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

Beyond Marx and Freud: Talk Notes

As I grow myself up to shift from crippling dependency patterns interdependent exchanges, and begin to take responsibility for my own life, to care for myself – to become healthy – I can increasingly see, hear, feel, taste, touch what in this culture and of this society keeps me sick, out of touch with myself and what is good for me in this culture.

I was brought up in New England to behave by rules of conduct formulated with the charitable purpose of investing me with commonsense reality: “You can’t have what you want in this world just because you want it.” And “”Pain improves character.” “Suffer, endure and carry on.” Acting in my own interest was thus suspect, and what was bad for me took on the appearance of being “good.” This ideological construct, imposed as reality, acts like poison. Such poison – much of which is represented in our culture as medicine, work satisfaction, beauty and truth – affects my whole being; it is in impulse and effect both physical and psychical. Distinguishing those, as though they were separate, makes less and less sense to me as I feel my way past the misty reality of “civilization” toward another reality based on what is good for me. Whatever poison I am forced – and choose – to accept limits my power, whether it’s an “acceptable level” of poison in the air I breathe or capitalism’s “necessary and acceptable level of unemployment” that is used to try to keep me in line.

The system functions by reducing me to participate in my own oppression – and at the expense of others – and by trying to force me when I refuse. The success of these coercive measures in the “public” realm depends upon my perception of their real function which benefits a few private individuals who profit from such arrangements at my expense, and depend upon my believing my expense is a private unreality, before the public good. My acceptance of an alien reality garbed as necessity depends upon the extent of my ability to see through the reality I am presented with and to act independently of it based on my own sense of reality. (I can spend my entire life focusing on its abuse and reacting to it in attempts to control it; and end up living a life dictated by its terms, if not in accord then in opposition, but always snagged. Or I can free myself to create better conditions, which is sometimes termed “escapist” by those still conforming/protected.

I can see with that reality only if I can trust my own sense of reality. I can trust my own sense of reality better when it is shared; and when I can trust my own shared sense of reality I can act independently of the old patterns of oppression. My ability to act independently of an exploitative system and not just react to it is thus grounded in the consciousness I can gain of options, of my own self as powerful. If I am healthy I am able to feel, think, act in my own interest and not give my power away to others to be used against me. The social constructs expected to keep me down function better if I participate. Withdrawing my participation in those social controls that pressure me into a reactive dependency -- in which I give up my power, my own sense of reality, my creative force – is possible only with the help of others in community. For refusal to engage in a destructive society where we have seen some forms of engagement as necessary for survival – or for change – places upon us the necessity to create life-sustaining alternatives.

Depending upon where I am in this transforming process, I “see” reality differently; what appears possible changes. One way to examine a system is to look at resistance to it. As a lesbian, I want to look at the heterosexual social/sexual system as I know it from a perspective of resistance. I could see myself, my perceptions of the world as crazy. I could see my behavior individualistically as that of an isolated individual who is sick, misguided or evil. Depending on the degree of contact and support exchanged with other resisters, I can act as a reluctant servant, a saboteur, a rebel, a creator. These conditions change the perspective from which the story is told and thus change the content of the “description,” and our ability to act.

As a lesbian constantly what I see, what I experience appears – I appear – to be different, from a heterosexual perspective. Yet, acknowledging these differences, seeing through them, being willing to speak, I am beginning – with the help of sisters – also to see myself as having a great deal in common with others. But most of that is hidden. What we have in common is hidden by the taboos of this culture and it is the function of taboos to keep us divided against ourselves. The social/sexual system is structured by taboos affirming what it denies.

Heterosexism assumes that behavior is gender-linked, that what it calls masculinity is part of being male, what it calls femininity is being female, and that these are mutually exclusive by nature. Where it is clear from the reality of our lives that this is not so, that this is a construct and not a reality, we are told that this “deviance” is a minor error. Rather than seeing the deviance as evidence that the construct is wrong, the norms of heterosexual culture label us; we are dismissed as “wrong.” It appears that social behavior is biological because the heterosexual system is so closed culturally and because it is so validated as natural whether in terms scientific or divine.

