and the other all the vulnerability. Together they operate as one ontological unity with complementary roles which are wholly unconscious. The amazing sensation of being ‘in love’—the feeling of

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 4 THE UNCONSCIOUS

oneness and completion accompanied by a feeling of exhilaration or euphoria—is frequently about meeting someone through whom we can express the part of ourself we can’t consciously acknowledge, through the mechanism of projection, and without either partner ever being consciously aware of it. There is only an unconscious recognition by both parties that they can ‘complete’ each other and increase each other’s sense of identity and self-worth. They experience this as ‘being in love’! It only becomes clear what is happening if one partner suddenly starts expressing emotions which weren’t part of the original unconscious ‘deal’—which belonged to the terrain of the other. The fragile equilibrium is disturbed for example when a woman stops being the person in the relationship ‘in charge’ of the vulnerability and starts to break out of this role, becoming strong and active. Very often the husband/lover feels a great sense of betrayal and doesn’t understand why. (Of course this can happen the other way round.) When this kind of relationship breaks up it often feels as if the leaver has literally ‘gone off with’ a part of the ‘self’ of the person who has been left. This is because the leaver has actually made him/herself absent still carrying a substantial part of the projected self of the other partner—who is left feeling, not surprisingly, fragile and incomplete. I would suggest that the concepts of projection and projective identification demonstrate very clearly the existence of the unconscious in our everyday behaviour. These two concepts derive specifically from the work of Melanie Klein who, on the basis of her analysis of very young children, took the view radically different from that of Freud and Lacan that the unconscious is structured not during the Oedipal crisis but in the pre-Oedipal baby’s developing relationship with its mother. In a relationship of projective identification the baby’s ‘self’ is characterized by Klein as being initially undifferentiated from that of the mother. In this early relationship of total dependence the baby, according to Klein, experiences alternating states of love and hate. When it is full and satisfied by the mother, it experiences itself as ‘good’, psychically ‘full’ and loves and idealizes the mother. When it feels frustrated and empty it experiences itself as ‘bad’ and in danger of psychic disintegration. To overcome this danger to the survival of its fragile sense of self the baby splits off its bad feelings and projects them onto the mother who is then experienced as attacking rather than loving. The baby, like the adult who projects in later life, is actually suffering from a paranoid fantasy—it feels itself under attack from its own externalized ‘split off’ feelings of hatred and envy now embodied by the mother, its psychic ‘other half’. Being ‘in love’ in the way I’ve described seems to hark back to the young baby’s feelings of ‘fullness’ and love when it experienced the mother as satisfying and fulfilling. The concepts of projection and projective identification allow us to see the evidence for feelings which are unconscious. They represent defence mechanisms against the emergence of these feelings into consciousness which enable us to ignore and disown them. Freud, using his very different concept of ‘repression’ for a defence mechanism which originates much later in the Oedipal crisis, offers as his most compelling evidence of the unconscious the analytical richness of his case studies (despite their flaws) and as further evidence the slips of the tongue and jokes of everyday life. In talking about evidence for the unconscious, I’m talking about evidence for a submerged ‘inner’ world which lies like an iceberg mostly hidden under water, with the ‘outer’

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 world—the conscious self—showing only as the tip of the iceberg. The unconscious of any individual seems to be structured by what goes on emotionally within his or her family whether it be nuclear, single-parent or extended. We all have to have parents or parent substitutes to survive whatever culture we’re born into. The unconscious we end up with depends on the repression of events and conflicts set up in early childhood involving these people and can be demonstrated in psychoanalysis or the much speedier process of analytical psychotherapy. Here ‘symptoms’, for FEMINIST REVIEW 5

example depression, obsession, free-floating anxiety, a sense of guilt and inhibition, disappear as a result of conscious insights into the unconscious gained in the special context of psychotherapeutic discourse. When we use the word ‘history’ we are normally referring to the history of consciousness, of social power and domination, the social construction of reality. But this leaves out entirely the other equally important history, that of the individual unconscious which takes place within the confines of the wider social constructions of history—the history of a human subject’s coming into being. This is the history of how an individual has reacted to the powerful currents of emotion within his/her family and the presences and absences both physical and emotional of the members of this family. What kind of events in this other unrecorded history constitute an individual’s personal construction? The crucial ones seem to be the powerful desire of the male or female child for the mother, the loss of whom provides the origin for the formation of the unconscious and the split subject. (‘Mummy, I’m going to marry you when I grow up.’ ‘But I’m already married to Daddy.’) The fear of retribution from the spouse of the desired parent, feelings of loss and rejection by the parents we can’t ‘marry’ and have to give up, feelings of rivalry and intense jealousy at the birth of new babies—in fact, all the feelings we would expect in a passionate love affair brought to an end by the existence of a rival, seem to be felt by most children however sensitive individual parents might be, and however much stereotyped gender roles have been changed. Psychoanalytic case histories suggest that these Oedipal feelings, which were first identified and described by Freud, seem to be experienced by many people including those brought up in single-parent families. However, in order to ‘cope’ in the real world they have to be repressed so that we can become viable ‘coping’ human subjects. This viability seems to be at the cost of our wholeness in the sense of our being able to ‘own’ all of ourselves, of having access to all our experience; the human subject is fundamentally split into the conscious and unconscious. The currently popular socialization theory of the type suggested by the American feminist Nancy Chodorow is inadequate because, although it quite rightly draws attention to the identifications we make with one or both parents (or substitutes), it leaves out the drama of the child in terms of its desires—which have a crucial bearing on its identifications and the formation of the unconscious. It also fails to explain the exceptions which Freudian theory allows us to explore: why some people grow up resisting their socialization, so that some women are more ‘active’ than ‘passive’ in their drives (sexual and others) and some men are more ‘passive’ than ‘active’. The problem in our society and perhaps all others (we need more feminist anthropological research in this area) is that, as Lacan argues, all men signify value and power, whether their personal behaviour justifies it or not, and are therefore invested with a privileged status in society which even the most ‘passive’ of them find difficult to give up. The problem for men is that to be more like women in any way— public or personal—is to have to accept a downgrading in status in social and sexual terms—to risk being seen as ‘less of a man’ on both fronts. The situation is different for women. For a woman to be more ‘active’, as many women are and want to be, there is at least an upgrading of status in social terms. The problem for her is that she may at the same time be downgraded in sexual status which

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 is a problem shared by many women, and especially young girls. The fear of many adolescent girls is that to be clever and active is to be seen as ‘unsexy’. A woman may become well qualified, get a high-status, well-paid job, feel fulfilled but at the same time fear that she may be judged by men as less sexually attractive—less of a ‘real’ woman and definitely more threatening than other women—and that matters to many women. 6 THE UNCONSCIOUS

Freudian theory—assuming the existence of the unconscious—allows us to explain why some men and women repress sexual aims which are dissonant with their gender. The ‘ultra macho’ man is often compensating, unconsciously concealing his femininity (his over-identification with his mother often in circumstances of a physically or emotionally absent father), and the ‘ultra feminine’ woman is often compensating for an over-identification with a father which has left her with unconscious anxiety about her status as a ‘real’ woman. Anyone who has experience of competent analysis or psychotherapy can hardly avoid coming to the conclusion that the unconscious exists. But it does look as if the unconscious must succumb to the charge that it is indeed ahistorical in the usual sense of that word. Even Lacan’s version of the unconscious ultimately seems to be ahistorical despite the view of French feminists like Kristeva who argue that Lacan’s unconscious, because it is socially constructed, is therefore amenable to historical change and the possibility of a society where the primary signifier is not the phallus signifying male power. It’s difficult to see how a child’s passionate feelings of desire, rivalry and loss in relation to its mother around the age of three or four—or intense jealousy at the birth of a new sibling—and its subsequent repression, can be dependent on historical contingencies and consciousness. On the contrary. The historical contingencies will obviously affect who is present or absent, how and what emotions can be expressed or repressed, what kind of defences are more socially acceptable at any one time, but they do not alter the fact that the unconscious comes into being some time in early childhood and has to be repressed in favour of consciousness and ‘history’ in order for the subject to come into being and ‘cope’ with the demands of life. History is, of course, contingent on everything in one sense, but powerful emotions such as the ones that lie behind the statement ‘Mummy, I’m going to marry you’, that lie behind the recognition that someone—a rival—was there before us, or behind the jealousy of a new sibling, look like experiences which run through the heart of historical contingencies and consciousness. If they are not universal experiences then at least we have to recognize that they are so widespread that we ignore their significance for our psyches at our peril. Symptoms of repression, defences against the lifting of repression, are present in everyone in the form of projection, emotional withdrawal, obsessions, phobias, physical pains and illnesses real or imagined. These are all behaviours which ‘stand in for’ and ‘represent’ those hidden, unconscious parts of ourselves which we would rather not know about because of the pain they caused us in infancy. We’ve all at some time compulsively wiped the work-surface or reorganized our cupboards when we’ve felt anxious about something, in order to get a sense of ‘inner’ control by controlling ‘outer’ reality. The more painful unconscious material we remain unaware of the harder we have to defend against its resurfacing and the greater our need for defences. At the moment, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy using psychoanalytic theory are the only activities whose expressed purpose is to allow individuals to gradually become more aware of the contents of their unconscious within the context of a protected environment. Using a special kind of discourse these practices can bring unconscious material to consciousness and consequently reduce both anxiety and inhibition. And it is this anxiety and inhibition which I want to focus on. The problem for intellectuals, and feminist

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 intellectuals in particular, is that anxieties and inhibitions may restrict not only their personal lives but also any academic work they do because much feminist knowledge revolves around the terrain of the personal and the emotional. Feminist intellectuals want to know how women’s oppression under patriarchy has come about and why it continues to exist. They want to know the extent to which the reasons for this oppression are social, the extent to which this oppression results in the conscious structuring of the male and female psyches in infancy, and in what ways these two FEMINIST REVIEW 7

dimensions interact. Some of this research is very likely to touch off unconscious feelings in the researcher which may provoke anxiety and resistance. Before tackling this issue let us look briefly at what the process of psychotherapy for the individual, using an eclectic approach, actually involves. It is fundamentally about integration, the integration of unconsciousness and consciousness in that individual—and his/her ‘recognition’ of the unconscious material plays a crucial role. It is the recognition of the observation made in the therapeutic situation which signals that something in the shared discourse characteristic of that situation is now ‘hooking up’ with something in the unconscious. The conscious and unconscious meet in that moment of ‘recognition’. The knowledge/insight gained in psychotherapeutic discourse is this felt ‘recognition’, this rapport or coincidence between what has been said on one side of the split individual (the part of the iceberg we can see) and the repressed unconscious material lying on the other side of the split (under the surface, to continue the metaphor). If there is no recognition—no coincidence—then the observation made by the therapist is wrong, it doesn’t ‘match’ and is rejected (as Freud’s Dora rejected his overbearing observations). It’s true that sometimes there is no sense of recognition because we defend against it. Even in therapy the recognition causes anxiety, so we reject it, often with boredom or anger. But once the suggestion has been made, if it is right, it’s difficult to put it out of our mind. Other ‘supporting evidence’ comes rushing in from the rest of our life and if it tallies with what is in our unconscious, the defences gradually evaporate and the ‘recognition’ takes over; it’s impossible to sustain the defence and reject the insight any longer. I want to return to the same issue of anxiety and inhibition which at the level of the individual can often be removed by analytical psychotherapy. To what extent does this same anxiety and inhibition constrain the horizons of academic work? Let us suppose the unconscious does exist, that it is ahistorical and therefore a universal phenomenon structured primarily within the personal emotional dramas of the child in the family. Why precisely is this such a problem for some people, except in terms of the intellectual difficulty of integrating a historical ‘consciousness’ central to social theory and an ahistorical ‘unconscious’ central to psychoanalytic theory? Is it because anxiety and inhibition present in individual academics make it impossible for them to deal with something as personally charged as the unconscious without risking the disturbance of their own consciousness? There have been understandable reasons for feeling strong reservation about some theorists who use psychoanalytic theory in their academic work. French feminists such as Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray have recognized that feminist intellectuals urgently need to find another kind of discourse which will allow them to challenge and subvert the male symbolic order of language and, drawing on individuals’ experience of integrating their conscious and unconscious through psychotherapeutic discourse, they have often, following Lacan, opted for a new kind of psychotherapeutic academic discourse. Unfortunately, the results have sometimes been rather inpenetrable and unintelligible, making it very tempting to reject them—and the concept of the unconscious. Alternatively, there are convincing reasons for rejecting other theorists for using psychoanalytic theory, because of the ahistorical argument, but when you analyse this argument it seems partly to be saying that the

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 unconscious is fundamentally different from recorded consciousness, which of course has to be true—this is indeed the point. It’s like criticizing the unconscious for not being conscious. We may also reject any concept which is ahistorical because we don’t like the company we might have to keep—we recognize that ‘universals’ can and have been used to justify the interests of those who want to maintain power and domination and exclude the possibility for change. I shall return to this political dimension later. 8 THE UNCONSCIOUS

But what if rejecting psychoanalytic theory and the unconscious, for what I think are rather unsatisfactory reasons, actually cuts us off from and denies the problem of the academic integration of social and psychical perspectives? Even if we can accept the unconscious, we still have the enormous task of how we begin to theorize the link between social and psychical reality, and between the competing psychoanalytic perspectives on how psychical reality comes about. But historical academic experience teaches us that, even within the relatively empirically testable domain of consciousness, just because we can’t yet adequately formulate or theorize some part of what we call reality doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In both the natural and human sciences paradigms have to change when they come up against an impasse. In the domain of feminism, socialization theories have failed to explain sexual difference and the continued existence of patriarchy. There is an impasse. To move forward it looks increasingly as if we will be compelled to give up some of our safe categories and structures of thinking, to re-examine the basis of the connotations of words like ‘ahistorical’ and challenge some of the fundamental underpinnings of our existing academic discourses. And here again lies the problem of our anxiety and therefore our inhibition. When we try to rethink our existing categories and boundaries of knowledge—to do things differently—the ‘mastery’ which Freud and Lacan identified as often a highly pleasurable constituent of academic work may be seriously undermined. Some of the pain the mastery conceals threatens to surface and makes us feel very uncomfortable—the eruption of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’ within the ‘symbolic’. But if the idea of re-examining our existing frameworks of knowledge (because they are inadequate as they are) provokes anxiety and hostility, it means the way forward is substantially blocked. Potentially productive avenues of thought are inhibited by emotions emanating from the unconscious. We are operating as our own censors. This is a serious problem and feminists, especially, need to be very aware of it, of falling into the same defensive rigidities which we criticize in patriarchal attitudes. Not totally understanding reality, tolerating gaps which we can’t yet theorize, not achieving total coherence, doesn’t mean that we have to fall into a chaos of unintelligibility—of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’—into an avalanche of phantasy. Feminists, especially, need to communicate their knowledge with maximum intelligibility. The way forward for feminism seems inevitably to require us to deal frequently with potentially anxiety-provoking material which is so powerful that it sometimes makes us feel dizzy because it ‘hooks up’ with uncharted feelings in our unconscious. But we can’t turn our faces against it for that reason—or rather we can, but we need to be honest about our reason for doing it. Alternatively, we can at least try to cultivate open minds and be daring despite the dizziness. Maybe personal insight has to be an integral part of feminist knowledge and study. We certainly need a mode of producing knowledge about sexual difference and patriarchy which tries to avoid mastery because the pain and loss that lies behind it may inhibit us from being able to tackle certain areas of experience, from being able to tolerate knowledge which, like us, is incomplete in places. Neither we nor our knowledge can be perfect. Of course in using language at all we are inevitably caught up in mastery, as Lacan suggests, and in a form of mastery which is for women not even of their own invention. Lacan argues that ‘woman’ in language represents ‘the lack’, ‘the negative’, ‘the symptom’—the

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 projection of man’s repressed lack and loss. Women ‘stand in’ for the unconscious loss men repress so they can be represented in language and culture as positive and potent. As Toril Moi wryly puts it, ‘woman as defective becomes a defence against the thinking male subject’s potentially devastating insight into his own lack’ (Moi, 1985). Our sense of being whole, of not being split into conscious and unconscious, is, according to Lacan, based on a ‘misrecognition’ in the ‘other’, the place where we identify ourselves, first in the way we ‘recognize’ ourselves in the mirror which stands for all FEMINIST REVIEW 9

future identifications (our being ‘appears’ coherent and whole) and later in language. But this view, though we may recognize ourselves in it, means we are inevitably totally disempowered by language. Theoretically that may be the case, but many of us don’t feel disempowered. We can use language while at the same time pulling apart the categories, the binary oppositions of language when we feel they restrict and inhibit our view of reality as we perceive it. Hélène Cixous has tried to do this. I would argue that ‘historical’ and ‘ahistorical’ are an example of a falsely grounded duality which, as it stands, prevents us from perceiving what lies in between, and we need to pull it apart. So I want to suggest that in rejecting the unconscious as part of the reality of a split subject some of us are primarily protecting ourselves from our own personal unconscious histories and we need to be honest about it. And I also want to suggest that we can’t begin to produce another form of knowledge which avoids mastery—which avoids the desire for total coherence—without at the same time being prepared for uncomfortable personal insights and self-knowledge as we produce it. If, as Lacan argues, passion, desire and loss lie at the heart of all existing knowledge, concealed by the safe categories of language and mastery, then the exploration of the personal involved in studying sexual difference and the continued existence of patriarchy is bound to confront feminists with a very tough task, especially if we are also, if not disempowered, certainly slowed down by our denigration in language as ‘the negative’ ‘the lack’ (not very conducive to our self-confidence!). However, though the task is formidable, it is one that can involve the excitement of the production of self-knowledge and insight in the course of the production of academic knowledge. And this may be the way not only to our own integration as women but also to the integration of social and psychical theory—a task which is an urgent one. But there is also the vital issue of women achieving political change. Can our gaining insight and integration also effect the achievement of equal status, pay, nursery provision and all the other material issues on the feminist agenda of such importance to all women? I would argue that it can. One of the major objections to the idea of the unconscious and the practice of analysis and analytical psychotherapy is that in operating at the level of the individual both are fundamentally politically reactionary bourgeois constructs supportive of the status quo and incompatible with political activity aimed at ending the oppression of women and other groups in society. I would argue that quite the contrary is likely to be true. Increased insight into our own personal unconscious histories and the behaviour of others, far from constraining us politically, is, in my view, more likely to be a liberating experience which can spur us to individual and collective action. Freed at least of some of the dead weight of our anxiety, inhibition, lack of confidence, repetition compulsions and all those states of mind which seem to stem directly from our unconscious rather than directly from the social reality of our lives, we may for the first time find the space, confidence and energy to behave more authentically. And this means that we are more likely to be able to assert our demands and find our own authentic voices rather than continuing to listen compulsively to the unconscious voices of significant others in our past which we have unknowingly internalized as children. Gaining insight into the mystery and

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 impenetrability of ourselves allows us much greater insight into the behaviour of other people which enables us to act individually and collectively with more confidence. We can be aware of and ‘use’ our ‘imaginary’ rather than having to waste energy keeping the lid on it because we are afraid of it. We are no longer in the thrall of our unconscious psychic drama which always insists that we prioritize its hidden agenda of fantasies rather than one of our own conscious choosing. 10 THE UNCONSCIOUS

So, in future, our own personal integration and insight—involving the attempt at least to avoid mastery when we can—may have to become an integral part of the production of new knowledge and political change. Conceptually the ‘unconscious’ seems at the moment to lie somewhere between history and biology in a place we cannot yet theorize adequately but which we need the capacity to make a space for without our knowing quite where it is. Without this ‘space’ we deny a part of ourselves and our capacity for a new kind of knowledge.

Note Rosalind Minsky teaches psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies on the Women’s Studies MA at Anglia College of Higher Education. She is also a freelance journalist for BBC Radio.

References

BRENNAN, Teresa (1989) editor Between Feminism & Psychoanalysis, Routledge: London. CHESLER, Phyllis (1978) About Man, London: The Women’s Press. CHODOROW, Nancy (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering, Berkley: University of California Press. CROWCROFT, Andrews (1975) The Psychotic, Harmondsworth: Penguin. EICHENBAUM Luise and ORBACH, Susie (1983) Understanding Women, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FAIRBAIRN, Ronald (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London: Tavistock Publications. FREUD, Sigmund (1976) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, vol 5, Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1977a) On Sexuality, vol 7, Pelican Freud Library, Harmonds-worth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1977b) Case Histories I ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’, Harmonds-worth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1981) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, vol 1, Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1984) Case Histories II ‘Rat Man’ ‘Schreber’ ‘Wolfman’ Female Homosexuality, Pelican Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FREUD, Sigmund (1986) The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin. GRIMSHAW, Jean (1986) Feminist Philosophers, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. LACAN, Jacques (1982) Feminine Sexuality; Jacques Lacan and The Ecole Freudienne, Mitchell, J. and Rose, J., editors, London: Macmillan. MARKS, Elaine and COURTIVRON, Isabella (1981) editors New French Feminisms: an anthology, Brighton: Harvester. MILLER, Alice (1987) The Drama of Being a Child, London: Virago. MITCHELL, Juliet (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London: Allen Lane. MOI, Toril (1985) Sexual, Textual Politics, London: Methuen. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 PHILLIPS, Adam (1988) Winnicott, Frank Kermode, editor, London: Fontana Modern Masters. SAYERS, Janet (1986) Sexual Contradictions, London: Tavistock. SEGAL, Lynne (1987) Is the Future Female?, London: Virago. SHOWALTER, Elaine (1987) The Female Malady, London: Virago. STORR, Antony (1981) The Integrity of Personality, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FEMINISM AND PORNOGRAPHY Kate Ellis, Barbara O’Dair and Abby Tallmer1

In recent years, the issue of pornography has engendered an intense debate in the feminist community. Dismissed by some as diversionary, it is a debate whose stakes, we feel, are high. Will feminism, having achieved some gains, capitulate to conservative forces, or will it continue to take a stand for the liberation of women in all domains, including the difficult and contradictory domain of sexual expression? We are still asking, in the mid-eighties, what do women want, and the answer is that women have multiple desires and goals. We want to be valued equally with men as earners, but we don’t want to contribute to the pollution of the planet and the exploitation of other human beings. We want to be safe from attack and abuse, in our private lives as well as in the public sphere, but we don’t want that safety at the cost of challenge, risk, exploration and pleasure. Safety and adventure represent conflicting demands: the relationship between the two, and how to negotiate it, is a key issue in the current debate. The roots of this debate go back to the nineteenth century, when some feminists were in favour of making divorce easier to obtain because patriarchal marriage restricted women’s opportunities. Others favoured making divorce harder to get because men were already too prone to abandon women. This is one example of the way in which a certain historical strand of feminism has put women’s purity and protection first. The focus on imagery that we see in the debate over pornography is more recent. When feminists set out, in the sixties, to demonstrate the sexist core of our supposedly liberated culture, no better evidence could be found than the portrayal of women in every area of representation. But with the increasing feminist focus on pornography since the mid- seventies, a descriptive tool has turned into a prescriptive one, as images of women came to be seen by many feminists not as one symptom among many, but as the principal cause of women’s oppression. And this has occurred as the context for all feminist discussion and activism has shifted from the liberal optimism of the sixties to the conservative pessimism of the eighties. We believe that frustration engendered by two decades of working against the most egregious expression of sexism, male violence against women, has led many women, often unfamiliar with pornography for the reasons we have mentioned, to scapegoat sexual images in their search for the real cause of this seemingly incurable social evil. Public consciousness about rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment has risen dramatically as a result of feminist work, but the Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 elimination of these pervasive assaults on all women’s freedom seems maddeningly distant. The continuation of the earnings gap between men and women, the decimation of affirmative action in order to protect white men from ‘reverse discrimination’ the rise in male victories in child custody

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 12 FEMINIST REVIEW

cases—all of these attest to the need for a way to galvanize women’s opposition and women’s power in the 1980s. In looking to the pornography issue to perform this task, the feminist opponents of pornography have drawn a picture of gender relations which, because it is so extreme and seductive, creates more problems than it solves. The underlying premise of this thinking is that most sexual activity in a sexist society is intrinsically male, or male-identified. Its proponents have asserted that male sexuality is inherently aggressive and destructive. Consequently, women cannot ever freely choose to have sex with men, or use male or ‘male-identified’ imagery in their sexual fantasies or practices. Certainly they cannot freely choose to earn their living inviting the rapacious male gaze with the use of their bodies. In our view, this position alienates female workers in the sex industry and women who create their own sexual pleasure, even though equality with men is not yet ours. We reject this analysis of the problem of male violence, seeing it as a dangerous over- simplification that is ultimately harmful to women. It is possible, we believe, to be dedicated to eliminating violence against women while supporting freedom of sexual expression. To close the avenues of sexual speech, at a time when women are only beginning to listen in on and participate in hitherto largely male-dominated conversations, and to hold conversations of our own, seems to us to endanger the climate of cultural demystification that has made these welcome beginnings possible. We suggest that perhaps one reason that the feminist debates on pornography have carried such a heavy emotional charge is that they are really about a lot more than simply how best to regulate a particular industry. We live in a culture where sexual speech and behaviour for women is still severely restricted at an informal level. Thus, much of the debate about pornography has served as a way for women to talk about sex, and about sexual variation, explicitly and publicly for the first time. A recurring theme in the discussion has been the meaning of sadomasochism, butch/femme role- playing and other consensual sexual practices and fantasies which can incorporate extreme scenarios of power inequalities and violence. This discussion has been infused with a general anxiety among feminists about which forms of sexual desire or behaviour are consistent with feminist politics. We believe that the feminist movement must not be drawn, in the name of protecting women, into the practice of censoring ‘deviant’ sexual representation or expression. We have been too long oppressed ourselves by a legacy of male prescriptions: being told, for instance, that certain orgasms were mature, while others were infantile, or expressed our striving to be men. Women had to learn, with the support of other women, to articulate experiences that lay outside the proper sphere of the ‘nice girl’, to acknowledge our fantasies, and to be proud of our sexual choices. Part of becoming sexual subjects involves distinguishing between images of bizarre, forbidden, or even degrading actions, which we may conjure up to excite ourselves sexually from reading, pictures, or memory, and nonfantasized or coerced situations (such as actual rape) over which we have no control. We must speak out when we are victims, but also acknowledge what excites us, and support women who make their living providing that excitement to men and to ourselves. We are therefore extremely troubled by the refusal of many opponents of pornography to make these important distinctions. Our problem is not with criticizing what is produced and sold in a

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 sexist culture, but rather with the idea that such material should not be available for discussion. Certainly people are influenced by what they read and what they see. But we share an agreement that the way to deal with that influence is not through silencing ideas or images that may disturb people. We question whether sexually explicit materials are more potent (or more harmful) conveyors of sexism than materials less vulnerable to censorship. PORNOGRAPHY 13

Looking historically and cross-culturally, we see that when sexual expression is confined to the private sphere, women become more vulnerable to sexist practices, and women’s concerns have a harder time claiming space in the realm of public discussion. Such silencing too easily serves, and has served in the past, to impose restrictions on women’s behaviour when it does not conform to standards of a ‘community’ hostile to the development of women’s autonomy and self-expression. We are not all in agreement upon each tactic and every issue in our movement, but are committed to the belief that sexual speech for women should not only be protected but encouraged, that free discussion of sexuality and of its representation is essential to our feminist vision.

Notes Kate Ellis is a Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Contested Castle. Barbara O’Dair is editor of Entertainment Weekly and contributor to The Village Voice, the LA Weekly and Elle Magazine. Abby Tallmer, writer and researcher, is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Vassar College.

1 This is a shortened version of the introduction to Caught Looking edited in the United States by Ellis, et. al. (1988). A book which combines ‘serious essays by feminists, explicit visuals, and an attitude both probing and playful…[it] began as a collection of essays, all written between 1978 and 1986, that were compiled by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) to serve activist ends. As the project developed…[we] began to see a larger goal for Caught Looking. Why not a book that looked at a range of pornographic material…a collection that would itself have to run the gauntlet of potential censors?’ (1988:1).

