Editorial Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Voices

01 Editorial (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:33 pm Page 275

Editorial

Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Voices

If we browse the book catalogues of major international publishing houses from the 1990s, lesbian studies appears with a substantial number of titles. In the world of international publishing, lesbian studies counts as an area which has proved both its academic quality and its marketability. In contrast, when we take a look at the curricula and teaching programmes of the majority of European universities, quite a different picture emerges. Here, lesbian studies is a non-issue. Only very few universities announce courses, modules or programmes within the field. In European academia, lesbian studies is firmly on the margins. It seems as if the thought of an institutionalization of lesbian studies as a regular and normal part of academic activities is too ‘queer’, ‘monstrous’ and ‘alien’ for the majority of European universities. Keeping in mind this paradoxical gap between the attitudes of mainstream European academia and international publishing towards lesbian studies, this special issue seeks to contribute to the growing body of important lesbian scholarship. We hope that its acknowledgement by publishers will have an eye-opening effect and lead to more recognition within universities. Seen from the point of view of a women’s studies journal, it is important, in theoretical terms, to give ample space to lesbian studies and lesbian feminist perspectives. This will contribute to the deconstruction of hetero- normative assumptions which might appear even within women’s and gender studies. Whether based in a lesbian identity politics insisting on lesbian visibility in culture and society, or engaged in a lesbian queer deconstruction of essentializing and normative subject constructions, lesbian studies fulfils an important critical task as part of feminist studies. It stresses that a constant focus on the multilayered quality of oppression, on the intersectionality of power differentials and on the entanglement of

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 8(3): 275–279 [1350-5068(200108)8:3;275–279;018253] 01 Editorial (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:33 pm Page 276

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hetero-normativity and sexism is necessary in order to avoid a reductive approach to feminist politics and theorizing. As the authors in this special issue demonstrate, lesbian studies is also important as part of a critical political practice. The articles make a theoretical contribution to this practice by carving out conceptual and discursive spaces for emerging lesbian subjectivities and lesbian voices in culture and society. In several ways, the research that is presented on the following pages shows that the existence of discursive spaces for voicing lesbian subject positions is not an unproblematically given thing. Quite the contrary. It is something that demands struggle, negotiation and critique on many levels, politically as well as theoretically. Hetero- normativity and heterosexism are dominant and pervasive ideologies still interfering powerfully with lesbian lives in culture and society today, although with shifting emphases in different national settings. The special issue opens with two articles on state-regulated hetero- normativity. Taken together, they show how these regulations differ considerably in different national contexts. But they also stress that hetero- normativity, cross-nationally, is still a powerful state-supported institution. In the first article, Joanna Mizielinska discusses Polish nationalism and the post-Communist Polish Constitution, which are both heavily influ- enced by the Catholic Church. She explores what this means for lesbians in Poland. In a comparative discourse analysis of the latest version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the new Polish Constitution, the author demonstrates how effectively heterosexual marriage is insti- tutionalized in Poland. It is discursively constructed as the only ‘natural’ and ‘possible’ lifestyle. Moreover, self-denying motherhood is idealized as the most important national duty for women today. It goes without saying that these discourses reinforce strong homophobic trends in the country. But, added to this, the official nationalistic attitudes produce a special social stigmatization of lesbians. They are considered to be non- mothers and, therefore, to be betraying nationalist goals. Drawing on a study of lesbianism in Poland based on qualitative interviews with Polish lesbians, Joanna Mizielinska shows how the strong tendency to othering and social exclusion creates a vicious circle. It makes lesbians reticent to ‘come out’ and engage in lesbian activism, thereby reinforcing the silence. From Catholic Poland, the second article, by Mette Bryld, turns to official politico-legal discourses on lesbianism in Denmark, often labelled a ‘sexually liberal’ country that gives priority to equality issues. But even though Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages (in 1989), the Danish parliament did not hesitate to pass a highly discriminatory law on assisted reproduction in 1997. This law excluded lesbians and single women from access to medically-monitored, assisted reproduction. In a discourse analysis of the heated Danish debate on this issue, Mette Bryld demonstrates how lesbian mothers and homes 01 Editorial (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:33 pm Page 277

