View source for Historical Development of Modern Lesbian Utopian Discourse talk

Introductory Sentence:  This is a transcription of a tape probably made at a community mini-course or book store event (Womankind Books perhaps, in Long Island).

The historical development of modern lesbian utopian discourse focusing on the handling of taboo, heterosexism and racism, and raising questions about the women’s movement.


TUCKER FARLEY:
…put them on the board, and then we could know what time they were written in and… know the most about them, like which ones were at war with which ones… and just society… and details like that. But um, there is no blackboard, and I don’t have a sense really of who has read what of everything that we will be talking about. So I’m very open to your letting me know whether you need more information from me (Audience member asks, “Will you read to us?”) as we go. Yes. (Audience is talking amongst itself, settling in.) Yes, no I wouldn’t mind at all. The things that may come up in this discussion are starting chronologically back… (microphone being adjusted) …and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Gilman’s utopian novel Herland was published in 1915); Virginia Woolf’s discussion of The Outsiders’ Society in Three Guineas, which was published in 1936, written as Hitler was making his way to power; Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, ’69 in France, ’71 in English in this country; 1975, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man; I should make note that Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time was published in this country in 1976. In 1978 there were a spate of writers who produced works relevant to the discussion, and it was the work in which… it the year in which Gearhart published The Wanderground; it was also the year that Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature came out, and Audre Lorde’s The Dream of a Common Language came out, when Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology… there were several… Audre Lorde… who were joining that discourse. In 1979… also 1978 was the year that Charnas, Suzy McKee Charnas – who is now a lesbian – published a book called Motherlines, a utopian novel. 1979 Donna Young published Retreat: As It Was, and in 1980 two books came out: Elizabeth Lynn’s Northern Girl (which is not strictly a utopian novel… it might come up in the discourse), and Rochelle Singer’s The Demeter Flower. In 1981 Gloria Anzaldúa was publishing her vision of el mundo zurdo, most accessible, I think, to the public in This Bridge Called My Back, which is an excellent book; it’s not a utopian work… I recommend it very much and I think that her discussion about el mundo zurdo are relevant to the points that we are going to be making in this discussion, too.

(Microphone is adjusted. Fades in to audience member asking question about Slenker Drake.) I don’t know, which way did she… let me check, how she… she used both names, and she’s listed differently in The National Biography and in The Library of Congress. Drake Slenker. (Audience member asks, “And what did she write?”) She wrote a series of works… actually I wasn’t going to talk too much about her, but she wrote The Darwinians: A Domestic Radical Romance, she wrote John’s Way: A Domestic Radical Story, she wrote The Truth Seeker Office, she wrote Little Lessons for Little Folks, she wrote The Handsomest Woman in 1885, and she started… actually, I’ll just say a little about her now, and then not too much later… she started out pioneering, really, for the reintroduction for 19th century women of the use of contraceptives, and this development led her – really inspired her – to the advocacy of free love at the beginning of her career, that later on she thought the better of free love, and began to realize that it maybe wasn’t so… safe for women in conditions of 19th century America, and so she came to see intercourse with men – sexual intercourse with men – as really only necessary for human reproduction. And she ended her life, finally, by deciding that even that wasn’t good for women, and her utopian vision included the need for parthenogenesis to reproduce the human race. So she actually (laughs) made quite a transition in her thinking, and was background for Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. 

So I said I was going to talk about lesbian visions of utopia, and I said I was going to talk about discourse… what else did I say I was going to talk about? “The historical development of modern lesbian utopian discourse focusing on the handling of taboo, heterosexism and racism, and raising questions about the women’s movement.” (Chuckles. Chuckling also from audience.) That’s it.