Reference

ELLIS, Kate, JAKER, Beth, HUNTER, Nan, O’DAIR, Barbara and TALLMER, Abby editors (1988) Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, Seattle: Real Comet Press. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 14 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 WHO WATCHES THE WATCHWOMEN?: Feminists Against Censorship

Gillian Rodgerson and Linda Semple

It has been a truism for many years that anything that happens in the United States within alternative political movements surfaces in Britain about five years later. This has been proved again by the current debates surrounding the issue of pornography, erotica and other sexually explicit material The chronology in the USA is well known. The most significant year was 1984 when Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin co-authored an ordinance for the City of Minneapolis which allowed women to take civil action against anyone involved in the production, sale or distribution of pornography on the grounds that they had been harmed by the image of women’s sexuality that it portrayed. Their definition of pornography was broad: it covered basically any depiction of women in a sexual situation. Although the ‘Minneapolis Ordinance’ was vetoed by the mayor, a revised version was suggested in other cities including Boston, Los Angeles and Indianapolis where it became law for a short time. In the same year, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) was formed by feminists concerned that the antipornography issue was a red herring for the movement and, moreover, that the analysis was problematic since it assumed a direct relationship between pornography and violence against women which has not been proven. FACT produced an eloquent feminist argument against the ordinances which addressed the problems of sexually explicit material while arguing that censorship was not a feminist position and that supporting greater establishment power over free speech left the feminist movement hostage to fortune and open to unwanted alliances with antifeminist elements. In 1985, after an appeal, the Indianapolis ordinance was declared unconstitutional by a circuit court judge. FACT was one of the organizers of a brief which helped this decision. Indianapolis appealed its case to the Supreme Court and Attorney-General Edwin Meese appointed a commission to ‘address the serious national problem of pornography’ and to find ‘more effective ways in which the spread of pornography may be contained’. Despite this, in 1986, the Supreme Court declared the Indianapolis ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the guarantee of freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the American Constitution, effectively closing the debate as far as legislation in the USA was concerned. In the United Kingdom, over the same period and earlier, there had been other celebrated cases Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 concerning censorship and obscenity law. Gay News was prosecuted in 1977 for blasphemous libel when it published a poem about the crucifixion; the paper and its editor were found guilty. Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain suffered a private prosecution because it contained scenes of

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 16 FEMINIST REVIEW

simulated buggery. Both of these prosecutions—and most public pronouncements on the subject of pornography during the 1970s and early 1980s—were made by Mary Whitehouse and her right- wing organization, The Festival of Light (later renamed the National Viewers and Listeners Association). Both the FoL and Whitehouse were viewed as figures of fun and not as really serious threats to civil liberties or freedom of speech by the Left and feminist organizations in the UK. It was assumed that the climate of opinion would remain such that their rigid pro-family, anti-lesbian and-gay, pro-religion and anti-sexual freedom would never gain wide currency. Midway through the first ten years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership more worrying events began to take place. Customs and Excise officers began to use their powers to seize and destroy ‘offensive’ material, specifically against lesbian and gay books and magazines. Lavender Menace (now West and Wilde) in Edinburgh regularly had shipments from the US destroyed and, to a lesser extent, Gay’s The Word bookshop in London was targeted. Then, in the notorious ‘Operation Tiger’, Gay’s The Word was stripped of much of its stock and its workers and directors were charged with ‘conspiracy to import offensive material’. This case became one of the causes célèbres of general civil liberties and was a chance to highlight the different standards which pertained to sexually explicit material depicting lesbians and gays and ‘straight’ material. The case was taken up especially by the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). It was finally dropped by the authorities two years later. Clearly, the climate of opinion was shifting. Media hysteria was beginning to be whipped up about the issue of AIDS; gay men were being blamed for its introduction into the UK and, it has to be said, some lesbian feminists played directly into the hands of the moral right by their willingness to apportion blame to gay men’s sexual practices while smugly assuming that AIDS was not a women’s and definitely not a lesbian issue. At a time when parliamentarians could seriously suggest in the House of Commons that people with AIDS should be quarantined, the introduction of Clause 27—later Section 28—of the Local Government Act in late 1987, restricting local authorities’ powers to give money to lesbian and gay groups, was no surprise. The Thatcher Government, aided and abetted in many cases by the Opposition, seemed determined to return the country to its own version of The Family’ and ‘Victorian Values’. Concern with the sexual expression of the people was widespread and given a spurious justification with fear of AIDS which the government and its pet media blamed on promiscuity. There were calls for the electronic tagging of prostitutes, tightening of the Obscene Publications Act and greater control over broadcast media. Meanwhile, in the subculture…feminists had won notable victories while the Greater London Council existed, over the licensing of violent and sexist films and against some sexist advertising on London Transport. At the opening of the London Lesbian and Gay Centre and on the Lesbian Strength and Gay Pride marches it was clear that the issue of sado-masochism within the community was still a hot potato. A short-lived group dedicated to putting the case for sexual variety and freedom—‘Sexual Fringe’—made some interventions. In the closing years of the decade the United Kingdom saw its first mail-order sex toys firm for women, Thrilling Bits’; the first Lesbian sex

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 magazine Quim—which was banned from Sisterwrite and Gay’s The Word bookshops; and the first UK collection of lesbian erotic writing, Serious Pleasure, published by Sheba. It was as if, the stronger the repression facing activists attempting to argue the case for greater freedom in sexual choice, the more varied the manifestations of that choice were becoming. In the late 1980s two feminist organizations were set up to combat pornography—which many women who subscribed to a radical-feminist interpretation of society considered to be one of the PORNOGRAPHY 17

major causes of violence against women. Quoting the experiments by Edward Donnerstein and his colleagues (Donnerstein, 1987) as evidence of the links between pornography and violence, and the evidence given to the Meese Commission in the USA, both the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship and the Campaign Against Pornography launched well-publicized initiatives. In April 1989, the NCCL voted at its annual general meeting to adopt a proposal put forward by the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship (CAPC) to look into legal methods of fighting pornography. The CAPC justified this radical change in NCCL’s position on censorship by claiming that pornography itself censors women and interferes with their civil liberties, therefore legislation to censor pornography is actually in keeping with the aims of the NCCL. The decision by the NCCL to advocate the adoption of measures similar to the MacKinnon- Dworkin bill, but tailored to British law, shocked many feminists, as did the assumption by the organization and other groups on the left that the antipornography position was representative of the opinion of the women’s movement as a whole. On 24 May 1989 the as-yet unnamed Feminists Against Censorship held its first meeting in London. We were among a diverse group of women united by their concern at the events of the past few weeks who met to discuss what action could be taken both to counter the influence of pro-censorship forces in the feminist movement and the larger political sphere, and to support those people who were attempting to produce alternative explicit material: that which was not sexist, racist or coercive. By the autumn of 1989, after lively and wide-ranging discussions, the members of the group were ready to speak publicly as feminists who could not conscientiously advocate censorship of pornography. We produced a leaflet setting out our objections to the pro-censorship arguments and explaining our positions. The leaflet said:

Women need open and safe communication about sexual matters, including the power relations of sex. We don’t need new forms of guilt parading under the banner of political correctness. We need a safe, legal working environment for sex workers, not repressive laws or an atmosphere of social stigma that empowers police and punters to brutalize them. We need sexually explicit material produced by and for women, freed from the control of right-wingers and misogynists, whether they sit on the board of directors or the board of censors. We need an analysis of violence that empowers women and protects them at the same time. We need a feminism willing to tackle issues of class and race and to deal with the variety of oppressions in the world, not to reduce all oppression to pornography.

The leaflet pointed out the dangers inherent in increasing government power to ban books and magazines, noting that it is often lesbian, gay male and feminist material which first feels the bite of legislation. When the Campaign Against Pornography and the National Union of Students launched their ‘Off the Shelf’ campaign, FAC attended the press conference at the London women’s centre, Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Wesley House, to question the worth and ethics of such a campaign of ‘prior censorship’. Feminists Against Censorship has never seen the current debate as an ‘Us or Them’ situation. Our aim is to make certain that the pro-censorship position is not seen as the only feminist perspective on pornography. We have been very successful in that it is no longer possible for pornography to be discussed in the Press without our position being mentioned. We have been 18 FEMINIST REVIEW

invited to speak at various colleges and universities, sometimes as part of a debate with the Campaign Against Pornography, at other times on our own. An article in the Guardian on 15 February 1990, in which FAC, CAPC and CAP all stated their positions, brought more than forty positive letters and no negative ones. The requests for information and offers of help made it clear to us that we were articulating things many other women thought but had not said publicly. The introduction of Labour MP Dawn Primarolo’s Location of Pornographic Materials Bill has shown that censorship is still a popular option. FAC is lobbying MPs, encouraging them to defeat a bill which would set a dangerous precedent by removing all sexually explicit material, straight, lesbian and gay, to licensed sex shops. From there it would be a very small step to outlaw the sex shops themselves. In its first year, Feminists Against Censorship has consisted of a small group of activists and a larger number of supporters who are kept informed of our activities and occasionally attend meetings or participate in specific projects. On 18 March, about thirty women attended a discussion day at Reeves Hotel, a women’s hotel in London. There we were able to talk at greater length about some of the problems we had been presented with in public debate and to clarify our personal opinions about issues such as Racial Hatred laws, child pornography and violence. We also had the opportunity to examine some of the material that can be found on the ‘top shelf in newsagents and some more ‘alternative’ porn. Strengthened by that discussion, FAC played a significant part in mobilizing opposition to censorship within the NCCL. At the 1990 annual general meeting, a strong group of speakers from FAC, the Campaign Against Censorship, the Stonewall Group and individual members was able to put a well-argued case that it is not possible to prove any causal links between pornography and sexual violence and that no state legislation in 1990s Britain would be likely to encapsulate a truly feminist definition of pornography, were such a definition possible. CAPC’s motion urging NCCL to recommit itself to the search for possible legislation against pornography was defeated and NCCL policy effectively reversed and rededicated to the anticensorship cause. As the forces of the right continue to gather on the side of increased repression in many spheres, all feminists who are against censorship must constantly be aware of the guises this repression can assume. Simply fighting against the banning and restricting of sexually explicit images is not enough. As feminists we also have a responsibility to be critical of those images we find sexist, racist or exploitative and to counter them in the most effective way there is: if not by creating our own, then by supporting those who are creating an alternative body of sexual images for women. The allegations made against us as a group and as individuals have been interesting. We are frequently charged with being in the pay of the pornography industry; individual members who are involved in publishing sexually explicit lesbian/feminist written and visual material have been publicly abused as ‘peddlers of pornography’; there has been a worrying suggestion that opponents of our position have approached employers about our views—a tactic used against women involved in fighting against antipornography groups in the United States.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Such reactions serve only to prove that our tactics have been successful. It is no longer possible for antipornography activists to say that they, and they alone, represent the views of all women—or even, now, of all feminists. In a movement whose original tenets included belief in the right of all women to make their own sexual choices, this can only be a step in the right direction. PORNOGRAPHY 19

Notes Gillian Rodgerson is a regular contributor to Gay Times, Capital Gay and Rouge. Her hobbies are needlepoint and writing pornography. Linda Semple has worked for ten years in lesbian, gay and feminist publishing. Recently, she has written on feminist thrillers. In her spare time she collects and reads too many books. They are both members of Feminists Against Censorship.

Reference

DONNERSTEIN, Edward , LINZ, Daniel and PENROD, Steven (1987) The Question of Pornography: the Research Findings and Policy Implications , London: Collier Macmillan. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 20 FEMINIST REVIEW Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 FAC leaflet: Summer 1989

PORNOGRAPHY 21

Who defines pornography? Much commercially available pornography is racist and misogynist. In a racist, misogynist society this is no surprise. It is possible to criticize specific pieces of pornography without being in favour of increasing the State’s power to suppress pornography itself and without regarding sexually explicit material as bad in itself. Even those who agree that sexually explicit material should be suppressed find it impossible to agree on what should go. The traditional pro-censorship lobby would destroy lesbian and gay material in the name of the Family. They seek to suppress safer sex information on the grounds that it encourages homosexuality. They have done everything in their power to prevent distribution of information about birth control and abortion; they consider this to be pornography as well. There is also sincere disagreement among anti-pornography feminists, Some argue that nudity alone is pornographic, others that the problem is violent pornography alone. With this much disagreement even among feminists, who can you trust? Do you think the Government will appoint feminists as censors? Instead of striking a blow against women’s oppression, censorship gives the patriarchy additional ammunition. It is inconsistent to oppose Clause 28 one year and support censorship the next. Pornography, a red herring? In the words of the Campaign Against Pornography (CAP), “Pornography…violates women’s rights to safety and equality, encourages and legitimates the abuse of women and children, sexually and emotionally, and involves the abuse and exploitation of women and children in its production.” Strong stuff, but women’s oppression in society is more complex than this.

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22 FEMINIST REVIEW

Let’s talk about real violence against women, not just images. Violence has multiple causes, one of which may be a high consumption of violent images. Studies are inconclusive. Most suggest violent images have no impact and that it makes no difference whether the images are sexually explicit. Yet it is precisely the comparatively rare combination of violent and sexually explicit images in pornography that anti-pornography feminists see as being at the root of women’s oppression in society. Why are they ignoring the fundamental causes of cultural and social oppression? Their single minded focus on pornography has distracted attention from more effective feminist responses to violence and oppression; for example women’s refuges, self-defence initiatives, alternative media, campaigns for better transport and better sex education, and attempts to make women economically independent. Is pornography really the problem? Is its suppression really going to change women’s low economic status? Will it remove the real violence which sustains unequal power? Many anti-pornography feminists are so concerned with pornography that they are ignoring the damage done to women by cuts in the NHS, the increase in racist attacks, assaults on lesbians and gay men, the promotion by the government of an ideology which reduces the freedom of women in the name of the Family and the erosion of women’s rights throughout the world. Censorship is dangerous Anti-pornography feminists’ solution to male violence is a dangerous new departure. The belief that there are direct causal links between pornography and violence has led groups like CAP to advocate authoritarian measures. These include censorship, euphemistically referred to as ‘legislation against pornography’. The danger allegedly posed by pornography is said to justify increasing the power of the State and trusting it not to abuse that power.

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PORNOGRAPHY 23

Experiences in Canada and the US show how wrongheaded this is. Even the most carefully formulated feminist anti-pornography legislation will be first supported, and then distorted by conservatives. The Minneapolis ordinance, a collaboration between Radical Feminists, the religious Right and local anti-vice crusaders was thrown out by a superior court because it constituted an infringement of civil liberties. In Canada shipments to gay and lesbian bookstores are routinely seized at the border and publications often appear with pages blanked out. In Britain alternative bookshops have spent thousands in the last few years fighting customs seizures, an example of existing laws being used repressively. Outlawing obscenity will not significantly affect large-scale commercial pornography which knows no borders. It will have a potentially devastating effect on small, alternative, lesbian and gay and women’s publications. It will also mean an end to porn industry workers’ attempts to improve conditions, since illegality and stigma form the worst possible basis for organizing. Suddenly the feminist movement that once fought for freedom and sexual self- determination is advocating giving power over our lives to the judges and the police; suddenly what it says about our freedom and our sexual desires sounds like the ravings of the Right. Suddenly feminism is about censorship rather than about opening possibilities. There is a place for sexually explicit material in our lives. We need a feminism and a society which respects sexual variety and sexual choice. Don’t support censorship under any guise.

©1989 Feminists Against Censorship Panther House 38 Mount Pleasant London WCIX OAP Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 24 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 PORNOGRAPHY AND VIOLENCE: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say

Lynne Segal

It is now conventional wisdom that there is overwhelming scientific evidence linking pornography with sexual violence. The link ‘is considerably stronger than that for cigarette smoking and cancer’, Every woman announces in its introduction to the transcript of the public hearings organized by Minneapolis City Council in 1983 to collect the latest evidence on pornography and sexual violence in support of proposals for new legislation against pornography, the Minneapolis Ordinance. (Everywoman, 1988:5) ‘I doubt that anybody disputes the data’, the psychologist Edward Donnerstein, a leading figure in pornography research, breezily announces at these same hearings. (Every woman, 1988:22) Well, anybody except himself, perhaps, and his fellow researchers, who, in their more scholarly writing, not only confess that their research on possible links between pornography and violence has been misunderstood and misused, but add that whether their laboratory experiments tell us anything at all ‘about real-world aggression, such as rape, is still a matter for considerable debate’ (Donnerstein, et. al., 1987:174). That debate, however, has not so much been opened up as closed down by much of the recent writing and activity around pornography. This is not so surprising. Accompanying an ever greater and more chilling awareness of the extent and horror of men’s violence against women and children, much of it sexual violence, pornography is becoming one of the most fiercely contested moral issues of our time—conceptually and politically. Traditionally defined as sexually explicit, and therefore obscene or lewd words or images intended to provoke sexual excitement, the term was first used in the 1860s to describe the photography of prostitutes. Today, however, there is immense disagreement over both its definition and its significance—such disagreement flowing inevitably from the contrasting political positions which exist around pornography. Before analysing the psychological research on the effects of pornography, therefore, we need to be clear about the competing political and moral arguments which feed into the debates.

The politics of pornography It has become customary to separate out three distinct positions on pornography: liberal, moral right and feminist. The liberal position, manifest in the North American Presidential Commission on Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 pornography of 1970 or, in a more qualified way, in the parallel British Williams Report of 1979, offers a nonevaluative definition of pornography, as sexually explicit material designed for sexual arousal. It argues that there is no scientific evidence for pornography causing harm in society, and

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 26 FEMINIST REVIEW

therefore no sound reasons for banning it. While pornography may offend many women and men, it brings harmless pleasure to others. The Williams Report aimed to limit the public display of pornography to protect those who might find it offensive. (We shall look into the justifications, if any, for such tolerance in a moment.) The position of the moral right, of Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light, is outlined in the Longford Report of 1972, and defines pornography as representations of sex or violence removed from their proper social context, or ‘a symptom of preoccupation with sex which is unrelated to its purpose’ (Longford, 1972:205). It sees pornography as a threat to traditional family values, arguing that sex exists for procreation and should be confined to marriage. In line with this approach, censorship in Britain during the 1950s and early 1960s was mainly directed towards nudity and premarital and extramarital sex. The moral right has also always sought to suppress information on birth control, abortion and sex education in schools. It has demanded rigid censorship of sexually explicit material designed for recreational consumption, particularly of so called ‘perverse’ and homosexual imagery, claiming that it threatens family life and creates general social and moral decay. This position has strengthened throughout the more conservative climate of the 1980s, assisted by sexual panics around AIDS. Under the Thatcher Government there has been an ever increasing, though piecemeal, tightening up of censorship legislation in line with moral conservatism. For example, the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act of 1982, which provided guidelines to councils for controlling the licensing of ‘sex establishments’ and their cinematic materials, replaced the Williams Report’s emphasis on harm with condemnation of material intended to stimulate ‘sexual activity’ or ‘acts of force or restraint which are associated with sexual activity’ or that which portrays ‘genital organs or urinary or excretory functions’. Two years later, the Video Recordings Act went further, again with stipulations not just against violence, but against explicit sexual images of genitalia, excretory functions and acts of sex1 (Merck, 1988). The moral right, however, is the position least interested in whether psychological research offers evidence of links between pornography and violence, claiming as a fact of common sense that imagery or writing designed primarily for titillation is offensive and bound to contribute to sexual decadence and sex crimes. Finally, there is the feminist critique of the sexism and exploitation of women represented in most pornographic material—which is also frequently racist. It is from within this position, however, that some of the most passionate battles have been waged in recent years. It is widely thought that feminists have uniformly understood pornography as offensive to women and an incitement to violence against them. And certainly, all feminists have seen the standard images of pornography as promoting and strengthening sexist images of women. In its heterosexual versions, reducing women to flesh—or bits of flesh—it celebrates the idea of men’s insatiable sexual appetite and women’s ubiquitous sexual availability. Defined and consumed by men, standard pornography would seem to mock feminist attempts to express a more women-centred sexuality. In the 1970s, however, few feminists sought legal restrictions on pornography. The state and

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 judiciary were seen as essentially patriarchal, and obscenity laws were known to have always served to suppress the work of those fighting for women’s own control of their fertility and sexuality. Objecting to all forms of sexist representations, feminists set out to subvert a whole cultural landscape which, whether selling carpet sweepers, collecting census information or uncovering women’s crotches, placed women as the subordinate sex. Representatively, Ruth Wallsgrove, then working for Spare Rib, declared in 1977, ‘I believe we should not agitate for more laws against PORNOGRAPHY 27

pornography, but should rather stand up together and say what we feel about it, and what we feel about our own sexuality, and force men to re-examine their own attitudes to sex and women implicit in their consumption of porn’ (Wallsgrove, 1977:65). In Britain, however, a more single-minded focus on pornography as the root of male violence and therefore of male domination was becoming evident in feminist writings from the close of the 1970s. ‘Pornography’ was redefined by many feminists as material which inevitably depicts violence against women, and is in itself the enactment of violence against women. It had been the popular writing of Susan Brownmiller (1976) and Robin Morgan (1978) in the mid-1970s which first made a definitive connection between pornography and male violence, generating the slogan: ‘Pornography is the Theory, Rape is the Practice’. More recently, following through this logic to draft model legislation—the Minneapolis Ordinance—which would allow any individual to use the courts to ban pornographic material, US feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon define pornography as ‘a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex that differentially harms women’ (Chester and Dickey, 1988:258). Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women remains undoubtedly the single most influential feminist text on pornography. Here she argues that pornography is the ideology behind all forms of female oppression, indeed all forms of exploitation, murder and brutality throughout human history. Women can never be liberated until all pornography is banned. (Dworkin, 1981) And yet, despite the growth and strength of the Western feminist antipornography movement during the 1980s, particularly in the United States and in Britain (where we have seen the emergence of the Campaign Against Pornography and a similar Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship), some feminists, myself included (represented in Britain by Feminists Against Censorship), passionately reject Dworkin’s analysis, and its related feminist practice. They see it as a complete mistake to reduce the dominance of sexism and misogyny in our culture to sexuality and its representations. They believe men’s cultural contempt for and sexualization of women long pre-dated the growth of commercial pornography, and is a product of the relative powerlessness of women as a sex. Narrowing the focus on women’s subordination to pornography, they argue, downplays the sexism and misogyny at work within all of our most respectable social institutions and practices, whether judicial, legal, familial, occupational, religious, scientific or cultural. More dangerously (in today’s conservative political climate), they fear that the evolving exploration by women of their own sexuality and pleasure is put at risk by forming alliances with—instead of combatingthe conservative antipornography crusade (alliances which Dworkin and MacKinnon have unhesitatingly pursued in the US, despite being opposed by some of the most well-established feminist writers and groups working and campaigning around women’s sexuality, like Adrienne Rich and the Boston Women’s Health Group Collective). Blanket condemnation of pornography, they stress, discourages women from facing up to their own sexual fears and infantile fantasies, which are by no means free from the guilt, anxiety, shame, contradiction, as well as the eroticization of power on display in men’s pornographic productions. What women need, according

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 to feminists opposed to antipornography crusades, is not more censorship but more sexually explicit material produced by and for women, more open and honest discussion of all sexual issues, alongside the struggle against women’s general subordinate economic and social status. 28 FEMINIST REVIEW

Early research on pornography and its eff ects So these are currently the four (rather than three) distinct political positions on pornography. Which one, if any, does psychological research support? Interestingly, the liberal arguments behind the relaxations on censorship which occurred in the US and Britain in the 1970s were based almost entirely upon psychological research, or what was seen as scientific evidence. There had been little systematic study of the effects of pornography before the US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography of 1970, which was set up partly in order to undertake new research, as well as to report on existing research. The studies conducted at this time, each and every one of them, supported the view that pornography had no harmful effects on its consumers. There can be few things more contested, even from within its own theoretical framework, than the relevance of the controlled and contrived social psychological experiment in the laboratory to human action in the world at large. However, it was and is from such research that many of the conclusions of policy-makers and campaigners around pornography have been and are still drawn. Considering the impact of pornographic material on sexual arousal and behaviour, the studies of the 1970s reported that a large proportion of adult males and females did find sexually explicit material arousing; men tended to appear more aroused by films and photographs, women by written material. Heterosexual people were more aroused by heterosexual material, and homosexual males by homosexual material. Despite repeated exposure to slides showing highly ‘deviant’ sexual activity, subjects showed no tendency to copy such practices, that is, there were no changes in subjects’ own customary sexual practices. (Those happily enjoying missionary sex remained untempted by titillating representations of its alternatives!) Those with less guilt, and more liberal attitudes around sexuality, found pornographic material more arousing. The greater the exposure to sexually arousing material, however, the less the arousal. And the greater the exposure to such material, the more liberal and tolerant of it consumers became. These studies thus reported no antisocial changes in sexual behaviour after short-or long-term exposure to sexually explicit material. (Byrne and Lamberth, 1970; Davis and Braucht, 1970; Mann et. al., 1970; Kutchinsky, 1973; and Donald Mosher, 1970) At this time, only one study was done on the effects of exposure to erotica on aggressive behaviour (willingness of a person to administer electric shock to another person). This study by Tannenbaum found that exposure to highly erousing erotica did lead to increased shock levels being administered to another person (the experimenter’s stooge or ‘confederate’) who had earlier angered the subject. (In Donnerstein et. al., 1987) However, illustrating the ambiguity of the experimental data, Tannenbaum found that the same material also led to more positive behaviour towards the stooge, if the previous interaction had been friendly. Other studies undertaken by this Commission also supported the liberal position on pornography. Those investigating the connections between pornography and sex crimes in the US, for example, reported no correlation between pornographic consumption and juvenile crimes in general, while studies of convicted rapists found them to have had less exposure to pornography during adolescence, and also less recent exposure to pornography than the control group. (Goldstein et. al., 1970; Johnson et. al., 1970) (Interestingly, and tellingly for later reports to Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 the Minneapolis hearings from people working with sex offenders, the rapists themselves were nevertheless inclined to claim that pornography was connected with their crime.) The empirical research by Kutchinsky from Copenhagen in Denmark, which had removed all legal prohibitions between 1967–1969, similarly reported a negative correlation between access to pornography and sex crimes. (1973) The quite significant reductions in sex-crimes reported over that same period convinced the Committee that access to pornography did not increase the rate of sexual crimes. PORNOGRAPHY 29

Subsequent work (Kant and Goldstein, 1978) also confirmed that sex offenders had less exposure to pornography, both as teenagers and as adults. (Although it does not invalidate these findings, we do, however, need to take into account the problem that rape is very often not reported, and rapists— especially if they are white and apparently ‘respectable’—very often escape conviction. This means that the rapists who are reported and successfully convicted are only a minority of rapists, and may be an atypical minority.) The psychological and sociological research of the late sixties and early seventies which, by and large, concluded that there was no connection between pornographic consumption and either change in sexual practices or an increase in sexual violence, however, was always rejected as irrelevant by the moral right in both the US and Britain. (As US newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick declared (in Donnerstein et. al., 1987:1): ‘Common sense is a better guide than laboratory experiments; and common sense tells us pornography is bound to contribute to sexual crime… It seems ludicrous to argue “bad” books do not promote bad behaviour.’ No wonder there is so much bad behaviour around!) More significantly, in terms of subsequent research, these studies were conducted just before the emergence of the feminist critique of pornography: in the beginning stressing its significance as part of our culture of sexism and misogyny; later, for some, stressing its role in directly causing violence against women, in being in itself violence against women. On the latter view, pornography becomes the source of myths about women’s sexuality, teaching men that women enjoy being raped or sexually coerced. This feminist critique has helped to spark off the new psychological research which is currently being used by those seeking new legal restrictions around pornography.

Updating the research on pornography Whereas in the 1960s and early 1970s studies of pornography had been concerned to look at the effects of pornography, seen as sexually explicit material, on men’s sexual or antisocial behaviour, by the late seventies the emphasis has shifted to the more specific study of men’s violence against women. Feminists could indeed rightly claim it as a victory, as Mandy Merck (unpublished) suggests, that whereas once the concern about pornography was primarily over its effects upon those who consume it, today the concern has shifted to its effects upon those represented by it. Another reason for the shift in concern, however, was the assumption, encouraged by feminist writing like that of Dworkin, that pornography had become more violent. In fact, although this was repeated throughout the Minneapolis Commission, there is little evidence of this. One study (Malamuth and Spinner, 1980), found that violent images in Playboy and Penthouse had increased from 1 per cent to 5 per cent between 1973 and 1977. But a more recent US study (Scott, 1985) on such imagery in Playboy between 1954 and 1983 found a decline from 1977, with well under 1 per cent of material containing violent imagery. Nor was there any increase in violent sexual imagery in adult videos, in another US study covering the years 1979–1983 (Donnerstein et. al., 1987). However, while it may be a myth that violent imagery in pornography has in fact been increasing, experiments

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 on its possible effects have undoubtedly been increasing. The best summary of this newer research can be found in Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod, The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications (1987). In this book, the authors distinguish different types of pornography in order to detect its effects. First of all, they report a multitude of laboratory experiments following exposure to nonviolent pornographic material. Here, like the earlier research of the 1970s, they fail to find any increase in 30 FEMINIST REVIEW

men’s aggressive, or general antisocial behaviour—either towards other men or against women. Indeed some of the experiments suggested that exposure to nonviolent pornography increases subjects’ sociability and decreases their level of aggression, measured, for example, by their willingness to reward a confederate of the experimenter (with money) after such exposure, and their failure to increase their aggressiveness when angered after viewing erotica. Nor did exposure to this type of pornography alter subject attitudes towards rape. Next, they look at the research on what they define as nonviolent but degrading images of women (depictions of women as sexually promiscuous and insatiable, even in the face of men’s callousness and contempt). For example, Check in 1985 showed male subjects a film clip of a woman doctor being verbally abused and sexually harassed by a male, who, once she catches sight of his penis, is desperately eager for, and enjoys, instant sex. Following such exposure, Check claimed subjects were more likely to say that they might commit rape—if they could get away with it. Linz, on the other hand, also in 1985, found that subjects watching a similar film narrative, Debbie Does Dallas, but seeing it in its entirety rather than in brief excerpts, exhibited no significant increase in their acceptance of calloused attitudes about rape, nor any increased likelihood to view women as sexual objects or to condone the actions of rapists and judge the victim of rape narratives as more responsible for their own assault. (In Donnerstein et. al., 1987) Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod therefore argue that no definite conclusions can be drawn about nonviolent but degrading images of women. Their main concern, however, is to explore the effects of violent pornography. Here they conclude, drawing on their own research and that of Malamuth, Check, and others, that exposure to violent pornography (for example depictions of rape) does increase sexual arousal in some men, especially if the victim is shown as ‘enjoying’ the rape. And a few subjects, those who say that they might commit a rape if they could get away with it, show the same arousal, even when the victim is seen to be suffering. Some researchers suggest, therefore, that arousal to sadistic material might provide a good predictor of men’s proclivity to rape. (Quite what would be said about women’s frequent arousal to masochistic and rape fantasies is not clear, given women’s rather low levels of known rape behaviour. But we are in the laboratory here, where troublesome knowledge can be safely ignored as unscientific.) The main finding which Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod wish to emphasize is that exposure to aggressive pornography does not only titillate men (though in fact the main finding from their research was that the great majority of men dislike sadistic pornography), but also that it can, in some cases, in certain circumstances, alter certain men’s attitudes and behaviour towards women. That is, it can produce more calloused attitudes towards women and greater acceptance of rape myths which downplay or dismiss the significance of rape. Thus, Malamuth and Donnerstein report that exposing male college students to sexually violent films in which a woman is raped but also portrayed as ‘enjoying’ it causes subjects, who have also been provoked by insults from a female ‘confederate’ of the experimenter, to score higher on a Rape Acceptance Scale. (Donnerstein et. al., 1987) From other experiments which asked men if they might commit rape if guaranteed they

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 would not be caught, Malamuth and Check suggested that the negative effects they reported from exposure to violent pornography may only occur if men are already predisposed to consider sexual violence towards women. Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod therefore conclude that the calloused attitudes to rape, which may in certain cases follow exposure to violent pornography in certain men, may not so much be caused by the exposure to pornography, as strengthened by it (1987). PORNOGRAPHY 31

They further suggest, from experiments using imagery which is not sexually explicit but involves violence against women, that it is the violence, rather than the sexual explicitness, which is mainly responsible for any increase in aggressiveness and more calloused attitudes in men following exposure to violent pornography. And this in turn means, as they indicate, that material which is not pornographic at all—from soap operas to popular commercially released films—but which contains violence against women, may be more of a problem than most pornography. Their aim is, of course, as they say, to emphasize the need to educate consumers about the effects of sexual violence and violence in general in the media.