If “male” and “female” are social constructs and not states of being, so are dyke and faggot. It is a characteristic of oppressive ideologies to attribute negative character to an oppressed minority. Generally, the more the group can also be defined by apparent biological differences the more successful will be the deviance of “nature” argument as a rationale for discrimination. But the apparent “nature” of a woman, a black person, a lesbian, a man jailed for a crime, is not an inherent state. The label concerning behavior has come to be an ascription of character. This trend is true not only for sexual behavior but for other areas as well. We need to examine the historical development of this phenomenon, and analyze the social function of the stages.

What looks like a state of being is simply a form of social organization that involves the participation and collusion of the entire society. Slavery is not a condition of being inherent in individuals or groups; it is a complex form of social behaviors acted out in society. The ideological and material construct comprising race, sex, class all function in inter-related ways and cannot be separated without distorting reality. As a black person can “see” white reality from a perspective imbued with an interest in describing its destructive inaccuracies, a lesbian can “see” heterosexuality; we would not rely on the perspective of a white ruling-class male to create the good life for or operate from the same interest as “his” workers because I can understand that he operates in a denial system that excludes our interest. Any understanding which does not integrate all these realities of power fails of accuracy. And power exists as a relation among people. Just as the slave and the master are part of a whole construct, the social definition of each dependent upon the unacknowledged behavior of the other, so prostitution sustains the institution of marriage, homosexuality and incest the institution of heterosexuality and “the family.” It is the result of social argument concerning who has permission to behave how under what conditions. Similarly, heterosexuality ascribes who is to do what, when, under what conditions. But that doesn’t mean everyone obeys. In fact, if everyone did, there would be far less pressure to conform.

But I could see males can act out “feminine” behavior and women do what is “masculine.” I experience a separation between biological gender and sexual behavior. Furthermore, the social behaviors ascribed to women as a state of our being can change, take different forms, develop, have a history; they are not simply biologically determined states of being. This appeared so in all the areas of human endeavor – despite the categories for describing human history: work, our sex, what is “public,” what is “private,” politics, science, art – what I saw was that people can place themselves throughout the range of human behaviors and evaluations of their biological gender. Denying this does not make it untrue though our participation in “closets” contributes to the invisibility of much of the evidence. But it is the categories, not the relations of humans, that are unreal or inaccurate. Because the ideal categories have material force, the sanctions for revealing their inaccuracy are heavy. Yet relations between people and the environment can not be contained by heterosexist descriptions of “reality.” The relations feel real, the categories unreal. As a lesbian I see options for women other than the “social servitude and precarious pleasure of heterosexual marriage” and I experience culture as a description of the world denying these options: a closed system.

[The pervasiveness and intensity of the pressure to be/appear heterosexual demonstrate the necessity to control each of us – it’s not just some women. Each of us can perform behaviors that are taboo; the strictures against this defiance shape what is permissible.] Heterosexuality is structured as much by behaviors that are taboo and denied as by those approved and visible. These too take historical forms in different times, places, under different conditions; they change and function variously. They have a history. Heterosexuality is structured by the denial of homosexual behavior in each of us and the approval of heterosexual behavior in each of us. All that denial is running the system. We don’t know what would happen if heterosexuality were not compulsory.

The compulsory and exclusive nature of the heterosexual system and the behaviors we call heterosexual themselves are structured by their very necessity to deny homosexuality. So homosexuality acts like a hidden motor which drives the culture. I will focus on woman-woman relations which exist at the expense of the gynophobic male-male relations that dominate and shape both the culture and women. The extremes of this domination under capitalism are engendering resistance; the development of modern feminism as a movement is concomitant with the development of capitalism. Lesbianism challenges those male supremacist relations materially and ideologically. I hope we can scotch the myth that woman-woman relationships are more tolerated. They are more hidden, more impossible to execute as alternatives to heterosexuality. Otherwise countless numbers of women would not have had to dress as men to resist the traditional female behavior system.