I should tell you that the person who is talking to you first started trying to talk in public as a lesbian in the mid ‘50s. I remember writing an essay in high school about BJ, whom I loved, and going to the library and finding all kinds of references to support my essay, and they all came from the Greeks, it seemed. Well, I had been reading the Greeks, in expurgated versions, so I didn’t know that they were homosexuals, these men, that I was quoting from. And I didn’t know what the word was, and I didn’t know any language, I didn’t know any vision, I had never heard of the phenomenon or the concept. I was simply writing an essay about love, loving my girlfriend. And we were all supposed to read an essay or short story or poem in class, and enter it into The Atlantic monthly writing contest, because I went to the same high school that Sylvia Plath did, and she had come before me, and she had won, and so now we were all supposed to come afterwards and do the same thing. (Audience laughs.) When she wrote Daddy, I knew what she was talking about. (Audience chuckles.) But here, in 1955, ’56, I said I wanted to read my essay on love, and my English teacher said no, I should read my short story. Well, my short story was… had the central character as some young man who found significance in the mud puddle of life, or something like that, and I didn’t really want to read that story, so I said, “Well I want to read my essay,” and he said no, I shouldn’t read my essay, and I asked him, “Why not?” and he wouldn’t tell me why not, so I read my essay. And I stood up at the podium in front of the class, (Audience member laughs.) like this, with my essay, and I started in full of enthusiasm and joy, because the essay had really been written out of love, which was inspiring to me, and I wanted to tell everyone about it. And so I started out reading about my experiences, and the things that I had read, and sharing it, and found it harder… and harder… to speak… and that was when I learned about the power of silence. That the silence from that room came reaching out to strangle my tongue, and I stopped in the middle of a sentence, not knowing why, understanding that I should not be reading that essay. And I looked around. No one said anything. I sat down. No one said anything. The class went on. And no one ever said anything.

Recently, I was up for promotion at the school where I teach, which is the City University school, and I was asked… I had done the work on Virginia Woolf, who was called “crazy,” and was told that she couldn’t have children because it was… (microphone adjusted) …doctors that she was seeing were using the eugenics theories and the anti-woman theories about what a woman “was” that were popular at the turn of the century, and the time was one of increasing suspicion of women who love women. And, of course, she was doing this “masculine” work of writing. So I was proposing a radically different understanding of her place as a creative writer from what the general canon had proposed, seeing her as a lunatic. And that had placed me, according to Quentin Bell, in the “lunatic fringe.” And I was asked, by the promotion committee of my university, how did I think that I could do research as a lesbian? Meaning, of course, that research is objective, and being a lesbian is biased, and I couldn’t do research if I was a lesbian. This was 1982 (laughter, exclamations from audience) at the University of New York.

So, it’s of course not surprising that come to look at the stories and puns and ideas written by people who don’t come up with creations that fit in to what’s seen as “history” and “reality,” because in my life, “history” and “reality” have often told me that I didn’t exist, that I was wrong; I was in a Marxist-Feminist study group for eight years in which my sisters told me that lesbianism was utopian. (And I knew what “utopian” was in that discourse you count me in that discourse and… you can’t get there from here.) That’s what that meant at the time. So… I knew that… I was being told that I was “conducting unrealistic experiments,” that I was “escapist” from the world. And, so, that’s the person who is talking to you today. And you can take what I have to say (microphone adjusting) with grains of salt because I am being subversive in looking at what has been defined as “history” and what has been defined as “reality” in my work. So the books that I am going to be talking about, and the works that I am going to be talking about, and the experiments are actually raising questions about discourse, about who gets to say what is possible. What agreements do we make that this is possible, but that’s not possible? That this is real, but that’s unreal? Who gets to say so? How do we arrive at the power by which we agree that they get to say so, and that they’re right? Or who’s right and who’s wrong about it, or who’s crazy or who isn’t crazy. Who believes whom, and under what conditions? And, if our language is a system of articulating symbols by which we come to agree at certain things look a certain way, what encourages us to agree? And what enforces those agreements? Now, I’m not going to deal with all of those questions; those are the questions that do underlie the discourse, and I raise them for you as we move into a discussion of breaking out of “history” and “reality” as they have been defined. 