Psychologists fall out over experimental research There are problems, however, even with the limited conclusions Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod draw from their survey of recent research—some of which the authors themselves admit. Indeed they now, rather disingenuously, criticize the uses to which their research has been put by Dworkin and MacKinnon in submissions to the US Meese Commission on Pornography of 1986, attempting to enact new sorts of antipornography legislation, like the Minneapolis Ordinance: ‘It seems to us that the legal recommendations made by the commission for strengthening obscenity laws do not follow from the data’ (Donnerstein et. al., 1987:178). (This is interpreted by Everywoman and the antipornography campaigners as evidence that Donnerstein has ‘changed sides and now works for the pornography publishers and producers’! Everywoman, 1988:5). The problems with the psychological research, as many others have noted, derive first of all from the intrinsic weaknesses of all laboratory experiments in social psychology. The highly artificial conditions in which psychologists produce their results may not involve behaviour which is in any way generalizable. So, for instance, the tests of arousal have been criticized by Canadian psychologist Thelma McCormack because the subjects’ own reports of sexual arousal may be unreliable, and the apparatus used to measure tumescense (expansion of the penis) may itself stimulate arousal. (McCormack, 1985) There is the additional problem of the failure of these researchers even to consider the complex question of the relationship between fantasy and reality, between psychic arousal and behaviour. They assume some direct causal relation between arousal to sado-masochistic fantasy and the seeking out of such engagements in reality, when we know for instance from the surveys of Nancy Friday, Shere Hite and Thelma McCormack (if not our own experience), that such fantasy is commonly used by both women and men to enhance sexual arousal—particularly masochistic fantasy (Friday, 1973; Hite, 1976; McCormack, 1985). It would be absurd to suggest that most of us therefore condone the existence of rape, let alone that we desire to be raped. So arousal to sexual fantasy would seem, contrary to the expectations of these psychologists, to be a very poor predictor of behaviour. Similarly, the measures for increases in violent behaviour following exposure to violent pornography produced in the laboratory may also have little correspondence with subjects actual likelihood to resort to real violence outside it. The measure used is most often the subject’s

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 willingness to act in complicity with the experimenter in apparently delivering an electric shock to the experimenters ‘confederate’ for failure in some task, usually after having, as well, been provoked in some way by this same confederate. But the validity of this test of aggressive behaviour would depend upon the laboratory behaviour having the same meaning for the subject as aggression in other situations—which seems most unlikely. (Even Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod now admit, as I have already indicated, that laboratory ‘aggression’ may be unrepresentative of aggressive 32 FEMINIST REVIEW

behaviour outside the laboratory.) There is also the danger, as in all psychological experiments, that subjects may ‘wise up to the game’, attempting to guess and confirm the experimenter’s hypotheses—this is the now well-known ‘experimenter demand effect’. The extremely simplified and totally artificial nature of these experiments would seem to cast doubt on their usefulness in considering the shifting and complex meanings attached to events and behaviour in real life. Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod, for example, report that if, following exposure to rape narratives where the victim was depicted as ‘enjoying’ the rape, experimenters debriefed the subjects afterwards by pointing out that of course rape was always a terrible thing, then not only did subjects not show increased acceptance of rape myths or greater callousness towards women, but instead they displayed greater sensitivity about sexist material and a heightened rejection of rape myths. This effect, moreover, continued even many months after the original exposure to violent pornography followed by the debriefing. (1987) As I have already mentioned, it is also the case—perhaps surprisingly—that the main findings of these recent experiments around men’s reaction to depictions of sexual cruelty is one of anxiety and depression, or revulsion rather than of arousal (whether self-report or tumescence is the data being recorded). And in the small number of cases were arousal to sexual violence is reported, Donnerstein and Malamuth themselves now admit that they are not quite sure how to interpret their positive finding. (In Donnerstein et. al., 1987). The psychologist Sherif points out, for example, that these experimenters always assume that any male arousal must occur through the subject’s identification with the male aggressor, when of course it could be that the subject was identifying with the female victim (Sherif, 1980). For all these reasons, it is less than clear that the recent experiments on violent pornography can establish that access to such material does in fact cause greater violence against women. The most any of the experiments can claim, as US psychiatrist Martha Kirkpatrick succinctly summarizes, ‘is an extremely weak effect in a very few people under carefully controlled clinical settings’ (quoted in Donnerstein et. al., 1987:10). Indeed, Donnerstein and his colleagues confess: To date, no one has conducted a study that examines adults who have been exposed to media violence for prolonged periods outside the laboratory in order to determine if there is an increase in aggressive behaviour’ (1987:65). However, although it is not really possible to demonstrate a causal relationship between the consumption of violent pornography and men’s violence against women, we can certainly claim that such material is a significant part of the general sexist, racist and misogynist climate and culture of our times. It is therefore legitimate and necessary to engage in criticism of it. But in objecting to sexism, racism and misogyny, should we not tackle all sexist and racist representations of women, rather than reduce these to the explicitly sexual and call upon what are probably spurious connections between pornography and violent behaviour? We are ubiquitously surrounded by images which confirm women as passive, fetishized objects for male consumption, and which work to deny weakness, passivity or any type of ‘femininity’ in men. Pornography is far from unique in its endorsement of myths of women’s desire for the brute. They abound in more ‘respectable’ discourses and images (whether expressed in the popular writing of psychological scholars and

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 therapists like Anthony Storr (1970), or consumed daily in the massive romantic fiction market, this time a multimillion-dollar industry produced by women for women). As I argue in Is the Future Female?: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (1987) and Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990), if the femnist rejection of pornography is to be more than the projection and denial of our own anxiety and confusion about sex, we need to look more critically upon, and create our own alternatives of, all forms of representation and media PORNOGRAPHY 33

production. The offensive codes and meanings of pornography—if less overt—are nevertheless clearly present in them all. (This has been neatly illustrated by Rosalind Coward in this journal: Coward, 1982). Feminist campaigns focused solely upon pornography cannot pursue this wider goal. Indeed, insofar as they seek increased legal restrictions upon explicitly sexual representations, they are likely to distort and undermine such objectives, strengthening the moral right which would seek to ban feminist, lesbian and gay erotica. (Dworkin herself, like many feminist antipornography campaigners, is adamant that ‘erotica simply means pornography for intellectuals’, and has no intention of condoning, let alone encouraging, women’s own production of erotica.) Antipornography campaigns—feminist or not—will mobilize today as they invariably did before, centuries of guilt and anxiety around sex, as well as lifetimes of confusion and contradiction in our personal experiences of sexual arousal and activity. In contrast, campaigns which get to the heart of men’s violence and sadism towards women must draw upon the widest possible resources to empower all women to embrace only those types of sexual encounter they choose, and to explore openly all the interests and pleasures, as well as the problems, which titillate and/or trouble them. We will get little help from the ‘experts’, or any of their psychological research, here.

Notes Lynne Segal is on the editorial collective of Feminist Review. Her latest book Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men is published by Virago. Thanks to Mica Nava and others from Feminist Review for editorial advice.

References

BROWNMILLER, S. (1976) Against Our Will, Harmondsworth: Penguin. BYRNE, D. and BURSTYN, V. (1985) editor Women Against Censorship, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. CHESTER, G. and DICKEY, J. (1988) editors Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate, London: Prism Press. COWARD, R. (1982) ‘Sexual violence and sexuality’, Feminist Review, No. 11, Summer. DAVIS, K.E. and BRAUGHT, N. (1970) ‘Exposure to pornography, character and sexual deviance’ Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity & Pornography, Vol. 7, Washington: US Government Printing Office. DONNERSTEIN, E., LINZ, D. and PENROD, S. (1987) The Question of Pornography: The Research Findings and Policy Implications, London: Collier Macmillan. DWORKIN, A. (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London: The Women’s Press. EVERYWOMAN (1988) Pornography and Sexual Violence: Evidence of Links, London: Everywoman. FRIDAY, N. (1973) My Secret Garden, New York: Trident. GOLDSTEIN, M.J. et. al. (1970) ‘Exposure to pornography and sexual behavior in deviant and

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 normal groups’ Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. 7, Washington: US Government Printing Office. HITE, S. (1976) The Hite Report, New York: Dell. JOHNSON, W.T. et. al. (1970) ‘Sex offenders’ experience with erotica’, Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. 7, Washington: US Government Printing Office. KANT, H.S. and GOLDSTEIN, M.J. (1978) ‘Pornography and its effects’ in SAVITZ, D. and JOHNSON, J. (1978). 34 FEMINIST REVIEW

KUTCHINSKY, B. (1973) ‘The effect of easy availability of pornography on the incidence of sex crimes: The Danish experience’, Journal of Social Issues No. 29. LAMBERTH, J. (1970) ‘The effect of erotic stimuli on sex arousal, evaluative responses, and subsequent behavior’, Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. 8, Washington: US Government Printing Office. LONGFORD (1972) Pornography: The Longford Report, London: Coronet. MANN, J. et. al. (1970) ‘Effects of erotic films on sexual behaviour of married couples’, Technical Reports of the Commision on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. 8, Washington: US Government Printing Office. MALAMUTH, N. and SPINNER, E. (1980) ‘A longitudinal content analysis of sexual violence in the best-selling erotica magazines’, Journal of Sex Research, No. 16. McCORMACK, T. (1985) ‘Making sense of the research on pornography’ in BURSTYN, V. (1985). MERCK, M. (1988) ‘Television and censorship’. Some notes for feminists in CHESTER and DICKEY. MORGAN, R. (1978) Going Too Far, New York: Random House. MOSHER, D. (1970) ‘Sex callousness towards women’, Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. 7, Washington: US Government Printing Office. SAVITZ, D. and JOHNSON, J. (1978) editors Crime in Society, New York: Wiley. SCOTT, D.A. (1985) ‘Pornography and its effects on family, community, and culture’, Family Policy Insights, Vol. 4, No. 2, March. SEGAL, L. (1987) Is the Future Female: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, London: Virago. SEGAL, L. (1990) Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, London: Virago. SHERIF, C.W. (1980) ‘Comment on ethical issues in Malamuth, Heim and Feshbach’s “Sexual responsiveness of college students to rape depictions: inhibitory and disinhibitory effects”’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 3. STORR, A. (1970) Human Aggression, Harmondsworth: Penguin. WALLSGROVE, R. (1977) ‘Pornography: between the devil and the true blue Whitehouse’, Spare Rib, No. 65, December. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 THE WOMAN IN MY LIFE: Photography of Women

Selected by Mica Nava

The following images have been selected for Feminist Review from an exhibition of women’s photographic and mixed-media work entitled The Woman in My Life organized by Norma Constable, Kathy Hall and Bjanka Kadićof Acton Community Arts Workshop (ACAW).

Andrea Stokes SHE WAS A VISION/OBSESSION Exploring a mind obsessed with the physicality of another. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 36 FEMINIST REVIEW Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

Kate Sully CONSUMING PASSIONS A comment on popular representations of mothers . Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

PHOTOGRAPHY

Cind Oestreicher ANOTHER LIGHT The hidden and the revealed; another language . 37 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 38

FEMINIST REVIEW FEMINIST

Cind Oestreicher OUTSIDE IN Undercurrents that exist under the surface of our daily lives. PHOTOGRAPHY 39 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

Bjanka Kadić CHANGE This work is about the permanent feeling of suspension and the inevitability of change . 40 FEMINIST REVIEW

Sarah Pucill SEEING THROUGH 1 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

Sarah Pucill SEEING THROUGH 3 My work is about a woman’s struggle for identity; seeing through the myths. PHOTOGRAPHY 41

Zarina Bhimji SELF-PORTRAIT This is a portrait of myself. I am the woman in my life. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 42 FEMINIST REVIEW

Gillian Bazeley THE WOMAN IN MY LIFE A reflection on the intricate relation between a mother and her daughter.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 PHOTOGRAPHY 43

Vale and Betts AXIOM Symbolism and dreamlike imagery illuminate our daily lives.

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Notes Gillian Bazeley is a student of Graphic Design at Portsmouth College of Art. Virginia Betts is an architectural model-maker and did a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. She has worked with Denise Vale since 1987. Zarina Bhimji did an MA in Mixed Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1989 she won a Coopers and Lybrand award for outstanding work by artists under the age of thirty-five at the Whitechapel Open. Bjanka Kadić graduated and taught Art History in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. She is currently working as a graphic designer and photographer for ACAW. Cind Oestreicher did an MA in Experimental Media at the Slade and is currently working as a painter and photographer. Sarah Pucill did a Postgraduate Diploma at the Slade. She is currently working in 16mm film as well as in photography. Andrea Stokes did an MA in Experimental Media at the Slade. She now works with Cinestra, a video production company, and continues with her own work in photography/mixed media. Kate Sully did an MA in Fine Art in Cardiff. She works as a scenic artist for theatre and television. Denise Vale did a BA in Photography at the Polytechnic of Central London. She has worked with Virginia Betts since 1987. The exhibition, The Woman in My Life’, opened at the Small Mansion Arts Centre, Gunnersbury Park, London W3 in April 1990. It includes more than sixty pieces by forty photographers. Further information about touring schedules and hire availability can be obtained from Acton Community Arts Workshop (ACAW), Acton Hill Church, 1b Gunnersbury Lane, London W3. Tel: 081 993 3665. The selection of work made by Feminist Review was limited by what it was technically possible to reproduce in black and white within the available budget. As a consequence certain other interesting images were unfortunately excluded. Thanks to the exhibition organizers and Ruth Davies for help with reproduction and other preparation required for publication., Mica Nava is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 SPLINTERED SISTERHOOD: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project

Clara Connolly

For most of the eighties, I worked at a feminist youth project in London. Our ‘client groups’ were local working-class young women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, the majority drawn from the area’s largest ethnic minorities, Irish, Afro-Caribbean and Asian. This is not a description of the Project’s work—much of it stimulating and rewarding for workers and young women involved—but a subjective account of the ways in which our activities and thinking bore on the subject of race. My main purpose is to contribute to a critique of multiculturalism, the dominant form of antiracist activity in the Project and elsewhere. ‘Multiculturalism’, the caring professions’ view of Black people from without, and its more radical sister ‘identity politics’ (the mainspring of political activity coming from within one’s sense of an oppressed self) have been strongly influential principles across the left and feminism throughout the eighties in Britain. The Project considered itself an integral part of the women’s movement, and our work was bounded by the parameters of feminist thinking on race issues and their perceived connexion with the question of gender. I write with the benefit of hindsight, in the wake of the furore over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The left in Britain has been thrown into confusion by the recent confident displays of religious fundamentalism in a large part of the Asian community. To judge by those who are prepared to support demands to ‘Ban the Book’, support for Muslim religious leaders who assert the right to speak for ‘their’ community has come from a wide spectrum of political opinion. It has been left largely to the right-wing press, like the Daily Mail, and extreme right-wing organizations like the National Front, to confront the fundamentalists directly. There are significant exceptions, however. Gita Sahgal, an Asian feminist and a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism, states that: ‘Fundamentalism has been the main beneficiary of the adoption of relativist multi-cultural norms by large sections of the political establishment’ (1989). If this is true, then it is high time for socialists and feminists—who have most to lose by a reassertion of dominance by religious leaders—to review our recent orthodoxies on the subject of race. Before I proceed to discuss the Project’s work, I want to examine the origins of the terrible twins—multiculturalism and identity politics—in social policy, and feminist theory.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Multiculturalism Multiculturalism as a strategy of social policy-makers in Britain—particularly at local government level—was adopted from the late seventies onwards. It seemed like a more progressive and

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 46 FEMINIST REVIEW

practicable ideal than the previous model of full integration of ethnic minorities into British society. It has recently been influential in social services—particularly in relation to family intervention—but it was outlined first, and most clearly, among educationalists. A quotation from the Inner London Education Authority’s 1977 document, Multi-Ethnic Education, provides an illuminating definition of the concept as understood by the social-democratic consensus of the time:

The Authority serves a city where the presence of people of diverse cultures with different patterns of belief, behaviour and language is of great importance… Recognizing this, we have reaffirmed our determination to sustain a policy which will ensure that, within a society that is cohesive though not uniform, cultures are respected, differences recognised, and individual identities are secure. (ILEA, 1977)

Such statements were criticized, by left-wing teachers among others, for their elision of ‘race’ and ‘culture’, which reduces racial inequality to cultural difference, in an attempt to neutralize the widespread resentment felt by British Blacks about the racism of state and other institutions. Less commented upon at the time was their description of Britain as a ‘cohesive’ society, with no real conflict between different beliefs and value systems. Even if you leave aside class conflict for the moment (difficult in Thatcher’s Britain) the Rushdie affair has exposed the element of wish-fulfilment in these notions of social harmony. Long-standing resentment at the brutal realities of racial injustice is now fuelling Asian support for the fundamentalist agenda—an agenda which presents a serious challenge to the state on questions of freedom of expression, family law, and the education of girls. The antiracist teachers’ movement of the late seventies distanced itself from multicultural education. All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism, for example, launched in 1978, produced a booklet on the secondary school curriculum. The introduction (which I wrote) warned of the weakness of multiculturalism for developing an antiracist perspective on education (ALTARF, 1978). History for us was a central issue: an antiracist approach would have to include a re-examination of Britain’s colonial past and its relation to a racist present. We also supported Black parents in their campaigns against ‘sin-bins’ (educational units for disruptive pupils, disproportionately populated by young Afro-Caribbeans), and fought against the discrimination of Black teachers in the education system. Despite these criticisms, however, the idea of offering some recognition of the ‘cultural diversity’ of school students was enthusiastically embraced by progressive teachers, particularly in troubled inner-city areas. What multiculturalism has meant in practice, though, has been a subject of debate. The most obvious change in the primary-school curriculum has been the multiplication of festivals. Divali and the Chinese New Year have been added to Harvest Festival and Christmas. But when Highbury Quadrant (a North London primary school) celebrated Nelson Mandela’s birthday, there was an inquiry which resulted in eight of the teachers being removed from their posts. Not only has ‘race’ been reduced to ‘culture’, ‘culture’ has been reduced to ‘religion’.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 The antiracist teachers, mainly organized on the left of the National Union of Teachers, was always a minority movement, and its themes were not familiar to feminists, who by the late seventies had distanced themselves from socialist organizations. The way in which race was discussed in the women’s movement was very different. ‘Identity politics’ in spite of its radical gloss, was in many ways similar to multiculturalism in its emphasis on cultural difference. ANTIRACISM 47

Identity Politics One of the famous slogans of the women’s movement—and a source of much of its criticism of socialism—has been that ‘the personal is political’. Its original target was the assumption that the ‘public’ is the proper domain of political activity. Against this, feminists argued that the details of domestic life, and of sexual practices, were as much a matter for political change as any other. The slogan also asserted, less convincingly, the primacy of personal experience as a source of political understanding: ‘consciousness raising’, or the development of an awareness of women’s oppression through the sharing of individual experiences, became an important tool of the early women’s movement. By the late seventies, however, interpretations of the slogan had shifted. While the women’s movement was small and relatively homogeneous, the experiences being compared were similar. If experience is the great teacher, the question was bound to arise, as the movement drew in more diverse groups—whose experience? How valid are generalizations about women’s aspirations if they are based on the experience of white, middle-class, heterosexual women of a certain generation? The first challenge to sisterhood came from the political lesbians, whose position was articulated most clearly in a pamphlet entitled: Political Lesbianism: the Case Against Heterosexuality (Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, 1979). Sexuality for them was the central source of women’s oppression: heterosexuality was imposed on women for men’s benefit, therefore lesbianism (or rejection of male sexuality) became synonymous with feminism. Lesbianism was not a sexual choice, but a political project. Lesbians’ experience of oppression—and their rejection of it—gave them the moral authority to tell other women how to be ‘real’ feminists. Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan gave a vivid account of this mode of argument:’ “naming” and “claiming” came to be invested with a peculiar moral authority. Just to name yourself as part of a given group is to claim a moral backing for your words and actions’ (1986). Political lesbianism introduced the first, most virulent strain of ‘identity politics’ to the women’s movement. Their self-righteous moralism became so difficult to argue with that many women (lesbian or heterosexual) stopped being active in the movement at that time. But other women—younger, some Black, some working class—were just coming in, and political lesbianism dictated their agenda. It was not until the early eighties that Black women began to assert themselves within the women’s movement in Britain. They brought with them a history of antiracist struggle, fought alongside Black men, so they were hostile to the political lesbians’ emphasis on the centrality of sexuality, and their insistence on separatism. They challenged white women for their lack of concern with Black women’s issues—particularly the ways in which Black women’s lives were structured by racism. Hazel Carby’s article in The Empire Strikes Back (1982), ‘White women listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’, laid down one of the first challenges to the white women’s movement, and attempted to broaden the scope of feminist concerns. Black women continued the process of fracturing the mould of sisterhood by insisting in their turn on the importance of difference and the primacy of experience for awareness. This dialogue with the white women’s movement, necessary as it was, since many white Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 feminists were indeed ignorant of or indifferent to the detail of Black women’s lives, came to dominate the writing of Black women, sometimes at the expense of dialogue among themselves. So their emphasis—at least during that period—was on the ways in which racism, rather than sexism, structured their lives. In ‘Resistances and responses: the experiences of Black girls in Britain’, for example, in a section called ‘the myth of arranged marriages’ the authors argued that ‘choice, arrangement, and freedom are all relative concepts’. (Amos and Parmar, 1981:141) That seems to 48 FEMINIST REVIEW

me to be falling into the trap of cultural relativism, precisely what multiculturalism, in its sphere, was doing. Many Black feminists defended the Black family against its pathologizing by social policy-makers, and the attempts by the racist immigration laws to break up Black families. In ‘Challenging imperial feminism’, the same authors claim: ‘In identifying the institution of the family as a source of oppression for women, white feminists have again revealed their cultural and racial myopia, because for Asian women in particular, the British state through its immigration legislation has done all it can to destroy the Asian family by separating husbands from wives, wives from husbands, and parents from children.’ (Amos and Parmar, 1984:15) Many white feminists accepted the justice of this (particularly because of the lack of involvement of the women’s movement in the antideportation campaigns of Black women) but it did prevent Black and white women uniting on issues that they could have fought on together: domestic violence, and the policing of young women’s sexuality by the family and the community. More seriously, it marginalized and silenced those Black women who were fighting such issues. The pattern already established in the women’s movement of discussing ‘difference’ with an emphasis on personal experience for understanding, was another obstacle to the establishment of real dialogue between Black and white women. As heterosexuals were supposed to have no basis for an understanding of heterosexism, so white women had no basis for the understanding of racism. Discussion was silenced by the privileging of oppressed experience: for a white woman to disagree with a Black woman was not only racist, but also resisting the process of ‘racism awareness training’. For what took the place of dialogue in many meetings and workplaces was a rush of ‘racism-awareness training’ a process and method imported from the United States, with an emphasis on changing personal attitudes and interpersonal behaviour. Coming as I do from a Catholic background, the sessions I underwent during my time at the Project reminded me most forcefully of the sacrament of confession—except that there was no ceremony of forgiveness. Discussion between equals remained impossible. (These aspects of ‘identity politics’ are addressed in Feminist Review No. 31, 1989—especially in the articles of Parmar, Adams and Harris.) The aspect of ‘identity politics’ that most resembled multiculturalism was its emphasis on exploring one’s group identity. This usually meant, for migrant or ‘minority’ women, who were supposed to ‘have’ a culture, exploring an often borrowed cultural identity. Women’s events became dominated by the multicultural festival, with displays of archaic folk dancing—Irish, African, Asian—which some women, especially younger women, had little real identification with. On the whole, there was a curiously undynamic and reverential view of ‘culture’, and a lack of exploration of its real meaning in women’s lives. Religion, for example, was rarely broached on these occasions: the dominant form of multiculturalism, as I’ve already pointed out, equates ‘culture’ with ‘religion’, but this was impossible for feminists. So the role of religion was a matter, for the most part, of embarrassed silence. But the main problem with such events and activities was not their ‘cultural’ aspects—they were often good fun—but that they substituted ‘culture’ for politics. In the name of antiracism, women’s energies were directed into organizing such events at

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 the expense of defining political goals and campaigning for them.

Feminist youth work The policy and practice of the Young Women’s Project I worked in were intimately, though incoherently, related to the themes and concerns of the women’s movement of the time. Women ANTIRACISM 49

youth workers were less likely than teachers to have been influenced by the left-wing critiques of multiculturalism. For one thing, trade union organizing was less significant for youth workers than for teachers. Women youth workers were more open to the issues of the women’s movement of the late seventies—the creation of a ‘women’s culture’ and a central concern with sexuality and male violence. The themes of women youth workers’ conferences, meeting from 1975 onwards, were a specialized version of these concerns:

1 Youth clubs were male-dominated; young women’s behaviour there was policed by boys and young men, often with the collusion of male youth workers. This explained why comparatively few girls over the age of puberty attended youth clubs. 2 Girls and young women needed space and time on their own to develop and articulate a female culture. (At the early stages there was little or no discussion of the separate needs of young women from ethnic minorities).

So a two-fold-strategy emerged for feminist youth work—firstly the organization of special ‘girls’ nights’ in youth clubs and centres and, secondly, the development, outside youth-club settings, of separate work with those young women who didn’t or wouldn’t use youth clubs at all—such as young lesbians, single mothers and, later, young women from ethnic minorities—especially Asian—who were not allowed to attend mixed-sex venues. The working methods we used were also based on the women’s movement:

1 Small group work, using the consciousness-raising principle. By encouraging young women to draw on what was common in their experience, they would (we hoped) come to understand the gendered nature of that experience. 2 The high status given to the fostering of friendships among women. Sessions were chatty and informal; attenders were encouraged to bring their friends, or develop friendships within the group. 3 The promotion of a young women’s culture, by providing activities which would foster cultural production—music, video, drama, magazines—in a women-only setting. The emphasis was on performance rather than the more formal acquisition of skills, and women performers, playwrights and musicians were used as tutors rather than more traditional teachers.

Hundreds of young women did use the Project during its eight years of existence in a successful and creative way—for support in trouble, to make friends and enjoy themselves, to obtain advice on personal, sexual and career matters, to develop their talents and educational potential, to become active feminists. The criticism that follows of our methods and the feminist culture that surrounded

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 them—especially from an antiracist perspective—is not intended to devalue the work of the Project as a whole. 50 FEMINIST REVIEW

Sex or culture? Our emphasis on separatism—not to be confused with the principle of autonomy, or the right of oppressed groups to meet for particular purposes—came from the influential current of political lesbianism. It caused us some problems, particularly in the supportive work we did on ‘girls’ nights’ in local youth clubs. Those girls who did attend a youth club—and it is true they were in a minority—did so because it was one of the few cheap and safe spaces in which they could meet boys. So a single-sex session was not calculated to appeal to them. This was especially true of Afro-Caribbean girls and young women, who attended local youth clubs in significant numbers, and had the self-confidence that came from the dominance of Black music and styles on British youth cultures. Young women were prepared to see the point of some separate activities, such as sex education, self-defence classes, or acquiring high-status leisure skills, such as pool or dee-jaying, usually dominated by the boys. So women youth workers had to develop much more structured programmes on the girls’ nights than on the ordinary mixed sessions, which was more expensive in terms of resources and energy. When these were available, such sessions could provide challenging and enjoyable experiences for young women. But what was more often the case—especially over a period when the ‘special funds’ ran out—was that the girls’ nights, running on a shoestring and a chat, succumbed to the closet charms of the ‘bedsit’. Teenagers, itching to practice the skills of ‘real’ women, made cakes, did each others’ nails and hair, and learned to inhale a cigarette. There was a cosiness about many ‘girls’ nights’ that discouraged the introduction of uncomfortable topics, such as the exclusion (conscious or unconscious) of the livelier Black girls, and a youth worker trying to raise such issues was often dismissed as ‘boring’. Young women rebelling against the norms of femininity—or at least of white femininity—despised and avoided such occasions. These sessions were justified in feminist terms by referring to the ‘fostering of female culture’. The fact that many forms of female social and cultural activity reinforced rather than challenged traditional notions of femininity was little discussed. The problem of the exclusion of Afro- Caribbean girls was answered by both Black and white women with: Their culture is different. There should be separate nights for Black girls only’. Attempts to establish separate sessions of this kind for Afro-Caribbean teenage girls were no more successful. We were more successful off youth-club premises, particularly when we targeted young single mothers and ran daytime sessions with a crèche. The newer mothers attended because many of them—rehoused on pregnancy or childbirth far from their mothers and friends—were isolated and unsupported. The older mothers, whose children were nearing school age, were interested in returning to education. (Afro-Caribbean young women are more ambitious educationally, and are in better paid jobs, than their white counterparts.) Our Project did not attempt, unlike others around London and elsewhere, to establish separate groups for Afro-Caribbeans. This was because, greatly to our own embarrassment, we could not employ a full-time Afro-Carribean worker. We fought a long-running battle with a local youth officer (the representative of the Inner London Education Authority, our funding body) over this Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 issue. (The only power he had over our work was on appointments.) Afro-Caribbeans—especially women—spelled ‘trouble’ in the eyes of the local state bureaucracy. Afro-Caribbean youth were regarded as politically subversive because of the prominent role they had played in the summer uprisings in many British cities during 1981 and later. Coupled with the fact that they did attend youth clubs (unlike Asians, at least in our area), no special facilities were made available to them. The local council, on the other hand, took a more sympathetic attitude, and funded us (among other ANTIRACISM 51

projects) for an Afro-Caribbean worker. But this was blocked by our youth officer as ‘unconstitutional’, though he was not able to challenge our council-funded Asian worker. This meant that we were constantly on the defensive about our work with Afro-Caribbean young mothers, at least with our feminist youth-worker peers. According to the feminist orthodoxies on race referred to earlier, that white women know nothing about racism, and Black women’s lives are structured primarily by racism, I was expected to have little in common with Afro-Caribbean women. But as a mother, I was permitted to work with mothers. So, although the mothers’ group was predominantly—and at periods solely—Afro-Caribbean, we never called it an Afro-Caribbean Group. Our defensiveness limited our work and inhibited our discussion, though we did encourage the young women (according to the third orthodoxy) to explore their identity as Black women. These discussions were fruitful, precisely because their theme was the contradictions of identity. Some young women identified as African, others declared themselves to be ‘Black British’. The ‘Africans’, influenced by the Jamaican-inspired Rastafarian cult, were more politicized, although the ‘Black British’ had their political priorities too. The Africans expressed concern about the police’s role in harassing young Blacks, and about ethnocentric education; the British were more concerned about the inadequacies of the social welfare system, and the failure of their children to learn to read quickly at school. The British were more interested in sexism, the Africans in racism. These polarities represented an illuminating tension amongst them between different definitions of antiracist struggle, between (crudely) cultural separatism and social equality for all. Another way of integrating young Afro-Caribbeans within the Project was through our long-running music project. Successive waves of young women learned to play together, in a mixture of contemporary styles, formed rough and ready bands and left. About half of these were Afro-Caribbean. So Afro-Caribbeans came to the Project as mothers or would-be musicians. This contrasted with our work with Asian girls and young women. Our Asian worker established separate Asian groups, mainly school-based. This made a significant difference to the profile and self- confidence of the Asian girls in such schools, who had been the main target of racist abuse. Because of the girls’ age (younger than most other Project members) and their relations with their families, the worker had first to establish the trust and co-operation of the local Asian communities. This she did successfully, but the nature of her work was limited by the restrictions this placed on her. For example, she was not allowed to take them to events at night, nor on joint holidays with other Project members, so they remained isolated from the rest of the Project. Because of the consequent emphasis on ‘identity’, Asian girls and young women who attended other Project groups (young mothers, school leavers) felt inhibited from attending the Asian groups. They believed (falsely) that the Asian worker would attempt to reinforce an ‘identity’ harmonious with their families’ wishes for them. These young women were often in rebellion against such wishes and refused to attend anything they saw as closely related to that form of ‘identity’. Thus the very young women who could have benefited most from secular, feminist Asian role models, were deprived of them. Another source of limitation on her work that the Asian worker faced was the tendency (referred

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 to earlier) to emphasize the racist threat from ‘outside’ at the expense of the policing of the young women’s sexuality by their community. The white young women who were facing the kinds of coercion from their families that some of the Asian young women were experiencing were supported in leaving home. There was a network of hostels and young women’s homes we used; we also established a hostel for young lesbians running from the hostility of their families. But Asian young women were not encouraged to run (though some of them did anyway); there was no Asian 52 FEMINIST REVIEW

young women’s hostel in the area, and it was assumed that they would be culturally estranged, as well as the targets of racism, in general hostels and refuges. This often presented the worker with agonizing dilemmas. There was no supportive network of women she could rely on; though there were Black women youth workers’ groups, they were not discussing such issues. It was difficult to discuss how to support Asian young women running from arranged marriages or domestic violence, when influential Asian youth workers like Pratibha Parmar were denouncing the ‘cultural dislocation’ thesis about Asian young women as a racist stereotype. Our worker wasn’t helped by the multicultural approach taken by some local social workers, who expressed a reluctance to intervene in the family life of ‘other cultures’. There was a particularly scandalous case, of long duration, of a father who brutally abused his successive wives and children. When the Project worker persisted in her attempts to have the daughters taken into care, she was refused entry to case conferences on the grounds that she ‘over-identified’ with the girls. A succession of half-baked assumptions about what was considered ‘normal’ in ‘other’ cultures were advanced as an excuse for inaction. The tragedy was that these social workers were consciously attempting to be antiracist. Their collusion with violence in this instance was a result of over—rather than under-sensitivity. In case I seem to be suggesting that Asian girls and young women suffered more from their families that others we saw in the Project, let me hasten to add that this was not the case. For example, we ran an incest survivors group which was attended by girls and young women across the races. We experienced difficulty in persuading the statutory services to take the views of any girls or young women seriously. But the multiculturalist norms that prevailed, both in feminist youth work and in the social services, meant that it was particularly difficult to develop an interventionist strategy with Black (particularly Asian) families. In general then, our policy at the Project was (or would have been with the resources) to divide young women off from each other into groups with labels on—Asian, lesbian, single mothers—corresponding roughly to the fixed hierarchy of oppressions that was the women’s movement strategy for dealing with ‘difference’. Many young women gained in confidence from the adoption and exploration of a group identity, but it caused problems for others, especially those uneasy with fixed identities, like the Asian young rebels mentioned earlier, or those without settled sexual identities. A weakness for the Project as a whole was its failure to develop a distinctive ethos which could feed into all areas of its work.

