Beyond Marx and Freud

Introduction: A project in historical excavation

These are some notes I made getting ready to write the paper “Beyond Marx and Freud: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective” for the first lesbian theory session, “Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture,” at the Berkshire Women’s History Conference in 1977.

The paper itself was lost when I foolishly gave the only typed copy to editors of a feminist journal who begged for it after the session. I was devastated by the loss, the ongoing lack of the piece. I had the sense of speaking aloud ideas I had not heard before, a dangerous activity. I was gratified when Adrienne stood in the audience and said I had found my voice, and encouraged when Blanche told me in the rest room that I would be the next theorist, observing with some surprise, “You really ARE going beyond Marx and Freud!”

At the conference, lesbians used the session to introduce demands for change at the Berks, and called a meeting afterwards in the lobby. I lost friends, comrades, sisters in the fracas and splits of that epoch. At the following Berks I spoke about the life and death concerns of Virginia Woolf as a woman who loved women.

For decades I have wondered what I did say. The time for the session was shortened at the last minute and I mainly remember the panic of trying to condense at the podium what was already over-condensed on the page, and feeling I was failing. I’ve always wondered what I wrote for that controversial 77 session. Some of the ideas have showed up in my subsequent work; some in the work of others.

More than three decades later, Hadley Smith found two folders surviving in my file drawers and made a typescript from scraps. I had in my handwritten notes crossed things out, crammed things in the margins and between lines, indicated by a series of cryptic symbols what from the back ought to be inserted where on the front or vice versa—only those who composed in the days of carbons and typewriters and handwritten notes can appreciate how difficult was her task. Hadley faithfully indicated what had been crossed out, but most of the crossed-out material seemed worth reading to my curious if now-failing eyes, so it’s here without my youthful or contemporary efforts at composition, cutting, editing, revision. I’ve summarized each “paragra

Summaries of Beyond Marx and Freud

by *paragraph

• Culture requires need to heal

• Commonsense is an ideological construct imposed as reality, which acts like poison.

The physical and psychical are not separate.

• mystique of public/private.

Hidden cost to me as public good.

Escaping this protective enforcement system is seen as bad.

• Sharing new reality increases trust in it thus ability to act without patterns of oppressive, exploitative system.

Need options that empower to avoid being merely reactive. To release creative force need life-sustaining alternatives, help of others, in community

• As my standpoint changes, what I see changes; then what is possible changes.

How we see effects what is seen

• What we have in common is hidden by taboos of culture to divide us.

These taboos structure the social/sexual system.

• Social behavior appears biological in closed system.

Validated by divine or biological destiny.

• ”Male/female” and “dyke/faggot” are social constructs.

Need to examine historical development of using biology/nature to make social attributes “inherent.”

Need to analyze historical stages and social functions of these claims.

• What looks like a state of being is a form of social organization requiring collusion of entire society.

Functions of ideal/material constructs of race, sex, class are interrelated.

Power exists as relation among people.

Racism and sexism sustain social norms; prostitution sustains the institution of marriage; homosexuality and incest sustain the institution of heterosexual marriage and family.

Pressure to conform reveals people don’t just obey.

• Denial runs the system.

We don’t know what would happen if heterosexuality were not compulsory.

• Homosexuality acts like a hidden motor which drives the culture.

• Compulsory heterosexuality underlies religion, political, economic theories and systems sustaining heterosexual marriage.

Need not renounce behaviors relegated to “opposite sex.”

• Unequal control turns mutual need into basis of exploitation and persuasion.

Male control as female protection.

• ”Battle of the sexes” breeds civil war, rape as domestic and foreign policy, whose activities have functions and can be resisted.

• This destructive system is raping the earth and its peoples.

The rational, white, conquering is normative.

As women we must resist the Protection Racket.

• Loving women is revolutionary.

Vs Freud et al putting men at the center, need to put women at the center.

First woman everyone (not just males) loves is the mother.

Mother is at center of life-sustaining system at present contained by imperialist, racist structures.

• Female incest unthinkable (while Freud posits female/male incest as basis of human culture and civilization).

• Repression of female is training for subservience.

• Needs of family system scorched into us.

• Powerless mothers act powerfully over children.

• Social relations are learned sexual power system labeled private, and non-kin male-dominated structures that reinforce it are labeled “public.”

Capitalism is the system of appropriations at the expense of human needs and life-sustaining systems of nurturance, socially necessary work for the entire society.

The nature of power and relations of power are obscured. Stealing, exploiting and/or benefitting is considered the prerogative of men in the public sphere. But these benefits are appropriated and enjoyed by private individuals (hidden in this public domain) while the socially necessary labor of reproducing and sustaining the human race done by women is called private and not worthy of payment. Thus public hides function of private and private hides function of public: “men’s work” dominates “women’s” work.

• Capitalism both encourages and destroys social forms of gender organization.

• People (not just men) “marry” their mothers.

Maybe lesbians too enact an incest taboo that Freud attributed only to males.

• Lesbianism is not irrelevant to social change.

We are beginning to release the power of oppression—the hidden and dark becoming strong and beautiful. <comments />