In 1975, Joanna Russ wrote in The Female Man:


Bringing my fantasies into the real world frighten me very much. It’s not that they were bad in themselves, but they were unreal, and therefore culpable. To try to make real what was unreal was to mistake the very nature of things. It was not a sin against conscience – which remained genuinely indifferent during the whole affair – but against reality. And, of the two, the latter is far more blasphemous. It’s the crime of creating one’s own reality, of “preferring one’s self,” as a good friend of mine says. I knew it was an impossible project.


Now here, Joanna Russ is not talking about breaking out of history, she’s not talking about creating the utopian vision that is in that book – of Whileaway, inhabited by Janet, Whileaway and Janet – she’s talking about actually becoming a lesbian in this world… in this life. And she’s using the understandings and the language that imply that there is a central identity and “the other”; the kind of understanding that Simone de Beauvoir accepted and used in The Second Sex, in defining how women have been seen as “the other.” And in The Female Man, we find the same kind of tension because, of all of the “J” characters in that novel – each one of whom is part of every woman, really – we find a different perspective on that assumption that patriarchal definitions are the definitions of what is “reality.” She has all of those characters in tension with each other: there is the one who is sort of passive, and accepting of her feminine self in thinking that maybe women know a little bit more than men, but she is limited in her vision of what is possible, and yet she doesn’t like it, she isn’t happy, she’s dissatisfied… she is the white girl of the ‘50s – Jeannine; and then there’s Joanna, who tries to be just as good as a man, and ends up acting like them; and then there’s Jael, who’s FURIOUS, who has claws and who scratches and who is at war, and she lives in Womanland at war with Manland, and actually kills and is quite embattled; and then there’s Janet, who’s beyond all that, she’s the lesbian from Whileaway who doesn’t even have to bother fighting any more, you know, she’s so far beyond it (which, of course, enrages Joanna). (Audience laughs.)

Most people think that this is what the book is about, and, yet, if we look at that novel, we see that actually the main dramatic tension is not only between those women and how they relate to men, but it’s also… that’s the struggle of another little voice to assert… insert itself, and to appear, and to become functional within that novel, and that is Laur, who finally comes out as a lesbian with Joanna at the end of the book, and begins to create the opening for another paradigm of struggle that isn’t necessarily confined to heterosexist parameters. She kisses… Joanna kisses Laur while she reads, and she expects that Laur will rebuke her, and tell her that this is not the thing to do, and the eternal order will reassert itself (as it had to, of course). She says, “But she let me do it. She blushed and pretended not to notice. I can’t describe to you how reality tore itself wide open at that moment; it’s like falling off a cliff, standing astonished in mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible, anything is possible.” (Audience laughs.) “Nothing that happened afterward was as important to me as that first awful wrench of the mind,” she says.

Now, that novel may be very much embattled, stance, the lesbian that emerges is very blonde, blue-eyed… version… but it was written in 1975, or it was published in 1975 when there were very few models in the world of a utopian vision or a woman-centered vision which had created a… a theor… a sense that the world could be different and actually portrayed it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman had published her novel Herland way back in… before 1920, in 1915 to 1917… and in her novel, Herland, there are no men, at all, due to some “accident,” (Audience laughs.) that just happened to have happened 2,000 years ago, and the women, of course, were forced to carry on, and they did, and they created this wonderful society which was just and fair and had its central principle, The Standards of Motherhood. If you were really going to nurture the children and have them grow up to be whole human beings, then you would have a wonderful society. But, in that society, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of sexuality. Now, it’s my theory that Gilman was probably relying a lot on the 19th century understandings amongst women of that so-called “woman’s fear” about affection between women. In the 19th century, affection between women was much more accepted as long as it wasn’t considered as an alternative to heterosexual arrangement. And, if there was no phallus involved in the affection that was expressed, or even in the passion that was shared between women, then it wasn’t sex. Because what was sex? Sex was reproductive. So, if there were wonderful, romantic friendships and expressions of erotic intimacy between women, as long as they did not provide alternatives to heterosexual positioning of women in society, then they were often ignored or even encouraged. And, so, while modern readers of today may read Herland and may wonder, “Well, what happened to sex,” readers at the turn of the century may not have felt that lack… may have had more of an understanding that, “Well of course those women were… pleased with each other.” (Audience laughs.) After all, they reproduced through parthenogenesis. And she, too, went back to the concept of parthenogenesis as a way of reproducing the human race. So, that… what… sexuality may have been a taboo in that book, but I have a feeling what was far more taboo was to create a world in which men had no place at all. And, that didn’t happen again for some time, really until the second wave of feminism.