Nursing the fracture There were times, however, when we brought the different groups together. One such occasion was an ‘Adventure Weekend’ when we took all the members except the Asian group (for reasons mentioned earlier) to a country house. During the daytime, the young women had a choice of activities—horseriding, canoeing, trekking, songwriting, rapping. For the evenings, however, we

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 planned a different kind of adventure, modelled on the kind of ‘awareness training’ adult women practised on each other. The theme of the first evening was heterosexism, the second evening, racism. The first evening was quite a success. After the showing of a lively video in which some of the young lesbians present had participated, there ensued a prolonged discussion, mainly among the young women. The young lesbian group members played with the others’ sense of shock, saying ANTIRACISM 53

‘we were like that too. It was very hard to adopt a despised identity’, and everyone went on to work out why this was so. The workers retired around midnight, leaving the young women to argue into the small hours over such topics as whether sexuality was innate or learned, eg. ‘were you born like that? (Were you?’) and what do lesbians do? (And what do you do?…) Echoes of the evening reverberated through the Project for a long time afterwards. The women’s movement —at least in Britain—has presented few such opportunities for women to explore their sexual practices in a way that doesn’t silence either lesbian or heterosexual women. But the second evening, on race, was less successful. For a start, we split into separate white and Black groups, according to the standard practice of ‘racism awareness training’ at the time, there was no joint discussion—the group discussions produced only an uneasy silence afterwards. The intrusion of ‘identity politics’, I believed, had negative effects. The only white identity one can assume in Britain—or indeed anywhere—is a guilty one, and guilt immobilizes. The Black women’s attempts to forge a united Black identity—given the lack of discussion at the Project between Afro-Caribbean and Asian women (and anyway, where did the Cypriots fit?) was fraught with difficulty. Another way of bringing Project members together was through the youth version of the women’s multicultural festival. We became experts at the art of Afro-Caribbean food, Asian and Irish folk dancing, multicultural poetry readings, and—blessed relief at the end!—Afro-Caribbean women rappers and disco music. The folk music and dancing was even more remote from the young women—mainly second generation ‘minorities’—than at adult festivals. It became a test of nerve to try it all out. An added pleasure on such occasions was the glow of righteousness we experienced from ‘dipping in’ to each others ‘cultures’. Mostly, the evenings were good fun, but they were a rather inadequate way of learning about other women’s concerns. Because we invested such occasions with the dignity of antiracism, we didn’t have to work very hard at devising more challenging instances of it. It was, rather, a way of underlining and continuing the process of (learned and well-intentioned) mutual incomprehension that much of the women’s movement indulged in throughout the eighties.

Current prospects Our emphasis on the fostering of cultural identity was done, I believe, at a cost. Firstly, it prevented us developing antiracist education and political work with all Project members. Secondly, it caused, on occasion, a dilution of feminism, our founding principle. Feminist youth workers are now paying the price for our mistakes. Many of the innovative projects have been closed, victims of the harsher ideological and economic climate of the early nineties. Separate girls’ work is now approved only in those areas where it is regarded as necessary for ‘cultural’ reasons. Feminism is no longer regarded as a respectable motive for youthwork (if it ever was); multiculturalism, on the other hand, has gained in stature. An illuminating sign of the times is a recent advertisement for an Asian girls’ worker. It specifies

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 ‘a non-traditional and non-stereotypic approach’ as a criterion for application (Guardian, 1990). In the eighties such code-words for feminism would hardly have been necessary: the credentials of applicants would usually have been taken for granted. But in recent years, a plethora of religious or religion-influenced organizations, obtaining funds under local councils’ multicultural policies, have been moving into the work formerly done by feminists, such as running refuges and youth groups. This is a tribute to the influence of Black feminists involved in such work, but it is also a direct 54 FEMINIST REVIEW

challenge to them. The only answer to this growing threat is to expose the dual function of multiculturalism—firstly a refusal, in the name of ‘cultural diversity’, to recognize the true nature of racism; and secondly a refusal, in the name of ‘community’, to recognize the separate interests of women.

Notes Clara Connolly is a member of Feminist Review and of Women Against Fundamentalism. This is a revised version of a paper given at the Institute of Cultural Sociology, Copenhagen, in April 1989, published in Studies in Cultural Sociology 28, Copenhagen 1990. My thanks to Mehmet Umit Necef in Copenhagen, and Southall Black Sisters in London, who provoked me into stronger criticism of antiracist orthodoxies than I dared in the original version.

References

ALTARF Secondary Workshop (1978) Teaching and Racism, London: All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism. AMOS, Valerie and PARMAR, Pratibha (1981) ‘Resistances and responses: the experience of Black girls in Britain’ in McROBBlE and McCABE (1981). AMOS, Valerie and PARMAR, Pratibha (1984) ‘Challenging imperial feminism’, Feminist Review, No. 17. ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1986) ‘Upsetting an applecart: differences, desire and lesbian sado-masochism’, Feminist Review, No. 23. CARBY, Hazel (1982) ‘White women listen: Black feminism and the boundaries of Sisterhood’ in CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982). CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982) The Empire Strikes Back, London: Hutchinson. FEMINIST REVIEW (1989) The Past Before Us: 20 Years of Feminism, No. 31. GUARDIAN 25 April 1990. INNER LONDON EDUCATION AUTHORITY (1977) Multi-Ethnic Education, report presented to the Education Committee. LEEDS REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISTS (1979) Political Lesbianism: the Case Against Heterosexuality, self-published pamphlet. McROBBlE, Angela and McCABE, Trisha (1981) Feminism for Girls: an Adventure Story, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. SAHGAL, Gita (1989) ‘Transgression comes of age’, Interlink (Journal of the Socialist Society and the Conference of Socialist Economists) May/June. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 WOMAN, NATIVE, OTHER Pratibha Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha

Trinh T.Minh-ha is a writer, film-maker and composer. She emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1970 after a year at the University of Saigon, and continued her studies of music and composition, French literature and ethnomusicology in the US and later in Paris. She taught music for three years at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her vast body of work includes the books Un Art sans oeuvre (1981), En Miniscules (poems, 1987) African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta (1985) in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, and the films Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces, Living is Round (1985) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). An essay by her entitled ‘Difference: “A special Third World women issue”’ was pub lished in Feminist Review No. 25, 1987. Her most recent publication is Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). Pratibha Parmar spoke to her in Berkeley, California, about ‘cultural hybridization and decentred re alities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, marginal voices and languages of rupture’, all of which are issues raised in the book and in Minh-ha’s films. Pratibha: I would like to start by asking you how you place yourself as a Third World woman vis-à-vis the women’s movement. Minh-ha: Well, it took me many pages in the book to develop this. The fact is that we are standing on a very precarious line. I see the women’s movement as being necessarily heterogeneous in its origin, even though it may be claimed more readily by certain groups and remains largely white in its visibility. On the one hand, I readily acknowledge my debt to the movement in all the reflections advanced on the oppression of women of colour. On the other hand, I also feel that a critical space of differentiation needs to be maintained since issues specifically raised by Third World women have less to do with questions of cultural difference than with a different notion of feminism itself—how it is lived and how it is practiced. Naming yourself a feminist is not without problems, even among feminists. In a context of marginalization, at the same time as you feel the necessity to call yourself a feminist while fighting for the situation of women, you also have to keep a certain latitude and to refuse that label when feminism tends to become an occupied territory. Here, you refuse, not because you don’t want to side with other feminists, but simply because it is crucial to keep open the space of naming in feminism. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Pratibha: The back-cover blurb on the book jacket of Woman, Native, Other describes the book as ‘postfeminist’. I find this term problematic, because my understanding of it within the context of England is that it is a term used by the mainstream media as a way of denigrating current feminist

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 56 FEMINIST REVIEW

practices. Furthermore, it also carries with it the notion that feminism is dead and is no longer a viable or necessary social movement. Can you say what you think about this and how you use the term? Minh-ha: This is an important question. Actually, I don’t know how the word popped up on the back cover of the book, except that the first subtitle I thought of included it as well as the words Third World’ which reviewers also strongly rejected. Its reappearance here is the publisher’s choice, not mine. I took it out at an early stage, not so much because I distrust its use but because, precisely as you said, it raises a number of confusing interpretations. I fear that one does not even need to go to the context of England to see how it can be condemned by certain feminists. Within feminism, there are, as in all movements, women whose questioning of the dominant system constantly pushes to the outer limits of what feminism is and what it is not. But you also have others who just hop on the wagon and are likely to turn feminism into a rigidly prescriptive practice, perpetuating thereby the same power relations as those established in the patriarchal system. Feminism is thus weakened in its political undertaking as it is reduced to something as simplistic and essentialist as man-hating. Sure, the mainstream is always very quick to appropriate subversive strands for their own conservative end, but one need not fall prey to this. For me, the notion of postfeminism is as problematic, but also as interesting, as the notion of postmodernism through which, for example, the definition of modernism keeps on being displaced in its certainties. Therefore, postmodernism cannot be reduced to something that merely comes after modernism or to a simple rejection of modernism. As some theorists argue, it can point back to a nascent stage of modernism, a dawning stage before the closure, in other words, a stage in between closures. Postfeminism in this context is both a return to a nascent stage of feminism where the movement is at its most subversive, and a move forward to a stage in which we have learned from the many difficulties we’ve encountered that, in spite of all the refinements of sexist ideology, the fight is far from being over. It has, on the contrary, become so much more complex now that the movement has reached an impasse on the issue of essentialism, whether this idea of an innate ‘womanness’ is defined by men or championed by women. Pratibha: In your book, as in your films, you critically engage with the ‘problem’ of how to represent a Third World female ‘other’. This critical engagement with certain ‘master discourses’ leads you to interrogate anthropology, deconstructionist philosophy, postcolonial literary criticism and feminist theory. In relation to feminist theory it is quite clear that Black women and ‘women of colour’ have shifted the frameworks of what was once the dominant trajectory of the eurocentric, middle-class and white women’s movement both in the US and in Europe. Would you agree that we have instigated these shifts through our interventions, our writings, our political practices? Minh-ha: As I mentioned earlier, I don’t believe the movement to be other than heterogeneous in its origins. In fact, this is the condition of any sociopolitical or aesthetic movement. That’s why history and culture keep on having to be rewritten. Because of their more privileged status, white feminists have been taking up this task more extensively, but the women’s movement resulted from the works of both white women and women of colour around the world. Now that more women of

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 colour have access to education, there will be more and more rewriting work to be done on our side. (This is not an easy situation to be in since, as I wrote in the book, writing is always practised at the cost of other women’s labour.) Moreover, the influence has always been mutual: if women of colour have at times taken their cue from white women’s sexual politics, their fight has consistently contributed to the radicalization of the feminist struggle. As you put it, it continues to shift the framework of Euro-American feminism and, depending on how the work is carried out, the refocus TRINH T.MINH-HA 57

on women of colour in white feminist discourse lately can be seen as a simultaneous form of appropriation and expropriation, or as an acknowledgement of intercultural enrichment and of interdependency in the fighting-learning process. The precarious line we walk on is one that allows us to challenge the West as authoritative subject of feminist knowledge, while also resisting the terms of a binarist discourse that would concede feminism to the West all over again.

Trinh T.Minh-ha Pratibha: What I find very exciting about your book is the fact that there’s a seamless quality between your subjective perceptions of fragmentation, your questioning of language and of identity as a postcolonial subject, and the more structured processes of how you give those experiences a theoretical coherence. In other words, organic to your theoretical project is your very personal voice which is integrated poignantly and often self-reflectively. What is also quite unique is the way you use poetical language and engage with writings of women of colour, be they prose, poetry, autobiography or philosophical and theoretical texts. Can

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 you talk more about this? Minh-ha: You put it very nicely. This will help to give another dimension to what I am about to discuss. What you find exciting in this ‘theoretical project’, to use your own terms, seems precisely to be the source of problems I have repeatedly encountered while seeking publication of the book. Aside from the fact that its subject appeared to be of little interest and relevance to publishers in general, what was widely rejected both by publishers and readers to whom they sent the book for 58 FEMINIST REVIEW

reports was the way I chose to write. Never had I experienced so extensively, at least in intellectual matters, the dilemma of crossing borderlines. Academics, infatuated with their own normalization of what constitutes a ‘scholarly’ work, abhor any form of writing that exceeds academic language and whose mode of theorizing is not recognizable, hence not classifiable as ‘theory’ according to their standard of judgement. Likewise, the militant presses also reject it because it does not square with the rhetoric of militancy and its insistence on literal thinking, while the feminist presses refuse it because either it is ‘too speculative to be a useful textbook for institutions’ or it is simply ‘not quite what we are looking for’. Last, but not least, the small presses focusing on creative writing condemn the book for being too ‘impure’. In other words, what bothers all these presses is its ‘impurity’: the irrespectful mixing of theoretical, militant and poetical modes of writing. Part of the fight carried on in the book is to show how theory can relate intimately to poetry; how they interact when meaning is prevented from becoming dogma or from ending with what is said, thereby unsettling the identity of the speaking/writing/reading subject in the signifying process. Theorists tend to react strongly against poetry today because, for them, poetry is nothing else but a place where a subjectivity is constituted and where language is aestheticized (such as building vocabulary and rhyming beautiful lines). Whereas poetry is also the place from which many people of colour voice their struggle. Consider Cuban and African poetry, for example. And if you look into Asian, Hispanic, African and Native American literatures here in the US, poetry is no doubt the major voice of the poor and of people of colour. So poetical language does become stale and self-indulgent when it serves an art-for-art’s-sake purpose, but it can also be the site where language is at its most radical in its refusal to take itself for granted. As feminists have insistently pointed out, women are not only oppressed economically, but also culturally and politically, in the very forms of signifying and reasoning. Language is therefore an extremely important site of struggle. Meaning has to retain its complexities, otherwise it will just be a pawn in the game of power. Even theorists like Julia Kristeva who only write prose, recognize that only in poetical language lies the possibility of revolution. For me, the political responsibility here is to offer meaning in such a way that each reader going through the same statements and the same text, would find tools for herself (or himself) to carry on the fight in her (or his) own terms. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 TRINH T.MINH-HA 59

Trinh T.Minh-ha Pratibha: At the core of the book lies a questioning of the languages and discourses of the grand narratives of the human sciences which seek to universalize and homogenize. What is interesting here is that rather than constructing an oppositional discourse you move in and out of these languages, challenging, deconstructing and reformulating their suppositions and ideological underpinnings. You say:

From jagged transitions between the analytical and the poetical to the disruptive, always shifting fluidity of a headless and bottomless storytelling, what is exposed in this text is the inscription and the de-scription of a non unitary female subject of colour through her engagement, therefore also disengagement, with master discourses. (1989:43)

In many ways, I think it is women of colour who are often best placed to engage and also disengage with master discourses since our entry into the ‘master’s house’ continues to be a forced entry rather than a polite invitation. Also, we don’t hold white male, Christian masters as voices of authority and legitimation. What do you think are the consequences for you as an individual who traverses so many theoretical and personal boundaries? Minh-ha: Perhaps I can answer this question by coming back to an important part which I left out in my earlier response: the role of theory. The situation is not unlike what we said earlier about feminism. You have people who practise theory in a very deadening way, so theory keeps on aiming for closures and building up boundaries rather than voiding them. What is constituted are areas of expertise and specialization, the fortification and expansion of which need a whole network of disciplinarians. I find this particularly true with film theory, for example. It certainly seems to be heading toward a dead end as it tends to become a mere form of administrative inquisition. In reflecting on language(s) as a crucial site for social change, theory should precisely challenge such a compartmentalized view of the world and render perceptible the (linguistic) cracks existing in every argument while questioning the nature of oppression and its diverse manifestations. This is where disrupting ‘the grand narratives of the human sciences’ becomes a means of survival, and where a straight oppositional discourse is no longer sufficient. In the book, I came back, for example, to the age-old division between the instinct and the intellect, and briefly discussed theory in relation to how women conceive the ‘abstract’. The way I dealt with a nonunitary notion of subjectivity in my film Naked Spaces, Living is Round may also contribute further to questioning reductive oppositions. The film has three female voice-overs which constitute, broadly speaking, three ways of informing. One of the voices quotes African writers and villagers’ sayings, while another reasons according to writings from the West, and the third tells personal anecdotes and feelings. This analytical differentiation is useful here, but it is certainly not adequate, since the three voices often overlap in their functions. The first voice is perhaps the most concrete, yet it has a pervasive abstract quality to it. Because it does not inform with a rationale recognizable Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 to the West, Western viewers often either classify it as being ‘symbolic’ or they decide that it is simply part of an abstract ‘intellectualizing’ process. I would say that this is not false, but it’s not true either. It is not false because representation is here visibly and audibly shown as being mediated by my own background and rationalization of the culture. It is not quite true, because this eagerness to equate the abstract with ‘intellectualization’ is an impoverishment due to the dominance of the literal mind. When you hear the conversations of these village women, you can never separate the 60 FEMINIST REVIEW

abstract from the concrete, and the level at which signs and symbols operate leads us directly into the very details of their daily existence. This, I believe, is where the power of the poetry of our environment lies. And this is also what theory can achieve when it comes closest to poetry in its signifying operation. The above example of simultaneous engagement and disengagement with master discourses can indeed, as you point out, be heightened by the fact that our entry into the ‘master’s house’ continues to be a forced entry. Even, and especially, when I visibly walk in the ‘centre’ with all spotlights on, I feel how utterly inappropriate(d)ly ‘other’ I remain—not so much by choice nor by lack of choice, as by a mixture of survival instinct and critical necessity. Here, the fact that one is always marginalized in one’s own language and areas of strength is something that one has to learn to live with. I can’t help noticing this in every single realm of my activities: how I am sent off from one disciplinary border, one classification to another, in academic milieus (never ‘quite corresponding to what they are looking for’); how I am categorized in conferences; how I am introduced in diverse public events; how I am viewed and read through my work; how I am rejected and retrieved by different communities; the kind of job I am expected to take on; the institutional territories I am allowed or not allowed to step into; and so on. Impurity and marginalizations have always had strong bonds; the more one strengthens these, the more one’s position proves to be fragile. It’s nothing new. Pratibha: I would like to move on to a question about definitions and identities that comes up quite frequently amongst radical postcolonial intellectuals. ‘Are we victims of fragmentation or, precisely because of our cultural hybridity and postcolonial experiences of displacement and marginality, are we a synthesis placed very much in the centre?’ Minh-ha: For me it’s not a question of fragmentation versus synthesis but, rather, of how one understands what happens within the notion of fragmentation itself. If one sees a fragment as being the opposite of a whole, then I have no affinities with the term, since it carries with it the compartmentalized world view I questioned earlier. But if the fragment stands on its own and cannot be recuperated by the notion of a totalizing whole, then fragmentation is a way of living with differences without turning them into opposites, nor trying to assimilate them out of insecurity. Fragmentation is here a useful term because it always points to one’s limits. Since the self, like the work you produce, is not so much a core as a process, one finds oneself, in the context of cultural hybridity, always pushing one’s questioning of oneself to the limit of what one is and what one is not. When am I Vietnamese? When am I American? When am I Asian and when am I Asian- American or Asian-European? Which language should I speak, which is closest to myself, and when is that language more adequate than another? By working on one’s limits, one has the potential to modify them. Fragmentation is therefore a way of living at the borders. Pratibha: So how would you look at questions of identity—as a woman, as a woman of colour, as a writer or as a film-maker? Minh-ha: Again, if it is a point of redeparture for those of us whose ethnicity and gender were historically debased, then identity remains necessary as a political/personal strategy of survival and resistance. But if it is essentialized as an end point, a point of ‘authentic’ arrival, then it only

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 narrows the struggle down to a question of ‘alternatives’—that is, a perpetuation, albeit with a reversed focus, of the notion of ‘otherness’ as defined by the master, rather than a radical challenge of patriarchal power relations. The claim of identity is often a strategic claim. It is a process which enables me to question my condition anew, and one by which I intimately come to understand how the personal is cultural, historical or political. The reflexive question asked, as I mentioned earlier, is no longer: who am I? but when, where, how am I (so and so)? This is why I remain sceptical of TRINH T.MINH-HA 61

Pratibha Parmar

strategies of reversal when they are not intricately woven with strategies of displacement. Here the notion of displacement is also a place of identity: there is no real me to return to, no whole self that synthesizes the woman, the woman of colour and the writer; there are instead, diverse recognitions of self through difference, and unfinished, contingent, arbitrary closures that make possible both politics and identity. Pratibha: I would like to talk about your films more specifically. What would you say is your agenda in terms of your film-making practice? Partly, I’m asking this as a way of going back to what we were saying earlier about the dominant culture being in many ways a mainstream fiction. I think the kind of work you are producing in your films and your writing is actually changing the cultural topography of visual discourses. Minh-ha: It is difficult to talk about a single agenda in my film-making. Each work engenders its own agenda. I can try, however, to trace some of the preoccupations that run through the different works produced. For example, I wrote Woman, Native, Other at approximately the same time I made my earlier films, and yet I was committed to not mentioning film in this book because I was dealing with writing rather than film-making. But in both filmic and written works, the attempt is to reflect

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 on the tools and the relations of production that define us, whether as film-makers or as writers. By doing so, what I hope for is to provide myself and others with tools not only to beat the master at his own game, but also to transform the terms of our consciousness. Since my films are not materializations of ideas or visions that precede them, the way they take shape entirely depends on what happens during and in between the process(es) of producing them. Therefore, what it is about can never be separated from how it is made. 62 FEMINIST REVIEW

Let’s take the example of my latest film, Surname Viet Given Name Nam. It is a work in which a number of questions tightly intersect: identity, popular memory, culture(s). In focusing on Vietnamese women in Vietnam and in the States, I was interested in exploring how we project ourselves through our own stories and analyses as well as how we are constituted through the image-repertoire that insiders and outsiders to the culture have historically fashioned and retained of us. Here the role of popular memory and of oral tradition remains pivotal in the film as it allows me to offer the viewer, not some ‘factual’ information on the condition of women and on the history of their resistance, but songs, proverbs, stories that bring to the fore their oppression, their struggle and highlight how and what people remember of them. While breaching the question of plural identity for example, the film works simultaneously at different levels on the intersection of nation and gender; on the problems of translation within a culture as well as between several cultures; on the politics of interviews with its emphasis on oral testimonies and its ‘voice-giving’ claims; and finally on the fictions of documentary. All this being said, I feel that in trying to respond to your statement, hence to look for a specific agenda, to explain, contain, or justify it, I am simply led to this banal question: why write? why make film? There is obviously no single answer to this. Perhaps it is not so much a question of ‘making’ as that of allowing things to be (or not to be) and to take form on their own. Perhaps resistance in this context is not to go against, but to assume a difficult ‘freedom’, one that also refutes itself as freedom.

Notes Pratibha Parmar is a writer and film-maker. She was one of the guest editors of Perverse Politics: Feminist Review, No. 34 (1990).

References

MINH-HA, Trinh T. (1981) Un Art sans oeuvre , Michigan: International Book Publishers. MlNH-HA, Trinh T. (1987) En Miniscules , Paris: Le Méridien Editeur. MINH-HA, Trinh T. (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism , Indiana University Press. MINH-HA, Trinh T. with BOURDIER, Jean-Paul (1985) African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta , New York: Holmes & Meier. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 OUT BUT NOT DOWN: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing

Jayne Egerton

Lesbians and ‘home’

City-center, mid- When it comes to work it always seemed to me that you traffic I gave the appearance of being a very lonely person having wake to your public kiss. Your name no social life at all, because you can’t talk about it. (Hall is Judith, your kiss a sign Carpenter Archives, 1979:58) to the shocked pedestrians, gathered beneath the light that means stop in our culture where red is a warning. (Broumas, 1972:62)

Lesbians do not have an undifferentiated experience of the world of work and family, but we share a sense of not belonging, of being ‘apart’ in many public, social and familial situations. Many lesbians are not ‘out’ to their families, workmates, the doctor, or even friends. Few of us are ‘out’ in every situation. We all make choices every day. Lack of recognition and support for our lives as lesbians means that our search for ‘home’ has a psychic as well as a practical dimension. The psychological effects of chronic housing problems cannot be underestimated. Feminists have described the way in which being homeless or living in poor-quality housing contributes to women’s feelings of failure and worthlessness. (Austerberry and Watson, 1980) We often internalize anger and blame ourselves for the problems we experience, whether they be battery and abuse, or homelessness. (Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1982) Denise Marshall of Stonewall Housing Association told me that homeless women who contact them often do not define themselves as homeless, or attempt to hide the fact. It is as if they believe it reflects badly on them rather than on our society. The inability to obtain decent and secure housing when combined with rarely being in living situations where one is able to be open as a lesbian can have disastrous effects on lesbians’

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 self-esteem and mental health. I once advised a Glaswegian lesbian in her seventies who had been driven from one squalid and impermanent home after another as a result of harassment from neighbours. Her family would have nothing to do with her and her only friend had been her lover who had recently died. She had never experienced the pleasures of a genuine ‘home’ in her entire

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 64 FEMINIST REVIEW

life and had taken tranquillizers for ‘depression’ for twenty years. Many of the lesbians who are resident in the worst and most institutionalized women’s hostels would tell similar tales about their housing histories; tales full of the grief of rootlessness and ‘nonbelonging’. Home represents a great deal to me—touching a woman without a trace of defiance or self-consciousness, feeling ‘real’ and having my life witnessed. For women who do not have my lesbian networks or public existence as a lesbian, home is the place they can forget the habit of self- concealment and constant vigilance which spring from having a ‘secret’ self. Home, for all lesbians, is the real or imaginary place where we feel safe, loved and validated. There has been little research conducted into lesbian housing need and experience, and existing feminist research has often ignored lesbians entirely (Austerberry and Watson, 1983). This article cannot hope to redress this omission in any definitive way. It combines statistics, anecdotes and impressions to convey what I see as some of the major housing problems facing lesbians, and considers whether this issue is part of a larger feminist agenda. In addition, it looks at the housing experiments of the 1970s in the light of changes over the past ten years in housing policy and the economic context. It asks whether or not ‘home’ is becoming an increasingly elusive reality for many lesbians.

Feminism and housing

Women’s housing struggles Women’s access to decent accommodation is frequently determined by their relationship with a male wage earner. Single, divorced and widowed women invariably have greater financial and housing problems than married or cohabiting women. (Austerberry and Watson, 1983) Women’s average hourly earnings continue to be only 74 per cent of male earnings, and 68 per cent of the low paid are women. (Small, 1985/6) The 1981 census revealed that, in London, where house prices have escalated, 54 per cent of households headed by men and only 32 per cent of households headed by women were homeowners. (CHAR, 1988) The vast majority of women are economically in no position to break into the private rented sector let alone owner occupation. Independent women have little choice but to rely on a shrinking public sector to meet their housing needs and those without children are rarely eligible for council accommodation. Women have historically often been at the ‘sharp end’ of bad housing. The fact that most women are restricted to the private sphere for significant periods of their life—as mothers, housewives and carershas given them an intimate awareness of the miseries of overcrowding, damp and disrepair, poor lighting and vandalism on council estates, bad design and lack of play space for children. From the 1915 rent strike on the Clyde to the housing struggles of Docklands in the late eighties, women have often initiated and played a leading role in community housing politics. In the 1970s, many Black and white working-class women found their political voice in tenants’ organizations and housing campaigns. As the authors of a book documenting the lives of Black women in Britain point Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 out:

At the hands of unscrupulous landlords or racist local councils, we faced—and still do face—the worst housing conditions in Britain. By 1978 the proportion of Black people living in homes without baths, running hot water or an inside toilet was LESBIANS AND HOUSING 65

more than twice the national average, and three times as many Black families as white were living in sub-standard privately furnished accommodation. Because of the discriminatory policies of local authorities growing numbers of Black women were being housed in high rise blocks of problem estates—particularly if they were single parents. (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 1985:160)

Few of these campaigns were self-consciously ‘feminist’ but many of the demands which were articulated did address female inequality and oppression. Some women developed a feminist consciousness as a result of involvement in housing politics. An organizer from a flat-dweller’s action group at Netherley, Liverpool told Spare Rib:

I have faced male chauvinism I failed to see existed before…we came to understand politics, usually thought of as a man’s world, and expected more of ourselves— knew more about what we could and couldn’t do for ourselves. People now call us women’s libbers. I never realized but, we must have become just that (Spare Rib, 1977).

A feminist issue? The politics of housing were a recurrent part of the agenda of the Women’s Liberation conferences of the seventies. There was never a housing demand formulated as such, but perhaps this is because so many of the issues which were debated and organized around could not be considered in isolation from women’s lack of access to secure, decent and affordable accommodation. There may also have been some ambivalence about defining housing as a feminist issue if this meant a capitulation to the idea of women as exclusively located in the home. (Austerberry and Watson, 1983) One of the most notable, and long-lasting achievements of 1970s feminism was the creation of Women’s Aid. Our recognition of many women’s economic inability to leave violent relationships with men lead to the creation of the refuge movement. Lesbians formed the backbone of Women’s Aid (in my experience many women ‘came out’ in this context) but were often invisible to the extent that we were there as feminists rather than as lesbians. There were a diverse range of feminist housing initiatives from the late 1970s. Women organized as housing workers, builders, architects and designers. There was a strong lesbian presence within most of these initiatives but there was no explicitly lesbian agenda. Looking back I would say this is because lesbian feminists of the time were primarily ‘active’ as women rather than as lesbians. It is also the case that many of the needs which we identified were of equal relevance and importance to women as a whole and single women in particular.

Lesbians and housing Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Many of the housing difficulties which lesbians encounter overlap with those of single women in general. Race, class and a host of other material factors can also play a critical part in determining lesbians’ experience of housing. Recent reseach amongst workers, residents and management-committee members at Homeless Action, a women’s housing organization with a 30 per cent lesbian target, found that twenty-seven of the total sample (of twenty-eight women) believed that single women generally have difficulty 66 FEMINIST REVIEW

getting housing. (Anlin, 1989:35). The majority of the respondents, however, also felt that lesbians have greater difficulty in obtaining housing than other single women.