Heterosexuality embodies a patriarchal power relation built however on mutual dependency. To the extent that the system has worked to link gender and behavior, and has built social forms of organization to contain that linkage, males are dependent on females; females are dependent on males. This is not a necessary division despite theories of biology, psychology and romantic love which underlie and support religious, political and economic theories sustaining heterosexual marriage, and organizing social life around it. The baby doll who marries the soldier becomes the battered wife, taking the meager assurance from his blows that at least he cares. Theirs and ours, when incomplete, become distorted, warped and self-destructive. To the extent we warp ourselves we hate ourselves, and this is a basis for getting us to put ourselves down, for social control. We need not give up the social behaviors designated to the “opposite sex.” I need not deny what they have called my tomboyness; boys need not deny what they have called their girliness; I need not search for what I “lack” and try to keep another close to me to “complete” me as my “other half.” Each of us can be whole in ourselves. What I give away I can’t control; taking it back restores my power.

If everyone had control of herself, then our true interdependency would be revealed and could function non-destructively. Unequal control turns mutual need into a basis of exploitation and persuasion. The remnants of the western medieval military code of chivalry between a liege-lord and his thanes and warriors betray this relation in a modern courtship, where female protection becomes male control.

If I am attracted to an independence I assume I cannot have but which you appear to have, I will love my suppressed autonomy in you and resent you for having what I am denied/deny myself by locating it in you. Such mutual dependency is neurotic and compulsory. What I deny in myself I am both attracted to and resentful of outside myself. This conflict constitutes a psychic civil war which is acted out socially. Historically, it appears visibly only as a game or a joke. Its name is the “battle of the sexes.” The battle of the sexes is not a romantic game but a destructive system for it is real. Its casualties are real. Rape is international and domestic policy. It is conducted at the expense of women. The activities of this war are not isolated in the culture; they are built in. They have a function. They can be resisted.

In this destructive system which is raping the earth as well as its people, the so-called male attributes are used to contain the so-called female attributes. What is rational, white, conquering is “normative” and perverse. To the extent we accept and protect it, we participate in our own destruction. As women we must resist this protection racket.

We need not be the mutilated other half of that dynamic; whatever others do, we can value ourselves. This power we have. We need not be or act out the behaviors of victim or servant. To the extent we love and value women as surviving, creative people who can shape our world, we reverse the gynophobic basis of patriarchal power relations. Loving women is revolutionary.

The first woman everyone, including females, loves is the mother. Yet the mother-daughter relation is that most ignored in our culture and contains the greatest taboo: incest. It is generally acknowledged that incest relations form the basis for the proto-typical sexual relation. But that system as described by Freud and others puts the male at the center of the family, the culture and the psyche. Working with lesbian culture, I can see woman at the center. She is at the center of life-sustaining systems, at present contained by an imperialist, racist structure, which could not work in the world if it did not work in peoples’ heads, making us sick.

The mother is expected to prevent the males in her family from having sexual intercourse with the females in her family. (Footnote: This is true in the family although the power of the woman to be effectual is systemically constrained at the same time that it is relied upon. This maternal restraint against rape is absent in social organization outside the family and unsupported within it.) Even more fundamentally, the mother is expected herself to refrain from sexual feelings and behavior in relation to the females in her family. So completely as never to know – consciously acknowledge – the possibility: female-female incest appears unthinkable. People have trouble conceiving of the notion.

She is prepared to police the males and repress sexual feelings in her children by herself being repressed and policed. She is thus enabled to train boys to be strong and not have feelings and to train girls to be servile and not have feelings for themselves, only for others. Thus our own feelings, repressed, are turned against us all. The rules of outward authority are substituted to direct our activity. If this process of social control does not work, the individual who has escaped an acceptable level of repression is labeled sick, deviant, criminal. And somehow – the “joke” again – it’s always the mother’s fault. This process occurs as a network of relations in the family and society.

We retain the needs of the family system which we developed in our psyches because we have been raised on a model of deprivation and abuse and not allowed to develop organically, being supported to meet our own needs. From the time we are torn, pulled, thrust – generally on the doctor’s schedule – into the world and our natural relation to the placental nurturance is violently cut, our self-motivating life processes are interfered with for the convenience of authorities in whose interests (however they interpret these) we are manipulated. (Footnote: This idea was articulated by Doctor Jean Eckerley at Maidenrock Learning Institute’s lesbian retreat, August 1978.) The health system, in appropriating and alienating the labor of the mother, obscures her primary function and power. She thinks that the sensual pleasure she receives suckling her baby is taboo. She may so programmed to deny herself pleasure, that she may experience the process as painful. Her feelings are rarely legitimate, whether the sensuous, physical pleasure she experiences (or denies) with the baby, or the burdensome and fearful responsibilities placed because of it upon her by a social organization which has made motherhood a tortuous pleasure. It is no wonder we learn masochistic behavior, denying ourselves what is healthy for us.

