2010 Response to Protection Racket

Reading “The Protection Racket”: 33 Years Later September 21, 2010

Mixed responses reading this. I expected some of the work I did on the protection racket in the relations between men and women. Here I apparently move without developing the move from male-female to female-female relations under the reign of heterosexism. In the former the male is privileged, in the latter the straight woman is privileged, at the outset. But then I glide into what I suspect was an impetus for this piece – a deep hurt – the relation between a lesbian protecting her relations with straight women, and the lesbian risk-taker in truth- telling from a lesbian perspective no longer dominated by the dominant model. To those maintaining the dominant model she is heard when discussing feminist theory as being beside the point, having a hidden agenda. Those were the accusations Joan made against me. And when I explained that the lesbian perspective appeared as beside The Point because it was supposed to remain subordinate to The Point, and we were meant to stay on The Point, they pounced on me. It was the pounce of the other lesbian in the circle that wounded me. She screeched my name, in a tone that said I was confirming their worst fears, and was persisting in being Unreasonable; under fierce personal attack I had lost my one hope of an ally, I had lost “in public” a relation of love. I had been deserted under fire. I felt betrayed. My beloved sister. I left the group, which I had begun with Alice, a Marxist-feminist group to read Marx (we had gotten through all 3 volumes of Capital by now) and rethink theory in the light of feminism. After I left no one from the group, which had been meeting for years, said a word to me. In order to make their treatment and criticism of me right in their own eyes they had to sustain their version, their charge: my thinking, my sort, was Beside The Point. Now we know this epoch as the gay – straight splits. For me most of the wrenching tears in the fabric of our community, these splits, came between me and other progressive women, the women I thought were my sisters for life: we were going to change the world together. But it was that Marxist theory that held them together as much as their ties to heterosexual feminism. And B had just entered the group, years after we began it, the more traditional Marxian for decades afterward. And R, my wonderful sister at the college, who married a leftist expert in imperialism and who accused me as a lesbian of being imperialist because the university took 17 weeks to deal with the proposed WSP lesbian literature course while spending only a couple of hours of the women’s history course. In a women’s studies meeting, with faculty, students, staff all working together—a new model for the university—she made this accusation. She was a fairly traditional Marxist and wanted class to be the main focus; but didn’t she see that to accuse a lesbian of being imperialist depicted the most vulnerable feminist as the most powerful? Had she just swallowed her husband’s terminology and spewed it out against me, with whom she had worked for years, without seeing its absurdity? The class analysis it seemed would persist in providing a filtering screen through which the world was to be interpreted. And when we had to defend my job; I was (the first out lesbian untenured coordinator of the first degree-granting WS program, in a NYC which had been taken over by a Wall Street cartel insisting on keeping NY out of bankruptcy in order to maintain its profit flow for money lent and paid back, but without enough interest). Having organized the NY Women’s Labor Project to develop and teach women’s studies to working women outside the university, having been active in the workers education union, I finally decided to apply the idea of defending my job to myself; I had With others recently organized the NWSA and the NYWSA, and the state-wide association decided to make a defense committee which held a public symposium at Brooklyn College, and while people came from all over the state, and I made a speech that terrified me to make, she didn’t attend. “I missed you,” I told her the next day. “I meant you to,” she told me. Ah! I can still see her face in the window of my car as she shut the door on our discussion of whether standpoint affected what was seen, or whether there was some directly knowable world that people could grasp without its being interpreted in any way. I thought so and that meant differing ways of telling such that history and literature shared something. But the university was divided into the hard, medium and soft sciences—Brooklyn College History Dept had been situated in more than one school—with the underlying assumptions that hard science was objective, with the medium sciences squeezing in—history, political science, sociology which had been developed to avoid class, anthropology which studied the primitives from the vantage point of the advanced; and then there was art and literature and philosophy which recognized perspective. The university committee interviewing me about tenure had begun by asking me “How can you, as a lesbian, claim to do research?” I was glad the question was out in the open for I was able to speak at length in answering. But R thought I was wrong (for wasn’t scientific materialism objective—this was the system, my own as well, I was having to challenge, for everything else was relegated as false, ideological, incorrect). “You don’t think you as a feminist cast a different light on reality?” I asked her. “Historians make narratives. Do you think historians are simply objective?” She got out of the car and shut the door, then looked back through the window. “Yes,” she said. “We are.”