If we look at the 19th century we can see that three things were happening. One was the extermination of the Native American population, and that population had often included, too, the tradition of the berdache, and institutionalized forms of cross dressing and assumption of roles which allowed women to marry women, for example. And if you read some of the selections about some of those women in Katz’s Gay American History, you can see that they performed the functions of peace-keepers and healers; that they had a strong institutional function, they were respected within that society; when that society was challenged by white European society, it was challenged in such a way that it did not and could not sustain that original understanding, and those women were exterminated and so were the men. Well, of course, the whole population was at risk.

The Sanctifactionist Sisters in Texas had decided that in order to live a life more truly in line with what God told them to live, they would have to address sexual services from men because it really skewed their existence in a way that was not appropriate to the “good life.” And, so, they did withdraw their sexual services from men, and the men began to beat them. In protection and defiance, the women pulled themselves together and left town and established The Commonwealth of Women in Belton, Texas in the middle of the 19th century, and said Jesus told them to do it. (Audience laughs.) They maintained their community of women right through the first half of the 20th century; I mean it finally died out in Washington, D.C. Their stance was a separatist stance, but it was almost as though it was necessitated by the backlash, that the men had forced them to withdraw, to protect themselves in order to create their vision of how to live a just – and Godly – life.

By the end of the century, with the strong drive for the abolition of slavery, and negro suffrage, and women’s suffrage, in that century, we find that an enormous backlash was occurring as women moved into the sphere of higher education, and the sphere of public work in the managerial areas, in the professions, they became doctors for the first time, and lawyers… they were taking over the white male managerial class roles, and it was precisely in that period of time that the medical profession, the legal profession, were called in to define that behavior as “aberrant,” “masculinized,” “unfeminine,” and the backlash hit all women, but it hit lesbian women the hardest. So that just at the time when what had been the minor phenomenon of “Boston marriages” amongst women, or, had been relations amongst women who were married to men, just at the time when those could move into alternative economic, social and political arrangements for women to heterosexual marriage, we find lesbianism being self-defined, and we find it also being defined as “deviant,” and being punished as “deviant” in a very strong way. So that when Virginia Woolf came to some analysis and understanding of her experience, which is very vastly coded in Mrs. Dalloway where she talks about Mrs. Dalloway loving Sally Seton, and then she fractures that experience from that of Septimus Smith and Evans and their love relationship, and has the man in the book go crazy, and directs her attention against the doctors who lock him up… she’s really talking about having been locked up herself, but in a way so that other people won’t know it too much. And, she wrote later about “the rescuers” that Charlotte Perkins Gilman talked about in The Yellow Wallpaper, that Virginia Woolf was subjected to… and made an analysis of society in Three Guineas which said that since women are already excluded from so much of patriarchal power, that what we have to do is constitute ourselves as an outsider society, and withdraw our support from the patriarchy. Now she didn’t mention lesbians in that book; she doesn’t want to get locked up and put into a “rescuer” again. But, she did provide a political analysis of the system, and talk about women as a class fighting patriarchy (even though she recognized, certainly, that there were class differences).