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without fathers were branded as ‘monstrous’ and ‘unnatural’ by a solid majority of Danish parliamentarians. They conflated their abhorrence of the ‘techno-monsters’, which many people link to the new biotechnolo- gies, with their homophobia and fear of ‘social monsters’. The author’s theoretical perspective is Foucauldian. She shows how the discriminatory law and the accompanying debate discursively gave birth to ‘the lesbian’ in a way that may be compared to the discursive emergence of ‘the (male) homosexual’, which, as analysed by Foucault, took place as part of the institutionalization of the hetero-normative Scientia Sexualis (science of sexuality) in the late 19th century. Mette Bryld points out that ironically a thought-provoking sexual division of labour is constructed by the official politico-legal and medical discourses. They created ‘the (male) homosexual’ as a ‘deviant sexual subject’, while giving ‘the lesbian’ the dubious honour of being officially recognized as an ‘unnatural mother’ (about 100 years later!). Radical renegotiations of lesbian motherhood and lesbian sexuality are the themes of the next two articles. Taking as her starting point a qualitative interview-based study of 20 lesbian families with children living in the Yorkshire region of the UK, Jacqui Gabb queries traditional discourses of love. She deconstructs the distinction between ‘mature’ (hetero)sexual love between adults and ‘instinctive’ (mother) love. Moreover, she points out that love and intimacy – between adults as well as between parents and children – are historical and cultural constructions. She stresses that they can be effectively deconstructed when viewed from the marginal position of lesbian mothers. Relationships within lesbian families cannot appear as pregiven in any traditional way, and this makes lesbian mothers privileged in the sense that they can much more easily disrupt the taken- for-granted assumptions and the images of ‘naturalness’ that adhere to traditional narratives of love, intimacy, monogamy, motherhood, procreation, sexual desire, gender and generation hierarchies within the family, etc. Lesbian family relationships and family practices are, to a high degree, results of a range of very deliberate choices (of lesbian lifestyle, of methods of procreation, of divisions of labour between birth mother, co-mother and other co-parents, etc.). This makes it more obvious that motherhood is something we do and not an inherent and essential attribute of the birth mother. Therefore, maternal love can be deconstructed as an elective, emotional investment in a child. What mainstream ideology will stigma- tize as the ‘unnaturalness’ of the lesbian family can, Jacqui Gabb argues, be looked upon as a strength and as a potential for opening spaces for pro- ductive negotiations of roles, emotions and functions. In the fourth article, Jeanne Hamming discusses the controversial issue of the dildo, which has provoked heated debates within lesbian com- munities, especially in the USA. What does lesbian desire for a dildo mean? Does it once and for all fixate lesbian sexuality on the phallocentric 01 Editorial (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:33 pm Page 278

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paradigm of phallic/castrated? Or are lesbian feminist recodings of the dildo as a pleasure-giving device possible? Since the use of dildos as part of lesbian sexual practices is not a prerogative of certain lesbian circles in the USA, the discussion needs to be broached in a European feminist journal as well. Jeanne Hamming negotiates a range of possible feminist and queer theory positions towards the use of dildos as part of lesbian sexual practices. Against this background, she shifts the debate away from the traps of phallocentrism, in which she thinks it has to a large extent been caught. She argues against the use of a psycholinguistic paradigm that codes the dildo in terms of absence and presence of the phallus. This always seems to end up inscribing the practices of dildo- using lesbians in a hetero-normative and phallocentric symbolic order. Instead, the author suggests a recoding of the dildo along the lines of Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and studies of post-human embodi- ment by US techno-culture theorist Katherine Hayles. Seen in this perspective, the dildo-using lesbian lovers can be re-coded as posthuman cyborg subjects. Performing as such, they no longer embody a static oscil- lation between a phallic and a castrated position. Instead, they become inscribed in the semiotic-material mutation patterns that are proliferating today as a consequence of the new techno-cultures and the more and more intimate bodily cohabitations with machines that these engender. In the fifth article, Kym Martindale renegotiates the lesbian body from a different angle. She re-reads Monique Wittig’s classic lesbian feminist novel, The Lesbian Body (1973). In a comparative close reading, she shows how Wittig rewrites the hetero-normative and phallocentric texts of classic anatomy teaching, such as those of late 15th-century scholar Andreas Vesalius, who set standards that still influence the medical textbook genre. This close reading illustrates how Wittig subverts the claim to objectivity and depersonalized scientific truth of the medical texts, and how she replaces their objectifying map of human (= male) bodies with subjectivized and desiring lesbian bodies. While acknow- ledging the subversive feminist potential of Wittig’s text, Kym Martindale is also, however, a critical reader. From a poststructuralist feminist position, she confronts the resemblances of the authorial positions of Vesalius and Wittig, who both claim normative authority for their body constructions, leaving no space for negotiation with readers. In this sense, Kym Martindale argues, Wittig’s novel closes rather than opens a discussion of ‘the lesbian body’. In spite of its subversive potential, Wittig’s text is, therefore, in need of deconstruction itself. The State of the Art section has three contributions: from Croatia by Sanja Sagasta, from Slovenia by Suzana Tratnik and from Serbia by Lepa Mladjenovic. Together they make visible important moments in the for- mation of lesbian movements in the region of the former Yugoslavia. Moreover, Lepa Mladjenovic tells both a personal and highly political 01 Editorial (jk/d) 2/7/01 1:33 pm Page 279

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story about the painful experiences of violence and fear caused by the war and the pervasive right-extremist, heterosexist, homophobic and ethno- centric macho nationalism which occupied all public spaces during the war. In the Open Forum section, Ailbhe Smyth presents a project in process, called ‘Sex, Sites and Scenes’. The purpose is to explore the dynamics of sexuality, space and place from a lesbian feminist queer perspective, with the city of Dublin as its focus. The project combines academic, literary and political activist approaches. The article is an experiment in poetic autoethnographic writing.

Nina Lykke