The original power relation between mother and child is conceived of as a power relation between powerful and powerless, and executed as though this were so. The needs of both, each, are not equally important. And our social forms confuse these problems: mothers end by behaving powerfully, out of their social powerlessness, in ways not to appropriate to children. To “meet” – to try to meet – their own needs, both parents demand from children behaviors which should be being, should have been, filled by adults. Such inappropriateness is the basis of incestual behavior.

The child learns to respond to the mother, to the mother in relation to the father, to the father, to the father in relation to the mother, all in relation to the child, and so on. The learned behaviors carry these power relations and become through defensiveness part of our own psychic structures. As individuals we learn and act out of systems of behavior where sexual relations are power relations. From incestuous behavior patterns the child learns the hidden message that she can get what she wants by using her sexual power; this is a dysfunctional system for her and she is, finally, powerless. What we call socialization depends for both boys and girls, on a learned sexual system of power relations. This power is labeled “private” and the non-kin male dominated structures that reinforce it are labeled “public.” This despite the fact – or rather, because of it, to confuse us – capital is a system of private appropriation at the expense of human needs, and life-sustaining systems of nurturance are social/public work. (Hence the current domestic crisis in the so called service sector over who will pay and who will do this work.) Our culture has obscured the nature of power as well as relations of power by such misnomers.

The civil war in my head was learned from the child-adult dynamics shaped by hierarchy and the social war between the people required to act out ‘male’ behaviors and repress ‘female’ ones – i.e., in this period the provider – and those required to do the opposite. Capitalism both encourages and destroys the social forms of gender organization that express these functions. We each manage the repression dynamics in a variety of ways, and to a variety of degrees. But because as socially defined gender people (males and females), we feel the lack of something, we seek it, reinforcing the system of mutual dependency. The truth is that what we think we lack is only repressed so we relate to it outside us from our repression of it – usually in anger, as projection. We thus feel trapped, or irrevocably hooked – tied in the myth of romantic love that we will one day meet our other half to complement us – that justifies this dependency. Sexuality when expressing power relations often conveys anger rather than joy; the bodiy’s excitement can come to conflate pleasure and fear/pain, and depend on these learned power relations .

While I don’t have the space to develop the idea here, it appears to me that people ‘marry’ their mothers; this is confusing to some people because if a woman marries a male, she is not wedded to the psychic dynamic developed in primary relation to her mother in the context of the patriarchal family system (I am using the word patriarchal because it conveys male domination.)

It may be we as lesbians are acting out what Freud says others are acting out (incest) but in non-traditionally ‘female’ not subservient ways.

I respect all our struggles: as a lesbian-feminist I am not ‘against males’ – and certainly not women in relation to men – but against social maleness and social femininity: behaviors not people, constituting a system of mutual dependency that is self-destructive and hierarchical. We can struggle together for what is healing from a wide variety of vantage points.

While it may look from a perspective of heterosexual privilege and male definitions of power as though female-female relations would be weak, and ‘not relevant to social change,’ what I see happening in the lesbian-feminist movement is a transformation of women; we are moving from seeing ourselves as and acting as victims to seeing ourselves as and acting as our own sources of strength. What has been hidden as “dark” we are feeling as strong and beautiful. We are beginning to release the power of the oppressed and it feels good to do.

But the word does not contain the movement, which has taken a variety of forms historically. Forms of goddess-worship persisted through the medieval period, and worshippers of wicca, a world-view positing female and male forces of power, had forcibly to be suppressed or eliminated. In some villages after the burning of homosexuals and witches there were scarcely any women left. This holocaust contributed to the foundation of heterosexual patriarchal institutions as they developed their modern form including the nation-state, the university and the professions particularly medical, effectively severing them from female spirituality and the power of women.

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 />