On the other side of the ocean, we find the development of a whole different form of discourse in music with Ma Smith and Bessie… no… Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who were singing about the bulldaggers that they went out with on a Saturday night, and living a very different life from what Renée Vivien and  Natalie Barney were doing, trying to establish a colony in… of Sapphists on Lesbos, and that was, too, a class difference. But for the most part – although a century before this Margaret Fuller had said that male and female differences were not real – we don’t find very much evidence surviving in the culture of visions of utopia, or of women-centered societies, or even of lesbians. It wasn’t until the second wave of feminism in… at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s, with Jill Johnston calling for “lesbian nation,” and Shulamith Firestone talking about having babies through test tubes, and Judy Grand saying that she wanted women… and how she wanted women was she wanted them, as very few women had wanted her, to own and control and run the city that they lived in – that’s what she meant, that’s how she defined “wanting,” in a very radical, revolutionary way, seconded by people like Pat Parker and others… that you get the reemergence of the possibility that we might find something like a lesbian culture, a lesbian voice, or any kind of a vision for alternative notions of society. The questions had been real questions at the turn of the century, but somehow they had been blocked out, culturally, up until the beginning of the second wave of feminism.

In France, we find Monique Wittig raising the taboo question of… about male-female antagonism, by having women go to war against men. Now, she didn’t write a realistic novel; she wrote a novel the way painters paint those paintings, you know, a little dot here, a little dot there, a little dot here, a little dot there, and you stand back and look at it and you see a pattern. So she was able to, at the same time, denounce women’s culture, a separatist kind of lesbian vision, which was very empowering to the women, as saying that it was fragmented and it wasn’t necessary, and to create it, to build it, to call on it, to use it, and to go to war with it. So her non-linear structure in the novel allowed her to both create this vision, and then to say, “Well, that’s not all, we can’t just stay with that,” so she was able to have it both ways. She believed that paradise existed in the shadow of the sword, and she connected revolution and change not only with guns, but also with language and with a cultural basis for empowering women. She saw women’s power as “witch power,” she said:


They speak together of the threat that they have constituted toward authority, they tell how they burned on pyres to prevent them from assembling in the future, they were able to command tempests, to sink fleets, to destroy armies. They had been mistresses of poisons, of the winds, of the will; their conjoint power has menaced hierarchies, systems of governments’ authorities. Their knowledge has competed successfully with the official knowledge to which they had no access. It has challenged it, found it warranting, threatened it, made…

END OF TRACK. SOME WORDS LOST.

So she is able to pull off that kind of vision of the chanting, warring woman, and then to say that, at the same time, it wasn’t enough. But, she did call attention to what language we can trust. What discourse we can rely on to describe reality. She said:


They say we must disregard all the stories relating to those of them who have been betrayed beaten seized seduced carried off violated and exchanged as violent precious merchandise. They say we must disregard the statements we have been compelled to deliver contrary to our opinion and in conformity with the codes and conventions of the cultures that have domesticated us. They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.


And I think that, particularly for white women who had felt that their inherited culture and identity was defined in a particularly intimate way with the patriarchy, that the act of separating from male myth, from male definitions of power, from male culture, white male myth culture and definitions of power, language, traditions, morals… the act of separating from that and from forms of self-expression that came ready-made available to women was a very important one – a very tortured one, and a very important one. And perhaps it is out of this context that we can understand the impetus for that very violent strategy that was proposed here and in some of the works to follow. Olga Broumas said that “we must not use forms of self-expression that are self-destructive” and believe that we had to go back into the body almost as an archaeological dig to find the sources of our power, and that women’s empowerment with women was encoded in… well, I guess… I would look at it and say sex, although she wouldn’t use that term that broadly. But… in that sexual communion that women would find a kind of empowerment. And she said, “I am a woman committed to/a politics of transliteration, the methodology/of a mind/stunned at the suddenly/possible shifts of meaning – for which/like amnesiacs/in a ward on fire, we must/find words/or burn.” There were no words, yet, and Rich talked about “the dream of a common language.”