Twenty out of the total sample did believe that being a lesbian, or becoming one, had contributed either directly or indirectly to their being homeless or in unsatisfactory housing conditions on one or more occasions, either now or in the past. (Anlin, 1989:5)

There was a strong awareness amongst the interviewees of factors other than sexuality which had a significant influence in their lives. Half of the women said other influences such as having children, race, cultural background, class, physical and mental health, prison records, family, or political affiliations were as important to them. When questioned about the relationship between sexuality and discrimination in housing one woman commented, ‘Single Black women might find it harder than a white lesbian, who at least has the option to “hide” her sexuality to avoid discrimination.’ (Anlin, 1989:36) This research does suggest that sexuality can lead women into forms of housing which they would not otherwise choose:

For many of the lesbians in the sample, although ghettos were seen to constitute bad housing, this was preferable because it meant they could be with other lesbians. Many often put up with unsatisfactory housing even if it is in conflict with what they would really like, because they can create a lesbian community there. (Anlin, 1989:31)

A major concern of many of these women was safety and security. She concludes those people allocated a low status by society are allocated the worst housing. And for women, and lesbians, such housing exacerbates risks and vulnerability to attack. (Anlin, 1989:31) Amongst the direct reasons which were cited as contributing to their housing problems there were several examples of appalling harassment and violence:

One lesbian couple had had excreta put through the letterbox of their council flat, had had break ins, and were subsequently forced to sleep with a knife by their bedside…another lesbian was verbally harassed (the threat of actual physical violence was also real) by National Front supporters in adjacent neighbouring flats… another, living in a hostel for young single homeless people, was harassed by other residents who targeted both her and a gay male resident as Aids carriers, refusing to use crockery and cutlery that they had touched. (Anlin, 1989:5)

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Stonewall Housing Association, which caters for young homeless lesbians and gay men, confirm that the lesbians who approach them for housing are more likely to have experienced violence than gay applicants. Between May 1988 and February 1989 forty-nine out of 261 applicants had experienced violence, and three-quarters of these were women. At the CHAR Housing for lesbians and gay men conference in 1988: LESBIANS AND HOUSING 67

Security was one of the major unmet needs voiced by the women’s caucus, a number of lesbians there expressing fears about isolation and vulnerability in terms of harassment and eviction (CHAR, 1988:7).

This fear of isolation has led historically to lesbians (and gay men) gravitating towards cities which offer the possibility of social networks and support. In the Homeless Action survey:

All the twenty-eight respondents either do or wanted to live in areas where they have other lesbian friends, or in areas they know to have a high proportion of lesbians. This makes many lesbians reluctant to leave London. (Anlin, 1989:29)

Sarah Green, a PhD student currently researching into lesbian feminism in London, has found that, in her sample, housing is the single, most chronic practical problem facing lesbians in London. Many of her interviewees live in short-life accommodation, and most of those who live in secure accommodation are council tenants. Those who do live relatively securely tended to express enormous relief to her and an acknowledgement that they were fortunate. The problem of housing was a recurrent theme in these interviews. The anxiety which these women expressed about living in sub-standard and insecure housing perhaps testifies to the extent to which ‘home’ has a special significance for us as an antidote to the hostility and invisibility which we may experience ‘outside’.

Lesbians and gay men Joint lesbian and gay housing initiatives in the voluntary and statutory sector are a mid-to-late-1980s phenomenon. The yoking together of lesbian and gay concerns gained its original impetus from the ‘rainbow coalition’ style politics of the Greater London Council, and, subsequently, a handful of other Labour-controlled local authorities. Lesbian and gay working parties and support groups now exist in a number of local councils and voluntary housing projects and campaigns. It is undeniably true that lesbians and gay men do have some housing problems in common. We suffer as a result of the refusal by most housing providers and managers to recognize ‘family units’ as self-defined. (CHAR, 1988:3) Same-sex couples still often face discrimination when attempting to obtain double mortgages from building societies (gay men in particular are having problems in this area because so many insurance companies want information about HIV testing and status). Large numbers of young people are thrown out of the parental home once their parents know about their sexuality. (Trenchard and Warren, 1985) Lesbian and gay partners do not have the same rights as heterosexuals in terms of the right to succeed to a tenancy if the tenant dies. The law, at present, gives little protection to anyone who experiences harassment, but harassment on racial or sexual grounds can be challenged in law, unlike harassment on the grounds of sexuality. (CHAR, 1988) Many lesbians and gay men experience harassment in both the private and public sector. As we get older we may fear ending our lives in Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 residential homes which do not recognize our sexual and emotional histories and lives. (This is more true for lesbians since the majority of pensioners are women.) We all need a home, at times, as a defence against homophobia and lack of recognition from the dominant heterosexual culture. I would argue, nevertheless, that gender is a more crucial determinant of housing choice and experience than sexuality. A survey in the United States found that white gay men were the single most affluent minority in the States. (Jay and Young, 1979) Research in this country suggests a 68 FEMINIST REVIEW

similar picture. Their lack of financial commitments in terms of responsibility for ‘dependants’ means that they have far greater spending power than heterosexual men. We may share an experience of certain forms of antigay discrimination in housing, but our initial capacity to obtain decent and secure accommodation is determined by our position in the labour market. In addition to the material advantages which accrue to gay men on a basis of their gender, the social and symbolic meaning of being men unconnected to women can be positive. Women, conversely, are expected to derive their sense of self from connections with men. Feminist psychotherapists have noted that:

Our culture does not have a positive image of a woman on her own. It is never seen as a choice. It always appears as something that befalls her and engenders sympathy… [Women alone] are out of the ordinary and somewhat frightening. (Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1982:2)

The tendency to too readily conflate lesbian and gay oppression is, I believe, symptomatic of the current weakness of organized feminism, and of lack of support which lesbians have often received from heterosexual feminists. Section 28 and the creeping moralism of the 1980s have also given mixed gay organizing a new lease of life but, I believe, our experience as ‘women’ has frequently been lost within these politics.

Lesbian-feminist housing experiments1 There was a significant trend amongst lesbian feminists in the 1970s towards squatting and communal living. It coincided in time with the antistatism prevalent in the anarchist and libertarian left. Many feminists came from this political background and had a passionate commitment to lifestyle, politics. Direct action and resistance were championed in movement writings as ways of seizing control of one’s own life. ‘In and against the state’ notions were not in the ascendant, the state was, in some quarters, seen as uniformly oppressive and unsusceptible to demands. (This is long before the days of the lesbian ‘femocrat’.) When I first came out in the early eighties, most of the lesbians I met lived in communal, women- only households. These houses were occasionally owner occupied, but more commonly were squats, housing co-ops and housing associations. Few women lived with their lovers. The desire to live communally was not, of course, uniquely lesbian any more than it was specific to that period of Women’s Liberation history. Anarchists, socialists and gay liberationists had also celebrated a lifestyle predicated on a critique of exclusive relationships and the nuclear family. Kollontai declared:

The stronger the collective, the more firmly established becomes the way of life. The closer the emotional ties between the members of the community, the less the Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 need to seek refuge from loneliness in marriage. (Holt, 1977:231)

Few of the communal households of the seventies, whether gay, women only or mixed socialist, still survive. As one feminist writer has lamented, ‘The debris of innumerable communal households litters our social arena’ (Clarke, 1983:174). One woman I spoke to commented: ‘It was a particular moment and it had a political content that was quite specific’. The time has passed. LESBIANS AND HOUSING 69

Squats are often repossessed within three months these days and, although there are more co-ops and housing associations than there used to be, there is also a greater housing crisis. In addition, there is no longer the same feminist context which bred the desire for communal living with other women:

It was a women’s community. We were very accountable to each other in terms of how we behaved in relationships, with money, etc. It was a whole social and sexual context that is hard to imagine now. Now my home is my refuge. Yes, it provided support but it was a political location and now it’s a refuge from everything— classic Thatcherism.

These communes were overloaded with impossible expectations, none more so in my experience than lesbian-feminist households. It had been noted by seventies researchers that mixed-sex communes often simply reproduced the existing sexual division of labour, albeit on a larger scale. (Abrams and McCullough, 1976) Our households, too, in their own way, were unable to resolve the inequalities which existed amongst us. They tended to be exclusively white and could not banish differences of class and culture. There were honest attempts however, to deal with these issues:

Women who did come from backgrounds of economic privilege often acted in good faith. Money was often shared. It wasn’t just playing around. It was politically serious.

There was a strong sense of being part of a general political struggle:

We felt the struggle for lesbian housing was part of the same struggle as for single women’s housing and for all women to have the right to choose how they would live and have autonomy. It wasn’t just wanting housing for us. We helped a lot of women to squat. We were on the crest of Women’s Liberation. Housing didn’t seem like a separate area.

The first lesbian squat I went to seemed to me to be teeming with messy and hectic life. It was a far cry from the ‘pressure cooker’ atmosphere and tidy sterility of my parents’ bourgeois home. I had been to mixed-sex communal homes before, but the absence of men made a pleasing difference. Living without men was the raison d’être of this way of life. Women’s houses seemed to offer community, an escape from ‘coupledom’, the chance to be free from the gaze or control of men (at least within four walls), the opportunity to acquire ‘male’ skills, the sense of living as if the revolution had already happened. I never squatted, however, since part of me was alarmed by the lack of comfort in some of these houses. Amongst some of the middle-class lesbians I knew there was a

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 self-punishing, anticonsumerist ethos which, I think, came from a position of class privilege. One writer condemned the way in which middle-class women enthusiastically embraced squalor. She described it as the ‘Ms Steptoe, Ph.D’ syndrome and declared that she did not find ‘poverty, dirt or ugliness groovy’. (Tension, 1978:87) For some women, though, the hardships of squatting were inspiring: 70 FEMINIST REVIEW

The squat we lived in was falling down but, like Patience and Sarah, we tackled our problems with a pioneering spirit. We saw it as an opportunity to demystify the male world of plumbing, electricity and carpentry. We read and experimented until we could stride into a builders’ suppliers and ask for one-way cistern inlet valves, 1.5 mm triple-core insulated or three-inch steel angle brackets, just as though we were born knowing all about it like men! (Dixon, 1988:79)

Although a few women, according to one woman, ‘treated squatting and maybe even being lesbians as a stage in their personal “growth”, as a dilettante thing, as slumming it a bit’, it was also true that most of these women had few alternatives:

Although we had roofs over our heads we were very discontented. We were living in bedsitters or small flats, and we wanted to live collectively. We wanted control over our own living space. None of us would have been able to buy, and at that time it would have been against all we believed in. We were disallowed from living in groups and that was what we wanted.

The desire to create new, nonpossessive relationships was paramount:

For a while there was a rather frenetic phase, rotating beds and clothes and lovers which was rather unfortunate for me as everyone else was tall and thin! There was lots of sex, sometimes it was difficult to winkle people out of their respective beds to go on demonstrations! ‘Desire’ wasn’t invented in the 1980s.

Some women inevitably became ‘burnt out’ by the stress and discomfort of this life:

You were not legal, you were never on safe ground. The houses were mostly in very poor condition. There was a hepatitis outbreak because of our lack of plumbing… I remember having cups of tea which fleas would jump into.

The constant moving around as households broke up and squats were lost could also lose its attractions:

Since 1971 I’ve lived at about twenty different addresses with about thirty-seven different people. I got a lot out of the variety but I now want to be more secure. I’ve felt increasingly insecure as the years have gone by. The prolonged struggles of meetings and negotiations and wondering if it’s the police or the LEB at the door, I couldn’t go on living like that, it’s just too nerve-wracking. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Inevitably, you get to the stage where you just want to be able to take where you live for granted and get on with other things, and not make housing your main political work in life. It was a full-time occupation. LESBIANS AND HOUSING 71

The division between self-help and making demands on the state was, for some women, blurred. They felt they did both:

We didn’t have housing rights to lose, but we were very visible and we did insist they take notice of us. In the end the councils declared an amnesty on squatting and we were all made legitimate.

There is a sense in which these experiments were both products of a specific historical moment as well as being only possible at a certain time of women’s lives:

Many of us were on the dole, or doing bits and pieces of work. We could have affairs during the day, sit up at night. It was very different from the position women I know today are in, in terms of work and income.

Looking back, the women I talked to clearly felt that lesbian access to housing has not improved to any significant degree. We expressed ambivalence about the changes in the ways in which lesbian feminists live in the 1980s in comparison to that earlier more experimental era. We noted the trend towards more women living with their lovers and having children as well as the increase in owner occupation amongst those who can afford it: ‘Are we duplicating some of the things about family which we wanted to get away from? How do we get the security we need?’ The recognition that most lesbians are poor should not make us oblivious to the fact that we are not immune to the general economic polarization which has occurred under Thatcherism. ‘Home’ is a less distant reality for some of us. As Sarah Green has observed during the course of her research: There are rich dykes around. One lesbian removals firm told me how pissed off they were with moving the same women first from co-ops to their own flats and then, later, out of London to buy bigger property in the north.’ The lesbian-feminist housing experiments of the past decade may seem remote and anachronistic for women living in such different times, but the women I spoke with agreed that there had been a positive legacy:

At an ideological level, even if there hasn’t been a corresponding material change, single women and lesbians do now get mentioned as being in housing need. Women without men just weren’t a category at all at that time, you just didn’t ‘fit in’.

The effects of national housing policy

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 The Housing Act 1988 The Housing Act 1988 is a crucial part of the government’s overall privatization programme. It is a continuation of the policies of the Housing Act 1980 which instituted the ‘Right to Buy’ policy which lead to a severe depletion of local authorities’ best housing stock: 72 FEMINIST REVIEW

London has lost £777 million in capital in the last eight years; 1,000,000 homes have been sold under the Right To Buy scheme; council housing stock is under new pressure through the Housing Act—from Housing Action Trusts and transfers to new landlords—and many local authorities have no money for new building (CHAR, 1988:9).

The notion that local authorities have any special role to play in providing homes for working-class people is finally jettisoned with this legislation. Local authorities under the new provisions are to become ‘enablers’ rather than ‘providers’: The belief behind this policy is that the system of public housing provision and management is bankrupt, and that private money and management is the key to the future’. (Burrows, 1989:7) The ‘hidden agenda’ is, arguably, to prepare the way for a public housing sector which caters for the same disenfranchised and voiceless ‘underclass’ who some government ministers see as the future consumers of the NHS. The avowed intention of the Act is to revitalize the private rented sector through deregulation, that is, through less security for tenants and more powers for landlords. This sector has declined from 90 per cent of the housing stock in 1914 to about 10 per cent in 1986. There has been a corresponding increase in owner occupation which has risen steeply from 10 per cent to 65 per cent. The private sector may receive a small boost as a result of the Act, but these new tenancies will be at ‘market’ rather than ‘fair’ rents which are registered with the council. Single women and lesbians will, for the most part, find this sector increasingly out of their financial reach. Lesbians who depend on co-ops and housing associations for their housing may also suffer as a result of the contraction of council short-life property and housing associations’ increased reliance on private funds which will lead to higher rents. Although it would be mistaken to assume that the government has an entirely systematic and coherent strategy behind its new legislation, it seems clear that the promotion of owner occupation is a way of ensuring that a majority of people in this country have a material and ideological investment in the promise of Thatcherism. It has the potential of creating a class of voters who attend the anarchic fluctuations of the interest rate at the expense of any interest in social justice and inequality. There is no doubt that support for owner occupation is also support for the traditional nuclear family at the expense of those who live for much of their life within a different social unit.

Other legislative disasters In addition to the Housing Act there are also a range of other changes in social policy which further restrict lesbians’ options. Changes in the tax law, preventing unmarried house-owners from each qualifying for tax relief, hit low earners who want to live together. The Poll Tax also affects alternative households’ capacity to survive. Changes in the way in which benefits are paid to hostels could, in the long term, result in their closure. Many lesbians rely on hostels at some point in our lives, particularly when we are in crisis situations. There are serious implications for the future of Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Women’s Aid and for women leaving violent men. Social security measures over the last two years have had the effect of making it extremely difficult for young people to leave the parental home and survive independently. This has led to a sharp and dramatic increase in the number of young women who are ‘sleeping out’ in our towns and cities. Young lesbians who are thrown out by their parents inevitably form a significant percentage of these homeless women. All of these developments have significance for different groups of lesbians. Whilst some lesbians will be increasingly unable to LESBIANS AND HOUSING 73

choose the kind of household they wish to live in, others will be unable to leave their existing home and can only face the prospect of temporary shelters and the street.

How are lesbians affected? I believe that the most disturbing aspect of the last ten years has been the extent to which the material conditions which make a lesbian life and identity possible are being progressively undermined. I do not hold with the view that there are a fixed number of lesbians in the world. The ability any of us have to choose a lesbian life is invariably determined by the social and economic status of women as a whole. In countries where the conditions for women’s autonomy from men do not exist lesbianism is a statistically negligible phenomenon and heterosexuality is compulsory. As Thatcherism bites deeper, many more women may feel forced into, or unable to leave, undesired relationships with men. As the decade draws to an end, we have to acknowledge how few lesbians have the homes which they would wish. The struggle for secure, decent and affordable housing links us with other groups whose needs are also marginalized by current housing policy and therefore to a larger feminist and socialist agenda. But we should also hang on to our own agenda. We all carry within us a memory of our first ‘home’, for better or worse. Feminists now, and in the past, have challenged the myth of familial bliss. Yet the lure and promise of the family is as potent as ever. Those of us who are feminists still struggle to escape ‘family’ and find ‘home’, in spite of the miserably conservative times we are living through. The struggle has never been simply about bricks and mortar.

Notes Jayne Egerton worked with young homeless people for three years in Piccadilly Advice Centre. She has been a member of the Hall Carpenter Lesbian Oral History Group and is Chair of Stonewall Housing Association. She is currently working as a freelance TV researcher. Jayne is an owner-occupier thanks to inherited wealth and lives with her lover. Thanks to Lynn Alderson and Frankie Green for their racy and fascinating accounts of lesbian squatting. Thanks also to Sarah Green, Denise Marshall, Gilly Green and Sandra Anlin. The title for this article is taken from Anlin’s research.

1 Part of this section is based on recorded interviews with Lynn Alderson and Frankie Green, who spent much of the 1970s in women’s squats.

References Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 ABRAMS, Philip and McCULLOCH, Andrew (1976) Communes, Sociology and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ANLIN, Sandra (1989) Out But Not Down, London: Homeless Action. AUSTERBERRY, Helen and WATSON, Sophie (1980) ‘Homewoman’, Spare Rib, Vol. 91. AUSTERBERRY, Helen and WATSON, Sophie (1983) Women On the Margins: A Study of Single Women’s Housing Problems, London: Housing Research Group, The City University. 74 FEMINIST REVIEW

BROUMAS, Olga (1977) Beginning with O, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. BRYAN, Beverley, DADZIE, Stella and SCAFE, Suzanne (1985) The Heart of the Race, London: Virago. BURROWS, Les (1989) The Housing Act 1988, London: Shelter. CANT, Bob and HEMMINGS, Susan (1988)Radical Records: Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History, London: Routledge. CASTLE, Barbara (1982) ‘Coming alive hurts’, in CURNO (1982). CHAR (1988) Lesbian and Gay Housing Conference Report, London: CHAR. CLARKE, Wendy (1983) ‘Home thoughts from not so far away: a personal look at family’, in SEGAL (1983). DIXON, Janet (1988) ‘Separatism’ in CANT and HEMMINGS (1988). EICHENBAUM, Luise and ORBACH, Susie (1982) Outside In Inside Out, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FEMINIST ANTHOLOGY COLLECTIVE (1981) editors No Turning Back, London: The Women’s Press. HALL CARPENTER ARCHIVES, Lesbian Oral History Group (1989) editors Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories, London: Routledge. HOLT, Alix (1977) editor Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Writings, London: Allison & Busby. JAY, Karla and YOUNG, Allen (1979) The Gay Report, New York: Simon & Schuster. O’REILLY, Maria (1977) Netherly United: Women take on the Housing Corporation, Spare Rib, No. 56. SEGAL, Lynne (1983) editor What Is To Be Done About the Family?, London: Penguin. SMALL, Robin (1985/6) ‘The price of low pay’, Low Pay Review, 24. TENSION, Evelyn (1978) ‘You don’t need a degree to read the writing on the wall’, in FEMINIST ANTHOLOGY COLLECTIVE (1981). TRENCHARD, Lorraine and WARREN, Hugh (1985) Something To Tell You, London: Gay Teenage Group. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 WELSH COUNTRY DIARY Gloria Evans Davies

Spring: The castle immaculate, scrubbed clean like a naughty child, A kingfisher pairs off with the moon among the willows. The yellow, cream and blue of a slow-moving, two-carriage train thread the hedges of six-marginal constituencies that saved it from the axe. Fflur’s kitten Bluebell mistakes the distant chime of an ice-cream van for a bird, looking up at the trees, stalking. Crwys’s donkey eats my poems through an open window. The bluebells from castle to castle make Wordsworth’s ‘daffodils’ a child’s posy. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Summer: Deep in buttercups a white farmhouse with white horses, and a white,

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 76 FEMINIST REVIEW

fat cat. A tourist’s cry of ‘Follow that train’, another’s ‘Darling train’, as in ‘Darling buds of May’. Well over eighty, in the last shop in the square, Gwlithyn closes at four, the same time as water-lilies in the village pond. I trail my fingers along a sage hedge, its fragrance on my finger-tips mixing with picked clovers. Ynyr’s tortoise returns with anemones on its shell. Autumn: In Ffairfach churchyard, apples fall on a grave. If it had been Blodwen ’s she would have liked that. An eight-year-old boy carries through the village a small duck in his arms, gently stroking its beak. Children pick whimberries on the mountains of Llangorse Lake, Brychan, long ago, saying to Blodwen he would pick her a pint of whimberries

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 for a kiss. Winter: Heard said The weather’s a fox’. Poor fox. Two milk bottles delivered on a farm wall. Her own name flowerless, POEMS 77

the flower-shop owner depleted after I mentioned my family names of Heather, Fflur (Welsh for Flowers) Blodwen (Welsh for Beautiful Flower), and in Blodwen’s Llanfihangel-Talyllyn Primary, by a legendary lake, Poppy, Violet, Daisy, Lily, Ivy, Iris, Holly, Rose, Eirlys (Welsh for Snowdrop), and Timothy. I write in the snow covering Blodwen’s grave. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 78 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 WANTED Éva Tóth

On the afternoon of June 23 1980 or maybe even earlier I disappeared without any trace Name: Tóth, Éva Born: Debrecen, 1939 Family status: Married Height: 162 cm. Eyes: Blue Hair: Graying though I still write on passport forms blond because I used to be one at twenty My hair is usually cut short but sometimes I’ve tried to grow it long. I won’t do that anymore. In summer I’m found wearing a blue batik dress with white patterns white sandals, for winter—a sweater, skirt, coat, shawl and boots high-heeled shoes—only when absolutely necessary. As a rule, I’m reserved and friendly I attack only if I’m provoked and even then—not always in time—and not always the right person. I have no visible distinguishing marks Lately, I’ve allegedly been seen in Szigliget, in Szigetvár, in Pécs, in Sikonda, in Havana, in Heiligendam, in Madrid, in Budapest, in my office, in the supermarket, at the doctor’s, on the street, back to school night at my son’s school, in church, on the seashore, in the cemetery, yet I’m unable to find myself. If anybody has information concerning me Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 please notify me.

Translated by Laura Schiff 80 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 THE CREATION OF THE WORLD Éva Tóth

The first day I came to in the dark cold trembling while I gathered twigs lit them he came out of the cave shivered held his hands over the fire and said: Let there be light The second day I woke at dawn carried water from the river to wet the clay ground so the dust wouldn’t whip his face he came out I poured water into his palms he washed his face looked up and said: Let’s call the roof sky the dryness earth and the gathered waters the seas The third day I got up early picked blue red yellow fruit piling small seeds between two stones ground kneaded roast them he awoke stretched ate the bread the sweet fruit said: Let the earth bear tender grasses grasses with seeds fruit trees The fourth day I awoke suddenly swept the yard with a branch of leaves soaked the laundry scrubbed the pots cleaned the tools he woke as I sharpened the scythe rolled over and said: Let heavenly bodies light the sky to divide day from night The fifth day I rode in the morning filled the troughs gave the horses hay milked the cows sheared the sheep grazed the goats stuffed the geese cut nettles for the ducklings ground corn for the hens cooked slops for the pigs threw the dog a bone poured the cat its milk he yawned slowly rubbed the sleep from his eyes and said: Let everything multiply and grow and cover the earth The sixth day Pains woke me I gave birth to my child cleaned swaddled nursed him he leaned over let the little hand squeeze his thumb he smiled at his likeness and saw that truly all of his creation was good The seventh day The baby’s crying woke me I quickly changed his diapers nursed him he quieted down I lit the fire aired the apartment brought up the Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 newspaper watered the plants dusted quietly made breakfast the smell of coffee woke him he turned on the radio lit a cigarette and blessed the seventh day

Translated by Laura Schiff 82 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 THE CHESS GAME Batya Weinbaum

He stumbled over his pawns and told me about his four wives two of whom he’d married and two, not. One of them he left over the phone calls. I called check and he told me about his desire to mate. First he thought he’d seduce me by telling me about his plan to move to France to buy a castle. I kept having to remind him to make moves. Your turn I said as he pontificated over his viceroys. Oh, yes, he’d say, and break—off muttering about his search for a companion, and back his castle back into the place where it last was. Again, I’d call check. Beethoven played on the radio. Together we enjoyed the sonatas. Grass grew, leaves fell. I listened to plans to finance his castles through the teaching profession. He ignored my move with the bishop. As we traced out, who would be king, and who queen, when we made our chessboard of Northampton he fell into the trap, and the game was done. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 84 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 OXFORD TWENTY YEARS ON: Where Are We Now?

Lorraine Gamman and Gilda O’Neill

On 2 and 3 March 1990, celebrations to mark the twentieth anniversary of Britain’s first Women’s Liberation conference were held at Ruskin College, Oxford. We might never have known about it had we not been listening to Women’s Hour. Apart from this one plug, publicity for the event seemed to be limited to a few posters. Yet we’d heard so much about what had happened twenty years ago (when almost 600 women had, against all the odds, taken over the male domain of Ruskin College to discuss women’s liberation) that we telephoned immediately for tickets. We were disappointed to find we could only buy tickets for the main Saturday event and not for the Friday evening social. Nevertheless we arrived full of anticipation expecting to find a massive gathering of women. Sadly, twenty years on, judging from the turnout on that second day, feminism appeared to have run out of steam. The enthusiasm that had marked the original event just wasn’t there—although there was a good book about it on sale in the hall. Never known to miss a marketing opportunity, Virago, co-sponsors of the event, were selling Michelene Wandor’s Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation (1990). This volume only served to increase our disappointment that more women from the original conference weren’t around. In this book Wandor presents a series of autobiographical fragments from ‘some of the women who were at that landmark conference’. In her introduction Wandor describes the 1970 programme of conference events which finished with a closing session called ‘Where are we going?’. In Oxford in 1990 what we wanted to find out was ‘Where are we now?’. The Oxford 1990 programme looked interesting enough, even though the workshops we attended certainly didn’t offer any clues about the way forward for feminism. A lot of the participants were familiar with the debates, apparently having rehearsed the arguments many times before. We couldn’t help noticing that being familiar with problems hadn’t made them go away. Worse, over- familiarity appeared to make sharing ideas a more boring experience than it should have been. Here it seemed that younger generations of women at the conference—coming to feminist consciousness now—were having their efforts to consolidate their political energies combated by a tiredness and lack of cohesion that we ourselves felt and were only too aware of in others. In this climate it is perhaps unsurprising that the only fully attended workshop was showing A Woman’s Place, a film of that vibrant conference of twenty years ago. This historical record and Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 opportunity for vicarious living provoked both laughter and tears in the audience. We giggled at the women in flares and fur coats, who looked stylishly retrochic, if not acceptably ‘green’. Others, who were there at the time, cried with nostalgia for the passion of days long gone. From the

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 86 FEMINIST REVIEW

amount of tobacco being consumed in the film, it was pretty clear that the antismoking lobby had a long way to go. But then so had feminism. The embarrassingly sexist street interviews, recorded outside the first conference, were filmed and presented by men. The notion of the male gaze (never mind the female gaze) had obviously yet to be conceptualized. By the time we got to the final plenary session we had formed the opinion that the old evangelism that we associated with some second-wave literature and our coming to feminist consciousness in the seventies and eighties just wasn’t there anymore. The conference seemed battle-weary after eleven years of conservative government. So many of us were now preoccupied with other issues (from the poll tax to the survival of the planet), that it seemed a futile distraction for some feminists still to be explaining the fragmentation of the movement in terms of theoretical differences between radical and socialist feminism. Or worse, to be blaming the lack of involvement on the emergence of that much hyped and derided development: the alleged career-orientated ‘postfeminist’. Throughout the conference there was an undercurrent of mourning the past and condemning the so-called lack of present contemporary radicalism. An attitude which got us nowhere. We found perhaps the biggest leap forward from twenty years ago was an acknowledgement of difference, Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 which incorporated a refreshing, and welcome, international perspective on feminism. Ironically this emphasis on diversity—on the plurality of feminisms—made it impossible to develop any sort of collective strategy or the sort of consensus that June Jordan has recently described in her political writing as being absolutely vital to effective political action (Parmar, 1989). The report from the workshop on South Africa was probably the only one to really touch us all in a way that none of the others had managed. So what produced this feeling of unity? Being OXFORD TWENTY YEARS ON 87

Sue Crockford, one of the makers of the film, A Woman’s Place, (left) with Juliet Mitchell (in a fur coat) at the 1970 Ruskin Conference

confronted with the reality of women surviving in impossible conditions obviously had the power to shock us into agreement. Many of us signed petitions and wrote letters as a result of this session, but where were the offers to start networking and leafleting that characterized past accounts of the first feminist conference? As perhaps too many recent feminist conferences in Britian have negatively illustrated (such as the ICA 1989 women’s ‘celebration’), there are many problems facing feminists trying to communicate through the barriers of difference. If we want to continue as a movement we need to do something about this. Identity politics, with its overwhelming emphasis on race, sexuality and the reality of working-class women’s lives, has been valuable in taking forward feminist ideas in the last ten years, but nevertheless seems to have created a theoretical impasse from which there appears to be no escape. Is there really no route towards feminist consensus? Well, if there is such a route, it certainly wasn’t apparent from this celebration of twenty years of feminism. So ‘where are we now?’. At Oxford we felt up the creek without a paddle. We could only identify a gap in a distant landscape, a shore that feminism hadn’t yet reached. In terms of contemporary politics, what was lacking for us was a critique that addressed the historical conditions in which we found ourselves, one which doesn’t simply trivialize the experiences of Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 younger women who are not caught up in the same structure of feeling experienced by those early ‘second wavers’. Indeed, we felt a strategy was missing that could both accommodate and articulate the generational shifts that may yet give rise to new and invigorating feminist directions. What we are talking about here is a discourse through which older feminists can acknowledge that their wayward daughters are not simply going the wrong way, but are, rather, following different routes. To allow for a genuine feminist pluralism to develop—one that will take feminism 88 FEMINIST REVIEW

(and perhaps Feminist Review) into the new century—what is needed is a forum that will prevent feminism becoming more than an academic interest (confined only to ‘Women’s Studies’ courses). What is needed is a venue that will enable us all to engage with and listen to ‘younger’ generations of women and their priorities. On the subject of ‘listening’ to new generations, we learned with interest that it was on the second day of the conference that the greatest number of younger women appear to have been present. We were disappointed to discover later that some of the women who had both appeared in the film (A Woman’s Place) and attended the cabaret the night before had chosen not to stay for the second day’s workshops. They may have had other things to do, arrangements that were impossible to break or change, but in the end it must be asked, where are all those women from twenty years ago and why weren’t the majority of them sharing their ideas with new generations of feminists? We are not referring only to the chronological age of younger women but also to the social age of different generations of women coming newly, via different routes, to feminism. A disturbing explanation for the overall lack of participants might be linked to the broader questions, about the future of feminism. It has been suggested by some magazine journalists that women’s liberation, as a revolutionary struggle, is a thing of the past. Feminism having achieved all its aims has meant that mature women have ‘grown out of it’. This is nonsense. Clearly, this media misunderstanding and hype has come about because the concept of postfeminism has been misused. Unfortunately, some of the women at Oxford talking about younger generations as ‘postfeminist’ didn’t always acknowledge this misuse. Today, many young women certainly wouldn’t describe themselves as feminists or even postfeminist. So does this mean that the bloody slog of reinventing the feminist wheel will have to start all over again with a third wave? We don’t think so. In the nineties, women new to feminist ideas have a knowledge and a confidence which is at least partly derived from being brought up in a culture that is still assimilating twenty years’ worth of feminist efforts and demands. This is why they are able to laugh at and enjoy the kinds of images and activities that would have brought out petition fever in their mothers. They’ve never applied for a job that advertised for ‘men only’ and so, today, animal liberation and freeing smoking beagles may appear to some of them as being more urgent than harassing beauty queens. We are not saying, in making generational comparisons, that the notion that women are second-class citizens has magically dissolved. But the generation growing up today does have access to feminist principles through education and the media and are subsequently demanding, among other things, a different model of masculinity to accompany their changed ideas about their own femininity. As Sheila Rowbotham astutely pointed out in 1969, ‘the creation of a new woman of necessity demands the creation of a new man’ (Wandor, 1990:11). But apart from advertising clichés and the occasional reconstructed man, the majority of women are still waiting for men to catch up with them. Some men may be redefining masculinity more urgently than other groups, but there is little hard evidence which indicates these ‘new’ men are more than a small proportion of the total male population (so we should not over-emphasize their significance). Obviously, there is

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 still a place for gender analysis when major economic and political inequalities continue to exist between the sexes. Today’s young women do, of course, live in a different world from that of twenty years ago. Sexual violence, although unfortunately not a thing of the past, is being challenged by women who have ‘broken the silence’ on this subject. Similarly, intellectual concerns, ranging from worries about the state of the planet to the changing face of socialism, are also being voiced by women. OXFORD TWENTY YEARS ON 89

Speaker at the first feminist conference, Ruskin College, Oxford, 1970

Cultural politics, as Michele Barrett has pointed out, are therefore ‘crucially important to feminism because they involve struggles over meaning’ (1982:37). In the sense it is not surprising that British socialism is using cultural politics as a site of struggle and is developing a critical agenda for the new times in which we live. This agenda is not as earnest as those of the past and does not exclude the analysis of pleasure or having a good time from its political strategy. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, if there’s no dancing, some of us won’t want to be part of the revolution. At the Oxford 1990 conference, dancing had been taken into account and given a space. Unfortunately this organizational emphasis separated ‘work’ and ‘play’ with no artistic or creative workshops available within the second day ‘serious’ programme. In developing theoretical ideas about pleasure, feminism has obviously made a massive contribution to contemporary political debates on the left. But in order to continue to contribute, and to be valid in the twenty-first century, we can’t simply go on talking theoretically about pleasure (in often the most unpleasurable language). Rather we need to re-embrace pleasure as part of our movement. This may mean revaluing other ways of communicating (rather than dismissing them for ‘lack of theory’). Good journalism, for example, as well as fiction and theatre, may provide the opportunity to expand the popular reach of feminism (addressing new generations of women) without compromising the space reserved for academic rigour associated with journals like

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Feminist Review. In order to come to terms with this new economic, political and cultural climate in which we are living, as well as celebrating and looking back to the past we must refresh our thinking about the future feminist agenda and the forums and discourses that will articulate it. Then, twenty years from now, perhaps we will again have something to celebrate. 90 FEMINIST REVIEW

Notes Lorraine Gamman lectures in Cultural Studies at Central St Martin’s School of Art. Gilda O’Neill is the author of Pull No More Bines: Memories of East London Women Hop Pickers, London: The Women’s Press (1990).