I learned over the years to survive individually at odds with my belief in flourishing in community. So many times in so many ways this wrenching tore me up.

So I read this transcript with those painful fissures behind the words, for I was protecting the women who hurt me—talk about a protection racket. I charge the women wanting protection from men with protecting the men who diminish them; I charge the women who betray lesbians to please the community of the protection racketeers. And here am I the biggest racketeer of all. I have for decades protected the women who hurt me the most. As a battered child who developed an independent spirit, eventually a rebellious spirit, her childhood nearly totally forgotten, I too had learned to survive by protecting or shielding those who hurt me. I was furious at the men who were in charge of the system and benefited the most. But I was most damaged by loving the women who participated, and to protect my love I protected them. I lost B and R from my community, women I loved, and kept my love for them. I protected them by my silence. I put the struggle into my work. It’s no wonder I spent the last decade and more in the university developing and teaching an honors seminar on the construction of objectivity in different scientific disciplines. It’s no wonder when I got breast cancer I interviewed other women, asking them what their own story was about their breast cancer, speaking out at conferences on the ways that that then-disregarded notion of stress could be seen to bridge the supposed gap between mind and body on which the universe was built. Every woman had experienced being torn apart, working with great responsibility and no authority, taking a second job in a field she disliked to please her husband, whatever it was that had troubled her deeply but which the doctor and her family didn’t want to hear, the stories told in revealing language—a serpent coiled in my heart (her hand over the missing breast)—but there I was beside the point, again. Still, now they have psychoneuroimmunology. I studied the way western medicine talked about, and made decisions about, and described breast cancer. They had the slash and burn, then the defoliation techniques, none of which worked or were as statistically significant as support groups in mortality rates for women with breast cancer. This work didn’t fit in the professional disciplines, then, though at feminist conferences it struck sparks, and support groups.

Over the years I developed the ten to twenty year lag theory. What was termed my “gutter scholarship” at the centennial conference on Virginia Woolf because I read her work valuing the ways her love of women informed it—a charge made in public at the star-studded conference without a word being said—and was in those days refused publication by feminist journals—is now I am sure readable, not so outré. When it was considered outré I decided the listening space into which I was speaking had to be changed; if I couldn’t publish what was at the time brilliant work—if you’re going to write about Virginia Woolf you have to write about Leonard Woolf a Feminist Studies editor told me, and recommended submitting something on returning women, because the reading eyes, the listening ears, the academic space was set in another direction, one that protected straight feminist interpretations and commitments—if I couldn’t get lesbian work on VW published in the academy even at its margins, then I would speak and speak and speak, and gradually the listening space would change, and (at first I thought it would be a five year lag, then ten, then twenty) I would learn to survive.

And this is what I hear way back then in the 70s, in this journal piece now transcribed. I hear the isolation. The individualism. The extrusion from community.

No wonder I spent the time I was supposed to be writing and publishing by organizing lesbian caucuses, in NWSA, and representing the lesbian and gay caucus in MLA—where the new female executive director announced as The Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession (which I had sponsored years before and nominated Florence Howe to chair) we planned sessions for the MLA conference coming up, “To utter the words homophobia and Virginia Woolf in the same breath is blasphemy!” and proceeded to eliminate my slot on the Commission. Still, I found a way to give two talks on the subject at MLA.

And I organized a CUNY-wide group to build a space for us all. We had faculty, staff, students all in the same group, and were active for two years until I got breast cancer again, and had to take a break from running the lesbian breast cancer support group I had organized at The Center, and from the CUNY-wide organization which was in any case splitting into two groups, one of people who wanted everyone to come out, and the rest. It was this activity that I used when another group began to form that went to Proshansky as head of the CUNY graduate center proposing a Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. I coined the term to put Lesbian first, as we usually were not in many senses of the word, and to reuse the C first as Committee and then as Center; we kept the name CLAGS, and out first conference was held at Brooklyn College (the academic part, “Transforming the Categories”) and the Graduate Center (the political part). Not all of this history has been retained.