Now in this discourse that developed, we find a linking between women and nature: that both were victims of men and patriarchy; that just as nature has been raped, women have been raped. And there was a strong identity that grew up in the literature that developed out of this period identifying out of that position as the victim. Nature is victim, woman is victim, woman and nature as allies. And, in a sense, it really did two things: on the one hand, it provided a source of women getting together again, seeing what we had to offer, what were the sources of our strengths… as Audre Lorde said, “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, it is deep. …For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light in which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry,” Lorde said, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

At the same time, we also find that women were accepting, in a sense, the terms of the oppression that had been so odious. We had been told that women were “the other,” and so, in a certain sense, we accepted that indoctrination of “the other,” and attempted to love it and make it the source of our strength. So that on the one hand while we were in the process of transforming what had been thought of as a weakness into our strength, we were also [??? and] accepting that very “otherness” which we had seen as so oppressive on the one hand. So that the literature and the culture that comes out of this period is full of tensions and contradictions that are very difficult to bring to the surface and articulate. And, which some of the utopian works do, by placing… making geographical places stand for cultural places. Let me give you an example. In The Wanderground we find that the women who live in the city – the City Women – are looked at as slave women. Slave women who have given in to men. And there’s very little hope held out for those City Women; they are treated almost contemptuously. The Hill Women in the country who have escaped are the heroic, strong, Amazonian women. Now, Gearhart doesn’t say, “these are straight women, and these are lesbians,” but… (laughter in audience) there is a problem, here. Does it mean that these women over here really do have contempt for these women over here? Are these women over here really slave women? Are we willing to say that? If we’re willing to say that, what happens to the radical feminist notion of women as a class? And, certainly, women of color have come along and raised these great questions about lesbian separatist visions and have challenged them and said, “wait a minute, these are elitist, and we cannot all of us live this way, particularly as long as there is racism in this country,” which forces Black men and Black women, for example, into a unity that is, again, imposed by white racism.

So the questions are difficult questions, they are problematic questions, they are touchy questions… what do you do about the fact that most war has been waged by men? Are men inherently violent creatures. When we look at these novels, we see that in almost all of them, we have war between men and women. In The Female Man… in Gearhart it’s subdued because nature has taken away the power of guns in the countryside, but nonetheless the threat of it is implicit… in Charnas’ Motherlines, she has the women gathering together: The Femmes, who are the escaped slaves from the city, learning from the Amazonian Horse Women how to be strong and fight, and they go off… they gallop off into the sunset at the end of the novel to rescue the other slave women from the city and provoke a war with men – which may wipe out all the women in the country, or it may save all women, all womankind. I mean, obviously this is a schematic, sort of sci-fi depiction, but it’s a place where that war is dramatized in a forum which looks like realistic literature even though it uses the convention of scientific literature. Donna Young goes back into the past and tries to describe how could women have ever given up the matriarchy and gotten into such terrible shape? And she imagines some futurist-type energy invading matriarchical societies, and women invade in a warlike fashion, and it so happens that there is a genetic mutation and there’s one poor child who has this dangling thing in front of him, and he’s malevolent and evil. I mean, on the one hand it’s sort of hokey-ridiculous, again, a sci-fi convention; on the other hand, where did that aggression come from? And what do you do about it? In this case, the women in the matriarchical society arm themselves when they’ve been peaceful for millennia! And, in one hour, they decide to go to war, and the whole society and civilization is destroyed. In Rochelle Singer’s The Demeter Flower, she posits a future in which the nuclear holocaust has already occurred, we’ve gone back to a sort of medieval civilization; people are living in little enclaves trying to survive: there’s a women’s enclave trying to survive, and the mothers and the daughters are bitchy, crabbing at each other, can’t get along together, the younger ones finally leave, the older ones feel threatened, and we don’t know whether or not they’re going to be able to go out and establish a new society without being discovered, or whether they’re going to bring, again, the downfall on the old.