References

BARRETT, Michèle (1982) ‘Feminism and the definition of cultural politics’, in BRUNT and ROWAN (1982). BRUNT, Rosalind and ROWAN, Caroline (1982) editors Feminism, Culture and Politics, London: Lawrence & Wishart. PARMAR, Pratibha (1989) ‘Other kinds of dreams’, Feminist Review, No. 31. ROWBOTHAM, Sheila (1990) ‘Women’s Liberation and the new politics’, in WANDOR, (1990). First published in 1969. WANDOR, Michelene (1990) editor Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation, London: Virago. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 THE EMBODIMENT OF UGLINESS AND THE LOGIC OF LOVE: the Danish Redstocking Movement

Lynn Walter

Everyday life, experience, practice, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ are each attempts to mediate between structure and the individual, between objectivity and subjectivity, or, if you wish, between determinism and free will. While such mediations are as old as the oppositions themselves, they have a particular immediacy in our time, an immediacy which can be attributed, in dialectical logic, to a reaction against structuralism, politically and intellectually. (Ortner, 1984) The sense that we are presently at the end of something, as expressed in the terms ‘postindustrial’ and ‘postmodern’, is a sign of loss of confidence in the structures of the state, the political party, the labour union, and the established ways of doing and thinking. This same loss of confidence is also found in the laws, models, and theories of the social sciences, as expressed in the term ‘poststructuralism’. Critiques from the right wing of the political spectrum of all manifestations of state power except those which support capitalism and critiques from the left wing of the state’s support of capitalism, all speak of agency, either individual or collective, against structure. The bourgeois critique is essentially coherent. It is, simply stated, that any structure opposed to the orderly accumulation of capital is to be opposed. The left critique of structure is more theoretically problematic. How can one act within the system to oppose it without creating structures which simply negate the structures they oppose, that is, without creating mere antistructures? To escape the endless series of contradictions—anti-antistructures—one might pose anarchism as a political response or nihilism as an intellectual one. However, to the extent that we still consider ourselves to be social scientists, committed to problem solving, to abandon the project is not a very attractive prospect. Assuming one has not reached the highest state of antistructuralism, one’s critique of it must take another form, both intellectually and politically. Those who are probing concepts like everyday life, experience and practice are seeking such other answers and other forms. Of those, I propose to examine Pierre Bourdieu’s, as expressed in Outline of a Theory of Practice. Further, I propose to do so using feminism and the new women’s movement in Denmark as a political-historical case with which to assess the usefulness of his concepts and theoretical outline. Why these two? Why Bourdieu and the new Danish women’s movement? My ansxwer must be brief, if I am to get to the heart of my argument. First, Bourdieu’s original work in ethnology and my own Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 attachment to that discipline mean that his ideas relate to my own previous thinking. Secondly, Bourdieu avoids directly confronting the oppositions he tries to mediate, thus allowing himself the room to develop new concepts. Since I wish to get beyond these oppositions, I welcome some new

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ideas and the chance to learn from them. Since his own expressed goal is to overcome these oppositions, I will end this paper with an assessment of how successful he has been in this regard.

We shall escape from the ritual either/or choice between objectivism and subjectivism in which the social sciences have so far allowed themselves to be trapped only if we are prepared to inquire into the mode of production and functioning of the practical mastery which makes possible both an objectively intelligible practice and also an objectively enchanted experience of that practice; more precisely, that we shall do so only if we subordinate all operations of scientific practice to a theory of practice and of practical knowledge (which has nothing to do with phenomenological reconstitution of lived experience), and inseparably from this, to a theory of the theoretical and social conditions of the possibility of objective apprehension—and thereby to a theory of the limits of this mode of knowledge (Bourdieu, 1977:4).

Why feminism and the new Danish women’s movement? The feminism that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s offered an alternative to antistructure politics, in the form of small, antihierarchical, consciousness-raising, support groups, which, in Denmark, were the basis of a movement organization called the Redstocking movement. Study of the movement should inform us as to the political issues and problems which arise in non-antistructural politics as a strategy for progressive social change. It is true that Bourdieu does not discuss feminism, or even women, in the depth and breadth that he does class struggle and men. However, he does recognize male domination of women as an aspect of his analysis of how class domination is reproduced. In so far as his analysis focuses on the ways our nonconscious and ‘misrecognized’ actions affect structure, his ideas parallel some of those of the new women’s movement. This is especially true of his concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘practice’ as well as of ‘doxa’, ‘embodiment’, and ‘misrecognition’, all of which parallel the notion that ‘the personal is political’, the primary slogan of the new women’s movement. The parallels are close enough to make me believe that it would be fruitful to bring the two into a constructed dialogue. Since this construction is mine, and not Bourdieu’s or the new women’s movement’s, I hope my dialogue is one they could acknowledge. I will start with a discussion of Bourdieu’s concepts and then follow with an analysis of how these help to explain the development of the Redstocking movement. One of the most important is ‘habitus’, which is nonconscious, ‘misrecognized’1 forms of practical actions within determinate life conditions. Habitus is:

the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures, and the socially structured situation in which the agents’ interests are defined, and with them the objective functions and subjective motivations of their practices (Bourdieu, Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 1977:6).

Through habitus the dominant structures and ideas are reproduced, daily and infinitely. An important part of habitus is ‘embodied’, in the sense that one’s everyday, nondiscursive actions are a part of habitus, but also in the sense that one’s body represents one’s place in society. Habitus is not ‘lived experienee’ in that it is not direct and unmediated. Habitus is produced and reproduced over REDSTOCKING 93

time. Therefore, it cannot be understood in models which abstract time away, as, for example, most conceptions of ‘the family’ do. Habitus is past successful strategies for getting things done, the things that need to be done to survive and to thrive under given life conditions (in the sense of modes of re/production and in the sense of positions within hierarchies of age, sex, class, etc.). Habitus reflects the practical logic of determinate modes of re/ production as practice over time.2 As habitus reproduces structure over time, it is essentially conservative, but vulnerable to changes in practice. Habitus, as part of an outline of a theory of practice, directs us to the routines and rituals of life as constitutive and reproducing the structure of society, including and most importantly, the structures of domination. Habitus also constitutes ‘dispositions’ that individual agents will assume, given their place in the social hierarchies. Thus, social categories and social groups as well as individuals’ subjectivity are reproduced in habitus. We can, for example, speak of working-class habitus. ‘Disposition’ refers to the relation between habitus and objective position and is, therefore, not the same thing as agent. Some of the most radical instances of habitus are those which go without saying, those which represent ‘doxa’, that which cannot or need not be said because it is taken for granted or is assumed to be ‘natural’. Even if someone were to challenge doxa by saying that it was not ‘natural’, this challenge would be ineffective unless that person or group had the power to force practical change. Doxa is accepted by all dispositions and, in societies with little internal differentiation or specialization, doxa represents almost all practical knowledge. However, in those societies with age, sex, class, caste, racial, ethnic, occupational, etc., hierarchies and dominations, some dispositions may include heresies in their agents’ practical knowledge. The term ‘heresy’ implies that there is an ‘orthodoxy’, a dominating knowledge. The chief difference between fields of doxa and those of orthodoxy (and heterodoxy) is that the latter are in a discourse and the former is not. With this introduction to Bourdieu’s key concepts, I will turn to the Redstocking movement and its development, as seen in the light of these concepts.

The Redstocking movement The Redstocking movement officially started in 1970 with a series of well-publicized actions by small groups of young women university students. They had been part of the student movement, an antiauthoritarian rebellion against the élite character of the university as a privileged centre of class and knowledge. They turned their antiauthoritarian challenge towards the very same young men who had been activists in the student movement. The ideals of the Redstocking movement were to challenge male domination in a new political practice which would, in itself, be transformative. That new political practice, encapsulated in the slogan ‘the personal is political’, was for women to form small groups of six to eight members to talk about themselves as women. For women to come together to talk about themselves as women was not simply antistructure or even antipractice. It was, in itself, a transformation, a work, a thesis. The discourse that developed around the work of creating new practice and new forms demonstrates the degree to which they were consciously

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 aware of creating new practice, new structures, and new meanings, ones which challenged the habitus, doxa, and orthodoxy (and heterodoxy as well, for to create one more opinion or voice was clearly not their project). When the Redstockings raised their consciousness, they changed the subjective conditions by challenging doxa and orthodoxy. They made sex-for-itself an obvious social category. They proceeded to politicize sex-for-itself in three ways. First, they created a discourse on the basis of 94 FEMINIST REVIEW

sex-for-itself, in which women were the subjects of an historical struggle against patriarchy. Secondly, they challenged habitus by creating a new practice (praxis?). Finally, they created a new political structure—an independent, nonhierarchical women’s organization and sex-in-itself as an objective category. The question of whether the generative principles or logic of patriarchy actually exists in the real world of the determinate conditions of life was a major bone of theoretical contention for the Redstockings and the left in Denmark. For the Redstockings, patriarchy existed as an objective condition, and they existed to overcome it. When some socialists argued that patriarchy did not exist and that, therefore, there was no logic to feminism, the implications were that the Redstockings’ political practice was not grounded in reality or that it was grounded in bourgeois reality and hence, reactionary. The critique by some socialist feminists that the Redstockings’ practice was anti-theory was, at least in part, based upon this crucial epistemological point. Since most Redstockings considered themselves to be socialist (or anticapitalist) as well as feminist, they participated in a dialogue with the new left on this point, despite its sometimes basic challenge to Redstockings’ practice. (Walter, 1989) Since the Redstockings obviously did exist historically, at least for the period from 1970 to 1985 in Denmark, the historical questions are: Why did it arise, and how and why did it develop as it did over time? The political questions are: Does it still exist? If so, in what form? If not, why not? These questions, of course, return us to the theoretical and epistemological question of the material base of patriarchy and of feminist practice. My reading of Bourdieu led me to formulate and address these questions in a way that was not obvious from the weight of the written discourse. The weight of the written discourse was on the dialogue between socialism and feminism, in theory and in organizational structure. However, when I ask what women’s motivations were for participating in the new women’s movement, it became apparent that analysing the socialist-feminist dialogue as represented in written discourse gaven an incomplete picture of what the movement was about in de-emphasizing the discourse on personal practice. I returned to the texts focusing on those which were more personal, those written in the first person and about personal experience. Then I was able to recognize how crucial to understanding of the new women’s movement was the facet of that historical project which supported a rebellion against the everyday ways of thinking and interacting, that is, against the habitus of middle-class femininity and masculinity.3 I concluded that the new forms of political practice developed by the Redstockings supported an uprising to oppose what I have chosen to call ‘the embodiment of ugliness’ and ‘the logic of love’.

The embodiment of ugliness and the logic of love Nine days after the first public action by a small group of Redstockings, came the following excerpt from a national newspaper:

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Most of the girls who work on women’s issues are ugly. One seldom sees a beautiful woman demonstrating for equal rights. These women always blame men. It must be because they are either so ugly or so uncharming that they can’t impress a man. (Ekstra Bladet, 1970) REDSTOCKING 95

And seventeen years later came the following headline in another national newspaper: THE REDSTOCKINGS LOST BECAUSE THEY WERE UGLY. (Politiken, 1987) According to Bourdieu, the embodiment of habitus is one of the most powerful forms of nonconscious modes of domination.

The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given by the body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy (Bourdieu, 1977:94).

The above expressions of the ‘ugliness’ of the Redstockings can be seen in this light as an aspect of embodied principles and not only as political dirty tricks by their opposition. The Redstockings embodied ‘ugliness’ because of their conscious, deliberate, explicit, and overt confrontations with the embodiment of habitus, with the ways their own bodies were used to oppress them and the ways they used their bodies to reproduce a societal beauty contest among women. The generative principle of the contest was that women used their bodies to compete for the best men. The judges were everyone in society, men and women, ugly and beautiful, but the judged were women, or rather, women’s bodies. Much of the earliest practice in the new women’s movement had to do with such issues around women’s bodies. For example, the very first public action by a group of Redstockings was to walk down the avenue sporting exaggerated sexy apparel (the things they used to make themselves more beautiful—wigs, bras, false eyelashes) and on reaching the town hall to take these off and throw them in the trash. In 1972, five Redstockings published a study of the women’s magazine eva, which made explicit some of the forms of habitus embodied in women. Among these forms was that the ideal middle-class young woman should be smiling, flirtatious, playful, original, soft, clean, wearing smart clothes and eye make-up, nonserious, and loved by a man. And the Red-stockings? One said in a post-mortem of the movement:

And when we shed feminine clothes, we also shed women’s roles. We never smiled, we were not friendly or considerate. We were heavyhanded, aggressive, and created a bad atmosphere. (Politiken, 1987)

In other words, they were ‘ugly’ because of their profound confrontation with the ‘beautiful’ as commercialized, objectified, pacified ‘nice girl’ and the innumerable, day-to-day practices of the beauty contest—the rituals of beautification. So, the beauty became the beast and even celebrated by dancing naked at the women’s summer camps. In 1970 the first Redstockings’ manifesto was published. Written collectively by four Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Redstockings and published as a newspaper editorial in an independent left newspaper, it spoke of the waiting time, the time before the prince comes:

We pass the waiting time crocheting smart clothes and shawls, which we look luscious in. ‘Need teaches naked women…(to spin).’ Therefore, we talk with girlfriends about how we are going to get it all to end happily. We talk about which 96 FEMINIST REVIEW

makeup, which hairstyle, which snare. We reinforce each other with gossip about all of our experiences with men, we sit and try to figure it all out and develop a strategy…we spin a psychological web and cunningly try to lower it over our poor, guileless, wandering hero, main character, and better half. It usually does work, at that (Holgersen, et. al. 1970:4)

The first Redstockings were at a stage in their lives in which, for most women, ‘getting a man’ was a primary project. They recognized a strategy for getting one which their own habitus supported—a strategy which had an underlying logic, given certain material conditions. They also began to recognize that the logic was not completely overturned by adopting a hippie lifestyle, for example, by sewing their own stylish clothes instead of purchasing them. This logic was the logic of love. A twenty-year-old hippie woman was one of those interviewed for a book on women’s lives. At the time, she was living with a beat musician and expressed the logic of love quite naively in explaining why she certainly was not a Redstocking:

I think the women’s revolt is completely ridiculous… There isn’t anything more beautiful on this earth than to be a woman and have a wonderful man, who likes you and who treats you like a woman (Schmedes and Giese 1970:127).

The interviewer asks her what it means to be treated like a woman, and she answers:

I love to be the weak one, the one who is taken care of… I love to know that I look beautiful and that he loves me. I like to cook for him and to do for him, because it’s my way of showing him that I love him. (127).

And somewhat later in the interview:

And besides I don’t think women are compensating for anything [prompted by the interviewer’s leading question] by making themselves pretty. Hell, they just want to get men. There can’t be any better reason than that. And it is certainly also the most important thing of all: love. There isn’t anyone who can live without love and, of course, one uses every means to get it. If I were ugly and boring, then no man would look at me; I would rather be pretty, so they all come running. I think the only really worthwhile thing to work on is to love one another. I want to use every second of my life to love a wonderful man, because you feel alive when you are loved. Don’t you agree? (130)

The main goal of her life is to be loved; her strategies are directed at getting and keeping love, in the

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 form of a man. However, she is critical of men as a category. ‘It is a man’s world we live in, and it is therefore that it is such a shitty place, because men are so insanely egotistical’ (128). But later: ‘I am completely free to do what I want… I just take things calmly and ask nothing more than to have it as beautiful as possible every second (131). From her perspective and that of the women’s magazine eva, beauty and ugliness are choices. From this standpoint, while there is an ‘objective’ standard of beauty and ugliness, most women could be passingly pretty if they chose to work on it REDSTOCKING 97

and act in ways that are beauty-making. And who, if beauty were hers to choose, would choose to be ugly? The radical nature of the Redstockings’ practice was that they chose to be ‘ugly’, that is, to oppose the societal beauty contest by acting ‘ugly’. This practical side of ugly/beauty constituted a habitus that was instilled from earliest socialization. It was objectified in structures of political economy and the unconscious, and it constituted middle-class feminine and masculine dispositions. For example, men were not to participate as contestants. A man who spent ‘too’ much time beautifying himself would be labelled homosexual. Men, as embodied love, were prizes, not the contestants. And, if you had the prize, then you must have been a winner; if not, then you were a loser no matter how ‘objectively’ beautiful you were. To experience the sanctions which negatively reinforced the logic of love was painful, as the following instances from one of the first Redstocking books attest. Helle ‘Ironingboard’ tells of when she was a teenager at a party and one of the boys got out the ironing-board, pinned two pins on it, danced with it and said he was dancing with Helle. All the boys and girls laughed. (Bisgaard, 1971:33) A man with whom she had just had sex said: ‘I understand well all your ideas [about women’s liberation], and they are all very fine, but it is naturally better to sleep with a really young girl than with an older one’ (45). Another relates:

My father often gives lectures on the human body. One should take care of one’s body, he says. An ugly body is unaesthetic. His legs are covered with varicose veins, he has a beer belly, his teeth are black, he’s often sick from cigarettes and alcohol. He says he gets physically sick when he’s with a fat woman. He could never sleep with a woman over 30 and has never loved a woman over 25. I never say anything when he says this, because I’m a woman and afraid of becoming over 30 and undesirable. (44ff.)

A political practice that confronted the embodiment of ugliness and the logic of love would demand a revolt against the ‘doxa’ of the ‘naturalness’ of beauty, sexuality, and love and the construction of alternative forms, attractive and powerful enough to counter the positive reinforcement and negative sanctions of this logic. It would require the deconstruction of the dichotomy masculinity- femininity (along with the deconstruction of the dichotomy heterosexuality-homosexuality) and the construction of new political identities and subjects.4 Among these new identities were the Redstockings, the lesbian movement, and several smaller socialist-feminist groups. The establishment of the lesbian movement separate from the Redstockings was based upon the recognition that oppression on the basis of sexuality and gender required a separate lesbian-feminist political practice. This was so for several reasons, but among these were that while becoming lesbian feminist might be a way out of ‘the logic of love’ for some women, it was not the way most women at that time in Danish history chose to follow.5 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 The Redstockings’ analysis of the problems women faced in Danish society and politics went beyond the demand for equality between women and men to confront the psychology and practice that reproduced patriarchal structures. That psychology and practice was that, in seeking men’s love, you also seek your own domination; and, in the end, you seem to want to be dominated and cannot love him if he is not the dominant partner. This was Maria Marcus’s ‘frightful truth’ (1974); Arnfred, Frastein and Giese’s ‘inner enemy’ (1979/80) and the basis of Suzanne Brøgger’s call to 98 FEMINIST REVIEW

‘free us from love’ (1974). Who would want to be ‘free’ from love? Only ‘frustrated man-haters’ or cold and bitter souls too ‘ugly’ to be loved by a man. (Clod, 1976:114) To challenge that logic would be risky. As the boyfriend of one of the Redstockings put it:

[The Redstockings] are OK for now, but just wait until they get older and unattractive and sit as old, hard-bitten virgins, writing bitter articles that no one wants to read and when no man will want to have anything to do with them. (Bisgaard, 1971:44)

To accept the risk that came with confronting the doxa and habitus of the embodiment of ugliness and the logic of love required certain preconditional changes in practice and the construction of a new political practice.

Preconditional changes in structure and practice Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and doxa are conceptions of the reproduction of ideology, structures and dispositions in practice. There is nothing in the concepts ‘habitus’ and ‘doxa’ that would predict the Redstockings’ radical confrontation with them. For example, even working-class habitus is a reproduction of past worker strategies and motivations in practice rather than a radical confrontation with the contradictions between capital and labour. However, his concept of practice as practically tied to material life conditions does allow for changes to habitus, because it is theoretically founded on historical materialism. If the material conditions change, so too must practice, and, hence, also habitus (either because of conscious political practice or as a threshold effect). On the other hand, changes in practices may pose new contradictions and lead to changes in material conditions (as, for example, the fallacy of composition), given a critical mass of practical change where the structures can no longer hold. For many women ‘the logic of love’ was a very practical basis for marriage and the establishment of a nuclear family, especially when other reasons, like property or labour interdependencies, were no longer operable. There would have to be practical options for women to support themselves before they could confront the contradiction of love. Those options most frequently cited were: governmental support for higher education for women and men, the increasing number of jobs for educated women, the expansion of social services, especially child care and care for the sick and elderly, expanding job opportunities in the public and circulation sectors, and the introduction of birth-control pills. (Foged, 1975; Richard, 1978; Flensted-Jensen et. al., 1977) All of these changes worked in the direction of increasing economic independence of women from individual male partners, thus providing the premises for confronting the logic of love. In addition, the state played a role in promoting an ideology of sexual equality in the so-called sex-role debate. (Möberg 1962) Questions like equal pay, marital tax reform, women’s double work burden in the labour force and at home and the expansion of care services were all being discussed or instituted Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 before the new women’s movement arose. (Markussen, 1980) Also, Denmark had a national women’s organization, the Danish Women’s Society, which was active throughout the 1960s and later as a women’s voice for sexual equality and equal rights. Thus, by 1970, when the Redstocking movement arose, there was little need for them to debate equal rights for women as a principle. The question was, rather, why those rights were not more effective in promoting equality. REDSTOCKING 99

When we consider that a new wave of feminist activity started in almost every Western capitalist country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we must conclude that determinate life condition changes, like the ones outlined above, must have contributed to the development of a new women’s movement in Denmark. However, if the concept of practice is to be useful in mediating between structure and agency, then statements of the structural preconditions alone are not adequate to explain the changes in political practice. This is especially true of the Redstocking movement because, as a political practice, the movement was not, in any obvious way, antistructural—that is, as a practice, it made few demands upon the state or other corporate societal institutions. Of those changes in practice that preceded and supported the Redstockings’ political practice, the ones which are most relevant are the antiauthoritarian student movement, of which many of the first Redstockings were members, and the sexual liberation that this same group of young people experienced in the late 1960s. The university and college students in Denmark were part of a general Western phenomenon of antiauthoritarian rebellion of the late 1960s, a rebellion that democratized the university power structure in Denmark and led to the creation of a new political party—the Left Socialist Party. The turn of the students to the left in critique of capitalism and the establishment included many conscious challenges to habitus—for example, in consumption patterns, in dress styles, in living arrangements, and in sexual and marriage patterns. Sexual liberation was a critique of monogamy and marriage along with a celebration of sex as a natural appetite and delight, which should not be suppressed or controlled by ‘petit-bourgeois morality’ and concepts of ownership and jealousy in relationships. A result of the new sexual practice was the uncoupling of sex and love. You did not have to love each other to enjoy sex with each other. However, when sex and love were uncoupled, so, too, were couples uncoupled. And, if the young woman was not in love with her sexual partner, then one of the key elements of romantic love as a basis for marriage was broken. ‘Love’ became even more abstract as a basis for marriage, if it did not mean sexual monogamy, at least as an ideal. Of course, love never really had meant strict sexual monogamy, as the young people pointed out in their critique of the hypocrisy of their elders. In his analysis of the impact of capitalism on Algerian peasant culture, Bourdieu examines the disenchantment of nature (1979) and, elsewhere, he considers the disenchantment of honour (1977). By analogy, one could say that sex was disenchanted by sexual liberation and that:

Henceforward reduced to its economic dimension only…the most sacred activities find themselves constituted negatively, as symbols, i.e., in a sense the word sometimes receives, as lacking concrete or material effect, in short, gratuitous, i.e. disinterested but also useless (Bourdieu, 1977:176).

The effects of the disenchantment of sex were different for young men than for young women. Young men were free to see women as sex objects. By extension, women were free to see men as sex objects (Marcus, 1970) but not to imagine them as love objects. A young housewife described

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 the problems this premise created in her marriage when they both agreed that it was impossible not to have sex with others outside the marriage. He was good about not falling in love with the others, but she was not so good at that. (Schmedes and Giese 1970) An unintended consequence of the disenchantment of sex was the disenchantment of men as love objects. As the first Redstockings’ manifesto put it: 100 FEMINIST REVIEW

We are liberated. We are finally free from feigning chastity and preciousness; finally we dare to confess that we want sex. Indeed, we dare not confess that, on some rare occasions, we don’t want sex. Say, for example, we would rather talk with him than have anything to do with his prick. However, we would rather do anything than be misunderstood and thought of as straitlaced, unfree, and (the left’s most contemptful label) ‘frustrated’. We stake everything on being the left’s wonderful, liberated ladies, and the boys on the panel love us, because we will when they can. (Holgersen, et al. 1970:4).

This statement expresses the disenchantment of the prince, that he, like the emperor, has no clothes. The disenchantment of sex and the challenge to the logic of love that originated in sexual liberation, the student movement’s challenges to authorities, and the rise of a general critique of Western culture and political economy, were all changes in practice that confronted gender, sexual, generational and class habitus. In so doing they paved the way for the radical challenge of a new form of feminist practice. That this new feminist practice originated with young women students can be attributed to several factors, but most importantly to economic position and generation.

1 They were relatively privileged economically, in comparison to other women, in having, or believing they had, options for careers which would be fulfilling and well paying enough to support themselves and their children without a man. 2 They were young enough to be attractive to ‘their’ man no matter how ‘ugly’ they might dress. They were in that chapter of their lives where being rescued by the prince was still possible, but they had not settled down in the castle. 3 They were young enough not to have committed themselves to older forms of practice but old enough to have been socialized to gender and class habitus.

The Redstockings’ practice Up to this point I have discussed the nature and depth of the problem of confronting gender habitus and the preconditional structures and practices which made such a confrontation possible, despite the difficulties. I will turn now to an analysis of how and why the political practice of the Redstockings movement developed in the direction that it did. The first moments of creative practice were dialectical moments of recognition (as opposed to the misrecognition of habitus) in the form of speaking and writing, listening and reading, but not yet at the point of a dialogue or discourse. Describing the beginnings of her becoming a feminist, a Redstocking wrote that in 1969 she attended a speech about minorities in America. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 I was inflamed by that speech and made immediate analogies between women’s and blacks’ situations. They both were oppressed on the basis of some physical biological traits—skin, color, genitals—that you could not change… It was clear to me that since society’s perception of me didn’t suit me, I would have to change society…and I could only do that in solidarity with other women who thought like REDSTOCKING 101

me and who felt just as frustrated as I did thinking that we were supposed to live the lives our mothers lived. I went around thinking that for several months, not really knowing what to do about it. (Arnfred et. al., 1974:13).