And thus the effort to create community at home was like so much of our movement life, rife with struggle that is so accepted today that it sounds difficult to believe how intense the struggles back then were for inclusivity and equity between white men and people of color, especially women of color, and between gay men and lesbians. The good old lag theory.

I have to ask myself, reading this piece with its desperate striving for a mode to survive as my former lover Ady had not—dying of breast cancer amid all this at the age of 33, back when we had no community to support even hospital visitation—if I with my impulse to organize, to speak out, to challenge systems (the “lost” paper I wrote in the 70s for the first lesbian theory session at The Berks was titled “Beyond Marx and Freud: Power, Culture and the Politics of Oppression”), if I who had thanks to the people who supported my tenure fight have had relative security and relative privilege, if I who believe in community-building have felt the need for such excruciating self-reliance, how many others out there are gasping to hold their heads above water, to survive? To rebuild. To carry on. To invent. To create. To inspire. To love.

And yet the inspired surge that created the early feminist work in the academy, most of it in the early days by lesbians, was thrilling; that is the other part of the story. Holding a meeting in a hotel (so it must have been MLA) that was really two rooms opened together, huge, full of women, and asking how many lesbian were out, I remember looking around the space and seeing maybe two or three hands, one of them belonging to a German friend who had started out teaching pure math and returned to Germany to begin Women’s Studies there, unsuccessfully, ending up as a municipal Commissioner of Women. In another room full of lesbians perfectly able to be articulate professionally, we discussed what needed to be done, and as Lesbian Rep I asked for help, but no one volunteered. At first I was mystified and a bit miffed, as I was often doing a lot of the work, but then I realized that this was a function of oppression. These capable women couldn’t speak out or act publicly AS lesbians: that is one of the reason we needed the lesbian caucuses in the first place!

Teaching lesbian courses in the 70s felt path-breaking. And not only to me. The backlash was a measure of the forward leap. At Brooklyn College, the Faculty Council Curriculum Committee debated for a semester—amid the erosion of the city and its institutions including the closing of CUNY campuses—a semester! they debated whether they cold allow a course on lesbian literature to be approved as a one-time special topics course. Colleagues came out of the closet to defend the course; in shock, the Dean called one of the most stylish and mild-mannered professors “Freddie with the boots” repeatedly. Finally they had to vote but refused to let each other see what their votes were, and amended their bylaws to require secret ballot! Thus it came to pass that at Brooklyn College if you wanted to offer a special topics course (which could be repeated a couple of times), you had to go through major rigmarole .

At Barnard, students in the mid 70s had conducted a multi-state search for a faculty member to teach a lesbian course in their fledgling women’s studies program; I was honored that they selected me, and through the support of a male faculty who had slipped gay work into an interdisciplinary course, they had a course slot. But when I was hired and they put up posters advertising the course, they were desecrated, ripped, torn down, the faculty met to debate whether to allow lesbian literature to be taught, though fortunately for me I was on leave and didn’t witness the mayhem. In later offerings, students heading for grad school were advised by their advisor to omit the course from their transcripts; some of those who insisted on taking the course asked that the word lesbian be put later in the course title so it wouldn’t be visible on transcripts with limited characters for each line offering. Still, women did the reading and came in to classes who weren’t even registered—we had a college and community each semester I taught the course. I was asked to speak at the Faculty Brown Bag lunch series, and chose to bring in medical as well as literary texts to read from, to illustrate how I came to the notion that “sex” in the 19th century was only applied to activity with penises, but “ordinary lovemaking but no actual sex” was carried on by “sentimental” and “romantic” women as an everyday occurrence. As I walked along the old flagstones from the entrance to the Deanery, worn by so many footsteps before me, I wondered how many had been made by those women who had engaged in “passionate kissing and fondling” that wasn’t “sexual.” And I felt that each step I took made a new kind of path.