So all of these works – do you notice? – betray an incredible tension about unity amongst women. What is the basis of unity amongst women? What do they do about the differences between us? How do we deal if we are so divided in how we deal with men? How do we deal with ourselves as women? So the lesbian utopian writing that occurred from 1975 to 1981 was really so absorbed in these questions… the way that Gearhart handles it in The Wanderground – the tension between women of color and white women – is she has two women of color moving away from the other women for a while and discussing “should we stay.” And one woman says, “Well, we have to stay, otherwise it isn’t safe.” And they haven’t quite made up their mind, and they go down and they go to sleep, and that just happens to be the time in which nature takes the power of men away from them… from their pricks and their guns that afternoon… and they don’t quite know it yet. They wake up, and there are two men who are out on a gang-bang… and they’re going to rape these women… and just before the rape is accomplished – even though the men are having difficulty doing it, because nature’s taken away their power – the rest of the women show up and rescue the two dark-skinned women. And, so, the two dark-skinned women are very happy to see them because they’ve been rescued, and they all go off and live happily ever after. Well, you know, this doesn’t deal with the issues that the women had been discussing in the first place about whether they should stay and why they were even raising those questions. So, on the one hand it raises the issue, apparently deals with it, but doesn’t really deal with it. And I say we don’t deal with these issues until we do deal with these questions, that they’re just going to go on. They’re going to go on and they’re going to create the feminism that they have to create and want to create, and we’re going to be the ones who are left by the wayside (and I say “we” as a white woman). 

Most of the fiction assumes that class relations will simply be abolished – that once the women get it together, to fight for equality and justice, that they will be unified. Now, Elizabeth Lynn in Northern Girl does not depict a utopian society that does not have class relations. She goes back to a mythical place and time. What she does is different: she has women doing the same kinds of things as men can do, so some of her heroes… like there’s a woman police chief, you know… and one the one hand it’s a wonderful read, it’s a wonderful book, to see a woman who’s just able to do all of those things – be strong and vital and whatever – on the other hand, there’s still these incredible class divisions in the society. And that book isn’t really a utopian fiction, it’s more of a science-fiction novel, which is fun to read, but doesn’t really propose an alternative mode for how society could be if we “did it right.” 

Now, if what I’m seeing is really there, yet, there is, on the one hand, there is a gathering of strength from looking at… just as there was a “Black is beautiful” movement that turned around the negative otherness of white and Black people in the ‘60s… if there is a “female is beautiful” movement, and a sense of female superiority, that is empowering on the one hand, and, I raise the question, is it also an entrapment on the other? Do we really want to continue celebrating the biological basis of our differences? If we look at how race, for example, has been used as a so-called “biological difference,” historically, it’s not too happy a picture. We may be at a time in which we’re being forced to look at strategic questions in a very hard light, so that we’re on the one hand reactive, we are only reactive. How can we even visage creative, alternative possibilities? 

In The Wanderground, what finally is the tension in that novel, I think, is the tension between the gay men – or “The Gentles,” as they’re called – and the Amazonian Hill Women. It’s not really a novel about women facing men (although on the surface it seems to be a bit… on the surface level, again, that seems to be what that novel is about). I’m suggesting that what really is interesting and funny about that novel is the challenge to female superiority. The assumption at the basis of radical feminism about female superiority gets very close to being challenged in that novel. The men have called for the women to come and meet with them, and the women argue about it – they never trust the men, at all. And the men don’t have the same powers, the same psychic intuitive powers in tune with nature that the women have. And some of them decide they aren’t going to meet with the men. Let the men educate themselves. If they can’t, they’ll die. Tough. (laughter in audience)