Her recognition occurred before the Redstockings existed and thus demanded an act of creative practice. This came, prophetically, when she decided to attend a lecture by R.D. Laing, whose book, The Politics of Experience had just been translated into Danish that year. She could not get into the lecture hall because it was filled, so she and a casual acquaintance she met there went to have a beer. As they talked they recognized that they had common problems and decided to get together a group of women who could ‘slowly change society’s conception of women by changing women’s conceptions of themselves’. Within a month there were twelve women in their group, and they were the ones who made the first public action on the avenue in April of 1970. (Arnfred et. al., 1974:13–14) Others of the first Redstockings came from such small groups or from already existing women’s or left student organizations. Once they started with a series of public actions, they drew media attention and had the chance to publicize their existence. Within a week after the first public open meeting was called, there were thirteen small groups of women who decided to call themselves after the first group, whose name came from the New York Redstockings. The media attention had contradictory effects. They became known, but through the media’s lens of ‘good stuff’, rather than through their own discourse. To construct a discourse which could confront the disposition of lover-mother embodied in women, they would not only have to challenge doxa, but also the orthodox position and the organizations which promoted it.6 The orthodox position was that men and women are entitled to equal rights and that the institutions of the state and capitalism should support appropriate measures to ensure equality. This was also the position of the Danish Women’s Society, the most important longstanding feminist organization. However, as early as 1963, younger members of the Danish Women’s Society raised questions about the political practice of their organization, questions in the direction of what would become the Redstocking movement. (Bryld, 1963; Groes, 1964) The fact that the orthodox position supported equality of the sexes meant that the Redstockings had to confront existing feminist discourse and practice as well as the doxic aspects of habitus. On the other hand, it meant that their more radical discourse had fertile soil to grow in. To go up against the lover-mother disposition required that they not only recognize and say that the prince has no clothes, but also, and more importantly, that the princess is naked too. This project would require a collective remaking of the engendered self. The primary means in this project came to be the formation of small, women-only groups with six to eight members who would meet regularly to talk to each other about their lives as women. This talk was not to be understood as therapy, even though some critics ‘accused’ it of being so. It was to be understood as political practice with which the groups’ members created themselves as political agents and constructed women as historical subjects. In a nonhierarchical, supportive

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 setting, one could come to see that one’s ‘personal’ problems had political causes, that they were common to many women in society. Over the period from 1970 to 1975, the Redstockings’ practice became more and more defined by this small group form—the ‘basis’ group, as it came to be called. The talk within the basis group was increasingly structured, at least in theory, as the principles and procedures of basis-group practice became the subject of political discourse in the movement as a whole. (See Rødstrømpebevægelsen, the Redstocking movement’s 102 FEMINIST REVIEW

publications En basisgruppe, 1975; En dag med 120 kvinder, 1976a; and Jordmorpjecen, 1976b.) The procedures were to work against dominance by individual members, against passivity, for security and support for personal challenges, against straying from the topic and slipping into familiar, girlfriend talk. For example, the meetings were to be conducted in rounds with each person having a turn, and they were to start with a round called ‘since last time’ in which the talk was about what significant conflicts or problems members confronted since the last group meeting. (Agger, 1977; Rødstrømpebevægelsen, 1975) In its own internal practice, the group was to build each other’s self-confidence, to learn to trust one another, and to develop a sense of appreciation for one’s self as a woman by appreciating other women and, as a whole, to develop sister solidarity. Thus, the group, besides being personally supportive, would also support change in practice and eventually would serve as a link in a unified feminist practice as a mass movement. As previously mentioned, the first groups of Redstockings did a series of public actions as part of their political practice. These included a bus sit-in demanding that women travel for 80 per cent of the fare since their wages were 80 per cent of men’s; a takeover of the podium during a televised speech by a man to the Social Democratic Party on equality in the 1970s; a sit-in at the offices of the women’s magazine eva; street theatre about Third World women to oppose the World Bank Congress; demonstrations for abortion on demand, against the Common Market, for equal pay, etc. (Rødstrømpebevægelsen, n.d.a.: 4–12). They also wrote and published books and newspaper articles to reach a larger public. They wanted to do something political, in the sense of making a public political statement, and they hoped that other basis groups would do likewise. That is, they hoped the basis groups would act as a group in political activities directed outside the group itself and outside of the members’ social networks. The question of whether the movement should be more outward directed came to be understood as a problem with the political practice of the movement—that is, that it needed to have a more centralized structure with which to make decisions on behalf of the movement as a whole. This discussion first became a definitive part of the Redstockings’ discourse at the Tåstrup ‘seminar’ in January of 1972 (Rødstrømpebevaægelsen, 1972) at which 200 Redstockings met to discuss the future of the movement. It ended with the Socialist Women’s Group splitting from the Redstockings, because most of the Redstockings wanted to maintain the small group, loosely co-ordinated mass movement with a political practice directed at changing everyday life and consciousness, while those who formed the Socialist Women’s Group wanted a more co-ordinated, more outward-directed, more ‘theoretical’, and more ‘socialist’ organization.7 Similar debates at the Helsingør Seminars in 1974 and 1976 resulted in the split-off of Alexandra Group and Group 27, respectively, on relatively similar grounds. (Alexandragruppe, 1977; Gruppe 27, 1977) Since most Redstockings considered themselves to be ‘socialists’ of one sort or another, this debate should be understood as one over practical priorities rather than a strictly socialist versus feminist one. Also, in 1974, the lesbian movement split from the Redstockings. (Rødstrømpebevægelsen, n.d.b) While this split should primarily be understood as one which reflects societal oppression on the basis of sexuality as well as gender, there was a tendency for the lesbian side of the Redstockings-Lesbian debate to

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 parallel some of the same arguments as the Socialist-Redstocking debate with the ‘sides’ lining up Socialist Feminist-Redstockings-Lesbian Feminist from most centralized to least. Within the Redstockings, these two debates resulted in a somewhat more centralized and formalized movement organization, but the critical significance of the basis group to the definition of Redstockings’ political practice was maintained. The specific outcomes were the introduction of a monthly co-ordination meeting to which each small group was to send a representative, an internal REDSTOCKING 103

newsletter, an external magazine, and the refinement of procedures and principles of basis-group practice.8 Thus, the Redstockings became a co-ordinated mass movement by 1974. (Rødstrømpebevægelsen, 1976b) The idea of a co-ordinated movement of small basis groups to work on individual practice collectively and collective practice individually was a new construction. The major purposes of the co-ordinated movement were to plan events and actions that, would promote the formation of new basis groups, develop the sense of the weight and substantiality of the movement, and represent the movement to other political groups and to the society as a whole. As the knowledge of basis-group practice spread, the number of groups increased. By 1976, there were approximately 110 basis groups in the Copenhagen Red-stockings (Rygård, 1976b: 21) and at least that many more around the country. Also, there were groups similar to basis groups, but which were not officially tied to the Redstocking movement, and there were basis groups in the lesbian movement. The Redstockings never had an official analysis of the basis of women’s oppression beyond the minimum foundation that:

1 Women were oppressed and exploited as women. Male domination was systematic, and the system included both capitalism and what came to be called ‘patriarchy’. 2 They adopted the slogan ‘No Women’s Struggle without Class Struggle, No Class Struggle without Women’s Struggle’. 3 Their organizational form was nonhierarchical and based on basis groups. 4 The personal is political.

Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the Redstockings had no official platform beyond this minimum, they did develop a very extensive and intensive discourse around these minimal themes, a discourse which was historically and politically new. Bourdieu states that heretical discourses (such as the Red-stockings’) ‘derive their power from the capacity to objectify unformulated experiences, to make them public’ (1977:170). And that: ‘“Private” experiences undergo nothing less than a change of state when they recognize themselves in the public objectivity of an already constituted discourse’ (170). And, quoting Sartre: ‘Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly’ (170). Discourse is in dialectical relation to the group which constructs it and which it constructs. Based on this conception, one could say that the Redstockings’ discourse and practice constructed ‘Women’ as historical subjects of a struggle against patriarchy or male domination, that it constructed sex-for- itself. The Redstockings’ practice was based upon speaking the experience of oppression and on supporting individual and collective efforts at confronting, confounding, and eventually, overcoming it. This practice required the epistemological assumption of ‘sex-in-itself as an historical category.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice The assumption of the objectivity of women’s oppression returns us to Bourdieu’s claim that practice mediates between subjectivity and objectivity. For, what if ‘sex-in-itself did not exist outside of the Redstockings’ construction of it? What if their construction was a mystifying one, which served the purposes of a small segment of the population for a short period of time, but which left most women and men more confused than enlightened? What if it were a discourse 104 FEMINIST REVIEW

constructed by a privileged segment of the middle class to promote their interests against the interests of the working class? These questions, from the epistemological to the political, are ones which were part of dialogues the Redstockings had with left political parties and with socialist feminists, inside and outside of the movement. That the Redstockings confronted such basic questions in dialogue with the left at the same time that their own internal practice confronted the embodied doxa of accusations like they are ugly, they are not real women, they are frustrated man-haters, and challenged the logic of love, must, in a practical sense and in Bourdieu’s terms, provide evidence to support their claims to represent objective structures. That is, the ability collectively to oppose in practice powerful efforts to undermine or deconstruct the basis of one’s understanding and practice, lends support to one’s claim to confrontation with objective structures of exploitation. Also, the strength of the reaction against practical change is confirmation of conflicting or contradictory structures. However, ‘habitus’ as structure reproduced in practice, and ‘practice’ as acting in ways to survive and thrive under given life conditions together, do not constitute a theory of knowledge nor a theory of practice. Bourdieu places these concepts in historical materialism as a theory of practice, but one could also tie ‘habitus’ and ‘practice’ to theories of psychoanalysis or transformational grammar, for example. Indeed, ‘the logic of love’ is likely to be connected to psychoanalytical habitus as well as to material life conditions of domination. The advantage of historical materialism as a model or theory of practice over other possible ones is that it is useful in explaining political practice and change. As a theory of practice, historical materialism assumes that habitus represents contradictions and conflicts of interest between social categories of persons and that practice represents shifting power alignments and interests between these. Marx’s critique of capitalism, as an example of historical materialism, recognizes that class conflict and interests under capitalism are objective material contradictions. Redstockings’ feminism recognizes that the gender conflict and interests under patriarchy are objective material contradictions. However, both recognitions are only revealed in practice. One of the interesting aspects of the dialogue between the left and the Redstockings was the left critique of the Redstockings’ political form—its decentralized, nonhierarchical, basis-group, mass-movement form—as being antitheory. This critique brings to mind the theory versus history ‘debate’ between E.P.Thompson and the ‘Althusserians’ because it is a confrontation between a politics of practice (the Redstockings’) and a politics of antistructure (the Left Socialist Party and the Danish Communist Party). The problem was that not only did ‘theory’ (e.g. kapitallogik) not have a place for feminism, but further, it could not recognize Redstockings’ practice as politics; rather, it was ‘navel-gazing’ and ‘egoism’, not real politics. However, all the proposed and actual alternatives to Redstockings’ practice involved more centralized organization, more ‘outward-directed’ actions and discourse, like support for striking women workers, and in-depth analyses of the problem, clarification of the theory, and schooling in analysis and theory. Because of their emphasis on theory as opposed to Redstockings’ practice, they failed to recognize that the attraction of the Redstocking movement was that it confronted a gender habitus

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 which daily, infinitely, and intimately reproduced male domination. This failure to understand the Redstockings’ practice as politics created a situation of theory versus practice. Partly, this situation was a result of the fact that Redstockings’ practice represented a thesis in itself and, therefore, could not be advanced by a different thesis; that is, it could not be reduced to class conflict. The result was a theory gap within the Redstockings’ practice, which sometimes got filled with biological reductionism or religion.9 Redstockings’ practice can be understood as an attempt to change habitus REDSTOCKING 105

by changing individual practice collectively in a co-ordinated mass movement. One understanding of a mass movement is that it is made up of changes in individual practice, sometimes to the threshold point or critical mass where structure can no longer hold. The difficulty we have in seeing an argument between spouses as politics, is that, traditionally, we have drawn a distinction between the personal and the political, a distinction which made it difficult for the Redstockings to develop a theory of their practice.

Post-mortem/post-partum By the late 1970s the Redstocking movement began to fragment, and by 1985 the Århus Redstockings had a farewell party and closed up shop. The possible explanations run from they won to they lost. (Information, 1985; Clod, 1985; Dam, 1985) There is no doubt that they succeeded in changing themselves and in making changes in society and culture. The question is whether those were deep and wide enough to remain without the deliberate, conscious, explicit and co-ordinated challenge and reinforcement of the Redstockings as an organized movement. I am not able to answer this question now, except to say that the logic of Redstockings’ practice has become so much a part of women’s politics that the idea of getting together with the women one works with in the factory or office, in the labour union or political party, in the schools and universities, is now commonplace. Critical aspects of the Redstockings discourse, like patriarchy and ‘the personal is political’ are also broadly disseminated. When I presented an earlier version of this paper to the Aalborg University Women’s Studies faculty, some members were convinced that ‘the embodiment of ugliness and the logic of love’ no longer held sway, that in contemporary Denmark women can beautify themselves without being part of a societal beauty contest. I hope they are correct in their assessment. Since there is currently no political practice which raises these questions, the answer is unclear. The absence of a critical political practice does not necessarily mean that there is no longer any problem, and the presence of actual beauty contests must make one wonder. In either case, it is clear that the Redstockings did not achieve all that they had hoped to. Therefore, a critical question is whether there was something about their practice and/or about the structural con ditions their practice confronted that might account for the dissolution of the co-ordinated Redstocking movement. The economic downturn which started in the mid-1970s and culminated in the installation of a Conservative Party government in 1982, and the cutbacks in social services, were threats to women’s security. Such circumstances would seem to work against bold challenges to patriarchy—no time for roses, when the bread is threatened. According to a Redstocking’s analysis from 1976:

The crisis and unemployment have the direct effect of making us afraid. ‘Will I lose my job?… I had better stop complaining’, that is how most of us think. In political work a tough line is taken: this is no time for all this foolishness— Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 now is the time for work on real problems—and that always means economic problems. In boom times the politics of the women’s question is considered an entertaining subject…in crisis times the latent contempt of women’s politics comes out: it is considered a luxury to concern yourself with women’s politics—especially your 106 FEMINIST REVIEW

own experience—it is pure navel-gazing, we are given to understand. (Rygård, 1976a:18–19)

Thus, one explanation for the fragmentation of the Redstockings as a co-ordinated movement is that patriarchy became stronger under an economic recession. However, to follow Bourdieu’s line of thinking to the conclusion of the Redstockings’ story is not to be satisfied with a structuralist answer alone. Their practice must also be examined. Even during the most active and expansive period in the Redstockings’ history, most basis groups lasted no more than two years. (Internt Bladet, 1979) There was always a tendency for ‘old’ Redstockings to drop out of the co-ordinated movement, taking their newly acquired feminist consciousness and experience with them to be used elsewhere. According to almost all former Redstockings, the experience they acquired as Redstockings was personally transformative, and they did not, could not, go back to their pre-Redstockings selves and to thinking and acting in their pre-Redstocking ways. That is, they did not abandon feminist practice when they dropped out of the Redstockings. They reached a point in their own lives (with time-consuming jobs and children) and in their own feminist development where the co-ordinated basis-group practice was not basic enough. The Redstockings’ practice was very time-consuming and required a great deal of personal commitment. This is evidence of the appeal and of the objective basis of the movement, but it was also its weakness, as that personal appeal had to be continually created and reinforced for it to be worth one’s time and energy. The moment one ‘got out of it’ what one personally could, then it demanded too much personal sacrifice to the general good to maintain such intense commitment. This was especially so when other facets of one’s life were becoming more and more demanding, as one was no longer a childless student but rather an employed mother. Basis groups were founded on the basis of friendship, acquaintance, or by the organized movement on the basis of geography or interests. In other words, the basis of the basis groups was its practice and the similarities in age and personal background and history of those attracted to the movement. Unless one were lesbian and/or one’s basis group were also a close-knit circle of friends outside the context of group meetings and/or one lived with one’s basis group, the basis of the basis group was feminist practice. On the other hand, it is difficult to see on what other basis than friendship basis-group practice might have been based on. Groups formed at the workplace would tend to focus on workplace problems and to face the complications that intimate disclosures might bring to the work environment, especially the competitive work environment of professional careers. Thus, the centre collapsed as experienced Redstockings left. Their lives, changed by that experience and by life-span developments, had too little use or place for the basis group. Further, the split-off from the Redstockings of the lesbian movement took some very active members’ time and energy in the direction of lesbian-feminist practice. Finally, the politics of practice found no way to use their politics to pressure the state and other corporate institutions directly. What demands should they make upon the state, the party, the union, the university, etc., when their practice was directed at nonconscious habitus? Certainly they

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 did make demands—like abortion on demand, domestic-violence shelters, women’s houses, equal pay, sex quotas, opposition to the Common Market, more and better child care, etc. The point is that these types of demands were not based upon the Redstockings’ politics of practice but rather on more traditional forms of feminist politics like the Danish Women’s Society and women’s committees in political parties and unions, and in state institutions like the Equal Rights Commission. The types of demands that were basic to Redstockings’ practice would require REDSTOCKING 107

changes in individual women’s and men’s behaviour and thinking and a politics of small, co-ordinated group work, work that would provide an immediate personal satisfaction as well as forming the basis of a mass movement. What happened instead was that Redstockings and other feminists became active in other political organizations. Among these are the lesbian movement, the Danish Women’s Society, the Left Socialist and Socialist People’s parties, Women’s Studies, and the peace and ecology movements. (See Christenson, 1989; Clod, 1985)

Summary and conclusions Because the Redstockings dared to be ‘ugly’, they challenged the embodied habitus and doxa of male domination, created a political practice, and constructed a new feminist discourse and ‘women’ as historical subjects of a struggle against patriarchy. That such a political process was necessary if women’s concerns and problems were to be addressed in a way that would confront the nonconscious doxa of ‘the embodiment of ugliness’ and ‘the logic of love’ is clear. Some form of the Redstockings’ politics of practice was necessary. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, doxa, embodiment, misrecognition and disenchantment all contributed to directing my attention to the logic of the problem the Redstockings confronted, and therefore, to the strategies they would need to address it. His concept of practice as mediating between subjectivity and objectivity led me to see the Redstockings’ practice as dialectically producing both sex-for-itself in a consciousness-raising process and sex-in-itself in a process which objectified personal experience, that made the personal political. Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical focus is on the reproduction of habitus, doxa and orthodoxy. He provides no examples of how and why habitus changes except through changes in determinate life conditions. Thus, most of what I have written about the Redstockings’ political practice is only indirectly based upon his thinking. However, his conception of how and why the dominated participate in their own domination fits precisely with the Redstockings’ own understanding of their role in their own domination and in overcoming this ‘role’ through a politics of practice. Bourdieu noted that:

The boundary between way goes without saying and what cannot be said for lack of an available discourse, represents the dividing-line between the most radical forms of misrecognition and the awakening of political consciousness (1977:170).

Where is this boundary line? How do you find it? What happens when it is crossed? These are questions which I have tried to address using the case of the history of the Redstocking movement in Denmark. My primary appreciation of Bourdieu’s thinking about practice is that it contributes to shaping answers to these questions in a way that mediates between structure and individual and between subjectivity and objectivity. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

Notes Lynn Walter is an associate professor in Social Change and Development, at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA, where she teaches Women’s Studies and 108 FEMINIST REVIEW

Anthropology. in 1981 and 1986, she was a visiting professor at Aalborg University in Denmark in Women’s Studies.

1 An example of what Bourdieu means by misrecognition is the misrecognition which occurs in gift giving. One form of misrecognition is the subjective experience of giving as an instant of generosity with no past and of no future interests. Another form of misrecognition of giving is the ‘objective’ model, which posits giving as a system of reciprocal or hierarchical exchange abstracting time out of the model. Therefore, both the subjective and the objective forms of misrecognition of giving misrecognize the historical nature of giving by not thinking of it as within and over time. Misrecognition is not ‘false consciousness’, because both the subjective and objective forms of misrecognition of the gift are true within their limits, that is of time as instants or as totalized (taking all of time). 2 Habitus is similar to Giddens’ concept of ‘routinized practice’ (Giddens, 1984:60). 3 I prefer terms like ‘facets’ and ‘aspects’ to the term ‘levels’ when discussing the relationship between structure and agency, society and individual, to avoid the connotation that the personal is in some sense ‘deeper’, ‘more profound’, or ‘more essential’ than the interpersonal and the societal. 4 It would also require the deconstruction of the dichotomy heterosexuality-homosexuality since gender and sexuality are historically and politically connected. That the lesbian movement arose within the context of the Redstockings movement is a confirmation of their political affinity. See Jackson (1987) for an excellent analysis of the relationship between women’s oppression and the social construction of heterosexuality. 5 This is not the place to discuss the debate between the essentialists and the social constructionists over the significance of sexual identity. My own view is that the social constructionist view is more useful politically, and I can see no reason to think that just because an identity is socially constructed that one feels it any less or that it is in any way less profound or deep than an essentialist identity would be. Part of the problem lies in our thinking of nature and psychology as deeper ‘levels’ of self than our social-historical selves. See Note 3. 6 The focus of this paper is the lover aspect of the lover-mother disposition. This is because it was initially the most important for the young women who started the Redstockings movement. The uproar against the mother disposition was just as important, but came to be a practical issue somewhat later in the movement as more and more Redstockings became mothers. An example of the confrontation with femininity as defined by motherhood was the often represented poster which asked, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up, Mother?’. 7 The term ‘socialist’ is put in quotes because there were various understandings of what it meant. Most of the Redstockings considered themselves to be ‘socialist’, in one form or another. The socialist-feminist dialogue was much more central to the new Danish women’s movement than it was to the American women’s movement, since at the end of the 1960s and through most of the 1970s Danish young educated middle-class women and men were Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 mostly on the left politically. 8 Redstockings movement history in Århus followed a somewhat similar history to that of the Copenhagen movement with the exception being that the Århus movement was more explicitly socialist feminist from its beginnings. Lands-Debat (1976) contains short histories of the Redstockings in the smaller cities and towns. REDSTOCKING 109

9 The intellectuals of the movement in the first five years tried to find ways to analyse gender and class in the same terms. This attempt was fruitful in that it sensitized women in the movement to the importance of class and to the idea that their own demands and thinking were shaped by class. Eventually, however, the attempt to conflate gender and class into one and the same theory was not successful. A dual systems model of capitalism and patriarchy prevailed. In the meantime, the development of women’s studies as a discipline with its own faculty and problem-foci has been critical to the advancement of theory during a period in which feminist practice is more fragmented.

References

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INFORMATION (1985) ‘Rødstrømpebevægelse nedlagt’, 13 February. INTERNT BLADET (1979) Debat No. 16, June, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevægelsen, in papers of the Århus Redstockings, Women’s History Collection, The State Library, Århus. JACKSON, Margaret (1987) ‘“Facts of life” or the eroticization of women’s oppression? Sexology and the social construction of sexuality’, in CAPLAN (1987) pp. 52–81. LANDS-DEBAT (1976) No. 1, in papers of the Århus Redstockings, Women’s History Collection, The State Library, Århus. MARCUS, Maria (1970) ‘Måske skulle du kneppe Mick Jagger’, Information, 20 October. —— (1974) Den frygtelige sandhed, Copenhagen: Tiderne skifter. MARKUSSEN, Randi (1980) ‘Socialdemokratiets kvindeopfattelse og-politik fra 1960–1973’, Den jyske historiker, No. 18, pp. 13–168. MlES, Maria (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books. MØBERG, Eva (1962) Kvinnor och människor, Stockholm: Bonniers. MØLLER, Hanne et. al. (1972) Udsigten fra det kvindelige univers, en analyse at eva, Copenhagen: Forlaget Røde Hane. ORTNER, Sherry (1984) ‘Theory in anthropology since the sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, pp. 126–66. POLITIKEN (1987) ‘Rødstrømperne tabte fordi de var grimme’, An interview with Ninon Schloss, 18 January. REX, Jytte (1912) Kvindernes bog, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. RICHARD, Anne Birgette (1978) Kvindeoffentlighed. Om kvindelitteratur og kvindebevægelse i Danmark, Copenhagen: Gyldendal. RYGÅRD, Elisabeth (1976a) ‘Kvindekampen skal omfatte hele kvindeundertrykkelsen’, Kvinder, April, pp. 18–19. —— (1976b) ‘Vores praksis er vores styrke’, Kvinder, No. 8, June-July, pp. 20–3. RØDSTRØMPEBEVÆGELSEN (nda) ‘Rødstrømpebevægelsen i København, Forår 1970- Sommer 1974, Kort historisk gennemgang’, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevægelsen. —— (ndb) Lesbiske, fra isolation til bevægelse, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevaægelsen. —— (1972) Tåstrup Seminar Rapport, in papers of the Århus Redstockings, Women’s History Collection, The State Library, Århus. —— (1975) En. basisgruppe, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevægelsen. —— (1976a) En dag med 120 kvinder, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevægelsen. —— (1976b) Jordmorpjecen, Copenhagen: Rødstrømpebevægelsen. SCHMEDES, Tine and GIESE, Suzanne (1970) Hun, Copenhagen: Thaning & Appels Forlag. WALTER, Lynn (1989) ‘Identity, structure and practice in the new Danish women’s movement: a contribution to the anthropology of feminism’, unpublished manuscript. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 REVIEWS

New Times: the carving out of a distinct social identity, came out Changing Face of of gay politics. It was both of these groups who Politics in the 1990s insisted that if politics was to be worth the Edited by Stuart Hall effort, if it was to be a lifelong commitment, it and Martin Jacques had to be fun, and even if it could not be fun all Lawrence & Wishart in the time, then at least it should not be punitive, association with Marxism self-denying or puritan. Far from being a sign of Today: London 1989, collusion with capitalism, making domestic life ISBN 085315 7030, £9. pleasurable through attending to ‘home 95 Pbk decoration’, and taking pleasure in ‘self- decoration’, were gestures which created within Most of the essays included in this volume have capitalism and within consumer culture appeared over the last few years in Marxism ‘personalized spaces’ which were active rather Today. They have been greeted, inside and than passive, negotiated rather than simply outside the left, as reflecting a political turning received. These pleasurable practices of point. New Times marks an optimistic upturn in everyday life were important precisely because left thinking despite ten years of Thatcherism. of their immediacy, their tangible existence in The critical term here is that of ‘facing up’ to the here-and-now. Finally, and most the new times. There is a determination to importantly, it was the recognition of the right extend the vocabulary of socialism into areas of to enjoyment and pleasure which by the mid- public and private life which have, until eighties seemed to connect some of the left, recently, existed beyond the boundaries of left many feminists and many gay men, with the politics. The New Timers have much to thank broader mass of the people. It was the shared feminists and the gay movement for in this pleasure of key television programmes, of respect. It was feminists, for example, who first certain social and cultural activities (for insisted on the importance of analysing pleasure, example, the pleasures of parenthood,) or of the rather than simply feeling guilty about it. This ‘culture of narcissism’ (sport and personal style) included small everyday pleasures as well as which, ironically perhaps, provided the link Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 larger social festivities and celebrations. between the ‘unpopular’ left and an electorate Likewise, much of the new emphasis on style, which had voted en masse for a radical right-wing consumerism and on the use of these in the government three times in a row. This in turn

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 112 FEMINIST REVIEW

became part of a wider political project, to tap immediately political context?1 Is Marxism Today into the sources of ‘popular’ needs, to less of a forum for feminist ideas than it was understand the success of the Tories’ only a few years ago? More contentiously, has ‘populism’, and to attempt to reconstruct a New Times moved ‘beyond feminism’ in the ‘new times’ left politics which was better able same way that it might be argued it has moved to take into account these social needs while ‘beyond marxism’? maintaining the commitment to social If this is the case then New Times might be democracy, social equality and social justice. seen as connecting to debates about This kind of new-left populism has been ‘postmodernity’. It could be argued that what welcomed and endorsed by sectors of the post-modernism is to American, Australian and Labour Party, (to the extent that some now see European left intellectuals, New Times is to their Marxism Today as the theoretical wing of UK counterparts. In both there is a tide of Labour), it has been dubbed ‘designer dissidence, an undercurrent of challenge to socialism’ by the Guardian, and has been some of the guiding precepts of socialist and dismissed as left Thatcherism by the hard left. Marxist thought. In postmodernism this entails The New Times manifesto goes further than a full-scale onslaught on the meta-narratives of this, however. Published before the tumultuous history, of which Marxism is one. In New Times events in Eastern Europe, the articles in this it means a more gentle process of transforming volume none the less envisage deep-rooted socialist ideals to bring them further into line changes in society, in production, consumption, with questions of individual choice, of personal class alignment, and social identity, such that freedom and of social and civic responsibility. nothing short of a complete reassessment of left The major issue, however, which underpins this theory and practice is required. The enthusiasm new times thinking is that shift in production and verve with which these writers confront away from mass manufacturing, the classic this challenge, and the sheer adventurousness of Fordist mode of production which has their thinking is to be welcomed. The characterized ‘modern’ capitalism, towards a collection, for the first time in many years, means of production which has been labelled gives the impression of a ‘Real Left’ dialogue, post-Fordist and which some have argued is also theoretically informed without being a postmodern means of production. theoreticist, and intellectually engaged without The growth of new computer technology, being élitist. As the editors explain, New Times the search for greater profits, the attempt to reflects an open-ended discourse. It asks many exert greater control over labour, the need to more questions than it answers. None the less it produce a greater diversity of goods and to is also the case that this is a collection where produce for a more segmented global market… feminism is foregrounded as a movement but all of these forces have created post-Fordism. In otherwise conspicuous by its absence. In 1990, fact this label covers a diversity of modes. As when feminism seems to have achieved so much, Paul Hirst points out in his critique of New Times it feels mean-spirited and somehow unfair to (also included in the volume), the problem with point to the few women contributors to this post-Fordism as it is defined here, is that it is

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 volume. More useful, perhaps, to ask the seen as market-led. That is to say, because question: why? Is the new-times project people seem to want different and differentiated relevant but tangential to the concerns of goods and commodities and because it is now feminists today? Are academic feminists possible, thanks to new technology, to produce engaging with many of the same issues as the such goods by adapting the technology to ‘small New Timers but in an intellectual rather than an lines’, then first the old production lines go, and REVIEWS 113

with them the working class who was their traditional notion of party loyalty. As a result ‘product’. Hirst argues that ‘flexible New Times also means social unpredictability, specialisation’ is a more useful term. This is loss, confusion and even bewilderment, what he calls an ‘ideal type of manufacturing particularly when taken alongside the rapid process’, a ‘technological paradigm or model of changes in communication and the further industrial efficiency: the manufacture of a range penetration of everyday life by ‘communicative of specialised goods for particular and changing networks’ including computers and other forms markets using flexible general purpose of mass media. machinery and predominantly skilled labour’. New Times is then a response to the scope and Hirst argues, against the New Timers, that the scale of these changes. But there still neither flexible specialisation nor post-Fordism remains the question of what these new times are widespread in the UK and that these are the might mean for women. ‘Identity politics’ seems products of a planned capitalist economy where at points to substitute for feminist issues, but politics and economics are more tightly they too are obscured. Feminism is duly synchronized than they have ever been under acknowledged by all and sundry and yet it is an the laissez-faire, free-market preferences of the absent presence. This can be interpreted in a present government. number of ways. Optimistically, feminism has For most of the New Timers it is, however, won through. It has so thoroughly entered the post-Fordism which symbolizes most aptly the political vocabulary not just of the New Timers changing landscape of class and social identity in but of all politically progressive forces that the contemporary Britain and which articulates with point need hardly be made. The women’s those popular desires for ‘customized’ rather movement, as a movement without a leader, a than mass-produced consumer goods, for grouping without a party structure, was pre- ‘lifestyle’ rather than for ‘class culture’, for figurative and all the more well placed to enter quality ‘retailing’ (Next, Benetton) rather than into the mainstream of ‘good sense’. Cynically, quantity ‘selling’ (C and A). These processes the absence of a greater number of feminist have indeed dramatically transformed the field contributions to this collection might be seen as of leisure and culture in the 1980s and into the a means of avoiding a more angry, more 1990s. In this respect New Times politics is as strident note. Culture, leisure and consumption much a necessity for the left as an act of political take the place of domestic labour, reproduction imagination. In every conceivable way the old and child care. Ironically the New Timers get to class map of the UK has been broken up. Class these new concepts through pleasure. But in de-alignment has corresponded with the doing so they go overboard for leisure and emergence of new social populations and enjoyment and conveniently ‘forget’ the representative bodies with their own interests, displeasure of a good deal of ‘shopping’ (at the and their own political agendas. These groups end of a day’s work with two young children in include women, ethnic groups, regional groups, tow), the disappointment of consumption youth groups, the poor and the new underclass, (when the new dress so quickly loses its appeal) gays and lesbians, and others. There is a and the distress of not being able to afford an

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 correspondence, then, between a change in occasional ‘treat’, because the mortgage, or the production and a change in culture. What Poll Tax, or the dentist’s bill has to be paid. connects each of these sets of changes is the Realistically, the absence might be seen as a decline of the unified, homogeneous grouping, reflection of the status of these contributions as the end of the ‘mass’. Emergent bodies blur the ‘position papers’ whose brief is to move on from old lines of party affiliation, and transform the the concepts which have dominated left thinking 114 FEMINIST REVIEW

over the last few years, and, drawing loosely on social movements have had on ‘everything once feminist debates and issues, to draw up a new thought of as “settled” in the theoretical ‘integrative’ vocabulary where social categories, universe of the Left’. social movements other than those of class, are, In Section Two, a socialist case is made for by implication, in the ascendant. moving beyond the old language of collectivism New Times falls into a number of sections. The into ‘identity’ politics which at once taps those first of these charts the significance of what popular desires for choice and individuality but Stuart Hall sees as the overturning of all of those which also extend the repertoire for local settlements which have come to be the hallmark of democratic representation through citizenship. post-war UK society. The disintegration of Once again, since feminism has emphasized these economic, social, gender, racial, regional, participation in spheres far beyond those of the environmental and national settlements has workplace (in the community, the nursery, the created an unprecedented moment of rupture. city and more recently in consumer politics), For Hall, the critical issue is not that these this emphasis is to be welcomed. A fuller changes are all reflective of a worsening crisis consideration of these new public spheres and but that the ‘terms upon which a new era will the extent to which feminism first ‘publicized’ be moulded’ are as yet unclear. Robin Murray, them, is, however, missing. Section Three in turn, reminds us that post-Fordism creates a charts the connections between local, national core of wellpaid workers and a periphery of and global identities, and Section Four gives workers who are insecure, underpaid and space to the critics of New Times. This includes marginalized. At present, women constitute a Mike Rustin who argues that Thatcherism may large proportion of periphery workers, at best be understood as a strategy of post-Fordism in ‘professional’ casualized work and at worst in initiated from the perspective of the Right’. The sub-contracted homework. The fruits of the implication is that post-Fordism is therefore new consumer culture for these women are a wholly bad thing. In contrast, Paul Hirst attenuated, the involvement in leisure and the insists that ‘flexible specialisation’ requires enjoyment of domesticity heavily circumscribed much closer co-operation between ‘companies by financial insecurity and dependence on a and public bodies’, implying that such a strategy, male breadwinner. Dick Hebdige decries the were it to exist in the UK, might be a good loss of connection and the lack of belonging thing. The final two sections of New Times which postmodern culture celebrates but sees describe the decline of party politics (Sarah none the less in this new state the possibility of Benton) and in its place the ascendancy of ‘weak new emergent disconnected forces coming to politics’ (Geoff Mulgan). The concluding the surface. He sees this in, for example, the Manifesto of New Times, searches among the cut-up sounds and ‘stolen’ noises of rap and hip ruins for a ‘new political language’ but it is left hop. He also sees a transitory sense of to Beatrix Campbell to introduce into this connectedness in, rather than in spite of, the volume not so much a new language as a few mass media and through the global music events snatches of the voices of some of those who on TV in aid of Ethiopia, or against apartheid. have been uprooted by New Times. In a series

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Finally, he sees in culture evidence of this of visits to different towns across the UK, breaking-up of consensus and unity. The spaces including Basingstoke, Sheffield, Livingston and created are, he argues, full of potential rather Swindon, Campbell comes close to capturing than, as Baudrillard would have it, ‘fatal’ or the uneveness and complexity of such changes. ‘finished’. Stuart Hall also welcomes the In Livingston, an American company producing ‘unsettling effect’ which feminism and the new computers operates Japanese-style management REVIEWS 115

practices. The company designates everyone 1990) and Mica Nava, ‘Con-sumerism staff, sponsoring higher education, offering the reconsidered: buying and power’, paper same holidays to everyone, providing free cancer presented to the BSA Conference, April screening, a smart gym on site and private 1990. health insurance.’ But in Livingston there are no facilities, hardly any shops and no Marks and Woman-Nation- Spencers. In Sheffield there are ‘Shops, shops, State shops’. But the women who work in the shops Edited by Nira Yuval- have ‘no rights because their hours aren’t long Davis and Floya enough, and no union because nobody ever told them they’ve got rights worth defending Anthias anyway’. And finally, in Swindon a fascinating Macmillan: London, sign of the feminization of work, and indeed of 1989, ISBN 033 458 the cultural and social maelstrom of New 036 (pbk), ISBN 033 Times/postmodernity, can be seen in one 548 028 (hbk), £12.99 company’s willingness to take on the Pbk, £25 Hbk unemployed fathers of some of their younger It may well have taken the ‘Rushdie affair’ to female workforce.’ “I’ve done my stint of the fully bring home the fact that England, and manly jobs”, says John Perkins who used to indeed Britain generally, is now a multiethnic work at Austin Rover’s car plant… and multiracial society with differing and “Fortunately I had two daughters working at sometimes sharply conflicting cultural and Allied Dunbar.” Perkins had been a shop religious values. British feminism in the long steward at Austin Rover. He is no longer in a tradition of native radical movements such as union.’ (p. 293) This example of an trades unionism, socialism and communism has unemployed man who finds a new job, thanks to exhibited a strong tend ency to ignore ethnic his daughters, graphically conveys the new and racial difference and, until recently, has ‘structure of feeling’ as well as the new social insisted on treating women of this island as a organization of labour which are the products of homogeneous category. There are several New Times. The New Times volume provides a reasons for this, not least a political arrogance force-field for understanding Britain during, and some would regard as an imperial hangover. now, perhaps, after Thatcher. Beatrix There is also the belief that for British feminism Campbell’s journey through the New Times to take on board the concerns of women from towns conveys something of the lived the various ethnic groupings here would, as experience of these years, and something of contributors to a previous issue of Feminist what they have meant for women. But it is a Review put it, ‘be completely disabling of lonely voice in a ‘new’ vocabulary which political mobilization on anything other than a gestures to feminism while shying away from small scale’ (Barrett and McIntosh, 1985:28). considering more precisely its future. Although this particular orthodoxy was subjected to criticism in the pages of Feminist Angela McRobbie Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Review (Rossiter, 1986:157–9) and elsewhere, current feminist writing fails to register much in Notes the way of a change. Fortunately, the same is not true of activity on the ground. The success of 1 See, for example, Annie Phizacklea, the feminist organization, ‘Women Against Unpacking the fashion industry (Methuen, Fundamentalism’, set up in London in 1989 in 116 FEMINIST REVIEW

opposition to the rising tide of fundamentalism attached to all things British, Protestant and in all religions, including Christianity, clearly white. This ‘nation’ proceeded to deprive demonstrates that a political strategy can be Aboriginal people of their land, of employment forged amongst women of all races and ethnic and their rights generally, thereby contriving to backgrounds and, uniquely in Britain, perhaps, put them outside not only the Australian nation the organization derives strength from the but also the state. Paradoxically there was an diversity of its membership. ever-growing demand for labour which other However, the work of ‘Women Against white settlers, such as the Irish, despite the Fundamentalism’ is but a beginning. At a time contempt in which they were held, partially when the ‘Rushdie affair’ has propelled a satisfied. Asian and Melanesian indentured complex of subjects—race, ethnicity, labour was predominantly male, females being nationality, religion—to centre stage in British excluded because of the ‘lower races’ political life, a certain amount of empirical work propensity to breed. An inordinate amount of by feminists exists, but there is little in the way pressure was therefore exerted on white of theory to inform us. An important and timely women to increase the population. Any fall in contribution therefore is the collection of essays, the birth rate resulted in an outcry over what Woman-Nation-State, which explores many was termed ‘race suicide’ and white women’s pertinent and thought-provoking issues within a rights, including enfranchisement, were theoretical framework. The essays are in the regarded as a threat to fecundity. It comes as a form of case studies covering women in a wide shock to read that the ‘white Australia’ policy variety of countries and communities—Britain, was relaxed only in the 1970s although it Australia, South Africa, Uganda, Israel, Iran, remains intact, if unofficially, in relation to Turkey, Cyprus and Italy—and each certain ethnic groupings. concentrates on the links between gender, the A situation with the same ingredients, but state and ethnic/national processes. As the one with which we are more familiar, is that of editors, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, South Africa. In an interesting and sometimes point out in their introduction, gender divisions provocative essay Deborah Gaitskell and Elaine play a crucial role in constructing ethnic and Unterhalter describe the symbolic and material racial divisions, an example being the central role of women in the construction of the role played by women, not only as biological Afrikaner nation and state beginning with the reproducers of an ethnic group but also as its ‘Great Trek’ undertaken by those who fled from ideological reproducers, i.e., the transmitters the British Cape Colony in the 1830s. From this of culture and the socializers of children; there emerged the potent symbol of suffering is the familiar feature of woman as the symbolic Afrikaner motherhood, further reinforced by embodiment of ethnic/national identity and defeat in the Boer War of 1902 and the death of difference, constituted in no small measure by 26,000 women and children in British her sexual and social demeanour; and the concentration camps. Motherhood also came to traditional role of women as the supporters and be seen as a powerhouse during the years nurturers of men, especially amongst groupings following in the drive to expand the Afrikaner

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 involved in military struggle against the state. nation and, as public affairs increasingly became Reading through the case studies it is difficult Anglicized, mothers fostered the Afrikaner not to be struck by the similarities regardless of language and cultural identity in the home. geographical location. Marie de Lepervanche Interestingly, Gaitskell and Unterhalter suggest outlines the construction of the Australian that despite the vastly different ideological ‘nation’ based on a colonial establishment content of Afrikaner and African nationalism, REVIEWS 117

the totemic symbol of the mother manages to lines of enquiry established in the other studies, straddle racial boundaries. The same image of she traces the central role allocated to British the suffering, careworn mother and nurturer of women as physical reproducers of the nation the revolution is reproduced in the discourse of and stresses that during the nineteenth and the the ANC and mass democratic organizations’. first half of the twentieth century women were But, as the authors point out, black women’s only allowed to reproduce the British nation on involvement in the workforce and the extent of behalf of their husbands. And it was not until their politicization means that the anti-apartheid 1981 that British women won the right to organizations’ vision of motherhood is transfer citizenship to their children born necessarily dynamic and activist, standing in abroad. Like Anna Davin in her seminal work, sharp contrast to the passive character of its ‘Imperialism and motherhood’ (1978), she Afrikaner counterpart. emphasizes that in the construction of the The recent influx of Soviet Jewry to Israel British welfare state there was more a has displaced the ‘intifada’, temporarily at least, commitment to making the British people ‘fit as the central focus of attention and has also defenders of the Empire’ than to improving the given rise to considerable disquiet amongst living standards of the poor. Without doubt the Palestianians about the demographic balance in rationale behind the Family Allowances Act of the region. Nira Yuval-Davis’s chapter, entitled 1945 was pro-natalist rather than humanitarian. ‘National reproduction and “the demographic The essay reminds us that concern over size race” in Israel’, therefore provides very useful of the British population also has meant concern background on the subject. Nira reminds us that about the composition of that population. the need for a Jewish majority has always been However, in the time-honoured tradition of the cornerstone of Zionist thinking. British commentators, she prefers to avoid Consequently, since the 1967 war and the attacking the question head-on and concentrates occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the issues of nationality and citizenship as with their massive Palestinian population, the they affect black immigrants in the modern ‘erosion of the Jewish majority’ has become a period. The fact that an unresolved National recurring nightmare for Israelis. In the absence Question, the existence of several clearly of significant numbers of immigrants, Israeli defined nations within a supposedly Jewish women have been exhorted to bear homogeneous nation state of Britain, which in children as both a national and a religious duty the Irish case involves an on-going war, surely which has severely undermined their position in needs serious attention. The creaking structures society. This imperative has ensured the central of an anachronistic empire state invoke a position of orthodox Judaism and the conception of what is alien, i.e., who belongs to incorporation of religious laws into state the British nation and who does not, that is legislation in such areas as marriage, divorce, much more complex than the simple white/ abortion, the guardianship of children and in the black racial dichotomy. It is also important to definition of Jewishness. Clearly, the role of remember that ‘race’ is not a biological women in the reproduction of the Israeli category but a social construct which can be,

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 national collectivity as ‘Jewish’ ensures that and is, applied to the Irish. their sexuality is tightly regulated. An examination of the Irish question would Against the background of such diverse and also have helped to bring nearer to home issues in-depth material it was interesting to read raised in Haleh Afshar’s essay on women and Francesca Klug’s ‘“Oh to be in England”: the reproduction in Iran and Deniz Kandiyoit’s British case study’. In keeping with the general examination of women and the Turkish state. 118 FEMINIST REVIEW

The fact that the Southern Irish state, on achieving independence, came to be imbued with a fundamentalist Catholicism has to be understood in the same terms as the contemporary reaction to ‘modernism’ and to imperialism in Islamic countries. And there are also many parallels between the Irish and Italian situations, the latter being very cogently described by Lesley Caldwell. Two essays which complete the collection are Floya Anthias’s ‘Women and nationalism in Cyprus’ and Christine Obbo’s ‘Sexuality and economic domination in Uganda’. The study of Cyprus must assume a particular importance for us because of the existence of such a sizeable Cypriot community in Britain. It is also significant because it deals with the effects of migration on a community—in this case the internal migration of 200,000 Greek Cypriots following the Turkish invasion of 1974. The window on the world of Greek-Cypriot women in conditions of war, and the way in which their traditional roles have been affected in the fundamental restructuring of their communities, is important in our understanding of the many immigrant communities that make up modern Britain. We can only hope that future feminist studies will take account of the theoretical insights this book provides.

Ann Rossiter

References

BARRETT, M. and McINTOSH, M. (1985) ‘Ethnocentrism and socialist-feminist theory’, Feminist Review, No. 20. DAVIN, A. (1978) ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop, Issue 5,

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Spring. ROSSITER, A. (1986) ‘A response to Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh’, Feminist Review, No. 23. LETTERS

Dear Feminist Review, natalist pressure to make an example of a I read Claudine Mitchell’s informative noted birth-control and abortion law article ‘Madeleine Pelletier: the politics of reform campaigner. Pelletier’s friends sexual oppression’ (Feminist Review No. 33, were in no doubt that her committal was Autumn, 1989) with great interest. As my politically motivated and, in my biography of Pelletier will be appearing judgement, a reading of her letters from with Polity Press in June 1990 (The Integral the asylum and her memoirs dictated to Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier 1874–1939), I Hélène Brion, do not indicate that her was delighted to see Pelletier gaining some mind was affected. From the point of view long overdue recognition in a major of the authorities, the advantage of a feminist journal. Mitchell’s general mental hospital over prison was that interpretation of the range of Pelletier’s whereas a sentence in the latter was work was convincing. There was, determinate, the sentence in the former however, one major error of fact whose was likely to last for ever. In the event, correction may interest your readers as Pelletier died at Perray Vaucluse within six throwing further light on what one can, months of her committal. without exaggeration, call Pelletier’s Claudine Mitchell rightly, I think, feminist martyrdom. challenges the ‘failure’ label with which In 1939, when Pelletier was arrested on Pelletier has been tagged, particularly by an abortion charge, she was not sent to some American historians. Her tragic end prison as Mitchell states. (p. 72) She was could be interpreted as an indication of her first acquitted, as being too ill to plead, success as a campaigner for women’s right having suffered a stroke some two years to control their fertility, and as revealing previously. Subsequently, the judge, M. how much she was feared by the pro- Linnais, found a psychiatrist prepared to natalist right wing. declare her ‘totally irresponsible’. She was Felicia Gordon

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 incarcerated in the insane asylum of Perray Cambridge Vaucluse, about forty miles south of Paris. Linnais was almost certainly bowing to pro-

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 120 FEMINIST REVIEW

Dear Feminist Review, In February 1988 I attended a Women’s The Feminist Review Special Issue No. 31, Foundation Course at the Polytechnic of 1989 was for me, a working-class activist, North London. This was my first leap into very informative. Particularly in further education. I learnt much from the highlighting how little say working-class lecturers and other students. I also learned people have when political comment on that, although fate had forced me to live a women’s status in relation to social/ life on the frontline of oppression very economic/ education/living lives, is early in life, my life experience on the sought. ground floor, as it were, was invaluable, It does highlight how easy it is for not only in terms of my own identity and women to get into print: when they are class politics, but also in terms of what I politically left of centre. It seems to me could give to those women whose lives and that their view is: the only view. The one experiences were totally different to mine. that gets into print that is! Many working- But I also learned how impractical many of class women do not have the chance for the feminists ideologies were in relation to open debate. They are taught that getting the struggles and isolation working-class into print is an activity their class cannot women face, without much help from achieve. There are few examples to make those feminists whose lives have not been them think otherwise! Tell me, how often grossly marginalized. Getting into print for have the people that produce Feminist many working women is rare. How can the Review gone out of their way to seek the views expressed in books like Feminist views of women like myself. Working Review be considered balanced, nonélitist, class? I am a 49-year-old working-class when so many women’s views never get woman who has struggled to educate aired. Most views expressed are from herself after a lifetime in repetitive low- individuals who are politically motivated. paid boring jobs that dull the brain. The Why not ask women living on the frontline isolation that I, along with many other their opinions? They are rarely sought! Are working-class women, suffer, is brought you trying to say; You don’t speak our home to us when we read books like language, you express yourselves Feminist Review. Educated women have differently, therefore you have nothing to many advantages over working-class say? Tell me, how do we validate our lives? women. Control over publishing too. They There are other women who inhabit this articulate their views logically, with planet you know! Or are you so biased, practice!, due to a good education. Their fixed, élitist, you don’t know. views are constantly sought, enabling them Patricia Bright to form a clique of highly opinionated London monopolists. PS. By the way: I did enjoy Issue 31! Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Women like myself are learning much, but are silenced by silence re: our struggles

and isolation. How little chance we have of Dear Feminist Review, debating issues with women different from The discussion about butch and femme ourselves in print! (Ardill and O’Sullivan, FR 34, 1990) still LETTERS 121

seems to pass me by. What kind of We could not ‘act heterosexual’ even if we phenomenon are we talking about when wanted to, and I think most lesbians— we have a conversation about it? How we however much some of them might wish express ourselves on the streets? What they had been heterosexual—don’t want turns us on? What we do in bed? to, finding lesbianism as seductive as Unfortunately, I observe no simple women. relationship between these three aspects of So in the broadest sense, the discussion our lives, and suspect that trying to cluster about our sexual styles and actions must be them is like playing yin and yang, or signs of about how we interact with prevailing the zodiac—looking for simple patterns heterosexism, in which ways we accept and that will tell us who we ‘really’ are. I don’t which we rebel against it. Let she who is believe that is sensible as a quest, but in any without, etc. However, it is too broad a actual manifestation it certainly leaves question to yield many interesting answers, many of us out. However, I do accept that since it is true of all of us, heterosexual and talking about the relationship between our lesbian alike. styles, our fancies and our sex lives is a lot In a much narrower sense, I wonder how more interesting than the influence of the much the discussion on butch and femme stars. boils down to two things: the different One aspect of the debate is pretty attractions of playing ‘active’ and ‘passive’ straightforward: if we consider the three in bed, and about what I have to call mild possibilities that lesbians who believe in fetishism, there being no other useful word butch and femme are acting heterosexual, for it. It is hard to say in the absence of are influenced by heterosexism or are thorough hands-on experience of different entirely free of its influences, the second kinds of sex, but I sometimes think lesbians has got to be true. It is true of all lesbians. are particularly characterized by the way For readers of Feminist Review there is no we appreciate both ‘roles’—another not need to spell out why the third is not very helpful word—in bed. (Or does that possible. And for anyone who accepts that show I’ve always had sex with a particular there is no personal behaviour that is kind of lesbian?) I’m interested in how we entirely untouched by the political take these turns, how much they are structures around us, the first is also not physical and how much psychological, but possible. I have known women who I’m not sure it is usefully discussed only wanted very badly to be men but, even as under the heading of butch and femme (or transsexuals, found them hard to mimic. sado-masochism, even more uselessly). I’ve never known a lesbian couple who The fetishism thing I find complicated— resembled a heterosexual couple except in the finding it sexy to wear, or to have your the most superficial ways, and the classic lover wear, some particular kind of thing,

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 fifties and sixties butch/femme culture be it lipstick or ties or checked shirts. I seems different from classic fifties and suspect you can develop a fetish from small sixties heterosexual culture in almost any beginnings, if your friends encourage you, way you can think of. The distribution of and that what gets perceived as a sexually power—that essential ingredient in all interesting item of clothing or material or relationships—just could not be the same. movement or make-up in our communities 122 FEMINIST REVIEW

is just what is not so common: women who the discussion into more meaningful like to wear ties are interesting, women questions. who fall for men in ties not so. (Blue jeans, Ruth Wallsgrove for example, are surely symbolic of London sexiness for huge swathes of the population including myself, but it’s much too References ubiquitous to be worth mentioning.) One other aspect of the discussion is ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue interesting. What makes one woman find (1990) ‘Butch/Femme obsessions’, the idea of butch and femme appealing may Feminist Review, No. 34. be very different from what appeals to another. As Sue and Susan suggest, some Dear Feminist Review, lesbians found the idea attractive when it Margaret Hunt’s interesting article The De- wasn’t fashionable: it was a challenge, even eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social a rebellion against prevailing lesbian culture Purity movements and the revolutionary (s). Others accept it because it is feminism of Sheila Jeffreys’ (Feminist Review fashionable: they want to conform, not No. 34) raises important and provocative question. points regarding radical and revolutionary Some lesbians (Joan Nestle, for feminism in the 1990s. I would like to example) were clearly heavily sexually respond however, to the first half of her influenced by the ‘real’ thing in the 1960s paper in which she discusses and criticizes —I understand that, having formed their Sheila Jeffreys’ understanding of a sexual identities in that culture, they just particular kind of feminism in existence couldn’t find the seventies lesbian-feminist 100 years earlier, namely the social-purity culture sexy, no matter what their heads feminism of the late nineteenth century. said. In some quite important way, all While Sheila Jeffreys’ book The Spinster and those three groups have actually different her Enemies (Pandora, 1985) takes these sexual responses. feminists’ beliefs and actions as morally I accept that I may be most like Joan exemplary, Margaret Hunt dismisses them Nestle—my sexual identity was set in the as reactionary and oppressive toward other 1970s, in an atmosphere of joyous women. I would suggest, however, that egalitarianism, and I just think I will never Margaret ends up replicating Sheila in not find sixties or nineties ‘difference’ sexy, no only misrepresenting several of the matter how hard I read Feminist Review. feminists discussed in The Spinster, but also So I welcome a real look at how we come falling into the same mistake of polarizing to piece together our sexual identities, that past feminists into ‘goodies’ and takes account of the multiple (and ‘baddies’—although one woman’s Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 continuing) influences, cheerful and ‘goodies’, (such as Stella Browne and Dora otherwise. Any attempt to simplify by Russell for Margaret Hunt), are the other’s lumping rather high-level characteristics is ‘baddies’, and vice-versa. Of course, all bound to miss most of the point. Sue and historical interpretations are by definition Susan make a valiant start at breaking down selective, mine as much as Sheila’s or LETTERS 123

Margaret’s, but I still contend that both period. In fact it was not dualism that was writers are guilty of simplifying and being advocated but, along with many distorting these feminists’ ideas on feminists who were closer to a ‘sexual sexuality, thereby missing what it is about libertarian’ than a moral purity position, a them that is both contradictory and call for unity of mind (or spirit) and body, fascinating. with the latter subordinate to the former and Reading Sheila’s book and Margaret’s not necessarily denied. These feminists article in the light of my study of the were reacting to what they felt to be their feminists they mention makes me rush to reduction to mere physicality; they were these feminists’ defence at being wrongly demanding that men change, that women lumped together into one camp: should be able to have sexual relations on revolutionary feminists’ foremothers to their own terms, that love not ‘lust’ should Sheila, coercive moralists to Margaret. be the basis of a relationship be tween the Ellice Hopkins was undoubtedly involved sexes. To dismiss this, as does Margaret in certain coercive actions, such as the Hunt, as some quirky, reactionary position regulation of prostitutes’ behaviour; of a few nutty social-purity feminists is Margaret is right in thinking that Sheila has both to misunderstand the context in which ‘whitewashed’ her image. However, as far demands were made, and to fail to realize as I am aware, neither Frances Swiney nor that such ideas were current currency across Lucy Re-Bartlett, and Elizabeth different kinds of feminism. Wolstenholme Elmy least of all, were I agree with Margaret Hunt that there is involved in any remotely comparable indeed a problem with a position which activities. Indeed Elizabeth Wolstenholme over-emphasizes the victimization of Elmy was very critical of any kind of moral women by men at the expense of policing of other women. recognizing women’s power to act. Margaret mockingly quotes Frances However, many social-purity feminists did Swiney’s advocacy of ‘raising sex relations encourage women to act: to stand up to from the physical to the spiritual plane’. men, armed with knowledge of sex and the Unless we know more about the context in workings of their bodies. Feeling able to which such ideas developed, they probably say ‘no’ to undesired sex is surely a crucial strike us as fairly extraordinary. But this prerequisite to being able to say ‘yes’ to quote represents not only a classic sex that is truly desired. If my concern with theosophical position, (and large numbers representation and distortion sounds like of feminists, from Charlotte Despard to petty quibbling, it is worth remembering Annie Besant, were followers of that writing a history of feminism of the theosophy), but also a vision held to by past is not 100 miles away from writing a many non-theosophical feminists at the history of feminism of the present. At least

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 time. As for misreadings of these feminist’s feminists in the present can answer back. ideas, one example is Margaret’s accusation Lucy Bland of there being a ‘remarkable revival of London mind/body dualism enshrined in the concept of “psychic love”’, a concept developed by several feminists in this 124 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 NOTICEBOARD

MA in Women’s Studies A new interdisciplinary MA beginning October 1990 which provides an introduction to feminist scholarship and its application to a range of disciplines—humanities, law and social sciences. Available on a one-year full-time or two-year part-time basis. Core course covers aspects of the theory and practice of feminism from the Renaissance to the present day. Optional subjects include ‘Gender and the law’, ‘Modernist women poets’, ‘Women under Italian Fascism’, ‘Feminism and writing’. Mature students welcome. Details from Lesley Sharpe, Dept. of German, University of Exeter, Queen’s Building, Queen’s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH

Women’s Theatre Collection A collection of materials relating to women and theatre in Britain is being established at the University of Bristol’s Theatre Collection. We are delighted to be able to set up here the country’s only collection of British women’s playtexts (our criterion is that they have been performed, although not necessarily published) and of related theatre material, from all periods. This will include archive materials from women’s theatre groups, writings about theatre, visual and written documentation of women’s theatre work. We hope in this way to establish a research collection and archive, for the use of scholars, and also as a way of making accessible for consideration for performance a large body of work which would otherwise be unavailable or disappear. The initial response from playwrights and their agents has been very enthusiastic and helpful, and we already have a number of texts kindly donated by them. We also have funding with which we are able to buy material. The collection will be separately catalogued within the Theatre Collection, and we hope to be able to make copies of the catalogue available on request. The Collection is open daily on week days. I am actively seeking help and support in building the collection. Please let me know of any Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 material you may be willing to lodge in the collection, in original or photocopy, or of any contacts who may be useful.

Feminist Review No 36, Autumn 1990 126 FEMINIST REVIEW

Please contact: Linda Fitzsimmons, Drama Department, University of Bristol, 29 Park Row, Bristol BS1 5LT; tel: 0272 303211.

Foundation Development Foundation Development was originally set up in 1988 with the expressed aim of giving financial support to projects organized by and for women in the developing world. The priority is to fund those projects which the more orthodox aid agencies are unable to support. FD is keen to encourage the growth of ‘networks’ between women with common interests, within a country or region, or perhaps between women working in the same industry in different parts of the world. Another aim is to enable women to learn and put into practice useful skills, some of which may not be easily accessible to them. For more information write to Foundation Development, 22 Freehold Terrace, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 4AB, Great Britain.

Call for papers The Feminist Foreign Language Teaching Collective (FFLTC) seeks manuscripts for a collection of essays on the relationship between feminism and foreign-language teaching at all levels of instruction (primary and secondary). Topics include, but are not limited to, teaching non-European languages (Asian, Slavic, African, Arabic); pidgins and creoles; black and hispanic English dialects and language standardization; bilingualism and biculturalism; Classics. Essays which also include analysis of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other forms of diversity are particularly encouraged. Deadline for manuscripts: 31 December 1990. Abstracts and letters of enquiry welcomed prior to that date. Typed manuscripts (in English) from 10–30 pages following MLA style may be submitted to either of the following addresses: Melanie Hawthorne, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843; Tamara Wiliams, Department of Romance Languages, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York 13323.

Pat Parker Poetry Award The Pat Parker Poetry Award of $250, funded by Woman in the Moon Press, is given for an outstanding poem by a Black, lesbian, feminist poet. The applicant’s name should not appear on the submitted poem. Application forms may be obtained from NWSA, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742–1325, USA. Applications must be postmarked no later than March 31, 1991.

National Women’s Studies Association 1991 Scholarships

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 The National Women’s Studies Association is pleased to announce its 1991 Scholarship offerings. NWSA will be awarding the Illinois-NWSA Manuscript Award for the best book-length manuscript in Women’s Studies as well as several scholarships and fellowships to graduate students and scholars of Women’s Studies. Two Pergamon-NWSA Scholarships will be awarded for graduate interdisciplinary work in Women’s Studies. One award will be awarded each for graduate work in Jewish Women’s Studies and in Lesbian Studies. Finally, NWSA will award a fellowship to a visiting NOTICEBOARD 127

Chinese student or scholar from the People’s Republic of China for research about women, national liberation movements, or areas that might have a special impact on the lives of women in China. For applications or further information, contact NWSA, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20842–1325, USA. Closing date for applications: 15 February 1991. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 128 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013

130 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 BACK ISSUES

1 Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh. 2 Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. 3 English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. 4 Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. 5 Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. 6 The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay. 7 Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson.

8 Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble. 9 Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. 10 Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. 132 FEMINIST REVIEW

11 SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. 12 ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Tèachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. 13 Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and the Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. 14 Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro- family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. 15 Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. 16 Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and The Family’, Caldwell. 17 MANY VOICES, ONE CHANT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection.

18 CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. 19 The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. 20 Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. BACK ISSUES 133

21 Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. 22 Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. 23 SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist- Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. 24 Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. 25 Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of De-radicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. 26 Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir.

27 WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt and Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. 28 FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & 134 FEMINIST REVIEW

Macleod Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. 29 ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA: Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey 30 CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. 31 THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill.

32 Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick.

Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 33 Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939) The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. 34 PERVERSE POLITICS: LESBIAN ISSUES Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s BACK ISSUES 135

Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the issue: Lesbian fashion for the 1990s, Blackman & Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. 35 Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Lani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 136 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013 138 Downloaded by [Central Uni Library Bucharest] at 01:03 08 October 2013