And, in a way, that stance forms a very positive function of showing that men have been leeches and parasites on the work of women; that women’s work has sustained and kept men very dependent. It’s a beautiful revelation of that vision, that truth, and it’s a service that Gearhart reveals that to us. But, at the meeting, of the women who are willing to go, the confrontation is over whether or not the women can at all trust the powers that the men are developing. They too are developing a form of psychic powers through discipline – not through nature, so they don’t have the biological equipment to be as good as women, but they’re trying. And one of the women is scornful of them, and unwilling to accept them and to believe that they could ever use it in a good way. She says, “Nonviolent? Never. You know what will happen. You will use your new power, all right. You’ll use it, perfect it, manufacture it, package it, sell it, and tell the world that it’s clean and new because it comes from a different breed of men. But it’s just another fancy prick to invade the world with. And you’ll use it because you can’t really communicate, you can’t really love!” That’s the definition of “maleness” in that novel. “Of course it’s not an enfoldment. You couldn’t enfold and anti-encriptment to the middle of your hand,” Andros did not flinch, but her words had reached him. He spoke quietly. “You still want it all, don’t you? Just like every woman since the dawn of time. You demand your holy isolation from men so you can develop your unique female powers. But you are threatened to the core by the suggestion that we might have equally unique powers. Don’t even whisper that they might be equally valuable.” And he goes on and talks about how the women want the men out of their lives so they won’t have to deal with their energy, but that really they would perish tomorrow if The Gentles weren’t out there on rotation helping protect this nonviolent space in the world. And he says, “Face it, Amazon women – we’re not just your protectors any more. We begin, just barely begin, to live without violence. To learn what you started learning long ago. Very slowly we are following a healthy hope, a life-giving possibility, a pathway that will make us your strong allies when the day of reckoning comes. You have to trust us now, lady. You may sicken at that thought, but you’ve got no choice.” Now, the language that Gearhart gives to him is condescending language, and it sort of prejudices the reader against him, and keeps us being very suspicious of him.

The argument, however, has surfaced finally into that discourse, and presents a very strong challenge to the kinds of female superiority… that concept that women really are better than men, we really could do it better if we had the run of society. If we made up a new society – and we’re pretty confident that if we made it up, it would be better, aren’t we? (laughter) We don’t want to give that vision up. We don’t trust that they would do it as well, maybe, or even, maybe, we don’t trust that they’re beginning to do it as well. We take a look at their language and their behavior, and we see that they aren’t there, yet. So where does that leave us? Where does that leave the writers? Where Gearhart ends is with a compromise, really, a sort of separate-but-equal posture of openness – very wary openness – to the possibility of moving beyond those sort of biologically defined categories of social behavior.

Finally, if we look at Gloria Anzaldúa’s vision in this world, and she’s doing other works now, which hopefully will be out soon, we see that what she’s doing is really challenging not only those classifications, but she’s challenging the whole classification that “The Movements” have used, have worked on for a long time, the divisions between what we are seeing as the materialist movements (which says that this material reality is the real reality, and we have to pick up a gun in order to change it), and the more idealist philosophies (which talk about the psychic power and the power of consciousness, the power of culture, and say that when we look at how reality is constructed, it’s constructed by what we see, how we see, how we talk, what we see, what we’re willing to accept, what we’re not willing to accept, and that that those are relational, intangible forms)… and those two forms of movement have been dividing the women’s movement. Some people call themselves “political,” some people call themselves “spiritual,” they may or may not see themselves as coming together… but Gloria Anzaldúa has called for a joining together in This Bridge Called My Back. She says, “Ultimately, we must struggle together.” Although she recognizes the right of autonomous third-world feminist movements to form, she says:


Together we form a vision which spans from the self-love of our colored skins, to the respect of our foremothers who kept the embers of revolution burning, to our reverence for the trees – the final reminder of our rightful place on this planet. The change evoked on these pages is material as well as psychic. Change requires a lot of heat. It requires both the alchemist and the welder, the magician and the laborer, the witch and the warrior, the myth-smasher and the myth-maker. Hand in hand, we brew and forge a revolution.


I’m going to leave it there, asking maybe: Will it work? Does it make sense? Now you talk to me. Or, whatever questions have come up.

[AUDIENCE Q&A BEGINS.]



Transcribed in May 2010 by Hadley Smith. Brooklyn, NY.